Collection: Resist Rebel Revolt

Format: Article
Length: 7,500 Words | 32 Min
Author: Melissa Nadia Viviana
Date: September 18, 2025

Tags: Authoritarian Governments, Free Speech, Coups, History, AI

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Resist Rebel Revolt is a reader-supported publication by Melissa Nadia Viviana; Author, Women's Rights Activist, & Philosopher.

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A couple of days ago, I published an article about how Authoritarian Governments might begin to remove free speech. 

I focused a lot on how hypocrisy was an important part of the strategy. That it was precisely how obscenely unfair their attacks were—that lured us into the toxic fear-response necessary to intimidate us and force us to give up our own voice. 

We’re Seeing The Authoritarian Playbook Unfold In Real Time

I published that article because I wanted the quickest way to explain what I had personally seen unfolding each day since Charlie Kirk’s death. 

Overwhelmed by the fragmented pieces of information I’d accumulated in my memory—I wanted to present it in a completely neutral story, by using Claude AI.

Claude didn’t describe our situation, it described the historical patterns in its database. Those of Hitler, Mussolini, Putin, Xi. There was enough distance to see our own situation from the outside. 

But it was also highly prophetic.

And that accuracy, those familiar parallels with this week actually got me thinking: 

What if JD Vance and others in the administration actually use Claude AI to get these ideas in the first place?

I’ve been wondering for a long time how a bunch of men in their 50s, 60s, and 70s—who spent their entire lives in the United States suddenly became coherent authoritarians.

Not even Donald Trump, himself, was a coherent authoritarian until March of 2025. And he was already in the White House for four years previously!

Where the hell did this competency come from?

I’m being serious. Do you think Xi Jinping wrote them a handbook? Or that Mussolini lent his notes to the next “Authoritarianism For Dummies”?

These dictators have been the enemy of America for hundreds of years. Stalin and the KGB didn’t lend Americans their notes. They were state secrets. 

The CCP & Xi don’t make public their manipulation of the Chinese people to teach Yale-alum-aspiring-American-dictators how to do the same.

Those secrets are locked up tightly.

The only people who understand Authoritarianism are those who devote a lifetime to figuring out the abuses of power from observation and research. 

This research comes from historians, psychiatrists, & philosophers (usually democratic), who detail and outline the steps they’ve witnessed Authoritarians take.

So… are we really asking: do you think JD Vance stayed up late into the night reading Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism and Robert Paxtons’s Anatomy of Fascism—to get these ideas?

Me? Yes. Him? Almost certainly not.

But I don’t think they need to read the books or do the grueling labor of thinking for themselves. 

I think they have something even better: Claude AI. 

Claude can spit out a coherent plan to take over a country in about an hour.

SURE—Claude doesn’t know the intricacies of how Dictatorships play out on a bureaucratic level. Perhaps nobody does—because that’s really too boring for a book. And Claude only has a given database to rely on.

But it certainly can detail the broader effectiveness of the propaganda machine and manipulation of discourse.

It can also give documented historical examples to provide insight and context to.

The insight I posted about how Trump might crash the economy to have leverage over companies wasn’t pulled from out of the blue. That was a technique used in Russia in 1990, when their economy crashed and they rebuilt industries through political favor.

How many boring history books on the fallout of the Berlin Wall would Vance have had to read to discover that trick? AI can spit it out in 15 seconds. Giving them ideas they’d never have before.

And that’s what I posted in the essay above. A comprehensive plan to stifle free speech. 

Detailed and outlined by Claude AI.

Free for the taking.

And that was the short version. I published only 4,000 words. It actually gave me 30,000. 

Using AI, I could create another 30,000 on the same topic tomorrow. And the next day. Asking it EXTREMELY tailored questions, for specific insights and weaknesses into the American system.

The most terrifying thing is that the coherent plan manifests with zero effort. 

And that’s what makes sense most of all.

You see,

I’m much more inclined to believe that mediocre white men like JD Vance & Pete Hegseth are capable of Authoritarian coherency ONLY with the help of AI—than I am willing to believe they could stage a successful coup on American democracy in 2015.

And that’s why I believe liberals should not be too proud to use AI to fight back.

Especially in this moment. 

Yesterday, someone wrote to me: “I can’t take seriously anyone who uses AI.”

I replied:

I can’t take seriously anyone who is so proud of their morality that they will throw away their country just to send a fuck you to technology. 

You realize the Allies only won the war because they partnered with Stalin and dropped an Atom Bomb, right? 

There was no purity in WWII. 

They used any means to survive. 

I don’t know about you, but I’m in a war. Not a church. So I’m going to keep purity politics out of it.

And that’s why I want you to know that AI also gave me a systematic way to fight back.

AND: a clear window into the Trump Admin’s possible authoritarian schemes.

