As the second Trump administration reshapes the U.S. government and its role in the world, how do technology, media, and political power intersect? In this episode of International Horizons, host John Torpey speaks with Zeynep Tufekci—New York Times columnist, Princeton professor, and author of Twitter and Tear Gas—about the evolving relationship between social media platforms, political movements, and democracy. From the shifting role of the internet in global protests to Elon Musk’s interventions in European politics, Tufekci unpacks the historical patterns shaping today’s political landscape. The conversation also explores the erosion of public trust in institutions, the implications of a weakened federal government, and the risks of unchecked technological influence. Tune in for a deep dive into the forces reshaping democracy at home and abroad.

Below a slightly edited transcript of this interview

Transcript

John Torpey 

In its first few weeks in office, President Donald Trump has appointed some questionably qualified nominees for high office and challenged laws and norms while dismantling major government agencies, all at a head spinning pace. If things continue at their present rate, one wonders what will be left of the federal government in four years time. And American foreign policy as well seems on its way to a major transformation in the country’s role in the world. At the very least, we are in the midst of a shift in political values and culture of enormous proportions. What should we make of it? Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is John Torpey, and I’m director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. We’re fortunate to have with us today Zeynep Tufekci, whose name I hope I’m pronouncing reasonably correctly, who is a New York Times opinion columnist and a professor of sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton. Her research revolves around politics, civics, movements, privacy and surveillance, as well as data and algorithms. Originally from Turkey, Dr. Tufekci was a computer programmer by profession and academic training, before turning her focus to the impact of technology on society and social change. She’s been published widely on the interaction of new technologies with science, society, science, politics and culture, and she’s the author of Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. Thanks so much for being with us today, Zeynep Tufekci.

Zeynep Tufekci 

Yes, it’s especially complicated for someone who has the word Twitter in the title of her book, because Twitter does not actually exist anymore as it was. In some sense, this was not completely unpredictable. I mean, this configuration wouldn’t be predictable because history is weird and it’s hard to predict exact outline, but the fact that these very powerful platforms would eventually align with people in power and shift as the people in power shifted is completely predictable and was predicted by many scholars. And my interest in writing about some of this, in fact, my public writing about some of this goes back to the Obama years, when I was a sociology professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, which, by the way, is an incredible public school. I’ve always loved being there, and I was just sort of working on this stuff that the internet, social movements, all its interactions. I published my very first op ed for the New York Times. Just on a lark. I pitched, they accepted it like, you know, I have, as you have, just struggled with somewhat hard to pronounce names. It was like this obscure little thing. And I thought, great, I’ll just get this out. And what I said was, look, it’s 2012 everybody’s celebrating how Facebook popped Obama. Like the headlines all over the place were Facebook’s great for democracy,” “the savior of democracy,” and versions of that, and the Obama White House and Silicon Valley people were having what people called a bromance. They were just, you know, revolving doors happy. And I wrote this, very mild, if you ask me, a piece, saying, well, you know, of course, candidates want to win, and they use whatever tools they have, but it’s really