Menu Bar

Home           Calendar           Topics          Just Charlestown          About Us

Monday, February 27, 2017

VIDEO: Any of these seem familiar?

7 Signs of Tyranny



As tyrants take control of democracies, they typically do 7 things: 

1. They exaggerate their mandate to govern. 

They claim, for example, that they won an election by a “landslide” even after losing the popular vote. 

They criticize any finding that they or co-conspirators stole the election. 

And they repeatedly claim “massive voter fraud” in the absence of any evidence, in order to have an excuse to restrict voting by opponents in subsequent elections.

2. They turn the public against journalists or media outlets that criticize them.

They call them “deceitful” and “scum,” and telling the public that the press is a “public enemy.” 

They hold few, if any, press conferences, and prefer to communicate with the public directly through mass rallies and unfiltered statements (or what we might now call “tweets”). 

3. They repeatedly lie to the public, even when confronted with the facts. 

Repeated enough, these lies cause some of the public to doubt the truth, and to believe fictions that support the tyrants’ goals.



4. They blame economic stresses on immigrants or racial or religious minorities.

They foment public bias or even violence against them. They threaten mass deportations, “registries” of religious minorities, and the banning of refugees.

5. They attack the motives of anyone who opposes them, including judges. 

They attribute acts of domestic violence to “enemies within,” and use such events as excuses to beef up internal security and limit civil liberties.

6. They appoint family members to high positions of authority.

They appoint their own personal security force rather than a security detail accountable to the public. And they put generals into top civilian posts.

7. They keep their personal finances secret, and draw no distinction between personal property and public property 

They profiteer from their public office.

Consider yourself warned.

ROBERT B. REICH is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fourteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations," and "Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent, "Saving Capitalism." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, INEQUALITY FOR ALL.