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DISMANTLE THE SCO NOW. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is becoming the central platform for authoritarian and anti-Western coordination across Eurasia. My warning is clear: China, Russia, India, Iran, Belarus and Pakistan are now on my failing & dismantling list because of https://t.co/fuCllgdqPx #DismantleTheSCO #Authoritarianism #Eurasia #CN #RU #IN #IR #BY #PK

There is a lot of (correct) talk about the role of evangelicals in supporting and electing Trump and his authoritarianism. But we are not nearly enough talking about the role of the Eastern European Orthodoxy in the promotion of authoritarianism. #Evangelicals #Authoritarianism #EasternOrthodoxy #US #EE

Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “CGAS (Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale) and related gender ideological-belief measures were strongly associated with left-wing authoritarianism” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “CGAS (Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale) was not simply standing in for being politically left-wing” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “Support for coercion, punishment, and violence appears to be tied less to liberalism generally than to an authoritarian disposition organized around left-wing ideological content” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “Gender ideology may function as an ideological accelerant” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “Gender ideology may supply authoritarian psychology with a structured map of perceived outgroups, threat sources, and oppressor classes” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “Dissent becomes not a legitimate position but a failure of professional duty or an act of harm” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “The same psychological machinery operates on the extreme left”- Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “Violence can come to seem permissible or necessary” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “Three findings pull in the same direction. People who strongly endorse gender ideology positions score dramatically higher on left-wing authoritarianism than their political identity alone would predict. Furthermore, both LWA (Left-Wing Authoritarianism) and CGAS (Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale) predicted support for political violence” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “Together, these findings support the paper's core claim: gender ideology may function as an ideological accelerant, telling left-wing authoritarian psychology who the enemy is, why the situation is urgent, and—in those already disposed toward force—that violence is legitimate” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “One mechanism by which clinical content may translate into violence permission deserves note. Trans-Genocide Belief—the perceived likelihood that a genocide of individuals that identify as transgender is currently underway in the United States—is predicted to more strongly relate to CGAS (Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale) and LWA (Left-Wing Authoritarianism) than to political identity and to be associated with elevated justification for political violence” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “This prediction is consistent with broader research showing that perceived threat, existential threat, and collective victimhood can increase support for hardline, punitive, or exclusionary action against outgroups, particularly when paired with authoritarian dispositions or strong moral conviction (Armaly & Enders, 2022; Carriere et al., 2022; Hirschberger et al., 2016; Kljajić et al., 2025; Schori-Eyal et al., 2014; Skitka, 2010)” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “Related work on moralization and violent intergroup conflict further suggests that when a political conflict is framed as a moral emergency involving dangerous or demonized outgroups, violence can come to seem permissible or necessary (Mooijman et al., 2018; Saguy & Reifen-Tagar, 2022)” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “The practical stakes are straightforward. Research frameworks for understanding authoritarianism have historically focused overwhelmingly on the political right, while analogous left-wing pathways have received far less attention. Yet federal agencies and public safety officials are concerned not only with ideology in the abstract, but with radicalization pathways: the content that tells people who to fear, why the situation is urgent, and when force becomes acceptable” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology “This study suggests that the same psychological machinery operates on the extreme left, and that it may be running through institutional channels—clinical guidelines, professional standards, credentialed expertise—that current threat-detection frameworks are not well designed to recognize” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “Violence connected to gender ideology remains largely undocumented in the academic literature. This study provides a first systematic empirical look at the psychological infrastructure that makes such violence conceivable” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “Both LWA (Left-Wing Authoritarianism) and CGAS (Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale) were significantly positively correlated with justification for political violence across all six targets” - Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology? “Our main findings for youth starting treatment with blockers include: At baseline, about one-quarter of these youth had clinically concerning scores for depression and anxiety. About one-quarter reported having thought about suicide, and 8% reported having attempted suicide in the past. These numbers are on par with the population of middle school youth at large” - The Trans Youth Care - United States “Our main findings for youth starting treatment with GAH include: At baseline, about half of these youth had clinically concerning scores for depression and anxiety. About two-thirds reported having thought about suicide, and one-quarter reported having attempted. By two years after starting GAH, these youth showed increased scores for life satisfaction, appearance congruence (having the physical appearance of one's body match one's gender identity), positive emotions, and psychological well-being and decreased scores for depression and anxiety” - The Trans Youth Care - United States

