In this season finale episode, Koki talks to Steven Gardiner, PRA Principal Research Advisor, to reflect on the first year of Trump's second term and its implications for U.S. democracy. While the MAGA base remains about 15% of the U.S. and Trump’s approval ratings remain low, the Trump administration has chipped away at democratic norms, maintained control over the Republican party, decimated the bureaucratic state, and is poised to interfere with the 2026 midterms and likely 2028 elections beyond through strategies of “contested authoritarianism.” 

But the highly visible actions of immigration enforcement, violations of the constitution, and nods toward White supremacy do not equate with chaos alone. Gardiner lays out how these are spectacles that mobilize, fear-monger, and deliberately normalize repression, erode democracy, and spur further political violence. He also discusses the effects of Project 2025 in action, attacks on trans rights and bodily sovereignty, and the roles of Dominionist theologies and Christian nationalism more broadly. The episode concludes by focusing on opportunities for division and dissent within the U.S. Right, along with the difficult but necessary work ahead to withstand election interference, register dissent, and continue to build the necessary power to overcome rising authoritarianism.

Steven Gardiner is Principal Research Advisor and formerly Research Director here at Political Research Associates. He has been researching writing in opposition to the politics of bigotry, violence, and authoritarianism since the early 1990s. In 2004, Gardner received a PhD in cultural anthropology from Cornell University. Since earning his doctorate, he has taught more than 20 different courses at eight universities in the United States, Pakistan, and the UAE. 

Episode Resources

• Political Research Associates, “Trump 2.0’s First 100 Days: Authoritarian Gains and Consolidation,” The Public Eye, 2025.  
• Katherine Stewart, “Burning Down the House: What’s Behind the U.S. Antidemocratic Reaction?” The Public Eye, 2025.  
•  Political Research Associates, “‘Do Not Let Grief Harden into Despair’: PRA Analyzes Trump 2.0’s First 100 Days, Part 1,” Inform Your Resistance, 2025. 
• Political Research Associates, “‘It's Never Just About Gender’: Gender and Authoritarianism: PRA Analyzes Trump 2.0’s First 100 Days, Part 2,” Inform Your Resistance, 2025.

In this episode of Inform Your Resistance, Koki reads “Florida Is the ‘Tip of the Spear:’ How 287(g) Expansion Fuels Mass Deportations” by Jessica Pishko, as part of our ongoing From the Archives series. From the Archives features those must read and, now, must listen to pieces from PRA’s more than 40 years of publishing. This article was published in the Fall 2025 issue of The Public Eye magazine.

Resources

• "The Unchecked Power Of Sheriffs," Fresh Air, 2024.

How is ICE mobilizing on our streets today? What role does local law enforcement play in Trump’s immigration crackdown? And what are local organizers doing about it?

This episode is guest hosted by Cloee Cooper, PRA Research Director and host of The Insurgence: Sheriffs, a podcast series that uncovers how a national network of far-right sheriffs is mobilizing to create a White Christian republic, one county at a time. This episode features Felicia Arriaga, Jessica Pishko, and Camilo Garzón.

Felicia Arriaga, who is featured in episode four of The Insurgence: Sheriffs, is the author of Behind Crimmigration: ICE, Law Enforcement, and Resistance in America. Felicia is also a former fellow with PRA.

Jessica Pishko, who is featured in episode six of The Insurgence: Sheriffs is a lawyer and journalist. She's the author of the recently released book, The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy.

Camilo Garzón is an award-winning Colombian American writer, filmmaker, documentarian, and journalist. He is the founder of Cuentero Productions which produced The Insurgence: Sheriffs.

Episode Resources

• The Insurgence: Sheriffs on PRA Presents, wherever you get your podcasts
• Pishko, Jessica. “Florida Is the ‘Tip of the Spear’: How 287(g) Expansion Fuels Mass Deportations,” The Public Eye, 2025.

In this episode, Hialy Gutierrez, PRA Deputy Research Director, and Claudia Espinel, discuss the connections and contradictions between prevailing economic systems, political infrastructure and ideology, and rising authoritarianism. We touch on the various ways that corporate power intersects with government, civil society, and media to prioritize profit accumulation and market dominance over human and environmental dignity and wellbeing. We also identify ways to sharpen movement strategy so that we can more effectively and more coherently fight back, not just against authoritarian leaders and governance, but also against the economic systems that keep enabling them. We highlight the urgent need to combine our narrative strategies to combat the spread of far right ideology with a clear, materialist strategy to build alternative economic systems.

