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authoritarianism
Lessons in Resistance From Scott Pelley
We can gain courage from our heroes of this moment: Scott Pelley is unintimidated, telling us bluntly that the new owner and management of CBS tried to force him to lie to us on the air and spin stories so they could please wannabe-Emperor Trump.
Jun 05, 2026
I started in radio news as a teenage reporter at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, then the number one station in the capitol city. I began reporting from the Capitol and City Hall, and was writing and reading the morning newscasts within a year.
The station owner was a hardcore Goldwater Republican, our news director was a liberal but Libertarian-curious Democrat, and I was a long-haired anti-war hippie member of Michigan State University Students for a Democratic Society.
I did the news there for years, and nobody ever told me how to spin it or what to insert or delete. I knew that I couldn’t bias it to reflect my own opinions: the news—accurate, factual, honest information—was sacred.
It was also the cost of our broadcast license, and we all knew it. The widely misunderstood Fairness Doctrine’s main demand was that radio and TV stations “program in the public interest” and that was widely understood to mean straightforward, reliable, faithful-to-reality news at the top and bottom of every hour on radio and an hour-long news block in prime time on TV.
As anti-democracy billionaires continue their march across the American media landscape and pour billions into elections, it falls to us to resist.
We did this—and embraced the Fairness Doctrine—because we knew it was part of the price of freedom, of democracy in our republic. When Thomas Jefferson said he’d rather live in a country with newspapers and no government than in one with a government but no newspapers, he wasn’t knocking government; he’d help create ours and was its president for eight years. He was talking about the vital importance of an honest and free press.
Part of that honesty came from the competition; there were multiple stations in Lansing and most had an in-house news operation like ours, and the ones that didn’t ran the CBS or AP radio newscast twice an hour. Honesty and clarity were essential to get and maintain an audience, as well as hanging onto our license.
Then-President Ronald Reagan ended the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and now President Donald Trump and his oligarch enablers are trying to bury the entire concept of honest, straightforward news.
Over the past year and a half we’ve watched Brendan Carr, Trump’s hitman at the Federal Communications Commission, go to Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) conferences and brag about how he’s going to assault stations that say things he and Trump dislike. He’s trying to intimidate ABC affiliates into muzzling Jimmy Kimmel—again. And he succeeded in taking down Stephen Colbert.
And a Trump-adjacent billionaire nepo baby has acquired CBS and is systematically stripping it of its journalistic integrity, starting with the evening news and now gutting the nation’s No. 1 news magazine show, "60 Minutes."
Storied journalist and "60 Minutes" reporter Scott Pelley isn’t taking it lying down, even though it’s a virtual certainty that he has the standard non-disparagement clause that most media operations now require for talent, which forbid them to ever speak ill of their former employer should they leave for any reason. He’ll probably get sued for it, but he’s a man committed to the truth.
Trump, David Ellison, Bari Weiss, the billionaire owners of Sinclair, the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News,” the 1,000+ billionaire-owned radio stations across the country, the billionaire-subsidized podcasters, and billionaire-owned social media sites like Facebook and X that have apparently been algorithmically slanted toward Trump’s neofascist movement are all following an ancient script.
Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Hideki Tojo, and Francisco Franco all seized control of the news in their countries in their first year in power. It took both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán two or so years, because they wrote a new script for the takeover: Sue the news outlets and reporters into bankruptcy for “defamation” or “slander,” then have friendly oligarchs take over the outlets.
Orbán even came to CPAC in Dallas to tell Republicans that they should do the same thing as he had done by turning America’s media over to right-wing billionaires. He also told the American CPAC conference in Budapest four years ago, during the Biden administration, that they should do the same in America when Republicans next seized control of the US government.
“Have your own media,” he said. “It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left. The problem is that the Western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.”
He added:
Of course, the GOP has its media allies but they can’t compete with the mainstream liberal media. My friend Tucker Carlson is the only one who puts himself out there. His show is the most popular. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcasted day and night. Or, as you say, 24/7.
Thus, this is now the Putin-Orbán-Trump formula:
- Manufacture a crisis.
- Declare an “emergency.”
- Seize powers the Constitution doesn’t grant.
- Bypass Congress.
- Bully or ignore the courts.
- Use masked, secret police and the military against your own residents.
- Send people to foreign concentration camps.
- Build concentration camps within the United States.
- Prosecute lawyers and judges.
- Assert control over universities.
- Merge corporate and state interests.
- Cow the media into silence about your corruption and crimes.
- Then call it all “law and order.”
