Nobel Peace Prize laureate and journalist Maria Ressa was arrested after Rodrigo Duterte was elected president of the Philippines. She wrote the book 'How to Stand Up to a Dictator.' Ressa said Trump, like Duterte did, is quickly moving to get rid of government's checks and balances: "There is a dictator's playbook, and you can look first at Russia, actually, even before that, Turkey, Hungary, Russia, right, with Putin taking office. And the first step is really to get elected, once you're elected, to crush the systems of checks and balances, and then replace them with your own --- we're starting to call them the broligarchy, because it's far more potent, the tech guys are more potent than just normal oligarchies. This is political largess, political patronage. You have to decide the world you want to live in. You have to decide whether rule of law exists. You cannot normalize impunity. And if you don't, over time, we normalize that and you lose more and more of your rights. But here's a positive note. Rodrigo Duterte's term ended. He had one six-year term. He did try to extend. And perhaps if the military had supported him, I wouldn't be here. But we now have another president and those 10 criminal cases that I have had, I have now won eight of those 10 and two left. I still have to ask the Supreme Court for approval to travel, but we're here. It's alarming to see it happening all over again."

Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa tells us about losing democracy[image or embed]

-- Mia Farrow (@miafarrow.bsky.social) March 3, 2025 at 7:44 PM