not great that we have, you know, this alliance and very little transparency, like, what on earth is Facebook actually doing? What are the ads? Who’s being targeted, and regardless of who’s using it, we should have some insight into this. And and I basically called on the Obama White House to, you know, just pass on laws. And I thought, you know, such a mild thing, it’s so obvious. They were super mad at me, they were very, very angry. It was a very bizarre episode, some details I learned later because I just felt derased as a nobody. And part of the reason they were so angry, I realized, as I interacted with these people, very, very angry with me, very high level people from both social media companies, the Facebook as it was, and the Obama White House, they basically told me a version of, this is a great tool for us. It will always be our great tool. They told me things like, you know, Republicans don’t believe in climate science, and data scientists are very data driven and science driven, and they believe in climate science, so they will never work for the Republicans and acted like I was just trying to take away their wonderful tool. Although, as I said, I had no power. I had just, you know, written one essay was a name, you know, nobody would remember. And I remember sort of listening to these incredibly naive to me, assertions that this big, rich, multi billion company and this advancing technology would somehow always be their special tool, only working for them and never for people they don’t like. And I was like, you are so delusional about how history works, like, I am not even like, it wasn’t even me, I don’t like it. It was more like you are delusional, like even your theory of how this is gonna go is just absolutely devoid of, I mean, a single moment of reflection on the history of these technologies. And I know we sort of criticize the tech companies for, you know, read more social science, read more humanities, but weirdly, I find that a lot of people at the top of these companies do have great interest in some of these like they do read widely more than people think. It’s just they might not draw the conclusions that you might like, but they’re well read. I was just shocked at how many people around that administration were so ahistorical on how power and new technologies work. Um, well, fast forward, you know, in 2016 after Trump got elected, I got a call from one of them, and he sort of publicly said this, I’m not going to name, but he was a high level person, so got reported elsewhere and apologized and said, you know what, you are, right. We should have thought more about the role of these things. And I said, well, yes, but of course, it wasn’t just me. Like there is an incredible amount of scholarship on how these things work, and this is partly, like my weird history, my public writing. This is like I’m talking, you know, I’m guessing. You know, as a fellow scholar in academic, you have a lot of academic listeners too. This is partly why I feel like one of the things we should do as scholars, as academics, is to try to get into these conversations, bringing these kinds of perspectives, which among us are not surprising. You know, technology and powerful companies align with powerful interests like this is not surprising to any scholar of any of these topics, but are often sorely lacking even among people who you think would have more awareness. So this is kind of how I got to write about all of that. And my book, actually the Twitter and Tear Gas talks a lot. It was published before Donald Trump was elected, but it does talk a lot about how these tools also help not so democratic forces, and how they create new kinds of censorship, and how they can support strong men and how they can undermine facts, and why this is all terrible. And so in some ways, once again, you know, partly because I’m from Turkey, so I keep telling people I’ve seen this movie before. It doesn’t end very well. And partly because, as a scholar, you know, we don’t predict the exact outlines of history, of course, and it does not repeat, for sure. But yes, it does rhyme, as the saying goes. Thank you for inviting me.