Trump is 18 months into his project, and he’s already taken down the Voice of America, defunded PBS and NPR, seen the Washington Post and LA Times acquired by sycophantic billionaires, and turned CBS over to a nepo-baby billionaire who’s going after CNN next. As Jefferson pointed out, this is how democracies are fatally corrupted, which is apparently Trump and his billionaire enablers’ goal.
Combine that with a capture of the police and prosecutorial agencies of the government so, like in Putin’s Russia, they can harass and prosecute anybody who dares speak up against their destruction of our way of life and you have the classic formula for turning a democratic republic into an oligarchic dictatorship.
The classic symbol of authoritarian governance dating back to ancient Rome and Caligula—violence as entertainment—will come to the White House as musclebound men will beat each other bloody and senseless for spectacle and the amusement of our 80-year-old “president” on our nation’s birthday.
Masked thugs snatching people off the street without warrants and putting them into concentration camps in violation of the Fouth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments also plays well for the fascist Klan-remnant Republican base, so long as the people they beat, pepper spray, or murder are either dark-skinned or “liberal agitators.”
We’re now way down the road to the complete destruction of America, all in less than two years, as I wrote and warned of in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy in 2020.
The courts are packed with Trump toadies; thousands of lawyers have been purged from government; the FBI is now weaponized against Americans; Blacks and women are being pushed out of senior military commands by an openly white supremacist defense secretary; our history is being whitewashed in national parks, museums, and every federal property; and Trump’s face hangs, 60 feet tall, on multiple federal buildings.
And now they’re coming for the news. If it falls, recovering our republic will be possible—the examples are Hungary with Peter Magyar and Volodymyr Zelenskyy being elected in Ukraine—but very, very difficult. It will take years and cost a fortune both in work, cash, and probably blood, as it did in those two countries.
But we can gain courage from our heroes of this moment. Scott Pelley is unintimidated, telling us bluntly that the new owner and management of CBS tried to force him to lie to us on the air and spin stories so they could please wannabe-Emperor Trump. When they tried to lie their way out of the PR mess Pelley created for them, he immediately called out their falsehoods.
This crisis isn’t limited to CBS: the same nepo-baby billionaire who’s taken over that network also, according to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), now owns, controls, or soon will control:
TikTok, Warner Bros., Paramount, DC Studios, The Discovery Channel, CNN, CBS, HBO, BET, Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, Nickelodeon, MTV, Cartoon Network, Food Network, Travel Channel, Investigation Discovery, Animal Planet, Comedy Central, Showtime, TBS, TLC, HGTV, and more.
Oligarchy and monopoly are two sides of the same anti-democratic fascist coin. They’re always tied together.
As anti-democracy billionaires continue their march across the American media landscape and pour billions into elections, it falls to us to resist.
To register our discontent with those outlets. To boycott them. To demand that our politicians start breaking up the monopolies that Reagan legalized when in 1983 he ordered the Securities and Exchange Commission, FCC, and Federal Trade Commission to stop enforcing the antitrust laws that went all the way back to the 1890s (leading to three decades of “merger mania”).
Monopolies are destructive, but media monopolies are pure Putin-style poison.
We all must become truth tellers, regardless of whether our platforms are, like mine, on radio, TV, and Substack, or if the place we can make our mark and speak our voice is on social media, the local newspaper’s letters to the editor, financial or volunteer support for a fighting progressive politician, or the town square with a protest sign.
We are all Scott Pelley.
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When Trump Targets the Media, the World's Autocrats Are Taking Notes
Trump's words and actions against the news media at home are inspiring copycat behavior by authoritarians and dictators around the world, fueling a growing global crisis of press freedom.
May 21, 2026
Only a day after President Donald Trump spoke of unity following a gunman’s abhorrent attempt to kill him and members of his administration at the White House Correspondents' dinner, the president quickly returned to his regularly scheduled programming of berating members of the press that ask him unwanted questions.
In a "60 Minutes" interview with CBS correspondent Norah O’Donnell taped and aired the day following the assassination attempt, Trump repeated many of his now-tired insults about the press, referring to the media in general as “horrible people,” and calling O’Donnell a “disgrace” who should be “ashamed” of herself for raising excerpts of the alleged gunman’s manifesto in a question to the president.
At this point, understandably, many of us have simply begun to tune out Trump’s now-frequent diatribes against the press. Nearly a decade since Trump first tweeted the now-ubiquitous phrase “fake news” and infamously labelled the news media the "enemies of the American people," such insults just don't land like they used to.
