According to author and Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder, the number-one rule when faced with tyranny is to not obey in advance.
“Most of the power in authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked,” Snyder wrote in his “On Tyranny” book. “A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
“[T]he major lesson of the Nazi takeover, and what was supposed to be one of the major lessons of the twentieth century: Don’t hand over the power you have before you have to. Don’t protect yourself too early,” he added. “[By] mentally and physically conceding, you’re already giving over your power to the aspiring authoritarian.”
Snyder also urges citizens grappling with the threat of authoritarianism to “defend institutions,” “believe in truth,” and “be as courageous as you can.” As Occupy.com has previously reported, truth and facts are antithetical to fascism. Authoritarians depend on a populace so overexposed to lies and disinformation that truth itself becomes subjective, making the people that much easier to control.
“To abandon facts is to abandon freedom,” Snyder explained. “If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”
The author’s most urgent plea is for courage in the face of looming fascism. He wrote: “If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.”
The recent decisions by two of the most influential national newspapers of record — the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times — to not publish their endorsements of Vice President Kamala Harris should be seen by every American as a stark warning that these two institutions are assuming the worst if former President Donald Trump is elected to a second term. Their non-endorsements, while cowardly, also say a lot more about how seriously they take Trump’s threats to democracy and his promises of vengeance against his enemies.
Ex-WaPo reporter says non-endorsement is “five-alarm fire stuff”
When Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong — a medical technology billionaire who bought the paper in 2018 for roughly $500 million — put the kibosh on the Times’ planned endorsement of Harris in the 2024 election, he insisted it was to allow readers to make up their own minds (his daughter, Nika, said it was to protest the current administration’s handling of the Gaza crisis, though Soon-Shiong said that didn’t factor into his decision). He wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that the editorial board was asked to “draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenure at the White House, and how these policies affected the nation.”
“In this way, with this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years,” he continued. “Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.”
Three members of the Times’ editorial board resigned after their pre-written endorsement was scrapped by their employer. One of those resignations came from Robert Greene, who won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing about criminal justice reform. He insisted that the job of differentiating between each candidate’s policy platform was up to the journalists in the newsroom, whereas the editorial board’s job was to take a position and vigorously make their case.
“How could we spend eight years railing against Trump and the danger his leadership poses to the country and then fail to endorse the perfectly decent Democrat challenger — who we previously endorsed for U.S. Senate?” Editorials editor Mariel Garza wrote in her resignation letter to the Times’ executive editor. “The non-endorsement undermines the integrity of the editorial board and every single endorsement we make down to school board races.”
NPR reported that Soon-Shiong may have had different motivations than he shared with the public. Part of his fortune was made after he invented the drug Abraxane, which is prescribed to treat breast, lung, and pancreatic cancers. And the outlet further reported that the billionaire businessman has previously had to rely on the Food and Drug Administration to approve his products for use by the general public, and once even sought a role within the Trump administration as a “health care czar,” according to Stat News.
“If you have a lot of exposure to heavily regulated industries, I’d be very surprised if it’s something that media executives are not thinking about,” Semafor editor Ben Smith told NPR.
In the case of the Washington Post, its own billionaire owner — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — also stepped in at the last minute and canceled the publication of a Harris endorsement the Post’s editorial board had already written. Two columnists and two members of the editorial board have resigned in the wake of Bezos’ decision.
“I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump,” editorial board member David Hoffman wrote in a letter announcing his exit from the editorial board. “I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice.”
Former Post reporter David Weigel, who now writes for Semafor, wrote on the social media platform Bluesky that the fact that Bezos personally silenced his own editorial board was an ominous sign.
“I worked at the paper for seven years and Bezos never interfered with a thing,” Weigel wrote. “This is five-alarm fire stuff.”
Washington Post publisher Will Lewis maintains that the decision to not run the endorsement wasn’t due to Bezos’ wishes, but out of the paper’s desire to remain “independent.” This is despite the Post regularly endorsing candidates in every presidential election dating back to 1976 (with the exception of 1988).
“We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility,” Lewis wrote. “That is inevitable. We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values the Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.”
According to the Post, they have since bled out more than 250,000 subscriptions — which makes up roughly 10% of all subscriptions — in the last week, as angry readers disinvested from the paper in response to the non-endorsement. Former Post executive editor Marty Baron told NPR that he doubted Lewis’ official explanation for why the Harris endorsement was called off.
”If this decision had been made three years ago, two years ago, maybe even a year ago, that would've been fine," Baron said. "It's a certainly reasonable decision. But this was made within a couple of weeks of the election, and there was no substantive serious deliberation with the editorial board of the paper. It was clearly made for other reasons, not for reasons of high principle.”
As with Dr. Soon-Shiong, Bezos’ reasons may very well be business-related. On the day the Post announced it wouldn’t be endorsing a presidential candidate in the 2024 election, the Guardian reported that executives of Bezos’ space exploration company, Blue Origin, met with Trump. The details of the meeting were not publicly disclosed, though Blue Origin executives may be concerned about protecting the $3.4 billion contract they landed with NASA last year.
Former Post editor-at-large Robert Kagan — who resigned after the non-endorsement — told the the Daily Beast the fact that the meeting took place the same day the endorsement was called off was not a coincidence.
“Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do – and then met with the Blue Origin people,” Kagan said. “Which tells us that there was an actual deal made, meaning that Bezos communicated, or through his people, communicated directly with Trump, and they set up this quid pro quo.”
Bezos has owned the Post since 2013, and didn’t interfere when the paper endorsed Democrats Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden for president in 2016 and 2020, respectively. But he seems to fear reprisal from the former president, should he be elected to a second term in the form of attacks on his business interests. CNBC reported that in 2019, Amazon lost out to Microsoft on a $10 billion cloud computing contract for the Pentagon. A lawsuit filed that year claims that the ex-president used “improper pressure … to harm his perceived political enemy.”
Bezos himself pushed back on the suggestion of kowtowing to Trump for business reasons in an op-ed he published in the Post. He insisted that the Blue Origin executive team’s meeting with Trump the same day his paper announced it wasn’t endorsing Harris was pure coincidence, that the decision was “entirely internal” and not based on his personal interference, and that he “sighed” when finding out about the meeting, knowing how it would be perceived.
“[N]o quid pro quo of any kind is at work here,” Bezos wrote. “There is no connection between [the meeting] and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.”
In a recent interview with the Guardian, Timothy Snyder said it was correct to call Dr. Soon-Shiong’s and Bezos’ interference with their newspapers’ respective editorial boards “anticipatory obedience.”
“Oligarchs, the very wealthy people, want to tell us that they’re just ‘staying out of politics’. But of course, when you stay out of politics in a way that harms democracy, what you are really doing is saying, we, the really wealthy people, are going to be fine in the new post-democratic order,” Snyder said. “What they are saying is: after democracy dies in darkness, they’ll be the ones who will be moving happily about in the shadows.”
Bezos and Soon-Shiong aren’t the only billionaire media executives obeying in advance, either. In August, Meta CEO and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg expressed a noticeably warmer attitude toward Trump, and praised his raised-fist response to the July assassination attempt as “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.” That same month, Politico reported that Trump claimed Zuckerberg plotted against him in the 2020 election, and that if he did it again, he would “spend the rest of his life in prison.”
A second Trump term will be defined by fascistic acts of vengeance
The former president has made it abundantly clear that the central theme of his second term, should he win the election, would be vengeance. In early 2023, when officially launching his 2024 candidacy for the White House, Trump gave an ominous speech to supporters in Waco, Texas (where a bloody standoff between federal agents and the Branch Davidian cult occurred), vowing to use the forces of the government to strike back at enemies of his movement.
“I am your warrior, I am your justice,” Trump said. “For those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution.”
This publication has not pulled punches about calling Trump and his movement explicitly fascist, as this author has done in a five-part series written between 2021 and 2022. But Occupy.com’s characterization of the 2024 Republican presidential nominee as a fascist is now also shared by two four-star generals who worked closely with Trump.
General Mark Milley, who Trump himself appointed to chair the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2019, told journalist Bob Woodward that the ex-president was “fascist to the core,” and “the most dangerous person to this country.” In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Milley contacted his counterpart in China to assure him that Trump’s attempts to overturn election results would not be successful. When Trump found out about that call, he suggested that the United States’ top military official should be executed.
John Kelly, a Marine general who was Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, recently told the New York Times that his former boss met the basic definition of a fascist, and warned that he would govern as a dictator if elected to a second term.
“Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” Kelly said. “So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America.”
Kelly also told Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg in October that Trump said he wanted “the kind of generals that Hitler had,” because they were “totally loyal.” He also praised the Nazi dictator, telling Kelly that he thought “Hitler did some good things,” and on one occasion asked who the “good guys” were in World War I. The four-star general told Trump in response that, actually, Hitler’s generals tried to kill him on multiple occasions (like the July 20 plot), that it was never acceptable to praise Hitler for anything, and that it was a good general practice for American presidents to always assume the “good guys” in any war were the US and its allies.
Trump has continued to defend his remarks calling Democrats and people who oppose him “the enemy from within,” and even asserts that they are worse than America’s foreign adversaries. This is also a callback to Hitler’s regime: In 2012, the University of Cambridge published a report finding that Hitler once referred to Jewish people as “the enemy within.” That characterization notably preceded the “Final Solution” in which Hitler signed off on the genocide of millions of Jewish people across Germany and its occupied territories.
And like the pro-Nazi German American Bund in 1939, Trump also held a fascist rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The Post’s Philip Bump observed that the Bund rally “bore some striking similarities” to Trump’s late October MAGA rally.
“Speakers in 1939 lamented government spending, railed against Marxism and complained about how information negative to their allies was ‘played up and twisted to fan the flames of hate in the hearts of Americans’ by the news media,” Bump wrote. He also reminded readers that Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s claim that “America is for Americans, and Americans only” mirrored Bund national secretary James Wheeler-Hill’s call “to restore America to the true Americans.”
Whether it’s the symbolic fascism of pro-Trump speakers saying the same things at a rally in the same location as avowed Nazis 85 years ago, or the very real, practical fascism that John Kelly and Mark Milley warned about, the fact that the final week of the 2024 election is focused on a national conversation about whether the Republican presidential nominee is a fascist should be alarming to all of us.
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Carl Gibson is a journalist whose work has been published in CNN, USA TODAY, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Barron’s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Bluesky @crgibs.bsky.social.