Hialy Gutierrez is the Deputy Research Director at Political Research Associates, where she supports researchers in grounding and testing their analyses in a political economy strategic framework. She is also a cooperator in the solidarity economy ecosystem in Chicago; a PhD candidate and Fellow at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she explores strategic relationships and possibilities across grassroots movements, state institutions, and alternative institutions; and a steering member of the NY-DSA political education academy where she helps to advance education on different expressions of socialism. 

Claudia works as a consultant for the new Corporate Rights portfolio and political economy at PRA. After spending 15 years in organizational development for both for-profit and non-profit organizations, Claudia joined the PhD program in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago as a student. Her research focuses on the role of labor in neoliberalism and the forces and dynamics that create the conditions for labor exploitation. Claudia’s main research interests include non-extractive labor, cooperative governance, and democratic workplaces. She served as the research manager for the Community Wealth Building Project, a City of Chicago initiative that supports cooperative development. She also works on political education projects within Chicago’s worker cooperative ecosystem and has experience in building structures and processes to institutionalize democratized economic governance.

Resources

• Media Justice. https://mediajustice.org/ 
• Rashid, Qasim, Esq. “Corporate Media Is Capitulating to Trump,” Let's Address This with Qasim Rashid, 2025. 
• Torres-Spelliscy, Ciara. Corporatocracy: How to Protect Democracy from Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians. NYU Press, 2024.
• Cooper, Cloee. “ What Is Movement Infrastructure? How Movements Sustain Us Amid Rising Authoritarianism,” The Public Eye, 2024.

This episode is the second in PRA’s panel discussion series, The First 100 Days of Authoritarian Gains: Key Analysis to Inform Our Resistance. This second part discusses how MAGA weaponizes gender to entrench authoritarianism. Looking at the essential role that anti-LGBTQ, particularly anti-trans organizing and policy and anti-reproductive healthcare access and abortion restriction play in reinforcing authoritarian norms and politics.

Research Analysts, Annie Wilkinson, Chancie Calliham, and Mary Reynolds are joined by reproductive justice movement leader Norbese Flint, for this focused discussion of the ways that gender and bodies are reified restricted and deployed by the U.S. Right to reinforce the cis-hetero Christian patriarchal norms that are essential to the authoritarian state making project both in the United States and abroad.

They conclude their discussion with a clear call to action that defending reproductive and LGBTQ rights and flourishing are essential to the work of resistance and provide key insights into how to do this extraordinarily necessary work. The discussion is inspired by PRAs recent Winter Spring 2025, issue of the Public Eye on gender and authoritarianism.

Resources

• Gardiner, Steven. “Authoritarians Must Break Your Will to Resist — So What Can You Do About It?” Religion Dispatches, 2024.
• Gardiner, Steven, and Tarso Luís Ramos. “Capitol Offenses: January 6th 2021 & The Ongoing Insurrection.” Political Research Associates.
• Political Research Associates. “Trump 2.0’s First 100 Days: Authoritarian Gains and Consolidation.” The Public Eye, 2025.
• Ramos, Tarso Luís, and Kathryn Joyce. “One Year In: A Q&A with Tarso Luís Ramos on Trump’s First Year in Office.” The Public Eye, 2018.
• Wilkinson, Annie, and Mary Reynolds, with Nourbese Flint. “Authoritarianism, Criminalization, and Reproductive Injustice: A Roundtable Discussion.” The Public Eye, 2025.

Inform Your Resistance is coming to you this week in between regularly scheduled episodes to introduce you to a new podcast series, Lifting the Curtain on Antisemitism. This collaboration between Political Research Associates and Diaspora Alliance explores how to understand antisemitism and its weaponization and to fight for collective liberation. Amidst rising authoritarianism and Israel’s genocide in Gaza, this series offers a rigorous analysis of how authoritarians uses antisemitism and its weaponization as a tool to repress progressive movements and to dismantle democracy itself.

You can find all six episodes of Lifting the Curtain on Antisemitism on the PRA Presents feed wherever you get your podcasts or on politicalresearch.org.

