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Human Rights Watch warned Wednesday, February 4 that President Donald Trump was turning the United States into an authoritarian state as democracy declines globally to its lowest ebb in four decades.

Trump’s return to the White House has intensified a “downward spiral” on human rights that was already under pressure from Russia and China, the New York-based advocacy and research group said in its annual report. “The rules-based international order is being crushed,” HRW said.

In the US, the group said, Trump has shown “blatant disregard for human rights and egregious violations.”

In descriptions that would have been unthinkable in the US section of its previous annual reports, the group pointed to the deployment of masked, armed agents – the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency – which has carried out “hundreds of unnecessarily violent and abusive raids.”

“The administration’s racial and ethnic scapegoating, domestic deployment of National Guard forces in pretextual power grabs, repeated acts of retaliation against perceived political enemies and former officials now critical of him, as well as attempts to expand the coercive powers of the executive and neuter democratic checks and balances, underpin a decided shift toward authoritarianism in the US,” the report said.

  • 4am@lemmy.zip
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    23 hours ago

    It’s wild to me that every complaint a right-winger has about socialism/communism is rather a direct complaint about authoritarianism, yet when we get actual authoritarianism they’re like “well at least I can still get rich someday”

    No you fucking can’t you bootlicker.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    19 hours ago

    Is heading?

    Authoritarianism?

    How about the US IS an authoritarian state, has been for a while, and it’s speed running heading into becoming a theocratic dictatorship ala handsmaid tale?

  • comrade_twisty@feddit.org
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    1 day ago

    Will the Washington Post even write about this now that Bezos fired 300 journalists who weren’t Trump friendly enough?

    Cancel Amazon, stop using US tech

    • kn0wmad1c@programming.dev
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      22 hours ago

      The hard part about the erosion of anti-trust laws over the last two decades is it’s really hard to do anything without supporting Amazon due to the sheer amount of things they own.
      And even if you made the effort to avoid everything here first-hand, supporting a company whose backbone runs off of AWS ends up supporting Amazon second-hand.

    • tomiant@piefed.social
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      1 day ago

      It’s so fucking disgusting. Literally fascist playbook 101. Purge journalists, intellectuals, politicians, judges. It’s like the USA stared so long down the abyss that it finally stared back like some Lovecraftian horror…

  • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    I mean technically I can still post the horrific shit they’re doing on Lemmy and facebook and I haven’t personally been prosecuted yet.

    So maybe heading is technically correct.

  • kylie_kraft@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    We are authoritarian whenever the R’s have control. That is not new. We are heading to fascism. Call it what it is.

  • Innerworld@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    Part of the life cycle of societies. Unfortunately, we live in a world in decline and there are many signs that indicate this.

  • rayyy@piefed.social
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    21 hours ago

    Funny when that ‘authoritarianism’ d oes land, those militias who helped get us there will either be forced to toe the line or be eliminated.

  • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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    22 hours ago

    Not authoritarianism: being the prison capital of the world, spying on everyone everywhere, police killing 1000+ a year, etc etc