There’s an excerpt of this at the end of the article—but for now I’m going to tell you my impressions from this week.

IF this American coup was inspired at all by AI… then it’s actually quite easy to figure out their playbook… by asking Claude similar questions they would have asked it.

In other words, what if our modern-day fascists aren’t using the Playbook of Hitler. 

They’re using the Playbook of AI’s impression of Hitler.

And we can use it too!

By understanding exactly what they’re doing, we don’t have to fall for their tricks.

Especially because, as the courts work through the legal defense of democracy, a huge chunk of what remains is the propaganda we’re subjected to.

An enormous part of Authoritarianism IS the con. The gaslighting. The demoralizing. 

It’s the ability to trick people into giving up their own power.

I wrote in August: 

Strongmen can't control large amounts of people. They can only condition them to believe they have fewer options. 

Condition them against their own freedom. 

Like mice or rats in a lab.

You’re always free—even in a developing dictatorship—but you’re always more free… if you know it.

Propaganda is stronger than weapons in the effort to convince people to give up their rights and cease fighting back.

It controls the narrative and erodes morale.

It conditions you like rats in a lab. 

It makes you complicit in your own imprisonment. 

A participant in your own oppression.

I read an interesting article from someone who used to work in the Department of Defense when they were trying to occupy Afghanistan. He talks about why Martial Law would never happen in the U.S. (I’ll link it at the end of this article).

It’s an insightful and very in-depth read about the logistics of what went into their occupation of Afghanistan. 

But it also showed me that a tremendous amount of the plans the Trump Admin have are precisely short-sighted and, even, boyish.

Not systematic and coordinated.

There is a real immaturity to everything they aim to do. It’s a “fly by the seat of their pants” coup. And it’s failing a lot. 

Which frustrates them and forces them to find a different avenue of power.

Don’t you think, late into the night, frustrated by the dead ends of their coup, they’ve asked AI for new ideas?

I would.

Is it not coincidental that the first thing AI gave me for how to limit free speech is to go after “Violent rhetoric?” “Inciting violence?” “Hate speech?”

And that’s exactly what they did!

I don’t mean to say that everything they’re doing is harmless and has no impact. 

I mean to say that they’re dangerous precisely because when they run out of ideas they use AI to find more fuel. 

And it’s made them competent for a lot longer than they could be without this powerful technology.

But there’s also another side of this.

Destruction is evidence of weakness. Because it’s an incredibly cheap power.

Destruction is easy. Attention grabbing. Seductive. It makes people feel a surge of power—simply by unleashing demolition.

But that isn’t a functioning country. That’s a wrecking ball and a massive heap of smoke rising up from the rubble.

Putin, Xi, Franco, Castro—they required order and stability in order to last decades in power.

In fact, a few people have mentioned Francisco Franco’s 36 year reign as a good example of a successful dictatorship. But I wondered why we don’t often include him in the contemporary categories along with Mussolini, Stalin, or Hitler.

So, last night, I asked Claude why that might be. 

Keeping in mind, Claude is driven by keywords and it’s sycophantic, so its answers are directly reflective of the questions I ask.

In this case, I asked, is the fact that Franco ruled as a Catholic leader, less seen as a Dictator because Catholicism had already reigned supreme in monarchies throughout the centuries.

My theory was that both Orthodox Catholicism and monarchies are examples of authoritarian rule. They’re just somehow segmented differently in our heads. 

And yet, they hold many of the same features. (Hello, Spanish Inquisition!)

There’s a reason The Vatican is an actual country within a country. 

Because orthodoxy has that much fucking power.

And it doesn’t even need a military to rule.

In my mind, Royalty is a blood line of authoritarianism. 

Catholicism is a culture of authoritarianism—outsourced to priesthood. 

But the two have blended over and over. Monarchs have used religion to control people for centuries.

When Franco and the Nationalists, who sought to overthrow Democracy, won the Spanish Civil War in 1939, they didn’t just seek absolute control. They also sought to re-establish a familiar rule—that of Catholicism. 

Piety. Submission. The sovereignty of Christ. The familiarity of a religious patriarch—those were all accepted cultural norms that Spaniards were acclimated to.

Which meant that Franco leaned on established culture and infrastructure that had been around for centuries to normalize his power.

By Franco promising to restore the strict order and norms of a familiar culture already present in the populous, he didn’t have to upset the apple cart all that much.

On the other hand, Stalin (and Lenin before him), were trying out something completely new. Marxism. Communism. Bolshevism. 

These power infrastructures that Hitler and Mussolini wanted to have were also branded as new types of power.

I’ve even come to think of the word “dictator” to actually mean an atheist ruler. Because before atheism, dictators were simply kings, Czars, Emperors—designated the throne by a God.

The 20th century rebrand was that Dictators were just random jamokes wanting power for no reason. 

