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America already has an ISIS, a Taliban, an SS waiting to be born. A group of young men willing to do violence at the drop of a hat, because they’ve been brainwashed into hating. The demagogue has blamed hated minorities and advocates of democracy and peace for those young men’s stunted life chances, and they believe him. That’s exactly what an ISIS is, what a Taliban is, what an SS is. The only thing left to do by an authoritarian is to formalize it.

when radicalized young men are killing people they have been taught to hate by demagogues right in the open, on the streets — a society has reached the beginnings of sectarian violence, the kind familiar in the Islamic world, and is at the end of democracy’s road.

Crucial institutions have already been captured by the extremist factions who stand against democracy. Do all those cops think of themselves as fascists? Of course they don’t. So what? Mullahs don’t think of themselves as hate preachers, either. What else do you call someone who gives a violent young man with a gun a free pass to kill people, though? Someone who tries to shield him after the murder? A good and decent person?The police in America might not all think they are fascists. Certainly, not all of them are. But what is certain is that some significant number of them are captured. They are sympathetic to the forces which are now attacking democracy. They prioritize those forces over democracy, freedom, peace, justice.

Brexit is causing far-right views on immigration and identity to be drawn into the mainstream, a report has warned. Research by Hope Not Hate found that Britain’s departure from the EU has fuelled discussions of loyalty, elitism and patriotism, “drawing people who might have otherwise have been attracted to the far right back into the mainstream right”.

anti-Muslim prejudice, demeaning rhetoric on migrants and refugees and notions of a ‘cultural war’ against social liberalism

partly as a consequence of politicians co-opting far-right narratives to gain support and partly because of the newer far right engaging in wider issues

"If you could name one thing that would really change your life, what would it be?" I ask. I’m expecting him to say a better house, or more food, or a doctor, or education for his kids. I’m expecting him to mention one of the things relief money often provides for.But Lebrun grins broadly at me, revealing a missing tooth, and says, "What would help me most? A land registry."

What Lebrun needs is security – security he can build a future on. And he needs agencies to safeguard that security. What Lebrun needs is bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy is also the system that organises everything into procedures that are the same for everybody. It’s what holds societies together. It’s not excessive; it’s indispensable.

teens who are trying to make sense of social issues aren’t finding progressive activists willing to pick them up. They’re finding the so-called alt-right. I can’t tell you how many youth we’ve seen asking questions like I asked being rejected by people identifying with progressive social movements, only to find camaraderie among hate groups. What’s most striking is how many people with extreme ideas are willing to spend time engaging with folks who are in the tornado.Spend time reading the comments below the YouTube videos of youth struggling to make sense of the world around them. You’ll quickly find comments by people who spend time in the manosphere or subscribe to white supremacist thinking. They are diving in and talking to these youth, offering a framework to make sense of the world, one rooted in deeply hateful ideas. These self-fashioned self-help actors are grooming people to see that their pain and confusion isn’t their fault, but the fault of feminists, immigrants, people of color. They’re helping them believe that the institutions they already distrust — the news media, Hollywood, government, school, even the church — are actually working to oppress them.

Deeply committed to democratic governance, George Washington believed that a representative government could only work if the public knew their representatives. As a result, our Constitution states that each member of the House should represent no more than 30,000 constituents. When we stopped adding additional representatives to the House in 1913 (frozen at 435), each member represented roughly 225,000 constituents. Today, the ratio of congresspeople to constituents is more than 700,000:1. Most people will never meet their representative, and few feel as though Washington truly represents their interests. The democracy that we have is representational only in ideal, not in practice.

Journalism can only function as the fourth estate when it serves as a tool to voice the concerns of the people and to inform those people of the issues that matter. Throughout the 20th century, communities of color challenged mainstream media’s limitations and highlighted that few newsrooms represented the diverse backgrounds of their audiences. As such, we saw the rise of ethnic media and a challenge to newsrooms to be smarter about their coverage. But let’s be real — even as news organizations articulate a commitment to the concerns of everyone, newsrooms have done a dreadful job of becoming more representative

local reporters suggest that use of force by law enforcement is primarily responsible for things turning violent — and that federal troops have been particularly, dangerously heavy-handed. “I have been in the streets of Portland documenting this movement since the very first riot,” reporter Robert Evans writes in Bellingcat. What’s happening now is “the end result of more than six weeks of escalating state violence against largely nonviolent demonstrators.”