Our collective freedom is at stake. How do we prevent the most vulnerable from being excluded, targeted, or taken advantage of, while providing values, moral clarity, and the most strategic inputs possible? In this first of a two-part series, we share insights from PRA’s researchers about how to move beyond the work on blocking rising authoritarianism, to the work of building power, vision, and solidarity. Steven Gardiner, Ethan Fauré, and an unnamed PRA researcher in conversation with the Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart describe the first 100 days of the second Trump administration, and how to respond. 

Our panelists provide an overview of the quality makeup and ideologies of the current Trump administration, the interplay between state repression, particularly of the Palestinian Liberation Movement, and Islamophobia and weaponized antisemitism, and the expansion of the deportation machine in direct alignment with the white nationalist anti-immigration movement. They provide deep insights into the White, Judeo-Christian authoritarianism demonstrated in extrajudicial violence, denial of humanity, further power disregard for congressional and judicial power, concentration of executive power, the “power of the purse,” and attacks on public speech, gathering, and due process.

Our panelists offer insights to focus your organizing, stay in community, right size threats to understand them more accurately, create counternarratives, get into the field, enact noncompliance, and identify and grow the fissures between factions of the Right.

Resources

• Trump 2.0’s First 100 Days Authoritarian Gains and Consolidation by Political Research Associates
• The Antidote to Authoritarianism with Jiva Manske by Political Research Associates (podcast)
• What Is Movement Infrastructure? How Movements Sustain Us Amid Rising Authoritarianism by Cloee Cooper
• Q&A: Harnessing Our Power to End Political Violence: An interview with Scot Nakagawa and Hardy Merriman by Naomi Washington Leapheart
• Book Review: Commune or Nothing! Lessons for Building Grassroots Power Toward Liberation and Democracy by Hialy Gutierrez
• Book Excerpt: Three Way Fight: Revolutionary Politics and Antifascism by Xtn Alexander and Matthew N. Lyons
• Rising Against Authoritarianism: Amplifying Voices for Immigrant Justice by Cloee Cooper
• Religion Dispatches article: “Authoritarians Must Break Your Will to Resist — So What Can You Do About it?” by Steven Gardiner
• Religion Dispatches article: “Trump’s Cabinet (and Other) Picks Paint Picture of a Christian Nationalist ‘Kakistocracy’” by Annika Brockschmidt and Thomas Lecaque
• Religion Dispatches article: “Leading ‘Constitutional Sheriffs’ Org Announces ‘Full Support’ for Trump’s Mass Deportations” by Ethan Fauré

Today’s episode welcomes The 22nd Century Initiative’s Director of Strategic Initiatives, Jiva Manske. Koki and Jiva lay out key ways that the Left can and must build a shared vision of democracy, all while the pro-democracy movement is in a moment of extreme crisis. They talk through the “what is to be done?” about this moment, drawing inspiration from key strategies such as mobilizing, non-compliance, non-violent direct action, and alternative institutions like mutual aid, collective care, and infrastructures of solidarity. In discussing a range of accessible, non-violent actions both historic and current—from the 1930 Salt March across India to the street theater of 1970s Chile to the recent veterans D-Day protest in D.C. in June 2025—Jiva describes why we need to look to our past to build up resilience for our present, and in turn, seed the global democratic future we need and desire.

Jiva Manske is an organizer, strategist, partner, and dad who is connected to people around the world who are dedicated to building powerful, transformational movements. As Director of Strategic Initiatives for the 22nd Century Initiative, his work focuses on building a more resilient, innovative, and aligned pro-democracy field. His approach to change is grounded in a commitment to accountability through collective action, organizing led by those most impacted by injustice, and healing-centered practice. He has facilitated strategy, training, and change with youth, elders, activists, incarcerated people, educators, and government officials in Afghanistan, Australia, Austria, Canada, Costa Rica, England, Iran, Ireland, Mexico, Peru, Romania, and throughout the United States.