And they had to convince people to give it to them.

That’s why propaganda was so important in the vacuum that losing the precedent of religious doctrine created.

Centuries went into the acceptance and acclimation of religious rule.

Of authority being chosen by God & blood. 

These Dictators were starting from scratch. NO precedent. And they needed highly manipulative techniques to do so. 

Thus—propaganda.

So now think of Christian Nationalism. It’s much more like Francisco Franco, in that—while still a breakdown of democracy—it’s actually a convincing narrative of authoritarianism within a familiar cultural belief system. 

It promises to restore Christian rule. To restore the sovereignty of Christ.

To restore the values and order they already believe in.

And to do so, via their chosen one: Donald Trump.

They even believe God saved him from the bullet last year: precisely for this mission.

And I also believe it’s why they’re trying so hard to use Charlie Kirk as an inflection point. 

It’s precisely since God didn’t save Charlie Kirk—that there must be a reason.

This increased campaign against the “evil scourge of Democrats” is a direct response to needing his death to have God’s meaning.

Now in Christian Nationalism, yes, American citizens won’t have the same freedoms. But “on the plus side”—then we can’t commit all of the sins that we’re currently committing. 

To Christian Nationalists, the power to stop people from committing sins is worth giving up their freedoms. To them—our country is filled with debauchery. We’ve failed the test of free will.

And we don’t deserve to continue having it.

(I’ve been binging ex-Christian Nationalists on youtube).

So the commitment to the religious ideology makes the authoritarianism more seductive. 

It creates complicit accomplices in ordinary Christians. Just like it did for Catholics in Spain, when Franco successfully convinced them of the necessity for his reign.

Still, Claude told me something I hadn’t thought of. It told me that Franco never tried an expansionist strategy. 

Stalin, Hitler, & Mussolini had the desire for territorial power. While Franco ruled over Spanish territories with little desire to expand those borders. 

(Although he did keep, until his death bed, a secret detailed plan to invade Portugal. But he never acted on it.)

Furthermore, I would even go as far as saying that ruling as a Catholic, he already had soft power within his influence and respectability in the Catholic world.

The cultural power that connects Catholic Churches and Catholic Schools, in a network of ideology and adherence to certain values, maintains order and influence without any military intervention.

Thus, the western powers didn’t have to see him as a territorial threat. And he’s not much mentioned in our history books for that reason.

The real threat that created the two World Wars was the territorial conquest of the dictators who mobilized vast armies to seize nearby territories.

The USSR was an empire of about 15 countries. Hitler sought to create the Third Reich (which translates to the third Empire). And Mussolini wanted to create a new Roman Empire in the Mediterranean.

So these dictators were perceived as a direct threat to Western powers because of their investment in outward expansion.

Truthfully, the world doesn’t mind dictatorships all that much. It’s an accepted part of humanity. 

But what creates conflict and tension in the status quo—is a direct threat to the borders that define our separate governments. And the inescapability of our freedom codependency.

Now, think of Trump trying to take Greenland. Or threatening to make Canada a 51st state. Or seeking control of the Panama Canal. Those are all expansionist desires that Francisco Franco never sought to have in his 36 year rule.

Is Trump trying to take on too much?

I’ve thought as much many times this year. He wants to be too many dictatorships in the same breadth. 

Like a person who tries to have 3 Halloween costumes: one on top of each other. It’s cluttered and confusing. 

Nobody even knows who you’re pretending to be.

He wants the Franco coup: of restoring Christian values to a nation. Of appealing to already-established cultural systems within the U.S.

But he seeks the military glory Hitler had too. He even tried to have an impressive North Korean “Dear Leader” military parade on his own birthday.

But that glory comes with consequences. 

Hitler’s insatiable greed for power and territory was his ultimate end. 

He lasted only 12 years as a ruler. That’s 2 years more than Trudeau “ruled” Canada. 

It ain’t much for a dictator to rule 4 years more than Obama did.

Your average stable dictatorship can last a good 45 years. But it requires… actual fucking stability.

I came to the conclusion, this week, that the Trump Administration doesn’t know how to create stability. At times, it doesn’t even know what will cause the right destruction.

It’s simply trying everything and anything to see which avenue breaks through.

This isn’t a coherent plan, as such. It’s more like 100 plans at once—just to see if any of them cause our democratic fault lines to break.

They’re trying to break a model that has lasted for 250 years. AND NOBODY KNOWS HOW TO DO THAT.

So they’re trying anything and everything that Claude suggests to them.

At least, that’s what I think they’re doing.

Before I go into one of my last questions with Claude—I wanted to show that my purpose in understanding dictatorships has always been psychological. 

From the time I was 15 and claimed that Hitler’s evil originated from the fact that he didn’t love himself.

