11 Sep 2025 | Americas, News and features, United States
In 2013, as part of research for my book on Chinese youth, I sat down with one of the country’s most notorious young nationalists. Rao Jin was known for running a website, then known as Anti-CNN.com, that was against the American 24-hour news network (as a proxy for the West). Ideologically we could not have been further removed. But his views were (and still are) popular and I needed to understand how he arrived at them. We shared tea and despite our differences we spoke calmly. It was very civil.
That word civil is not one we can use right now for the USA, where the murder of Charlie Kirk and the response to it expose just how far we’ve drifted from basic norms of decency. The right-wing influencer and Donald Trump ally was shot and killed, aged 31, while speaking at a university in Utah. He was silenced, literally, though by who and for what reason we can only guess right now.
It was a horrifying display and because some people on social media seem to have no boundaries, I have accidentally seen, when scrolling, the moment it happened. I wish I hadn’t.
Horrifying too has been the commentary. Hours after the shooting, President Trump posted on Truth Social that his “administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence” and that the “radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people”. Trump’s words could be seen as an invitation to retribution. They’re full of assumption – that he was killed by someone from the left who opposed his views – and they’re inaccurate. Claims that violence is a liberal issue, echoed by Elon Musk and many others too since yesterday, are rubbish, a smack in the face of facts. Political violence happens on the extreme edges of the left-right spectrum. It was just two months ago that a Democrat lawmaker and her husband were killed.
The USA has also always been marked by such violence. I have first-hand experience of it. On a visit to LA in 2002 I had to duck behind a bus stop after two men sparred in a queue at Starbucks, leading to one pulling a gun on the other outside. Beyond my own experience are the well-known examples – the Kennedys, Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr, Huey Long, Harvey Milk – to name just a few.
That said, it’s clear that in today’s USA a violent form of authoritarianism is growing, feeding off an angry, deeply polarised population and aided by lax gun laws. Kirk’s murder is sadly just another piece of the puzzle, something we are trying to understand at Index and to counteract.
While Trump’s comments are terrifying in their implication, the remarks of those who either defended the shooter, diminished the horror or delighted in a form of schadenfreude were very troubling too. It is one thing to call out Kirk for his views. Many were vile and at the limits of what might be considered acceptable speech. It is another to badmouth a man in his dying moments, or after, with the implication being that he got what he deserved. Some have even responded to our post on Bluesky in such a way. It’s strange that I have to say here that Index will never condone violence.
As is the case with Rao Jin, I am sure that if Kirk and I had ever met we’d have vehemently disagreed with one another. Is it so hard though for people to hold two truths at once – that you can abhor someone’s views and abhor their murder too? Is it so hard to listen to people across the spectrum, to use words to counter speech you don’t like, not bullets?
The murder might peel open the USA to expose its fault lines like no other in recent years. It comes in the same week that the country’s leading free speech organisation, Fire, issued their annual report on free speech on campus, in which they said “the atmosphere isn’t just cautious – it’s hostile”. According to the report a majority of students surveyed opposed their college hosting six hypothetical speakers with controversial views and that students of every political persuasion showed “a deep unwillingness to encounter controversial ideas”. There’s a bitter irony here in the report’s timing.
The dust will settle on Kirk’s murder. The person behind it, perhaps already arrested, will likely be named. Their motivations will hopefully be aired. Maybe it was nothing to do with his views. As someone speculated on our Bluesky post, “what if he was having an affair with the wife of an army sniper?” Maybe he was.
Still, the broader context and point remains. We have a president in power who is not in favour of free speech for all and whose comments essentially encourage political violence, likely because it is expedient – it makes coming after ideological enemies easier. At the same time we have too many people who condone or downplay violence when it concerns those who they don’t agree with. But violence begets violence. Left unchecked it will come for us all and no one’s views, no matter how confronting, should make us lose sight of that.
25 Jul 2025 | Americas, Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Russia, United States, Volume 54.02 Summer 2025
This article first appeared in Volume 54, Issue 2 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Land of the Free?: Trump’s war on speech at home and abroad, published on 21 July 2025. Read more about the issue here.
On a hot June evening in London’s Bloomsbury earlier this summer, there was standing room only to hear the American historian Benjamin Nathans talk about the Soviet dissident tradition. Perhaps the audience at Pushkin House, the UK’s oldest independent Russian cultural centre, was drawn by the author’s new-found celebrity – the result of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize he has been awarded for his 800-page history of the dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause. Whatever the reason for so many people being there, they were treated to a masterclass in storytelling. After detailing the struggles of a tiny network of writers, scientists and academics against the authoritarian Soviet regime, Nathans turned to the subject of Donald Trump’s America.