John Torpey 

Great to have you. So your areas of expertise and interest make for an interesting combination, I’ve always thought.  You’ve specialized in analysis of the role of new media in popular protest, the character of contemporary authoritarian government and the dynamics of pandemics, most especially the COVID pandemic, although we’re going to get into the possible bird flu pandemic as well. So let’s start with the internet and protest. How is it that? How is that working today, when the world’s richest man owns one of the world’s largest social media platforms and is also the newly inaugurated President’s chief wing man?  Right, right. So yeah, I’d like to have your thoughts on, you know, more specific case, which is Elon Musk’s interventions in European politics. I mean, certainly in the case of Germany, he’s, you know, stirred up a lot of enmity around, you know, support for the Alternative for Germany, the AfD, which seems poised to get, you know, 20% or so of the vote on Sunday, and, you know, at the same time, it’s also provoked a lot of outrage. I mean, so the ambiguities that you point to in Twitter and Tear Gas are, it seems to me, very much alive in what’s going on with Elon Musk and others, in regard to, you know, supporting different political movements in these, in these countries. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. And, you know, I am interested in how the Turkish story, you know, helps you frame all this. I spent some time teaching in Turkey, 25 years ago, and it was a very eye opening experience.

Zeynep Tufekci 

So, um, so, the European case, and especially the German case, obviously, there’s history there, right? I mean, it’s not as strong in living memory now, but, you know, with the European Union, an institutional realignment stopped what had been, you know, hundreds of years of turmoil and wars and religious wars, and, you know, conquest wars. And Germany started two major aggressive wars in one generation, basically. So the European Union comes out of this. In 1940s we’re talking about, like, after the war, World War Two, we were looking at the ruins of a continent, nuclear weapons have been used, Auschwitz discovered. And this is the second war Germany just started. You know, the World War One, World War Two. And there’s an incredible amount of, I think, very justified worries about how to prevent this from happening again. You know, the the Holocaust, the entire war, all of it. And one of the things that came out of this is, of course, the European Union, which intertwines French and German interest to stop them from being able to go to war again. And in some sense, it’s a spectacular success in a sociological sense, because it’s an institution that changed what looked like, you know, the ancient hatreds people like to talk about Middle East, they had nothing on what France and Germany have, relatively speaking. And here we are. They don’t even have passports between them. So sociology has very powerful forces that work. But the other thing of course, they wanted to prevent the rise of another fascist authoritarian regime that kind of wiggled its way through an imperfect democracy. So they have a couple of things that have been put in place since then, and one of them is there is an absolute shunning across the political spectrum of parties that are or voices that are Nazi apologists, even in the slightest, and that comes from their history. And this is something that the political parties voluntarily do. They see AFD as that, and right or left, they just will not form a coalition with them, even though the party is growing right so they kind of don’t want to empower that path. Again, that’s their voluntary thing. And on the law side, there are strong hate speech laws against certain kinds of hate speech, specifically anti semitism, especially. Now for a US person, the First Amendment is like very core to the United States, but it’s a historically and globally, it’s really stand out. It’s its own thing, right there. Almost every other major developed country has some form of hate speech restrictions. There’s a lot stronger defamation, libel law. So us stands kind of alone. And it’s partly because of the way it was founded, and partly it is easier when you have two oceans, Mexico and Canada, one of which might become our next state, as the joke goes. Or maybe not a joke, but they kind of helps to be so protected. And sometimes, from a US perspective, it might be hard to understand, but from a German perspective, this is how they feel that they need to do to prevent the rise. And I had very, you know, debates with my German friends, because sometimes I would say things like, well, is this really, you know, too long now, like, isn’t the threat pass? And they would say, no, you do not understand. And I will say, come on, it’s been like 80 years. And they would say, oh, you do not understand. And well, here we are with AfD, second biggest party. So, like, I can’t really sort of comment on what a country thinks of as its constitutional right, weight of totalitarianism, but this is the reality. So now you have an American administration allying with like the richest person on the planet, owning a very significant megaphone, essentially trying to push that party to be part of the power structure in Germany. Now, if somebody else had done this to us as the United States, there would be a lot of backlash to that, obviously, because, you know, it’s their country with their own considerations, but it just kind of shows you how much sort of realignment, in some ways, that’s going on, and it’s absolutely baffling, I think, to the German public, in some sense. But for the AfD, which, as I said, a lot of the parties, the rest of them conservative or liberal, left or right, they see them as soft or getting stronger, Nazi apologists. For that party, of course, it’s a bloom, and I have to say, like whatever else, it is really scary to have these sort of unchecked, quick, turbulent interventions by very powerful people, because when you shake something like this so quickly, you know the kind of instability is quite dangerous, and it did not end well the last few times this happened. So this is like one of those things in which, as I said, the German public is the right, you know, judge and jury in this particular case. But it’s really striking to see it happen like this so fast.

John Torpey 

Indeed, and I guess we’ll see more in the results on Sunday. But let me turn now to another area, the other area in which I think you’ve written the most and so insightfully, and that has to do with pandemics and their dynamics. And you know, I mentioned at the beginning that the administration had made some questionable calls, it seems to me, anyway, for its cabinet officials and other officials. And RFK Jr comes to mind here in particular. And you know, the administration is not only hollowing out the US government’s also detaching us from global institutions. Then, I guess, practically the first one was the World Health Organization. Even as you know, the news is that there are measles outbreaks in Texas and elsewhere, and the bird flu, H5N1, seems to be jumping from species to species, and the CDC’s not just supposed to talk about it for some reason. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that situation, which, to me, is very worrisome.

