Editor’s Note: Day 125 of the Great Con II. The shakedown of Harvard continued with efforts to drain the best and brightest from across the world from American soil (makes zero sense), arresting public servants at protests, firing government watchdogs who protect the public, another embarrassing display of a President that will believe and market any hoax, and dinner at the White House in exchange for buying the President’s crypto.

Some of us grew up going to the library and love reading and learning history. For others, such access to books and literature and knowledge at your fingertips is a dream, truly a luxury. They live in places without libraries or punishment for having forbidden materials, or there’s no electricity for a light, or the work days are so long and hard that the only thing you look forward to is blissful sleep.

We assume that with the freedoms we enjoy in the United States, people will use them to gain knowledge and make adjustments throughout life. To a certain extent, that has happened. We have grown and attracted enough visionaries that the United States is a global leader in tech, entertainment, and science.

But it’s not enough.

Democracies like ours are rare. They build up over time from many decisions and choices, wars, calls to gods, and so on, and they typically don’t disappear in a single, dramatic moment either.

What we should take notice of is that they can falter. When we think of Rome or Greece and the seeds of citizen rights, we think of places long ago; their foundations laid with good intent but eroded gradually, perhaps unseen by many, recognized by a few.

There is typically a series of choices made; the rise of a leader who exploits fear, seeks division, and works to manipulate the very institutions designed to protect those freedoms. It is the everything, everywhere, all at once effort via a drip, drip, drip towards an eventual collapse.

While most scholars consider the United States to be the longest-lasting continuous democracy, it is still vulnerable to poor decision-making and self-serving usurpers. Not only can we read about such events and individuals in history, we also know them when we see them.

From Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts in the 1950s (written about in Issue 77) to Vladimir Putin’s iron-fisted rule in Russia, history reveals a chilling pattern for democracies: would-be autocrats are always present, always waiting to hijack the very freedoms they used to rise, then dismantle them from within. As the United States grapples with Donald Trump’s presidency, understanding the past missteps in history is essential to defending our democracy from following suit.

Authoritarian leaders, regardless of era or geography, share a common set of tactics. They target the guardrails of democracy: free elections, an independent press, and the rule of law.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia offers a modern example of how a fledgling democracy can be hollowed out from within. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia went through a ten-year period of sputtering toward democracy. One man, Mikhail Gorbachev, made the opening, and another, Boris Yeltsin, followed. During the time I was there, Russians were only a few years into newfound freedoms of speaking out in public, more freedom of movement, and being able to purchase and sell products freely.

I remember Russians expressing embarrassment at the public drunken antics of Boris Yeltsin, the president during this time, something unheard of with prior communist leadership. While the Russians found their voices, they lost their economic footing. Western conditions for aid and support rarely considered the plight of the working-class Russian, and with the internal greed by those who became known as the oligarchs, Russians found a taste of freedom came with economic uncertainty.

Products we take for granted here entered the Russian market. One analyst of the time likened it to a kid in a candy store with no money to buy anything. A famous line went Under the Soviet system, I had money but nothing to buy. With democracy, now I have no money and everything to buy. I recall a young Russian in a family I knew talking about the need for a strong leader like Stalin. For him, a strong central authority was needed to ensure fairness in the new Russia, but he did not know the real history.

Yeltsin, frail and alcoholic, appointed Putin to continue the sputtering democratic effort, yet Putin reversed course. He systematically dismantled Russia’s fragile democratic institutions. He jailed rivals, silenced independent media, and rewrote term limits to keep himself in power. His invasions of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 were not just about territory, they were about crushing democratic movements he perceived as existential threats.

Putin manufactured crises to justify his actions, inventing threats like “denazification” to rally support. He eliminated competition by poisoning or imprisoning opponents, and forced political parties to “re-register” under Kremlin oversight. Beyond Russia’s borders, Putin exported authoritarianism by funding far-right groups in Europe and spreading disinformation to destabilize other democracies, including the United States. His regime thrived on public apathy and learned helplessness; by the time Russians protested, the country’s institutions were hollowed out and democratic leaders like Alexei Navalny and Boris Nemtsov were killed off.

One studies history so we know how not to repeat it. These historical examples from modern Russia offer urgent lessons for the present parallels with Donald Trump.

Trump’s relentless attacks on the press, branding journalists as “enemies of the people” and dismissing critical coverage as “fake news,” undermined public trust in independent media. His refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, culminating in the January 6 insurrection, mirrored the authoritarian tactic of election denialism. Firing inspectors general, personalizing federal law enforcement agencies, and threatening to prosecute political rivals are straight from the Putin playbook. Praising extremist groups like the Proud Boys and using dehumanizing language to describe opponents was the same tactic Putin took with supporting the Wagner Group and taking on Zelensky and Ukraine.

In moments like these, the role of the American is not to fall into the trap of considering yourself powerless. Just as Putin hoped to roll up Ukraine, the Ukrainians fought back.