“We are in a state of war,” he said. “We are in a state of war with our own government, and this is a war that’s going to last at least several years. The sooner that people understand that, as far as I’m concerned, the better. We need to be on a war footing.”
Nathans is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution based in Philadelphia, who has made his reputation through careful and nuanced analysis of Russian and Jewish history. His comments on US politics were delivered in the same calm and measured tone as his answers on Soviet intellectuals in the middle years of the 20th century.
Although “UPenn” is not on the frontline of attacks from the Trump administration, like Harvard and Columbia, it has been threatened with significant funding cuts – a $175 million embargo on research. Its offence? Five years ago, the university allowed the trans athlete Lia Thomas to participate in the women’s swimming team.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of this decision, at the time Thomas met the requirements of the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) to swim on the women’s team. Nathans elaborated: “So what the White House is essentially saying is, you obey the law five years ago, but we changed the law three months ago, and now we’re going to go after you retroactively for having violated our version of the law.” University of Pennsylvania is suing the government to block this action, but Nathans recognised that the Trump administration has a whole armoury of measures up its sleeve: stripping the university of its nonprofit status, taxing its endowment, or blocking the recruitment of foreign students, to name a few.
Beginning the fightback
Initially shellshocked, those opposed to the attacks on American civil society, including universities, are finally fighting back, said Nathans. “I know a lot of people in Europe have been dismayed at the lack of protest, at least until [14 June] with the ‘No Kings’ Day’, which produced a tremendous turnout in dozens and dozens of American cities. I participated in several quite modest-sized protests against these threatened funding cuts, against the demand by the administration that they have a say in our admissions policy, that they have a say in our hiring policies, things that just so egregiously cross the line of state interference.”
It would seem the global expert on dissidents is himself becoming a dissident in his own land. However, Nathans believes Trump and his allies are not mistaken in their view that American universities are hotbeds of left-liberal thinking.
“The reason why this war started with the Trump administration is that they view American universities as factories that produce Democrats. And they’re not wrong,” he said. In case anyone in the audience doubted him, Nathans repeated himself for emphasis: “They are not wrong. 95% of my department identifies with the Democratic Party. You have to look really hard to find a Republican in the humanities at a place like Penn.
“In general, there is a very clear, powerful correlation between higher education and voting Democratic – the more degrees people get, the more likely they are to vote for a Democratic candidate. Now, correlation is not causation, but as they say in the social sciences, it’s a good place to start.
“Republicans say, you know, why are we giving so much money to these institutions that just produce Democratic voter after Democratic voter? They concluded at some point that we are unreformable, that they cannot break the chokehold that left-of-centre academics have on the Academy.
“And so, what they’re going to do is break the institutions themselves, and that is what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to destroy these institutions so that they can remake them in a very different mould. It’s a war, in other words.”
The end of the Ivy League?
On a slightly more positive note, the historian said he didn’t believe the present US government would succeed in its mission to crush the USA’s elite universities, but he felt it would do a lot of damage on the way.
Intriguingly, there is a strategy at the heart of the dissident movement that may serve those fighting the Trump regime well. In the opening chapters of his book, Nathans describes the thinking of Alexander Esenin-Volpin, an eccentric mathematician and poet, who developed an ingenious method of resistance. For figures like Volpin and those around him, the old ways of the revolutionaries, such as mass demonstrations and underground cells, seemed outdated and associated with the romantic myth-making of the regime they opposed.
Volpin despised the “lingering romance with revolution as the paradigmatic form of historical change”. Instead, he suggested holding the Soviet government to the literal meaning of the 1936 Stalin-era constitution, which guaranteed free expression and open justice. In the 1960s, he developed the concept of the “glasnost meeting”, where people would gather to demand adherence to the law by the authorities. Glasnost translates to “openness” or “transparency”.
This “law-based dissent” was tested first at the glasnost meeting of 5 December 1965 in Pushkin Square, led by Volpin. It was designed symbolically to coincide with Constitution Day under the watchful eye of Russia’s late national poet Alexander Pushkin, the author of Ode to Liberty.