Zeynep Tufekci 

It really is worrisome. So I started writing about pandemics, partly because I used to teach pandemics as part of my Introduction to Sociology course, because, like, the textbooks for sociology are fairly standardized, because it’s a Gen Ed class a lot of people take, and the young people would be super interested in the race chapter, the class chapter, the gender chapter, and then we get to globalization, and their eyes would start rolling over. So I started introducing like pandemics, obviously pre pandemic, to sort of get them to think about globalization. I would teach some network theory, things like that. So when it started happening, I was somewhat familiar with a lot of things, because pandemics are major sociological forces. They shape history again and again. So they they’re important. So I kind of started writing because of that. And it turned out my skill set, which was bringing science and technology in the digital computer science AI area, with sociology and policy, which is what I do. It kind of really fit well. It was just now, you know, the viruses, rather than computer science or AI, but like, there’s still the sociology public trust. How do institutions respond? How do you make policy when there’s unknowns? So that’s how I started writing about the pandemic, which was a eye opening experience, obviously, for all of us. Now here’s the problem I see, is that for a bunch of complicated reasons. We have emerged from the pandemic with less trust in health institutions and public health, I have to say, a big chunk of it is, in my view, own goals. I feel like the public authorities…

John Torpey 

It’s self inflicted.

Zeynep Tufekci 

A lot of self inflicted ones, and one of…

John Torpey 

The United States is not a soccer country. So they may not know what the own goal is.

Zeynep Tufekci 

Right. It is like that is true, self inflicted. It’s true. We do call it soccer too, not football. So there you go. So one of the things that, and this is, once again, a call to maybe, sort of the sociology. One of the reasons, I think they, the public health authorities, had so much self inflicted damage is that even though they are, many of them wonderful public servants, medical doctors, you know, biologists, virologists, they did a lot of pop psychology on what they thought the public could handle. And we’re seeing like revelations all the time. They said this, but not that, because they didn’t. They just were trying to nudge the public in particular ways. But you know, we know from, you know, decades of sociological research that just backfires, especially in an emergency, and a being is just sort of leveling with the public on uncertainties and what’s known and what’s not, rather than trying. To guess what’s in their mind and how will they react, like just basically playing pop psychology, the thing really hurt their effort, even when they were well meaning. And then there were, of course, like, you know, bad faith attacks on them, but since they left themselves open, they couldn’t really defend either. So long story short, here we are with somebody who’s heading to HHS, whose main qualification seems to be channeling an anger at the status quo. But an anger, you know, whatever the combined sources of that anger are, is not a qualification for actually reforming something unless you kind of also want to and understand what went wrong right and how to fix things. Because, yes, US health system could use a lot of overall it could use some reform that includes the NIH, that includes our research, that includes our health system. But now so we now have in place someone who brazenly misrepresents even the most basic facts about, you know, the simplest things like vaccines and even food, even on the areas where he’s supposedly, you know, got some points to make. I’m just looking at his statements, and I’m like, But you know what? The big food, Big Pharma, big agriculture, will run circles around the sky, because if you can’t tell what’s what, you can’t reform something. The big, powerful people will just like mumbo jumbo, jargon, jargon, jargon, complicated words, and just sort of fool you into doing their bidding. So I don’t even expect good stuff. But meanwhile, the bird flu situation kept getting worse under the Biden administration. And I have written about this, they basically let the USDA, which is not a public health institution, but essentially the agricultural industry, is representative and not at all qualified to put the interests of the public over very few, very large agricultural industrial production systems, they just put their interests in place, and they had this theory that it would just burn out. And everybody was horrified at that theory. And to be honest, the CDC tried, but they didn’t have jurisdiction for the farms. And we wrote all of this, and I just kept thinking and sometimes writing, saying, you have to, you know, get rid of this while we can, because who knows what the next administration will be. So here we are, and the next administration isn’t just, you know, unfriendly to the CDC. They have put in someone who doesn’t even believe in germ theory in some tellings of what he believes in, and we still have an elevated risk of bird flu, but also we have an elevated risk of everything, right? Like we may get lucky with bird flu, not every virus makes that successful jump, although we’re giving it every chance. We’re rolling out the red carpet, but not all of them, you know, can make that jump. But like pandemics, big epidemics,  a severe flu season like this year flu A is pretty severe. Other outbreaks like they’re a constant reoccurring future of history, and we’re heading into it so unequipped that it is genuinely scary, and I really, really, really hope that we don’t face it, but if we did, I don’t think the world would ever forgive us and forget the damage to us, which would be terrible. Nothing, forget it. If we unleashed a pandemic on the world that was such a obvious, slow motion wreck that basically telegraphed, yelled that it was coming under two separate administrations like this. I just cannot even fathom what the world would look like after this. And at the moment, as we said, I’m from Turkey, and there’s a sort of in the all of East Mediterranean Levant people like their evil eye beads to protect them against, you know, evil spirits and the the sort of envious eye or whatever. And you don’t have to, it’s just like a nice ritual. I feel like, at the moment, that’s all I have. I feel like that’s all we got. We can just like have lucky charms and fingers crossed, and can I have some, you know, evil ideas, because I just don’t trust this, the institutions, the entire edifice that I want to trust to handle this. So I’m down to here we go. Hope we get lucky, which is, I mean, it’s just so terrifying to be uttering these words. But here we are.