Multiculturalism or Liberalism… You Can’t Have Both Canada’s Combating Hate Act received royal assent on June 18 and became law in July, defining hatred as an intense and extreme emotion and extending emotion’s reach into government and criminal law. Supporters cite a 169% rise in reported hate crimes from 2018 to 2024, but the increase reflects predictable outcomes when groups with deep historical, cultural, and religious conflicts are placed together in large numbers while assuming differences will fade. “Diversity is our strength” can’t replace shared culture: cooperation at scale requires shared values and norms. Import enough difference quickly while demanding universal tolerance, and social order begins to fracture, leaving strangers who share a passport but little else—so the state steps in to do what culture once did. Multiculturalism can drift toward authoritarianism: the state expands to manage conflicts, neutrality becomes impossible without common standards, and unequal treatment follows. Britain illustrates the danger, with thousands of arrests in 2023 under communications laws for alleged offensive messages and long sentences for single posts. Meanwhile, authorities have shown hesitation toward major crimes involving protected communities, often citing fears of racism and community harm—creating a double standard. Canada also has examples, such as the Gladue principles, which require sentencing judges to consider the circumstances of Indigenous offenders, letting group identity influence state treatment. The multicultural liberal state was sold as open, tolerant, and equal—but if groups won’t “melt,” or fundamentally oppose one another, the result is increasingly unequal laws, more surveillance, and less liberty. Multiculturalism and liberalism are incompatible: without shared cultural standards, a society will be governed from above through laws, courts, and coercion.

When Culture Collapses, the State Takes Over On June 18, the Combatting Hate Act received royal assent in Ottawa; in July it becomes law. Among its provisions, Canada’s Criminal Code will define hatred as an intense and extreme emotion tied to vilification and detestation. Feeling is moving into criminal law. The state has taken on the job of policing it. Supporters cite a reported 169% rise in hate crimes from 2018 to 2024. But such spikes are not random: they follow predictable outcomes of placing groups with long histories of cultural and political conflict together in large numbers while assuming grievances will vanish. “Diversity is our strength” can’t replace shared culture. Shared culture enables voluntary social interaction; without it, cohesion is not automatic—it must be built, and conflict is often the norm. When rapid, large-scale difference is combined with demands for perpetual tolerance, social order weakens. The law then steps in to do what culture once did. This is how multiculturalism can drift toward authoritarianism: institutions empowered to manage social conflict gain authority by promising to solve problems their policies help create. Enforcement is rarely neutral. The same legal mechanisms that target “offensive” speech can also punish individuals harshly, while authorities can remain slow to confront serious harms—raising the question: who decides whose equality matters?

When the Fog Begins to Lift If you feel as though the world is going crazy, you’re not imagining things. Over the past decade, a media-driven “woke” movement gripped Western societies, creating what Michael Shellenberger calls “mass psychosis.” He argues that Democrats and media figures labeled opponents of DEI, racial quotas, and open borders as far-right—not because those people had changed, but because the political left had moved dramatically further left on cultural issues. Evidence continues to support this view. U.S. General Social Survey data suggests that center- and right-leaning opinions have remained relatively stable since the early 2000s, while left-wing views have shifted substantially. Meanwhile, publications such as *The New York Times* and *The Washington Post* sharply increased their use of terms like “racist” and “white privilege” after 2012. Shellenberger writes: “The media did this. The mass brainwashing came from college-educated elites in control of the most powerful propaganda machine in world history. These elites convinced the public that the West had grown more racist than ever, a blatant contradiction of the evidence. While the public was distracted by manufactured culture wars, governments exploited the chaos to consolidate power. Authoritarianism, spiraling debt, and economic devastation were the crippling costs of this deception.” He describes the political consequences just as bluntly: “By the time we got to 2016, Democrats had become completely unhinged. They made everything political, hunted heretics, and weaponized the government—three core characteristics of totalitarianism.” The fallout has been severe. Institutions lie in ruins, public trust has collapsed, and communities remain deeply divided. This was not simply a political miscalculation. It was ideological warfare, designed to divide and control. As the fog begins to lift, one question remains: Have we learned enough to resist the next wave of fearmongering and manipulation—or will we once again accept the same tactics from new faces?

Hard choices to be made under authoritarian rule. Do you preserve institutions that can never be rebuilt and that are not wholly corrupted? A great part of the Kennedy Center audience chose symbolic resistance over institutional preservation: the boycott https://t.co/Blw8vBEJhh #Authoritarianism #SymbolicResistance #Boycott #Nocountrycodesidentifiedinthetweet.

