'America Is Moving Into Hell,' Says Nobel Laureate Who Stood Up to a Dictator
The US under Trump is a 'hop, skip, and a jump away' from the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte, says acclaimed journalist and Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa.
Donald Trump has begun his second presidency precisely as Americans concerned about preserving democracy and the rule of law had feared. He pardoned or commuted the sentences of 1,500 participants in the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection he incited four years ago in an attempt to overturn his defeat for re-election.
That frees Trump-aligned extremists to commit political violence on his behalf again. Combined with other initial steps taking aim at those he claims “weaponized” the federal government against him, the first convicted felon to occupy the Oval Office has signaled his quest for the unchecked power that our founders designed the US constitutional system to prevent.
The journalist Maria Ressa understands the threat authoritarian leaders pose to democratic societies as well as anyone. A citizen of both the United States and her native Philippines, Ressa shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her work safeguarding freedom of expression from a Filipino government marked by brutality and attacks on the independent press – including multiple criminal charges lodged against her.
Born in Manila and educated at Princeton, Ressa, 61, straddles the two countries in her work as CEO of the Filipino news site Rappler and professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Her 2022 memoir, How to Stand Up to a Dictator, has gained wide currency amid threats to democracy that have gathered momentum around the world.
I spoke to Ressa last week about the prospects for the new Trump administration, the role of large technology companies in fueling populist anger, and whether journalism remains a viable check on government power. Ressa warned that the US now stands just “a hop, skip and a jump” from the sort of repression that beset her native country beginning with the ascension of President Rodrigo Duterte in 2016.
Here’s more from our conversation, edited for clarity and brevity:
You won the Nobel Prize, which is about as great an honor as somebody can receive in this world. The temptation is to think well, once you’ve received that award, your problems are no longer present. But as I read from your book, you remain under criminal charges. You don’t know if they’ll ever be prosecuted and wreck your life. Tell me what freedom you have to operate right now.
RESSA: In the Philippines, we’ve moved from hell, which is when we had like up to 30,000 people killed in three years, to purgatory. And the criminal charges against me go hand in hand with that. So there was a year, 2019 when I got 10 arrest warrants, and I would come home, and I’d be arrested. Today I’m down to two criminal charges.
Does that mean you needed permission from the government to make the trip you’re now on to New York City?
RESSA: Always – every single travel I do outside the Philippines.
So you straddle two worlds, the United States and the Philippines. There are people in the orbit of the new US administration taking power who talk about going after journalists. Do you think the specter of media persecution in the way you have suffered is a real prospect in the United States?
RESSA: It already is. Our constitution was literally a copy of the US Constitution. We have three branches of government. We have freedom of the press. Within six months of President Duterte taking office in 2016, those institutions crumbled. We saw, as we are seeing in the United States, leaders in business genuflecting in advance because then you can cut great deals. It’s alarming to me to see the same thing happening all over again. And the first things we saw, of course, [were] journalists coming under attack. Democracy crumbles, checks and balances crumble. I am really worried that America is moving into hell, and must come out. The corruption begins in the information ecosystem.
To the extent that you see this happening in the Philippines, Europe, Canada, is this a situation where America is not exceptional, and this is the same political and media trend?
RESSA: Absolutely. Big Tech took over, I would say, in 2014. What we saw starting in 2014 was the seeding of a meta-narrative that is then opportunistically pounded to make it go viral, that when you say a lie a million times, it becomes a fact. You create alternative realities. The meta-narrative seeded by Russia allowed it to annex Crimea. And then eight years later, in 2022, that same meta-narrative [was] used by [Vladimir] Putin to invade Ukraine itself. [Democracy-monitoring organization] VDem in Sweden said that 71% of the world is now under authoritarian rule. We are literally electing illiberal leaders democratically. That is the net effect of going to the cellular level of democracy to insidiously manipulating the people who will vote. They hack our biology – fear, anger, and hate – to change the way we feel, to change the way we see the world.
Do you see anything positive about this populism?