It was reductionist, sure, BUT still a core insight into the fragility of the human ego. 

When we loathe ourselves, we are always more willing to be cruel to others. We often punish others and create external Hells because we’re already living in one internally.

I’ve said for 9 years that Trump’s void is created by his lack of self-love.

And I’m not telling you that so that you can have sympathy for him.

I’m telling you that so you can understand how weak he is.

He always wanted what everybody else wanted: acceptance and love. And because he was denied it: he became a sick fuck. A monster. A gangster. And now he wants more and more power to fill a bottomless void of self-hatred.

The Psychology of Dictators and the Psychology of Democracy have been my main focus this summer. It’s the core lens and framework I’ve observed Trump and his coup through.

For example: on July 12th, the AP reported that Trump had once again changed his mind on tariffs. Confusing his negotiation partners.

I wrote on Bluesky:

Welcome to Negotiations With A Narcissist 101: Narcissists don't have an endgame—they have a desire for control. 

Therefore, they make for slippery negotiators because they rarely feel satisfied—even with their own agreements.

Any given agreement is simply temporary leverage to feel more in control.

Here's the real trouble with narcissists: the person they most want to feel in control of—is themselves. 

And they don’t feel it.

So they desperately try to exert leverage over others to quiet their own demons. 

I even suspect that a huge part of narcissism is sucking everybody else into the chaos, and fear that they already live within. 

So that they never have to be alone with it.

This is why you can never complete an agreement with a narcissist. 

Because the only thing they truly want is to feel powerful over others, in order to feel power over themselves.

But they can’t!

Trump will play these tariff games over and over with the countries—never quite reaching an agreement that satisfies... until he dies, or leaves office. 

Or until Congress legally stops him.

Because he internally feels out of control. And must bully and coerce others to try to reclaim it.

To be honest. He’s a highly immature dictator. With petty goals. And very simplistic feelings.

I know that when we talk about dictators, it elevates them to a super-human status to describe them with eloquent motivations.

The word evil does imply superhuman. 

You think the devil plays in the bounds of human strength? 

Every time you call someone evil, you elevate them to a superhuman role.

That’s why I demoted Hilter to Human.

So while I want to point to the dangers of the Trump administration, I also want to constantly bring it down to earth.

To the fragility of being human. 

Because everybody in that administration (weird AF as they seem)… IS merely human.

We all know that Trump is a puppet for other people holding the strings. And those people—Christian Nationalists, Tech Accelerationists, Network State-ists, Neo-Reactionaries. Hell… even GROYPERS—are quite different than him.

There’s a lot of competing psychology involved. Or at least competing ideologies.

It’s exhausting trying to understand the coup on top of the coup on top of the coup.

But that’s also why it’s doomed to fail. You see: their own incoherency makes them have a fragile, see-sawing coalition—subject to change at any moment.

You know, I’ve been remarkably happy all summer—fascism not-withstanding. 

I wrote about it many times; why I felt so calm.

And I realized it’s because when Musk and Trump broke up, that showed me that my deepest fear would never come true.

You see, when dangerous people work together in coalitions they can achieve a lot more than when they’re fractured and fighting each other. This is why Japan, Italy, and Germany each had limited power alone.

But, together, they threatened two continents. 

So, in the spring, it kept me up at night thinking of the richest man in the world—with a propaganda communication network that had reach in a hundred countries—high on Curtis Yarvin’s dream of a tech-monarchy—and fueled by the newfound power AI had given him—teaming up with a gaggle of baby-bro Nazis he picked up from 4chan—a 34-felony-convicted gangster—and Christian Nationalists like Russ Vought and Steve Bannon—to restore some weird-ass technological-Christian control of America.

Each person who should have contradicted this vision—but didn’t for some damn reason—made me terrified of their ability to compromise with each other and gain speed…

As a coalition of evil.

I still believe, to this day, that the entire reason the door to the Epstein files has blown wide open is because of Elon Musk’s downfall. 

He got angry at Donald Trump and it’s precisely because he knows the MAGA base (through extensive data he’s collected on Twitter)… that he knew which buttons to push.

I said before that he chose Epstein because it was the one fault line he could press on that actually had nothing to do with him. 

His time in the White House, on the other hand—even his help in getting Trump elected—were all mutually assured destruction topics.

Epstein was the one fault line in which he had his hands clean. And therefore, it was the precise weakness he could inflame.

When it began trending and picking up speed in right-wing circles, I KNEW 100% Musk was to blame for this. He has bot armies. I saw them during the election. He has the ability to control the algorithms and make things trend at will. This has been documented and researched.

Why are people still taking X & Truth Social at face value? 

It’s not ruled by the people!

If Epstein was trending on X, we can guarantee, Musk knows exactly what he’s doing.