Concise summary of key research findings on the impact of Beijing's transnational authoritarianism on the Uyghur diaspora in the Foreign Policy essay: China Is Finding New Ways to Coerce Uyghurs Abroad https://t.co/IAU0OFFEUq #Uyghurs #Authoritarianism #ForeignPolicy #CN

There is a reason the 🍊🤡 –like Putin and Modi, Erdogan and Orban– has put so much energy into dismantling the free press: it’s a lot easier to lie to people and distract them from your broken promises when your billionaire buddies own the media https://t.co/PdJo4YIlqj #FreePress #MediaOwnership #Authoritarianism #RU #IN #TR #HU

A Crown Instead of the Barracks: An Idea From Outside the Box Could Egypt’s exiled opposition use constitutional monarchy to dismantle the legitimacy of the 1952 coup? By Adham Hasanin Egyptian journalist and political writer, based in the Netherlands To understand what follows, a reader unfamiliar with Egypt needs one basic fact: since 1952, Egypt has never been governed by anyone who did not first wear a military uniform. Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, Hosni Mubarak, and today Abdel Fattah el-Sisi four men, four eras, one common origin. All rose through the armed forces. All inherited a state built by a coup that year, when a group of officers calling themselves the "Free Officers" overthrew King Farouk I and, within a year, abolished the monarchy altogether and declared a republic. For seventy-three years, the underlying equation has not changed: the army rules, power passes from one officer to the next, and legitimacy is drawn from the barrel of a gun rather than the ballot box. Every conceivable form of opposition has been tried legal parties and banned ones, Islamist movements, liberal and leftist coalitions, the 2011 popular uprising, and the 2013 elections whose result was overturned by force within a year. All of them hit the same wall: a military institution that reproduces itself under different names, while the core of the system remains untouched. So what if the problem, all along, has not simply been who rules, but the constitutional framework that makes military rule possible in the first place? And what if the answer lies not in swapping one president for another, but in dismantling the underlying equation itself, through a framework Egyptian opposition movements have never seriously tried: a purely ceremonial constitutional monarchy, on the model of Belgium, the Netherlands, or Spain where the head of state becomes a symbol above the political fray, while the army is permanently expelled from politics and returned to its barracks. This is not a call to revive a particular family, nor nostalgia for a golden age that never quite existed. It is a proposal for a political and strategic tool that has not yet been used in the intellectual arsenal of Egypt’s opposition in exile a tool that deserves serious discussion, regardless of whether it is ever literally realised or simply serves to expand the boundaries of what is politically thinkable. I. Why 1952, Not 2013 or 2011, Is the Root The strategic error made by most Egyptian opposition movements from the Muslim Brotherhood to the April 6 Youth Movement to the various civil opposition parties has been treating each political crisis as an isolated case: Mubarak was corrupt and had to be toppled; Sisi staged a coup that must be condemned; the interim military council was a transitional phase to be endured. This piecemeal approach treats the symptoms while leaving the original illness untouched. That original illness is the very structure of legitimacy established by the coup of 23 July 1952. The Egyptian republican system, from Nasser to today, has never built its legitimacy on a genuine democratic social contract. Instead, it has rested on a fixed trinity: the rhetoric of "revolution against feudalism and colonialism," charismatic individual leadership, and military protection of the regime framed as the guarantor of stability. This trinity has repeated itself from Nasser to Sadat to Mubarak to Sisi, with only cosmetic variations. Each new president was never a break from the system he was its continuation. When the opposition says "let us return to the constitutional framework that preceded the coup," it is not criticising a particular policy. It is declaring that the legal foundation of everything that came after 1952 was illegitimate from the start. Here lies the rhetorical power of "returning to the pre-1952 order": it does not merely demand swapping one ruler for another. It withdraws historical legitimacy from the entire republican military system including today’s regime, which draws its own declared legitimacy from that same "1952 legacy." II. Why a "Ceremonial Crown," Not "the Return of a Ruling Family" Here is the most important distinction anyone advocating this idea seriously must grasp: the project does not rest on restoring any particular individual from the Muhammad Ali dynasty, nor on nostalgia for King Farouk or his ancestors. The real power of the idea lies in the constitutional form, not in the person who happens to sit on the throne. Three successful European democracies illustrate the model clearly. Belgium, where King Philippe is a purely constitutional symbol with no real executive power, while the state is run through an elected parliament and a complex coalition government reflecting the country’s linguistic and political diversity. The Netherlands, where King Willem-Alexander formally opens the parliamentary year and signs laws, but where actual decision-making rests with the prime minister and the elected parliament. And Spain, where the king represents symbolic continuity of the state above party politics, while the military and security services answer entirely to civilian authority a transition achieved after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, when King Juan Carlos I voluntarily relinquished the extensive executive powers he had inherited and backed free elections, most dramatically in February 1981, when he personally ordered the armed forces to remain loyal to the constitution during an attempted military coup, causing it to collapse within hours. The common thread across these three models is not "the presence of an ancient royal family." It is the principle of separating symbol from power. The monarch in these countries does not rule; he represents. He issues no political decisions; he provides the continuity and symbolic stability that allows party political competition to revolve beneath him, without every transfer of power becoming an existential crisis of legitimacy. This is precisely what Egypt’s military republican system lacks: a neutral mechanism for guaranteeing state continuity that does not depend on the person of the ruler or his security apparatus. When Egypt’s military-republican president is absent, it is always the army that fills the vacuum, because it is the only institution built to be the "guarantor of stability." Under a ceremonial