John Torpey 

Yes, I was afraid you were going to say that. I was sort of hoping you’d say something a little more.

Zeynep Tufekci 

We could get lucky, but, you know, we could get lucky, but luck is not a plan. But here we are.

John Torpey 

Indeed, indeed and meanwhile. So this gives me an opportunity to ask a question about the deep state, which is I first encounter, which I first encountered in Turkey, when I was teaching there, 25 years ago. And it meant something really, basically, quite different than it’s used to talk about here in Turkey, the deep state was the defender of Kemalism, of, you know, the semi official ideology, I guess, of the modern Turkish state named after Mustafa Kemal, better known as a deterrent to us, and it was a kind of shadowy group of people who would fend off attacks from Communists and Islamists, basically. Whereas in the United States, the deep state is something that conservatives, I don’t know what Donald Trump is exactly, I’m not sure he’s a conservative, but, you know, attack the deep state as you know, a bureaucracy, a useless bunch of people who sit around doing nothing and collecting large paychecks. But I wonder what you would say about, you know, what the Administration has been doing. You know, is there a pattern that you see in terms of who they’re going after? And you know, how does this remind you or not remind you of Turkey?

Zeynep Tufekci 

So, yes, so it’s kind of funny. You bring that up because, as you know, deep state comes from Turkish lexicon in some way, and in Turkey, which is a republic founded on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, basically, part of how things played out was that you had the people who had led the War of Independence, which, at the time was no longer a war  defending the Ottoman Empire because it had collapsed, but trying to stave off a lot of, you know, colonial invasion too, because, you know, the British, the French, Italians were trying to occupy parts of Turkey. And there was a war with parts of the Greek population, which were, of course, local over many centuries. And some were on, some Turks were on what is now Greece. And you know, that complicated the situation. So they established a secular state from the ashes of what had been a theocratic empire that had basically failed, and there were certain reforms they undertook, which obviously were not, you know, voted in by popular consent, because you just sort of had this historic situation. And that is not the first time that you know such things have happened around the world, right? That is, you have the sort of the formation of a nation can be complicated. So what over time, though, of course, Turkey had elections, and Turkey had political parties and all these other sort of processes. But there was what people would consider like an entrenched bureaucracy and a military that had thought of itself as the founder of the Republic, because they had been like the military was who fought this war for independence, and established these, you know, principles of secularism and science and but in a certain rigid way. So we also had occasional coups. In fact, we had so many coups that, um, we have different kinds of names for their different flavors. We are connoisseurs of coups. We know like how to call this one and that one. We don’t have like one kind of coup. So this is obviously like a struggle to democratize, and you have these entrenched interests. But on the other hand, things get highly complicated, because for something like women’s rights, my grandmother was born with the Republic, and she was about to be married off, because a very young teen when the Republic basically created the system for educating girls, and she got a scholarship and she got to get educated instead of getting married off. It was not a super democratic process, in the sense that they didn’t get everybody’s vote before letting 13 year olds get education rather than get married. But in the other sense that is, in my view, a form of liberation, and because those children also have rights that nobody was protecting. Like, you know, she would have been literally married off at 13, and the Republic came and she got to go to school instead and be educated. And, you know, have, you know, professional life and family just got married later. So in the US