Yet Trump's words do in fact matter. While many of Trump’s rhetorical attacks against the press during his first term were dismissed as bluster from a president known for his flair for the dramatic, they laid the groundwork for the broad attack on the media that we’re seeing under Trump 2.0.
Under Trump, attacks on the media have been a leading contributor to the US’ year-over-year tumble in global democracy indexes.
Under his second presidency, the Trump administration has waged a multifaceted campaign against free speech and independent journalism, characterized by retaliatory lawsuits against major media outlets; legal harassment and intimidation of journalists; slashed budgets for public broadcasting; and regulatory pressure, taking aim at reporting not to the administration’s liking.
Even as the First Amendment comes under unprecedented pressure in the US, the impact of the Trump administration’s attacks on the news media hasn’t stopped at the US border. The linguistic framing Trump popularized to villainize the press (and justify executive action against them) has also contributed to a growing crisis of press freedom worldwide.
Trump’s attacks on the media have inspired copycat behavior from press freedom pariahs around the world. From Hungary to Turkey, authoritarian or illiberal leaders have echoed Trump’s hostile rhetoric against the press, adding their own spin in remarks designed to discredit the news outlets and journalists intent on exposing corruption and holding their leaders accountable to their people.
Autocratic regimes in Russia, China, and Egypt have seized on to Trump’s “fake news” framing with actual legislation barring the spread of “false” or “misleading” news and information. What actually defines fake news usually isn’t clear—the vague, ambiguous wording of many of these laws gives the government wide latitude to decide how they are applied.
Amid a rise in global conflict, governments around the world are increasingly using “national security” as a pretext to censor critical war reporting. Only weeks prior to the Correspondents’ dinner, Trump threatened to jail an unnamed journalist from an unnamed media outlet if they did not reveal the identity of the government source who gave the press information about a US military operation to rescue a pilot whose plane was downed in Iran.
While Trump hasn’t yet followed through on this particular threat, other countries have not hesitated to lock up journalists that report inconvenient truths about the conflict. In early March, the government of Kuwait arrested Kuwaiti-American journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, a day after he shared a verified CNN video depicting the downing of a US F-15E fighter jet by the Kuwaiti military during a friendly fire incident. Luckily, after a wave of international pressure on the part of the press freedom community, Shihab-Eldin was released and was able to safely leave Kuwait—at the cost of his citizenship.
Despite the bad news, there are still a few bright spots as journalists and independent media outlets in places like Hungary have demonstrated remarkable resilience and strength in the face of sustained political and economic pressure.
Perhaps no one has better mastered the art of media capture than Hungary’s now-ousted prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Despite Trump’s ill-fated bid to save Orbán’s reelection campaign, the Hungarian people in April proved that government pressure on the media has its limits, and that public interest reporting that holds leaders responsible for corruption and abuses of power cannot be so easily silenced.
At this critical time for democracy around the world, we must not become complacent to rhetorical threats against the media, no matter how banal or flippant they may seem. As history has proven, over and over again, attacks on the press are a harbinger of broader crackdowns on civil liberties and personal freedoms.
The US is not immune to democratic backsliding. Under Trump, attacks on the media have been a leading contributor to the US’ year-over-year tumble in global democracy indexes. We must not make the mistake of normalizing Trump-style attacks on the press. When the president makes a threat against the media, we should listen to what he says. The world’s autocrats certainly are.
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To Defeat Trump, Be Mindful of the Anti-Democratic Tradition He Sprung From
Trump and his MAGA backers (white supremacists, the Christian right, tech billionaires) are part of the anti-democratic tradition that has existed in the United States literally since the early days of the republic.
May 21, 2026
The notion that the US is an empire in decline has been a recurring theme in international relations literature since the 1980s. Surely, the United States remains the dominant force in the world economy, but it faces daunting challenges from the emergence of China as an economic superpower. And there is no denying the fact that while the US is a military superpower, with the highest defense budget in the world and possessing a range of weapons that other major powers simply do not have, its influence over global politics has been getting weaker. It can bully a country like Venezuela into submission and strangle Cuba to death as part of a strategy of selective hegemony under Trump 2.0, but cannot shape political outcomes across Latin America; holds no monopoly over diplomacy in the Middle East; cannot dictate policy to Europe; cannot force Russia to end the war in Ukraine; and surely lacks the political and economic leverage to contain and isolate China.
