From the slaveholding South to Jim Crow, Reagan’s billionaire revolution, and Trump’s police state, the same dangerous pattern keeps repeating. Is fascism conservatism’s ultimate destination? What happens when “conservatives” would rather destroy their democracy than surrender power? History shows us how that road leads straight to fascism, and Trump is taking America down it.

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. — Trump’s Justice Department has sued to throw out Alaska’s Senate election before anybody’s finished voting in it, but — surprise! — only if the Democrat wins. — The Supreme Court just told New Hampshire’s college students to go find a different ID two weeks before an election, and did it in the name of not changing the rules too close to an election. — Trump now says he has “the right” to run in 2028 because, you see, the election he lost in 2020 was stolen, so it doesn’t count. — Trump spent Thursday night demanding that Mike Johnson refuse to seat Ilhan Omar, and for good measure declared that her party had “conceded” her seat. — Mark Zuckerberg’s algorithms are apparently pushing hard for Trump’s buddy’s son, Flavio Bolsonaro, to win Brazil’s presidential runoff. — Donald Trump looked an NBC reporter in the eye Friday and said he doesn’t “know anything about a stepfather,” which is a remarkable claim about an ad he’s spent three days defending — A new book alleges Jared Kushner had access to roughly $2 billion in Gulf money while running Middle East policy out of the White House, and Trump’s considered response is that the reports are “fake news.” — Climate Alert! The American West has lost nearly 300 of its original 1,450 glaciers since the 1960s.

America’s 45-year crisis runs deeper than politics, raising a defining question about whether the nation can rebuild economic fairness, restore democracy, and revive the American Dream… Something big is in the wind.

Millions march against authoritarianism while a handful of powerful men control the digital public square, shape our news, and decide which voices Americans get to hear… As many of us were showing up this past Saturday for our local No Kings marches, with over 3,000 of them underway, the movement’s organizers suddenly found themselves locked out of their Instagram account for hours. Meta blames it on a software glitch or something close to that, but that episode illustrates exactly the concern progressives and anti-fascists have been voicing for years: that Big Tech and the billionaires behind it have way too much power, and that they are using it to control public opinion to their own benefit. Then yesterday morning Christiane Amanpour announced that after reporting for CNN for 43 years she’s leaving the network. While she didn’t mention nepo-baby David Ellison who now owns the network, she didn’t have to: back in May at a journalism summit in London she said she was “concerned” about Ellison ownership and how it might bring about the same kind of “ideological realignment” that he’d already imposed on CBS News. What we’re seeing here with these two companies in microcosm is that the men who own the social media digital square where a near-majority of people get their news, and the people who own the TV networks and papers like The Washington Post, are the same handful of billionaires with political and financial axes to grind that fit nicely with Trump’s vision of a strongman state run by a ruling elite. Whether it turns out that Meta did something for politics or it was just an error doesn’t change the fact that one company run by one man can switch off a national movement’s megaphone and doesn’t legally owe anybody an explanation.