When Nathans was writing the conclusion to his epic work in the summer of 2023, his first thought was how it would carry in translation in Russia. He never imagined that it would take on a resonance in the USA. Now, he believes the parallels are real and that lessons can be learnt: “The dissident legal strategy can serve to highlight the really fundamental role that American courts are playing in resistance to Trump. And it’s a mixed picture, to be sure, but a lot of the imperial overreach that we’re experiencing now from this administration is being pushed back by the courts saying, ‘No, you can’t expel people from the country without due process. No, you can’t withhold money from a university and threaten to take over its hiring procedures’.”
Disdain for the law
The consequences of these judicial rulings are still unclear, and Trump, like his Soviet predecessors, is not overly concerned with obeying the law. But Nathans said there was inspiration to be drawn from law-based dissent along with other dissident strategies. “The legal strategy and the ability to destroy the Soviet government’s monopoly on the flow of information in the form of samizdat (censored and underground publications) and the radio broadcasts that brought it to millions of Soviet listeners – there is an echo of that in the situation in the United States today. It’s the courts and the press that are the front lines.”
It was also possible, said Nathans, that the legalistic approach coupled with a robust media might ultimately prove more effective than a traditional protest movement. “It’s very hard to measure the impact of public protests. The numbers are impressive. The diversity of the crowds is impressive. But how do you translate that into political outcomes? Whereas judicial rulings and the transparency that good journalism forces on a regime, those are things that you can really measure. So, I do think there are lessons to be learned from this story.” Nathans has referred to the “radical civil obedience” of Soviet dissidents and it is not difficult to see the correlation with Trump’s America.
It is no longer fanciful or hyperbolic to characterise Trump as an authoritarian leader. What he hinted at in his first term, he has delivered in his second. In a matter of months, he has dismantled the structures of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) within state-funded institutions and thousands of people have been fired from their jobs. Political activists have had their visas revoked and dozens of universities have been investigated.
On the research side, cuts to funding have forced labs to shut down and university departments to lay off staff. There is now a real possibility of a brain drain in American academia. Meanwhile, civil society organisations have faced threats over their tax-exempt status. The crackdown on the media has included the White House taking control of the press pool that covers presidential events, and the defunding of broadcasters such as National Public Radio, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Challenging the American state
The concept of the “American dissident” is already gaining currency in intellectual circles. In April 2025, Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer published a New Yorker weekend essay entitled So You Want to Be a Dissident: A Practical Guide to Courage in Trump’s Age of Fear. Angwin, a respected investigative journalist and Fields-Meyer, a White House senior policy adviser from 2021 to 2024, warned that “the consequences of challenging the state seem to increasingly carry real danger”. While recognising that there had always been retribution for those who took on the American state, this felt different.
“The fear now is different in kind,” they said. “The sweeping scope of Trump’s appetite for institutionalised retaliation has changed the threat landscape for everyone, almost overnight. In a country with a centuries-long culture of free expression, the punishments for those who express even the slightest opposition to the administration have been a shock to the American system.”
Angwin and Fields-Meyer also cited To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause and Nathans’ concept of “radical civil obedience” as a potential source of inspiration for Trump’s opposition. “An affirmative vision of what the world should be is the inspiration for many of those who, in these tempestuous early months of Trump 2.0, have taken meaningful risks – acts of American dissent.”
In December 2024, four months after Nathans’ book was published, The Atlantic staff writer Gal Beckerman was quick to recognise its saliency for contemporary America. In an article entitled A Mindset for Trump’s America, Beckerman picked up on another dissident strategy expressed best by Andrei Amalrik, the author best known for his provocative 1970 essay Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? Writing later of his fellow dissidents, Amalrik said:
“They did something simple to the point of genius. In an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.”
Never normalise
Ultimately, the dissident mindset is the radical refusal to accept institutional untruth. It is the denial of denial. Whether embodied in Václav Havel, the former dissident who became President of Czechoslovakia, or Alexei Navalny, who died at the hands of Vladimir Putin’s neo-Stalinist regime, dissidents are people who, like George Washington, cannot tell a lie.
“What dissidents teach us is not to normalise,” said Beckerman. “Just look at the Republican Party’s radically shifting attitudes about Trump to understand how easily this can happen. Leaders who were once worried enough to publicly call the former and future president out as a ‘reprehensible’ (JD Vance) ‘con artist’ (Marco Rubio) who had ‘discredited the American experiment with self-governance’ (Robert F Kennedy Jr) are now his closest advisers and legitimisers.”
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause has taken on an almost mythic status in Trump’s America and its author rightly won the Pushkin House Book Prize, which celebrates the best non-fiction writing in English on Russia, to go with the Pulitzer Prize.