You will need to fight back in ways and methods only you may know. The examples are everywhere. Support efforts to reject baseless lawsuits, withdraw support from election deniers, support longstanding reporting media like the AP, Reuters, and the Guardian, remove your support from corporations that buy airtime on Fox, run for office, and support the youth of America to get involved.

You can also volunteer as a poll worker or walk for a candidate. Share factual news on social media. Attend local government meetings. Encourage friends to vote. Donate to organizations defending voting rights. Speak up when you hear misinformation. Write letters to your representatives. Support civic education in your community. Mentor young leaders. Join peaceful rallies or community forums.

Every action, no matter how small, adds up. It is our everything, everywhere, all at once.

Refuse to give in to cynicism or fear. Refuse to be complacent. Trump is not a normal democratic outcome, and we can’t depend on the routine obstacles to tyranny.

You have a role.

You know what to do.

Make good trouble.

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As I’ve worked my way through AI tools over the last two years, I continue to be concerned that there is no discussion on how to compensate and retrain the many workers that this will affect. In the early days, there was regular mention of AI as a tool to work alongside and assist employees. That has now shifted to the reality that AI will have the ability to replace many jobs. While this piece uses the job shift coders are facing, millions of jobs that deal with customer service on phones and chat are ripe for the picking, and companies are going to do it.

While the Wall Street Journal does an excellent job of research and reporting, they can’t help but do a free market twist and present unions and trade agreements as roadblocks to quicker, widespread acceptance.

That is simply not true.

We are going to continue to see widespread adoption of tools based upon AI because they work and open up all kinds of new creative opportunities at home and in the workplace, but they are also going to make a lot of people unemployed and lead to a new level of problems to deal with.

Just like the jobs reports are false indicators since many of those jobs added are low-wage, we are going to have to adjust our systems to be more worker and family oriented or else most Americans will continue to lose economic ground.

We should be proud of AI. It is the dream compilation of the world’s brilliance. It is a piece of all of us. Everything we’ve ever done and accomplished. The further it drifts from being used as a public good, the more unnecessary trauma we will have.

The only thing this article gets wrong is the timing. Offering workers fewer hours to stay below mandatory benefits was common in the 1980s. I know because I worked at a Walmart then. And it's another reason modern economic indicators can be so misleading. We must improve these measures to focus on the quality of job growth, not just the quantity.

If quarterly reports show that 250,000 jobs were added, that looks good, until you get into the details and find that those jobs are for fewer hours and less benefits. We are well overdue for a middle-class correction, and it's not coming with the cut of 100,000 public service jobs at the same time as the rise of AI agents. It will only happen with public policy, which will continue under attack until we reach the midterm elections.

Every advancement in worker pay, benefits, and protections came by good public policy, not by the goodwill of private industry. This piece also reminded me of the importance of good journalism. The author spent time on the inside of Walmart to see what it's like. If you've read any books by the great Barbara Ehrenreich, she was a trailblazer in this type of investigative reporting.

We need more of it.

The America you want to turn over to your kids is not one where you want them to scrape by to earn a living, to be at the beck and call and whim of places that value profit more than they value principles. Our generation has a responsibility to do better than this for the next.

We spend most of our waking hours working when we reach a certain age. This right here is the goal: to find work you have a passion for and make a living doing it. The level of love for something like this is the nature of a true public servant. In this case, it’s a federal employee who spent his time trekking through swamps to record the trees that have been there longer than any of us are alive, as well as the meanderings of the land and the water. He understood his role as a steward for a short time.

It’s important for us to remember this type of dedication day in and day out by some Americans. It goes beyond any profit motive to preserve a legacy and a record for generations to come.

Just a beautiful piece.

If you've watched any of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, he uses the art of humor to bring forth a lot of excellent education. I am a big believer in using all forms necessary for education, and humor is both a great coping and enlightening mechanism (the South African president visiting with Trump understood this succinctly).

The language Oliver uses is adult, but the subject matter is very educational, even to high school age, though this episode wasn't much to laugh about. What we’ve seen is a watering down of what the free press means, by allowing the inclusion of pure right-wing fantasy “media” access to the President. In this quid pro quo arrangement, they throw softball questions and guarantee good coverage. You know who else does this? Russia, China, Hungary, and North Korea. The press is one of the core rocks of democracy, and this is yet another attempt to control it by either excluding it or watering it down. It’s a good watch.

This is a timely piece given the subject of this issue, and it is a fantastic piece of journalism by the Washington Post.

Civil protestors have to be prepared to be arrested, but the devil is always in the details. Many an American has had cooked-up charges thrown against them, and there are always useful idiots around to carry out orders. The Post did a deep dive into video and audio to get to the truth of the events.

Read and watch for yourself.

The other important element to consider here is risk assessment and scale. Make a comparison between what you see and read here, and, for example, the January 6th insurrection. Be honest. Again, there’s a big difference between real civil disobedience and outright violence.

And Now….

Do your good deeds. Don’t settle for what you’ve been told. There’s a lot we believe, and a lot we don’t know. Read some books. Ask a few questions. Above all things, be a good human. Not just an employee, neighbor, or friend. A real force of life, here and now, not somewhere in heaven.