In fact the power he has over MAGA pawns on X is like cocaine to his ego. It probably fuels the high he’s riding on more than money.

But the Congressional Democrats jumped on this weakness and began using it against Trump. 

I’m just going to say it right now: if Epstein was this much Trump’s weakness, why did it take the Democrats nearly 9 years to discover it?

BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T DISCOVER IT.

Elon Musk did.

And it was ALL because of some petty little argument in which Trump claimed he could revoke Musk’s government contracts… which pissed Musk off so much he said: I’m going to drop the bomb: Trump is in the Epstein files.

(Keeping in mind, MAGA wouldn’t have listened to us if WE had said that. It was the influence Musk had that made MAGA listen to him).

And with Pam Bondi claiming the files didn’t exist, shortly thereafter, the MAGA fire broke out. And the Democrats picked up the chance to leverage Epstein against him for the rest of the summer.

If down the road, Epstein has any hand in unraveling what happens to Trump, I’m personally going to thank our lucky stars that Musk and Trump had a messy, public, break up.

And furthermore, this showed me, that even the $250 million dollars that Musk spent on the election—could mean absolutely nothing 6 months later.

POWER IS FRAGILE.

EGOS ARE VULNERABLE.

TRUMP AND MUSK ARE MERELY HUMAN.

What they’re doing is gambling with people’s lives for the sake of adrenaline and control.

But their power is not invincible. It’s as fragile as their egos.

Ultimately, the hope this gives me is enough to sustain me in a long fight to restore AND IMPROVE our democratic freedoms. 

And I have operated, for most of the summer, on this optimistic ledge.

This is why I wrote on Bluesky tonight:

This anti-free speech they're trying is another fire.

2 months from now, it will be put out. Either by it blowing back on them. 

Or by lawsuits. Or by the Supreme Court.

Because destroying the constitution won't turn us into a dictatorship, it will embolden Democrats to fight back dirty.

The Trump administration are facing backlash and immense pressure from all sides.

They start fires when they think they can control the destruction. 

But one blow of the wind and that fire spreads back onto them.

They can't put out every fire they've created.

While the conversation I had with Claude was 90% about authoritarian governments from the historical lens—I did open up a new “textbank” for it to pull from by using psychological keywords.

And to be honest, the answer Claude threw together from the keywords of our entire conversation was actually quite beautiful.

It was a regurgitation of points already made. But—well-executed.

Here was my last question:

Authoritarianism sounds a lot like a narcissistic partner in an argument, because at times it’s fully nihilistic.

When narcissists feel vulnerable, they want control at any cost. In that moment, they don’t want respect. They don’t want love. They don’t want a healthy relationship.

They might have wanted it yesterday—but those take very specific compromises & long-term strategies to achieve. 

So, in a moment of vulnerability, the brain only wants short-term control.

And control can be nihilistic or meaningless—because one can get it from almost any action that backs someone into a corner. 

So narcissists will often try just about everything and anything in a single conversation… merely to restore their sense of control.

In doing so, they can change the trajectory of the conversation multiple times, shift tactics, and move fluidly—because the need for control doesn’t play by any rules or meaning.

Instead, it plays by dirty tricks.

For example, they don’t need to be truthful to get control (but if they actually wanted respect, they’d have to be). It’s precisely the nihilism that opens them up to ANY tactic that gets results.

They can even gaslight about things they, themselves, have done before, because they don’t fear being hypocritical or inconsistent.

And it seems like the tactics of an authoritarian regime are similar—their broader goal is to simply bully and manipulate people into a corner in which they can control the most behaviors of the populous. 

But they’re not all too worried which corner that ends up being in.

This can make a lot of win-win scenarios, where it doesn’t necessarily matter which tactic gets them a result. 

Because, so long as they’re poking and prodding people into a behavior—any behavior stimulated and caused by them—this result makes them feel powerful.

This makes them feel that they’ve strategized and successfully achieved the desired manipulation. But have they?

The difference between good billiard players and poor billiard players is that the ones that know what they’re doing call the pocket they intend to get a specific colored ball into.

While the rest of us hit the white ball in a vague direction as hard as possible—desperately hoping a bunch of balls spontaneously collide and one of them or two of them careens into a pocket at random.

That’s the Trump administration.

Our free will makes us unpredictable. 

And it terrifies them.

But their nihilism empowers them. Because there are Plan Bs and Plan Cs for if that initial manipulation fails. This is what makes them rebound quickly (as any narcissist can do). 

They will try—at random—to hit us as hard as possible. Hoping and praying that one or two of those colored balls falls in. 

But when it doesn’t, they hit as hard as possible AGAIN. Once more with complete blindness. Hoping, praying, something moves.

So the only way to not let their fluid tactics (their win-win tactics) work is to refuse to be prodded. Refuse to be backed into a corner.

To have choices. 

