Trump saying the war is finished and yet Australia is sending military support.
One of those things doesn’t make sense…
Updated it 2 hours ago ahead of my 10am lecture 😀
You just know he looks in the mirror every day and tells himself he is a big boy
And so it begins! Watch now as Western media proclaim Khamenei's son to be more moderate/progressive/Western-influenced etc etc than his father.
They said the same about Kim Jong Un, Baby Doc Duvalier, Ilham Aliyev, Bashar al-Assad, Hun Manet, and just about every other next dictator ffs.
Last week I tasked Copilot with extracting the text of assassination events from scanned pages. It simply made up a good 75% of the victims names and I quickly abandoned it.
Has it occurred to anyone that competitive authoritarianism has achieved ascendancy as the operative term for the United States, even though a national election has not occurred? Given there are 100s of diminished subtypes capturing authoritarianism outside of elections, should we excercise caution?
"Two prison terms, a collapsed marriage, and permanent exile" is not enough.
Russia, Venezuela, Iran, China, the Sahel region, the United States ...
Want to know why state agents carry out brutal repression — or participate in illegal coups?
Our new book "Making a Career in Dictatorship" provides answers — it just got published by @academic.oup.com:
tinyurl.com/ystwm3tf
If the Trump administration is brazen enough to close a major airport without notification and without reason, just imagine all the horrible things they are not being transparent about. It will take a generation to uncover all their dirty secrets.
In case anyone is still wondering whether the United States has transitioned to authoritarian rule, I previously listed funding foreign think tanks as 1 of the 20 modern techniques of autocratic innovation. Paper available here -
61eb8c0a-6652-49a6-902e-3063f76b517e.filesusr.com/ugd/ca20d0_a...
I give it less than three months before CBP/ICE are authorized to quell mass demonstrations (under the pretext that such demonstrations are disrupting immigration enforcement operations). Many innocent people will die.
We had three papers under review in APSR, AJPS, and JoP & every time a new tranche of reviews came in they just magically whittled away until they were rejected. It looks on its face to be fraudulent. Can I prove it? No.
The fact there are infinitely more people discussing the Epstein files (which Trump has been removed from) than participating in a spontaneous protest at the Kennedy Center (which Trump is going to destroy and plunder) says everything about the state of authoritarian rule in the United States.
Has his measure been around long? The methodology does not provide much detail.
Because I merely wondered when the other cases were coded? Could easily be a recency bias to the US result.
Little Giants energy from this fucknuckle.
Does this also mean the media is going to stop making awful comparisons between Trump’s America and Orban’s Hungary? What about Erdogan’s Turkey? Modi’s India?
So much unhelpful analysis of non-democracy in recent years.
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
"The media tends to treat Trump's more insane statements as ephemeral, but then turns around and treats his climb-downs as binding....This is a mistake, and a dangerous one....It's a form of sane-washing....It contributes to the authoritarian's progress."
www.thebulwark.com/p/how-the-me...
I really think there needs to spontaneous protests against ICE happening right now in front of every federal building in the country and especially in Washington D.C. Otherwise those opposed to the Trump administration will not gain enough momentum or control the narrative.
No one told me we were going by country, rather than by individual. I proudly stand by my list! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION IN THIS MATTER.
Actually, it was just two sorry,
1) Mass subscription (and unsubscription) pledges for legacy media. So try to use collective bargaining to get them to lift their coverage of Trump’s authoritarianism.
2) Mass social media deactivation month for those companies aligned to Trump. Try hurt them.
I wrote about those same experiences here. Originally had ten lessons, but editor cut it back.
bsky.app/profile/lmor...
In announcing the final makeup of the board, Trump highlighted how Putin will be joined by other distinguished individuals, including
Genghis Khan
King Leopold II
Caligula
Pol Pot
Lucky Luciano
Curtis LeMay
Tony Blair
Sauron
Hernán Cortés
Count Dracula
Benito Mussolini
Henry Kissinger
Thanos
America is afflicted by a rare combination: early-stage authoritarianism, but with a late-stage dictator. Think El Salvador today ruled by a crazy Papa Doc Duvalier.
While chaos is the defining feature of this struggle, pro-democratic forces can still prevail…
www.thebulwark.com/p/crazy-or-c...
Any far superior writers out there who want to present their Pulitzer Prize to me? Will go to a happy home.
Has any country ever been in both a civil war (say Minneapolis) and a foreign war (say Greenland, Iran, or Venezuela) at the same time?
While I am of course much younger and more handsome than Tom, I too would take said training course.
The worst opposition party in the history of democratic backsliding.
