This What The Road To Authoritarian Rule looks Like

 

George Soros foundation hits back at Trump after report that DoJ plans to target group

New York Times reports justice department is pushing attorneys to investigate as Trump ramps up attack on rivals

The Open Society Foundations (OSF), the major philanthropic group funded by George Soros, has criticized the Trump administration for “politically motivated attacks on civil society” after a report that the justice department had instructed federal prosecutors to come up with plans to investigate the charity.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that a lawyer in the office of Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, sent a memo to several federal prosecutors in attorney’s offices in California, New York, Washington DC, Chicago and Detroit, offering a range of charges to consider against the group. Those charges included racketeering, arson, wire fraud and material support for terrorism, the newspaper reported.

    

Here's an example of a government using the legal system to stifle dissent and sideline their political rivals.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey had the mayor of  Istanbul arrested on corruption charges in April of this year. Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu of the Republican People's Party was seen As Recep Tayyip Erdogan's main rival in next year's presidential election.  

Putin's Russia is notorious for using the legal system to silence its critics.

Ads about Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and websites providing information about using VPNs to circumvent online censorship are now banned and criminalised under a new law that took effect on 1 March 2024.

Western social media such as Facebook and tens of thousands of websites have been censored by the Russian government under the pretext of “protecting its digital space against external influences” since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. But to the dismay of the authorities, this prompted a big increase in the use of VPNs.