The title of Nathans’ book is a reference to the ironic toast dissidents made to each other in the dark days of the Cold War. The American dissident cause must sometimes seem equally hopeless in the face of the USA’s first authoritarian president. Donald Trump has often been described as a “pathological liar”. It is entirely appropriate then that his opponents should take inspiration from Alexander Esenin-Volpin, the man who the great Russian dissident and fierce Putin critic Vladimir Bukovsky described as “pathologically honest”.
18 Jun 2025 | Americas, News and features, United States
For many casual listeners, Bruce Springsteen’s song Born in the USA sounds like a glorious patriotic celebration of being American.
Yet listen beyond the upbeat chorus and you discover the dejected life story of a Vietnam veteran who has returned from the war and found it difficult to fit in, readjust to home life and find work.
You can assume that President Donald Trump hadn’t previously picked up on these nuances but now that someone has pointed it out to him, he’s mad as hell.
Born in the USA came out in the middle of 1984 – the year that the eyes of the world were on the country for the Olympics Games in Los Angeles.
It seems that former President Ronald Reagan and his campaign team misinterpreted – either inadvertently or otherwise – the meaning of the song. Reagan name-checked Springsteen on the campaign trail but the rocker later distanced himself from the Republicans.
Springsteen has since used his music to focus on the struggles of the working class and has been more closely aligned with the Democrats, throwing his support behind John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
Whether President Trump was aware of the song’s meaning or not, he did not fail to understand the meaning of the comments the Boss made during his current world tour, which opened in Manchester this month.
Introducing his 1999 song Land of Hope and Dreams in Manchester, which he had previously played at the inauguration of Joe Biden, he said: “In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration. Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring!”
If that message wasn’t clear enough for Trump, he carried on ahead of playing the song House of a Thousand Guitars.
He told the crowd: “The last check on power after the checks and balances of government have failed are the people, you and me.”
“It’s in the union of people around a common set of values now that’s all that stands between a democracy and authoritarianism. At the end of the day, all we’ve got is each other,” he said before launching into a stripped-down version of the song on acoustic guitar and harmonica.
Before launching into his song My City of Ruins, a paean to his home town of Asbury Park In New Jersey, he said that the norms of democracy were being eroded. “There’s some very weird, strange and dangerous shit going on out there right now.”
“In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent,” he said. “This is happening now.”
He went on: “They’re rolling back historic civil rights legislation that has led to a more just and plural society.
“They are abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They are defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands.
“They are removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centres and prisons. This is all happening now.
“A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government. They have no concern or idea for what it means to be deeply American.”
He signed off with a message of hope: “The America l’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and, regardless of its faults, is a great country with a great people. So we’ll survive this moment. Now, I have hope, because I believe in the truth of what the great American writer James Baldwin said. He said, ‘In this world, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough.’ Let’s pray.”
Trump had certainly got the message by this point. He took to his Truth Social platform to call Springsteen “highly overrated”.
“Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy – Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK, who fervently supported Crooked Joe Biden, a mentally incompetent FOOL, and our WORST EVER President, who came close to destroying our Country,” he posted.
He then went on to threaten Springsteen.
“This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country…Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”
So much for the “free speech” that Trump can’t stop talking about.
Volume 53, Issue 4 of the print edition of Index on Censorship looked at how musicians are raising their voices against oppression. Read more about the issue here. The issue was published on 12 December 2024.
25 Apr 2025 | Algeria, Americas, Canada, Europe and Central Asia, Hungary, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, United Kingdom, United States, Venezuela
In the age of online information, it can feel harder than ever to stay informed. As we get bombarded with news from all angles, important stories can easily pass us by. To help you cut through the noise, every Friday Index will publish a weekly news roundup of some of the key stories covering censorship and free expression from the past seven days. This week, we cover El Salvador’s plan for a prisoner swap and look at how Hungary has been placed on an EU watchlist.
Political prisoners: Bukele condemned by families of American deportees for Venezuela swap plan
Last week, the Donald Trump administration once again made headlines for wrongfully deporting Maryland resident Kilmar Ábrego García to a jail in El Salvador, and failing to facilitate his return. The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, has become a prominent figure in this story, aligning himself with Trump and stating that he “does not have the power” to return Garcia to the USA – a claim that experts say is false.