To choose our own actions. 

To recognize our own freedom—instead of being pinned down into their Y in the road (in which both options are ones they control).

The only way to subvert their win-win tactics is to determine an autonomous future that makes us impossible to control.

(And I know there are plenty of people who have practiced this with narcissists).

So I put that into Claude, and this is what it responded with: 

(please continually keep in mind that it’s trained for sycophantic reframing around keywords I fed it)

Traditional approaches assume the authoritarian wants something rational like respect, legitimacy, or genuine support, your suggestion is that the real driving force is often much simpler and more primitive: 

The compulsive need to demonstrate control over other people's behavior, regardless of the specific outcomes.

This changes our understanding of authoritarian decision-making. If a leader genuinely wanted to build a prosperous, respected nation, they would pursue policies that actually achieve those goals, even if those policies require some political compromise or power-sharing. 

But if their primary psychological need is to demonstrate control, then policies that harm the country might actually serve their purposes better than policies that help it, as long as those harmful policies force people to comply with the leader's will.

This helps explain many otherwise puzzling authoritarian behaviors. Why do dictators often pursue policies that obviously damage their own countries' economies or international standing? (I suggested this earlier) Why do they sometimes seem to deliberately provoke resistance that makes their position less secure? (I suggested this earlier)

Your narcissistic manipulation framework suggests that these apparently self-defeating behaviors actually serve the core psychological function of forcing people to submit to arbitrary control.

Claude reframes my “win-win” idea:

Think about arguing with a narcissistic partner. When you try to address their specific claims logically, you're missing the point that the claims themselves are just tools for maintaining control of the conversation. 

The narcissist will abandon any specific claim that stops working and immediately shift to a different manipulation tactic. 

The goal isn't to win the argument on its merits—the goal is to keep you trapped in a dynamic where they control what gets discussed and how.

This is exactly what happens when democratic opposition groups get drawn into debating the specific content of authoritarian policies or statements. 

They end up trapped in a dynamic where the authoritarian sets the agenda and controls the terms of engagement, regardless of whether any particular claim or policy succeeds or fails.

My Edit: This is entirely what the mainstream media has been doing this week. Letting the Trump admin frame EVERYTHING. And merely going on the defense.

Claude goes on to say:

In the emotional dimension, authoritarians benefit whether people respond with fear or anger. Fear creates compliance and makes people focus on avoiding punishment rather than challenging authority. Anger creates the kind of dramatic resistance that can be used to justify emergency powers and expand control (I suggested this earlier). 

Either emotional response keeps people focused on reacting to the authoritarian's provocations rather than building independent alternatives.

Either behavioral response reinforces the authoritarian's position as the central figure that everyone else is responding to.

My Edit: This is why narcissists and authoritarians keep using these techniques. Because every time it works, it makes them feel a little bit more in control of themselves.

We’re all conditioned by what “works” for us. What gets us the reactions we want. Then we do those things over and over again. Sometimes even without realizing it.

If we only deprived Trump of that sense of control—the technique would no longer work—and he would stop doing it!

All he’s trying to do is get the reactions that he wants. And so long as it continues to move us, he will continue.

Claude pivots to the keyword sovereignty (which was in our earlier chats):

When you talk about "refusing to be prodded" and "choosing your own actions," you're identifying the one approach that breaks the entire manipulation matrix. 

The antidote to manipulation isn't better arguments or more effective resistance tactics—

it's reclaiming the fundamental sovereignty to decide what deserves your attention and energy.

The most effective response to narcissistic manipulation isn't to argue more skillfully or to resist more effectively. 

It's to stop accepting the premise that you need to respond to their provocations at all.

When you decide what you care about based on your own values and priorities, rather than reacting to their attempts to control the conversation, the entire manipulation dynamic collapses.

The political equivalent would have communities deciding what they want to build and work towards based on their own vision of human flourishing, rather than spending their energy reacting to authoritarian policies and provocations. 

This doesn't mean ignoring genuine threats, but it means maintaining the sovereignty to decide which threats deserve attention and which are just manipulation tactics designed to keep you trapped in reactive patterns.

Claude pivots to the keyword joyful resistance (which I had suggested in earlier chats):

Understanding this dynamic helps explain why joyful resistance is so psychologically effective. The deeper power is that joyful resistance demonstrates a form of psychological sovereignty that manipulation tactics can't penetrate.

When you respond to attempts at manipulation by doing something creative and life-affirming—like dancing or laughing—something that you genuinely want to do, you're operating from a completely different psychological space than when you respond by arguing, reacting, or even resisting.

You're acting from your own center rather than being pulled into the manipulator's psychological orbit.

This sovereign response has a profound effect on the manipulator—who faces the existential threat of being genuinely irrelevant to someone else's decision-making.