• The 22nd Century Initiative, www.22ci.org (2025)
• Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography By Grace Lee Boggs, Minneapolis: UMN Press (2016)
• Chancie Calliham, ”Calling In Author Q&A with Loretta Ross,” Political Research Associates (2025)
• End Political Violence, endpoliticalviolence.org (2025)
• Freedom Trainers, freedomtrainers.net (2025)
• Jean Hardisty, “The Resurgent Right Why Now?,” Political Research Associates (1995)
• Lauren Jacobs, Worker Power in the Fight Against Authoritarianism, a conversation with PowerSwitch Action's Lauren Jacobs, Inform Your Resistance (podcast) (2023)
• Political Research Associates, “Ground Rules and Tips for Challenging the Right,” Political Research Associates (2016)
• Scot Nakagawa, The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook, antiauthoritarianplaybook.substack.com (2025) 
• Urvashi Vaid, with eds. Jyotsna Vaid and Amy Hoffman. The Dream of a Common Movement Selected Writings of Urvashi Vaid, Durham: Duke University Press (2025)

In this episode of Inform Your Resistance, Koki reads “Gender and Authoritarianism: A Framework for Analysis and Action” by Annie Wilkinson, as part of our ongoing From the Archives series. From the Archives features those must read and, now, must listen to pieces from PRA’s more than 40 years of publishing. This article was published in the Winter/Spring 2025 issue of The Public Eye magazine, and you can read the article here.

In conversation with PRA’s Principal Research Advisor Steven Gardiner, he and Koki discuss the wide-ranging practices, policies, and ideologies underlying the antidemocratic goals of the Neoreactionary Right—and how to resist them. Diving into the foundations of white nationalism and Christian supremacy that prop up the billionaire agenda under Trump, their conversation pieces together the connections in topics ranging from privately owned micro states and the tariff regime intended to re-industrialize a post-industrial United States, to the fascistic, curtailing of opposition and checks on power.

Steven Gardiner is Principal Research Advisor, and formerly Research Director, at Political Research Associates. He has been researching and writing in opposition to the politics of bigotry, violence, and authoritarianism since the early 1990s. In 2004, Gardiner received a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Cornell University; since earning his doctorate, he has taught more than twenty different courses at eight universities in the United States, Pakistan, and the UAE.

Resources:

• Peter Montgomery, “Project 2025: How Trump Loyalists and Right-Wing Leaders Are Paving a Fast Road to Fascism,” Political Research Associates, Feb 14 (2024)
• Erica Verrillo, “The Neo-Reactionary Coup Erica Verrillo,” Medium, Feb 8 (2025) 
• James Pogue, “Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets They’re not MAGA,” Apr 20 (2022)
• Andrew Prokop, “Curtis Yarvin wants American democracy toppled. He has some prominent Republican fans. The New Right blogger has been cited by Blake Masters and J.D. Vance. What exactly is he advocating?,” Vox, Oct 24 (2022) 
• George Michael, “An antidemocratic philosophy called ‘neoreaction’ is creeping into GOP politics,” The Conversation, Jul 27 (2022)
• Jason Wilson, “He’s anti-democracy and pro-Trump: the obscure ‘dark enlightenment’ blogger influencing the next US administration,” The Guardian, Dec 21 (2024) 
• Ben Makuch, “Extremist blogger to debate Harvard professor at unsanctioned campus event,” May 2 (2025)
• Hialy Gutierrez, “Exposing and Resisting the Coordinated Attacks on Higher Education: Q&A with Isaac Kamola on Manufacturing Backlash,” Apr 16 (2025)
• Scot Nakagawa, “Why They're Winning And What We Can Do About It: An Issue of the Anti-Authoritarian Playbook Newsletter,” Apr 9 (2025)
• Alyssa Bowen, “The Education Wars: Author Q&A with Jennifer C. Berkshire,” Political Research Associates, Dec 13 (2024)
• Ben Lorber, “Three Way Fight: Author Q&A with Xtn Alexander and Matthew N. Lyons,” Political Research Associates, Mar 11 (2025)
• Steven Gardiner, “End Times Antisemitism: Christian Zionism, Christian Nationalism, and the Threat to Democracy,” Jul 9 (2020)
• Aidan Orly, “101: Christian Zionism,” Apr 24 (2024)

Keywords: 

Authoritarianism, fascism, Far Right, techoauthoritariansim, NeoReactionary Movement, Neo-Reactionary movement, NRx, Dark Enlightenment, DOGE, Elon Musk, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, Peter Thiel, technofascism, technostate, White nationalism, Christian nationalism, private military, neoliberalism, Libertarian movement, labor, theocracy, microstates, Christian Zionism, state capture, Project 2025, Trump administration, Donald Trump, anti-immigrant, deportations, resistance, mutual aid, democracy