monarchical model, by contrast, it is the king not the army who represents that symbolic guarantee, genuinely opening the door to removing the military institution from the political equation altogether. III. Egypt’s Standing Under the Monarchy: An Honest Reckoning, Not Blind Nostalgia For a Western reader with little prior knowledge of Egypt’s monarchical period (1922–1952), it helps to know this: Egypt was nominally independent under its own king from 1922, but Britain retained enormous informal control over the country’s foreign policy, military bases, and the Suez Canal throughout the period a reality that shaped everything that follows. Any honest invocation of "Egypt’s standing under the monarchy" must avoid the trap of mythologised nostalgia that many advocates of this idea fall into. Egypt in that era was no lost paradise, and any honest article must say so plainly. The Egyptian pound, for instance, often invoked as a symbol of "national currency strength" in that period, was not strong because of independent Egyptian monetary policy. It was pegged to the British pound sterling as part of Egypt’s complete colonial financial dependency until 1947, with Egypt exercising no independent oversight of its own currency whatsoever. The pound’s strength, in other words, was not a sovereign Egyptian achievement it was a reflection of British imperial power ruling Egypt from behind the throne. But this does not mean Egypt lacked a genuine regional standing worth studying. Cairo, in the 1930s and 1940s, was the undisputed cultural capital of the entire Arab world: the Egyptian film industry produced more than half of all Arabic-language cinema; its theatre scene, led by figures like Youssef Wahbi and Naguib al-Rihani, and its music, with Umm Kulthum and Mohammed Abdel Wahab, set the standard across the region; Cairo University was the first modern university in the Arab world; and the Egyptian press was the reference point for Arab public opinion from the Atlantic to the Gulf. Cairo was, quite simply, to the Arab world what Paris was to Francophone Europe: an unrivalled centre of cultural and intellectual gravity. This standing was not necessarily a product of monarchy itself, so much as a product of a relative space of political and press pluralism that allowed Egyptian civil society to flourish, despite all the flaws of the political system and the interference of both palace and occupier. The lesson here is not "bring back the king and the standing will return." It is: when even a limited margin of civic freedom exists, Egypt flourishes culturally and intellectually almost by its own nature. And that margin is precisely what has been entirely absent across the past seven decades of unchallenged military rule. IV. What Reform Would Actually Require Not Repeating the Old Mistakes Any serious advocacy of this model must include, even briefly, a clear vision for avoiding the flaws of the old monarchical system itself otherwise the proposal collapses into simply replacing one form of authoritarianism with another wearing a different crown. First, the armed forces would need to be placed fully under a civilian ministry of defence, with its budget subject to transparent parliamentary oversight the exact opposite of its current status as a state-within-a-state, and equally opposed to its role under the monarchy, when it often served as an instrument of British influence. Second, a judiciary fully independent of both palace and government alike, unlike the old model, which saw direct royal interference in political life as when King Fuad I dismissed the elected government of Prime Minister Saad Zaghloul’s successor, Mustafa al-Nahhas, in 1928, in one of the clearest "constitutional coups" in modern Egyptian history. Third, a parliament that genuinely represents the people rather than landowners and the aristocracy, as was the case before 1952, when membership in the Senate was effectively conditional on the ability to pay land taxes meaning political representation was, by law, restricted to the wealthy. Fourth, genuine economic sovereignty, with a truly independent national currency rather than one pegged to a foreign power’s currency, unlike the historical dependency of the Egyptian pound on sterling. These four principles are enough to clarify that the project on offer is not a literal "return to the past," but a borrowing of the constitutional form (symbolic monarchy) combined with an explicit rejection of its old substance (colonial dependency, palace interference, parliamentary feudalism). V. The Role of Egyptian Movements in Exile: Between Goal and Instrument This raises the most practical question of all: how might Egypt’s opposition abroad actually adopt this idea, and in what capacity? The honest answer is that the power of this proposal does not necessarily lie in its literal fulfilment, but in its dual strategic function. On one hand, it can be advanced as a genuine political goal adopted by broad coalitions of Egyptian movements coalitions that might include Islamists, liberals, leftists, and traditional monarchists, united around a single shared premise: rejecting the legitimacy of the 1952 order and everything that followed from it, even if they later disagree over the precise final shape of the state. On the other hand and this matters more in practice the idea can be deployed as a rhetorical instrument of pressure to widen a Egyptian political debate currently trapped between two false choices: "continued military rule" or "no alternative, chaos awaits." When the opposition puts forward a clearly defined third model a European-style constitutional monarchy it breaks this false binary and opens new intellectual space in Egyptian public discourse, even if the project is never realised in its literal form. This kind of "leverage idea" is common in the history of political movements worldwide: it is not necessarily proposed to be fulfilled immediately in full, but to redraw the boundaries of the politically possible, and to force the existing regime to defend its legitimacy rather than simply assume it. Conclusion: An Invitation to Debate, Not a Ready-Made Prescription This article does not claim that restoring a monarchical form would magically resolve Egypt’s chronic crisis of legitimacy, nor does it ignore the immense difficulties facing any transformative project under a military institution as economically and securitywise entrenched as Egypt’s is today. But it raises a question that deserves serious debate among Egypt’s opposition in exile, rather than automatic dismissal simply for being unfamiliar: Has the Egyptian opposition exhausted every available tool for dismantling the legitimacy of 1952, or has it remained trapped in the same old binary swapping one ruler for another while the framework that makes military rule possible remains untouched? The idea is on the table now, not as a finished solution, but as an overdue invitation to think outside the box.