Last week’s Trump-Xi summit drove home the reality of shifts in global power. Chinese leader Xi Jinping made US President Donald Trump look weak. Not only did “philosopher-king” Xi concede nothing to the American wannabe emperor but made a subtle threat to the US by invoking the Thucydides trap. In so doing, Xi was letting Trump know that China’s rise is real and that, as such, the world has once again come to a new crossroads. Subsequently, the US should be careful how it handles the new reality of a world no longer dominated by Washington; a strategic miscalculation on its part over Taiwan (the reddest of red lines for China) could lead to war.
Nonetheless, while the debate continues to rage over whether US global hegemony is in decline or not, there should be much less doubt about domestic decline. The over-extension of the empire, characterized by forever wars and endless aggression, an enormously bloated Pentagon budget, and roughly 800 military bases in over 80 countries, has imposed severe pressures on the domestic economy and led to the worsening of social conditions and the unraveling of civil society. The economy has been facing unsustainable economic imbalances (deficits in its fiscal and current account balances) since the late 1990s, and the national debt now exceeds the country’s GDP. In the meantime, the problems of the country as a whole are mounting: crumbling infrastructure, decaying cities, disintegrated education, an unaffordable healthcare system, and a housing crisis that has reached a breaking point make the US resemble a third world country. And the rich are getting richer every day while wages have remained stagnant for most US workers since the late 1970s.
As if this wasn’t bad enough for what is still the wealthiest country in the world, economic alienation and racism are tearing the social fabric apart, thereby offering more opportunities to extend the police operations of the imperial state to the domestic realm as well—increasing the size of the police and building more prisons, as mass incarceration is indeed “big business” in the United States.
Trump and his backers are a real menace to everything that defines a decent society.
The rise of Donald Trump to power is a symptom of the decline of the US as a world power and as an advanced industrial society. It is in that context that Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan captured the imagination of a large segment of the population, reflecting a desire for a return to some idealized state of American society. But it wasn’t simply economics that drove so many to Trump’s arms. The MAGA movement is dependent on racial resentment and straight-up racism. “Make America Great Again” is a politico-cultural project, not some blueprint for economic restructuring.
Many of followers of the MAGA movement professed an aversion to US imperial ambitions and believed that the system is somehow rigged, although they never explained in whose favor. But like traditional conservatives before them, they opposed the federal government not only because they saw it as an instrument of a globalized elite but because they oppose the expansion of federal programs. Their real frustration was over the direction in which the country was moving socially and culturally, which they felt had major ramifications for the economic status of white Americans. This made them perfect prey for Trump’s demagoguery.
Trump himself did identify some of the real economic problems facing the United States, such as decades of manufacturing decline and a growing trade deficit, and spoke from very early on of a collapsing infrastructure that made the US resemble a third world country. But it’s not just that Trump’s actual diagnosis of the structural problems facing the United States is wrong and that the remedies pursued by his administration (sweeping tariffs and mass deportations) are incoherent and designed to backfire. Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself and his family, enforce a plutocratic agenda, roll back decades of social progress, and get revenge on his political opponents any way that he can.
Trump and his MAGA backers (white supremacists, the Christian right, tech billionaires) are part of the anti-democratic tradition that has existed in the United States literally since the early days of the republic. From the 20th century onward, the enemy for the political tradition that Trump and his billionaire allies stand for is equality, social welfare, and redistribution. It was so for the era of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and remains so for today’s reactionaries. As Project 2025 perfectly epitomizes, which the Trump administration has been enforcing with great dedication, the enemy is a society that seeks to place the interests of working people ahead of greed, profit making, and the unlimited accumulation of capital by striving to create institutions that strengthen the public good and enforce democratic accountability.
What we have with Trump and the MAGA movement is an updated version of Social Darwinism, a foundational pillar of fascism. Trump and his backers are a real menace to everything that defines a decent society. For decent people everywhere, it can be said that the greatest of a nation can be judged by how it treats its weakest members. For Trump and his ilk, it can be judged by raising plutocratic power to new heights and inflicting as much pain as possible on the poor and the weak. In this manner, the Trump administration’s politics of cruelty and the callousness of its approach to social policy go beyond simply serving the interests of capitalism as they are designed to produce systemic fear and turn brutality into a source of pleasure. Part of the aim is to make the public numb and apathetic to the astonishing accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few and how it corrupts politics and the media.
How Trumpism ends is anyone’s guess. But while it must be defeated if there is to be a future hope for the United States, it must also be understood that a major part of the nation’s history is intrinsically linked to the anti-democratic tradition that made possible Donald Trump’s rise to power. How to uproot it is of vital importance for the realization of a good and just society.
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