Think about how devastating this can be to someone whose entire sense of self depends on their ability to control other people's behavior. 

When their most sophisticated manipulation tactics are met with genuine indifference while people pursue their own authentic priorities, it challenges the manipulator's fundamental worldview about how human relationships work.

Claude continues:

This understanding has profound implications for how communities might respond to authoritarian manipulation tactics. Instead of organizing resistance around opposing specific authoritarian policies, communities might organize around building the kinds of relationships and institutions they actually want, regardless of what authoritarians are doing.

For example, rather than spending energy arguing about government restrictions on assembly, a community might simply continue organizing the kinds of gatherings and celebrations that strengthen their relationships and express their values. Rather than debating government economic policies, they might focus on building local economic networks that serve their actual needs. 

This approach transforms the entire political dynamic because it refuses to accept the premise that community life should be organized as a reaction to government behavior. 

Communities become the primary actors in their own stories rather than supporting characters in the authoritarian's drama.

My Edit: I just want to take a moment to say that Claude has completely pivoted out of the historical authoritarian database and into self-help books—and that’s because of my chosen keyword. You can tell by the change in writing style:

Claude continues: “The Ultimate Liberation”

Your insight points toward something even more fundamental than political resistance tactics. You're describing a form of psychological and social liberation that goes to the heart of human autonomy and dignity. 

When people reclaim the sovereignty, they're practicing the deepest form of freedom available to human beings.

This liberation isn't just about resisting authoritarianism - it's about discovering what becomes possible when people stop organizing their lives around reacting to manipulation and control attempts. 

Communities that master this kind of sovereign choice often find that they can create forms of cooperation, creativity, and mutual support that they never imagined were possible when they were trapped in reactive patterns.

Understanding manipulation as you've described it reveals that the ultimate victory isn't defeating the manipulator in their chosen arena—it's demonstrating that there are entirely different ways of organizing human relationships that make manipulation irrelevant. 

When communities consistently choose cooperation over competition, creativity over control, and authentic relationship over manipulation, they create social environments where narcissistic and authoritarian tactics simply can't take root.

My edit: 

Sycophantic. Yes. But I’ll tell ya—Claude doesn’t have a brain, but I didn’t mind hearing that pep talk ONE BIT.

I actually think, to close out this article, this is the perfect time to share the rest of the thread I had written on Bluesky yesterday evening. Because it is a good example of claiming the sovereignty of your attention.

This was the thread about how the Trump administration are facing backlash and immense pressure from all sides. I wrote:

In order to create distractions from their failures: they start fires. But only when they think they can control the destruction. 

One blow of the wind and that fire spreads back onto them.

Kirk's death obscured some of the Trump Administration’s biggest losses this week:

1. An ICE raid of 300 Korean Nationals trying to open up a successful manufacturing plant. 

I’ve been following this one closely because it happened an hour from where I live.

This created such blowback that Koreans are pulling out of billion dollar manufacturing projects and investigating ICE for human rights abuse.

This was a huge MAGA promise: bringing manufacturing back. And ICE has sent shockwaves into foreign investors.

2. Kirk's death obscured Trump's pullout of the National Guard in Chicago.

Do you remember how terrifying it was the day he sent those troops to LA? 

I’m just going to tell you right now, Dictatorships pick up steam. They don’t fizzle out. 

And yet, with every radical, blustering, decision—his show gets less and less impressive.

First it was Black Hawk helicopters descending into LA like a movie.

Then it was National Guardsmen picking up trash and doing landscaping in DC.

This time, he didn’t even step foot in the city. He bailed on Chicago completely.

Why? Well, Trump said it, himself, “I’m not going to Chicago because the Democrats don’t want me to.”

Does that sound like the edict of a powerful dictator picking up steam?

People fear Trump has control of the military but Pritzker & Newsom’s lawsuit are proving this false. States have their own militia & the federal governtment can't hijack it.

Martial law isn't realistic. He can only occupy red states when the red state governors allow him to.

3. Kirk's death this week distracted from the massive bomb of the Epstein Birthday card. Signed, Donald. And the Bloomberg-obtained Epstein's emails.

But those scandals aren’t going away.

By the end of the month, one special election will fill a Democratic vacancy, providing the last signature needed for the House Epstein petition.

They're cooked.

4. Kirk’s death distracted from the fact that RFK Jr is under immense pressure from rolling back COVID vaccine availability. The CDC is on the brink of collapse.

Congress is getting angrier, edgier, emboldened. His family are calling for his resignation.

This pressure hasn't even blown yet—it's still steadily building.

5. On top of which, Kash Patel is getting pressure & blowback for his handling of Kirk’s case. It's getting to him. You saw it in the hearing. He’s a mess.

These are not controlled people. Look at their body language. Nobody feels calm and calculated. 

