This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 14 episode of “The 11th Hour with Ali Velshi.”
There is a famous saying attributed to Plato about the price society pays for treating politics with indifference: “One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”
Here we are — way past the “being governed by our inferiors” stage of things. We are being governed by a would-be autocrat, his ruthless Cabinet of sycophants and a cabal of oligarchs. Donald Trump has sent masked ICE forces into American neighborhoods, where they snatch our neighbors off the streets and fire at protesters and into vehicles. He’s targeting his most vocal critics for investigation, indictment, arrest and harassment.
But Trump and his accomplices aren’t stronger than you are, and participating now means more than simply voting — it means resisting.
On Tuesday, a judge indefinitely blocked the president’s press ban. For the last month, Trump has tried to block three news networks — MS NOW, CNN and Politico — from the White House simply because he does not like the stories they publish. Expectedly, a White House spokesperson has already said they will appeal the judge’s ruling.
Trump is following an established roadmap: an allegedly anti-establishment outsider takes advantage of a right-wing populist movement and is elected president in 2016. Yes, that’s how Trump came to power, but it’s also how Rodrigo Duterte was elected in the Philippines.
Duterte was a brutal leader who presided over what he called a “war on drugs.” But in reality, it was a justification for government-linked vigilantes to openly carry out savage murders in the streets of the Philippines. Those murders became known as “extrajudicial killings.” And to this day, nobody knows exactly how many “extrajudicial killings” took place under his leadership. Some estimate the death toll to be as high as 30,000.
Regardless, Filipino journalists with spines of steel pursued the story relentlessly, and the Duterte administration punished them for it. Many reporters and outlets were targeted, but few felt Duterte’s wrath worse than Maria Ressa, the founder of the digital news site Rappler.
Rappler was a fearless critic of the government. Its journalists wrote many stories laying out the truth about Duterte’s so-called war on drugs and the widespread corruption that happened during his administration.
In response, the government retaliated against Rappler — many times. In 2018, one of its reporters was once barred, without warning, from entering the grounds of the presidential palace, the Philippines’ equivalent to the White House.
During a nationally televised State of the Nation address in 2017, Duterte accused Rappler of being foreign-owned. In a follow-up statement, he added, “Not only is Rappler’s news fake, it being Filipino is also fake.”
A government task force accused it of being associated with communists as part of an effort to shut it down, and the outlet even had its license revoked at one point.
Ressa herself was targeted. In November 2018, she was charged with a series of tax-related crimes, including tax evasion. A few months later, she was arrested and charged under an anti-cybercrimes law that the Duterte administration widely used to go after journalists and other critics. A court found her guilty, but the case remains under appeal.
Despite all of those attacks, Ressa showed the world how to stand up to a dictator. She endured years of being treated as a criminal and never wavered from defending her rights and those of the free press.
All of the tax-related charges against her have since been dropped. Rappler’s license was also restored by the court, and it remains a top news site in the country.
In 2021, Ressa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work. Meanwhile, Duterte is awaiting trial at The Hague after he was arrested and charged by the International Criminal Court with crimes against humanity last year.
In Ressa’s new book, “The Fight Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Standing Up to Dictators,” she offers Americans a blueprint for confronting an autocratic leader — and defending democracy before it’s too late.
“Courage isn’t the absence of fear; it’s the decision that something matters more,” she wrote. “It’s the first step in the fight back.”
Allison Detzel contributed.
The post Journalists who stood up to an autocrat have a blueprint for fighting Trump appeared first on MS NOW.
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