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.
that gets abbreviated to “There is no bottom.”
4:49
“We cannot allow a handful of communist radical left judges to obstruct the enforcement of our laws.” What starts to matter is not what is concealed but what has been normalized.
There is no limit to the depravity — ”President Trump did not rule out the possibility of a third term.” — and the sadism — “The White House released this video titled ASMR Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” — and the cruelty that we are watching now play out in real time.
“This facility is one of the tools in our tool kit that we will use.”
You have to continually ask yourself the question, “Is this OK? Is there a line I wouldn’t cross? Is there something I would not do?”
5:37
People say, oh, the Democrats should be doing more. They should be fixing things. But if you want the Democrats to do things, you have to create the platform for them. You have to create the spectacle, the pageantry, the positive energy, the physical place where they can come to you.
5:54
Poland recently went through a shift towards authoritarianism. Unlike in Russia, unlike in Hungary, the media remained a place, in Poland, where you could criticize the regime. And as a result, democracy returned. The moral of Poland is that our democratic institutions — the media, the university, and the courts — are essential.
6:30
You know you’re living in a fascist society when you’re constantly going over in your head the reasons why you’re safe. What we want is a country where none of us have to feel that way.
TRUST US
I don’t trust US
I don’t trust US
You clearly trust using media systems like Twitter, little short noise comments to drive serious discussion away.
To take the May 2025 situation in USA and turn it into social media mockery and entertainment, more than it already is. Conditioned reactionary reply comments.
“As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, “blood,” “folk-ishness”) seeped through Germany, elevating the self-esteem of the “little man,” the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society. Germany was preparing to cut its own head off. By 1933 at least five of my ten friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon “intellectuals” as unreliable and, among these unreliables, upon the academics as the most insidiously situated.” ― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, published 1955