Now, Bukele has proposed a deal to send 252 Venezuelans incarcerated in El Salvador (following deportation from the US) back to their home country, in exchange for Salvadoran “political prisoners” currently held in Venezuela. President Nicolas Maduro has stated that the Venezuelan nationals held in Salvadoran prisons were “kidnapped”, while Bukele has accused Maduro of imprisoning political opponents and activists.
These Venezuelans, many of whom are believed to have no criminal background and were deported on evidence as spurious as having tattoos, have now become pawns in a game of politics – which both their families and human rights groups alike have denounced. Nelson Suárez, whose brother is among those Venezuelans imprisoned in El Salvador, told The Guardian that he feels his brother is being treated “like political merchandise”.
Under surveillance: Hungary clashes with EU over use of facial recognition tech for LGBTQ+ Pride attendees
Last month, Hungary passed a law that banned LGBTQ+ pride marches in the country, with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stating that he “won’t let woke ideology endanger our kids.” This move sparked outrage, with opposition leaders lighting flares in parliament and demonstrators taking to the streets of Budapest. Now, one aspect of the law has drawn further ire.
The new legislation allows the use of biometric cameras by police for facial recognition and tracking of LGBTQ+ demonstrators and those attending Pride gatherings, which Politico reports could be in breach of the EU’s newly adopted Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act.
The European Commission is currently investigating whether this is the case, which has increased existing tensions between the EU and Hungary’s leadership.
This is just the latest threat to democratic rights in Hungary – last week, parliament rushed through a bill to allow passports of dual citizens to be revoked if they are perceived to have acted “in the interest of foreign powers” and to have “undermined the sovereignty of Hungary”. The bill’s passing through parliament has drawn fears about how it could be abused to strip dissenters of their citizenship.
AI deep fakes: False videos of James Bulger circulate on social media
While AI is being used against the public in Hungary, closer to home in the UK, public-generated AI videos have taken a concerning new turn – social media content creators are using AI to create “avatars” of murder victims describing their own deaths.
One harrowing example includes depictions of James Bulger, the two-year-old boy who was abducted and murdered in 1993. Fake videos are being generated that portray Bulger himself describing the details of the crime – content which Bulger’s mother, Denise Fergus, has described as “absolutely disgusting”.
Fergus is pushing for a new law to be passed that would prohibit the creation and sharing of this sort of AI content. Such videos are becoming increasingly prevalent online, with some accounts creating likenesses for multiple murder cases.
Index’s CEO Jemimah Steinfeld spoke to the BBC this week, stating that these videos already break existing laws, and that there is a concern that further regulation could restrict legitimate, legal content.
Steinfeld said that while we should “avoid a knee-jerk reaction that puts everything in this terrible box”, she sympathises with Fergus. “To have to relive what she’s been through, again and again, as tech improves, I can’t imagine what that feels like.”
Imprisoned for a hashtag: Algeria clamps down against peaceful online activism
Amnesty International has condemned the Algerian government for its continued moves to repress online activism within the country.
The organisation reports that at least 23 activists and journalists have been arrested and convicted for human rights activism and protests over the past five months, with a focus on the use of the hashtag “Manich Radi” (“I am not satisfied”), which first came to prominence in December 2024.
The hashtag started being used after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, with many Algerians reportedly drawing similarities between the situations in Syria and Algeria and becoming hopeful of a fight for democracy in their nation.
But Algerian authorities responded to this with swift arrests, and have continued their campaign against those posting the hashtag. Algeria’s President Abdelmadjid Tebboune said of the online movement: “Let no one think that Algeria can be devoured by a hashtag”.
Academic asylum: American professors seek refuge in Canada
Hundreds of Canadian professors have urged the Canadian government to open its doors to “academic refugees” from the USA amid President Trump’s attack on universities and education.
CTV News reported this week that more than 500 Canadian university faculty members had signed an open letter calling for greater funding to Canada’s higher education system and programmes to allow more foreign professors and academics to resettle in the country, to fight the “rising anti-intellectualism” in the USA.
This follows a continuing stream of reports of American academics looking to seek exile in Canada as their professions come under fire by the Trump administration. Many US universities have seen increasing restrictions, most notably Harvard University, which is currently locked in a major funding dispute with the US federal government. The university’s president Alan Garber told NBC that he is “very concerned about Harvard’s future”.
University professors across the country are equally as concerned about the future of education in the USA. One such professor is Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University. Stanley, who has written multiple books about fascism, recently accepted a position at the University of Toronto. He told the Daily Nous that he was leaving the USA to “raise my kids in a country that is not tilting towards a fascist dictatorship”.