This kind of violent federal deployment over the objections of state and local officials has no real precedent in American history. The closest parallels are Reconstruction, when Union troops occupied the states of the defeated former Confederacy, and military deployments to the South during the civil rights era to enforce desegregation orders.

it was uniformed soldiers that were sent, not unidentified state security forces from an alphabet soup of obscure DHS agencies. More fundamentally, these troops were being used to protect moves toward racial progress — not suppress protesters who were there to demand it.

now if someone is hungry, he deems us directly responsible for that…the Taliban used to be free of restrictions, but now we sit in one place, behind a desk and a computer 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Life’s become so wearisome; you do the same things every day

“I sometimes miss the jihad life for all the good things it had,” said 25-year-old Abdul Nafi. “In our ministry, there’s little work for me to do. Therefore, I spend most of my time on Twitter. We’re connected to speedy Wi-Fi and internet. Many mujahedin, including me, are addicted to the internet, especially Twitter.”

“In the group, we had a great degree of freedom about where to go, where to stay, and whether to participate in the war,” he said “However, these days, you have to go to the office before 8 AM and stay there till 4 PM. If you don’t go, you’re considered absent, and [the wage for] that day is cut from your salary. We’re now used to that, but it was especially difficult in the first two or three months.”

On April 23, the U.K. officially proscribed the U.S. accelerationist neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division and its alias, National Socialist Order, as a terrorist organization. This designation follows Canada’s similar move in February and comes after the group’s members have been linked to five murders, explosions and hate crimes in the U.S. With group proscription under the Terrorism Act 2000 carrying sentences of up to 14 years for members or those who invite support to the group, designation seems to be a step forward in the fight against white nationalism and right-wing terrorism. But because the group seems to lack a physical presence in the U.K., the move appears to be more for international solidarity and to provide tools to combat online propaganda than one of current and direct operational necessity.

Nearly one-third of terror plots foiled by British police since 2017 relate to right-wing ideology, and the youngest Brit ever sentenced for a terror-related offense was the U.K. head of the affiliated white supremacist group Feuerkrieg Division. As of Dec. 31, 2020, 42 (20 percent) of the people in custody for terrorism-connected offenses in Great Britain were categorized as holding right-wing ideologies

Once proscribed, a designated organization is subject to asset freezing and seizure, in addition to disruptive activity including the use of immigration powers like exclusion, prosecution for other offenses, encouragement of the removal of online material and EU asset freezes. In addition, the penalties for the proscription offenses of membership or support (Terrorism Act 2000, Sections 11 and 12) are a maximum of 14 years in prison and/or a fine; the penalties for the offense of wearing a uniform or publishing an image (Terrorism Act 2000, Section 13) are a maximum of six months in prison and/or a fine of £5,000 at most.

There’s an undeniable voyeuristic frisson of seeing a man who once commanded a superpower hawking pizza

BBDO Chairman Philip Dusenberry insisted that the agency’s advertisements be cinematic in their quality. The Gorbachev production lived up to that standard. Informed estimates put the commercial’s budget in the low millions of dollars. Darbyshire, who wrote the script in English, went through three translators to get the right level of idiomatic Russian. To capture the beautiful establishing shots of Red Square and its domed churches, the crew hefted the film cameras high atop the Kremlin itself. And somehow the production managed to get the whole square shut down for the entire shoot.

In 1991, the heads of the former Soviet republics had voted to give Gorbachev a pension of 4,000 rubles per month—but it was not indexed to inflation. By 1994, according to Meduza, his pension was worth less than $2 a month.

Nigeria’s government is reviving old habits from its authoritarian past to stifle criticism.Evoking memories of Nigeria’s three decades of military rule, the repression risks undoing progress Africa’s top oil producer has made since the restoration of multiparty democracy in 1999. Governance and other reforms have helped more than double average annual foreign investment since then -- a pace President Muhammadu Buhari needs to sustain to help reduce the world’s largest number of people living in extreme poverty.

Buhari won a popular vote in 2015 claiming to be a “converted democrat,” and was reelected in February. That assertion has been eroded by crackdowns on civil-society organizations, increasing arrests of journalists and planned laws to regulate social media.

“Investors are less keen on venturing into regions that are considered to be within the grip of erratic strongmen.”

According to a new report by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (which usually monitors violence in war-torn countries), 20 violent groups—left and right—have taken part in more than 100 protests related to the George Floyd killing. In June, there were 17 counterdemonstrations led by right-wing militant groups, one of which sparked violence. In July, there were 160 counterdemonstrations, with violence in 18.

A decade ago, Kilcullen counted about 380 right-wing groups and 50 left-wing ones, many of them armed. In the early 1990s, the faceoff between the FBI and the Branch Davidians, outside Waco, Texas, left 80 people dead—and inspired Timothy McVeigh and his gang of extremists to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, left-wing groups such as the Weather Underground set off bombs all over the country; police waged deadly shootouts with the Black Panthers in Oakland, California, and Chicago; and marchers for and against the Vietnam War—mainly students and hard-hat workers—clashed in violent street battles.

the prevalence of cable TV networks and social media, which amplify and spread the shock waves. Incidents that in the past might have stayed local now quickly go viral, nationwide or worldwide, inspiring others to join in.