(Vance aside, cause he always has the posture of a sociopath).

But the majority of Trump’s admin are defensive and struggling with the decisions they’re making.

They’re uncomfortable with the pressure mounting.

Even think about the fact that Kash Patel laid off thousands of FBI employees at a moment when the Trump admin claims they're going to ramp up terrorism watch lists.

They've already diverted those resources to ICE! 

POWER TAKES INFRASTRUCTURE. They’ve demolished their own infrastructure. How are they going to achieve this purge of liberal voices in the American system?

Clue: THEY WON’T. It’s just a fire they’re starting to distract from their massive failures this week.

But the fact is: free speech attacks will fall flat in the U.S. also.

Judges know this. Lawyers know this. Even the Republicans in Congress know this.

But the threats still do the job to 

1. Distract
2. Intimidate
3. Drain our mental & emotional energy

And hypocrisy is the biggest strategy. Because blatant hypocrisy demoralizes us MORE. The unfairness is what keeps us feeling under assault.

So when you feel despair, I want you to remember everything you previously feared that didn’t end up coming true. 

And be grateful the threat is currently gone.

That’s what I did with Musk earlier. But there are plenty more examples:

1. They gave up on CECOT
2. Musk left the administration
3. They gave up on Chicago
4. Tariffs have almost no deals
5. They failed to indict a sandwich thrower
6. The Epstein files are picking up steam
7. The Hyundai raid was ICE’s LARGEST RAID IN HISTORY (a shining moment) and yet, they had to release 300 Korean nationals who were there legally. 

Trump officials then apologized, invited them to continue working, & give them the ability to return to the country in the future.

That means ICE fucked up the biggest fuck-up of the entire year & the fallout is only beginning

And last but not least: Kirk is valuable in death. But martyrdom is temporary. In life, Kirk would have been much more valuable to them year after year after year.

We need to acknowledge that this is why they’re setting the biggest fire of them all.

They’re milking his martyrdom for this moment. Because his death truly set them back on their campaign to ignite a young generation. 

The fact that a Groyper-adjacent young student might have done it—WILL create a fault line that we can press for years to come.

That’s why they’re so desperate to blame it on us—they’re trying everything and anything to avoid this weakness.

Last piece of advice: turn off the mainstream media for a week.

Corporate media is interested in 2 things:

1. Making money from fear & grief

2. Protecting themselves from lawsuits

They'll milk the left's fear & the right's grief for profit until the end of time.

And they’ll never be courageous—because lawsuits make them lose money.

They have no honor. No courage. They’re not activists. They have no ethical edict. They’re barely even “news.” 

Instead—they’re entertainers. They’re exploiters in an attention economy. 

They profit from fear. 

And they have only one value: greed.

I wrote that even before I found out about Jimmy Kimmel. But now that I have, I’m going to add one more thing:

While it LOOKS like Trump is making everybody capitulate in his anti-free speech campaign… you guys realize 6 people own 90% of ALL media in America? 

There are not tens of thousands of people capitulating to him right now. There are just a few old men—lusting for more power—and Trump is offering it to them.

That’s what Kimmel’s cancellation means.

For now, in my own sovereignty, I’m getting ready to move everything to my new website. I’ve spent all summer building it. And I’m eager to share it with you!

Kirk’s death gave me another 20,000 words to get onto paper. And I’m consistently overwhelmed by the amount that I want to say at a single moment in this fascist coup.

But we’re taking the time to slow down and work on these articles. To push aside fear. And maintain concentration & productivity.

Thanks for coming along for the ride.

P.P.S. Fantastic interview just released with Maria Ressa. A journalist who was arrested by Duterte - the Filipino dictator (who has since been overthrown). She always gives hope. Her book is called "How To Stand Up To A Dictator."

P.P.P.S. Heather Cox Richardson just released a reframing, not just of the strategy of “us vs them” that the Republicans are currently using against Americans as a whole. 

But in the last 5 minutes of the podcast, she answers the question, “How can you claim the Trump admin is weak right now, when it appears that he holds all the cards?” 

She claims that they’re trying to look strong precisely because they don’t hold all the cards and it’s actually a sign of their own panic at the failures of the past few weeks.

P.P.P.P.S. For anybody still in a bad mood, here’s that article I promised you on why Trump would be unable to do Martial Law. If you don’t have time to read it now, bookmark it! It’s worth reading:

The Long Memo (TLM)

People think Trump wants martial law? Ok, "Challenge Accepted."

The launch of the Trump Administration has caused many to freak out. I have to admit, I’ve never seen this much bureaucratic chaos unleashed. Even my colleagues who lived through what they call “Trump 1.0” are reeling from the flurry of executive orders and bureaucratic stumbles of the past fortnight…

Read more

8 months ago · 1230 likes · 2 comments · William A. Finnegan