Over 400 former US intelligence and national security officials warn that Trump is following the authoritarian playbook: concentrating power, dismantling democratic safeguards and cultivating a personality cult. One of them said “We are nowhere near the worst of where this is https://t.co/zvLzmYvQch #Trump #Authoritarianism #Democracy #US

Orientalism (racism) doesn't just distort how we see "them", it disables social antibodies. My next report to the UN examines how legacy media have contributed to erode the capacity to recognise authoritarian descent. Germany is a case study. #Orientalism #MediaInfluence #Authoritarianism #DE

Like other authoritarians before him, Trump has retreated, irrevocably, behind the walls of his own Forbidden City of the mind—a place where he is the emperor, his judgment is always right, and his commands must always be obeyed https://t.co/Tk0nJ6G0kC #Trump #Authoritarianism #ForbiddenCity #Nospecificcountriesarementionedinthetweet.Therefore #theresponseisempty.

People have no idea how bad its getting in Budapest. The vain dictator @magyarpeterMP posts selfies while he celebrates undermining civil liberties and destroys the country’s economy. Anne Applebaum supported this. She blocked me after becoming an authoritarian lunatic. https://t.co/gxqLRMZIoH #Budapest #CivilLiberties #Authoritarianism #HU

If you want to understand what’s really happening in Hungary: political witch hunts, growing authoritarianism, political theatre, and, above all, the denial of reality. The last point is the most dangerous. You cannot solve a crisis by pretending it doesn’t exist. My latest #Hungary #Authoritarianism #PoliticalTheatre #HU

Back on @Bannons_WarRoom to discuss what the hell is happening in Europe - and especially in Hungary. Unfortunately, I don’t have good news. Across Europe, Brussels-backed liberal governments are taking increasingly authoritarian steps and steadily eroding freedom and https://t.co/A4Xxkt2oNJ #Hungary #Authoritarianism #Europe #EU #HU