context, it’s kind of funny seeing that word, but here, because the US, of course, have civil service, right. US has civil service. And arguably, like any other country, the civil service has a certain kind of power. And civil service is not an elected process, but the civil service is in this country fairly subjected, like it’s subjected to power of the elected or, you know, the elected people can shape rules and limits of the civil service. In Turkey, the issue was that a lot of people didn’t feel like that was true, right? Because big part of it was the military, and when they didn’t like what the elected governments did, they had coups. And there was big parts of the, so it was like a tension between the institutions of the country, which ones were subject to democratic oversight and which ones were not. So in the United States, you could argue, in particular periods in time, and I think it’s a fair argument to wonder, like if the unelected bureaucrats have exercised power in a way that is beyond the scope of their authorization, but in the United States, you have a remedy for that, which is the elected power, Congress, the President, the judiciary, doing their job and saying, Okay, here’s the scope of your authorization, and here’s what you can’t do anymore, right? So the deep state, you know, to the degree there is such a thing, the real question is like, what is the remedy? And that’s what’s so shocking to me, is that what you have in the United States is especially Congress, essentially not doing its job in so many areas like it doesn’t, it’s turned over its constitutional prerogative to engage the United in the war in some vague thing. After 9/11 they passed this vague law giving all future presidents incredible amount of latitude. And like, they haven’t taken that back. They have, you know, allowed presidents to enact terrorists and all of that. They have the power of the purse, which is an incredibly important power, but they’re so dysfunctional that the only thing that passes is these omnibus bills, which everybody crams everything into them, and there, that’s not like, so you don’t even know what’s going on. And so this is gonna sound sort of maybe unusual to you, but when the sort of parts of the incoming Trump administration were complaining about the omnibus bill, the budget deal that it had so many things that nobody understood, I was like, yes, that is a problem. I mean, that really, but that’s a bipartisan problem. Like they do this, they don’t pass bills, and they just sort of, you know, stay up for a week, and then everybody gets their compromised wish list. But not there’s no discussion of what’s going on. So it’s the Congress not doing its job, not doing its oversight job, and then we have a situation where the Senate was envisioned as like a veto institution, because they’re trying to hold 13 colonies together, fine, but they also gave Senate the power to shape the judiciary, but they also gave each state the same number of senators. Maybe that made sense enough more than 200 years ago, but now we have 40 million in people in California of two senators, and we have, I think last I counted was like 16 small states with the same population of 32. Like once again, where are the checks and balances? This is so what we are seeing right now, I believe, is a bipartisan problem, in the sense that this failure has led to every administration trying to use the executive order to enact this agenda. But, you know, further weakening checks and balances and dysfunctional Congress. So fast forward. Here we are all these powers that have been concentrated and all these checks and balances that have been eroded has given basically a very sharp tool to the current administration, which is using them, in my view, to further slash checks and balances. Like this does not like I would have been fairly pro a reform that strengthen checks and balances, but this is the opposite of that. This is further weakening checks and balances, um, and this. These are things like this is why you’re I’m sort of like, I am from Turke so it comes up, these are not easy things to recover from, because these are self feeding dynamics. Once you do this, it gets worse. Once you like so and then somebody comes in power and does this, and then it just gets worse and worse and worse. I’m not super optimistic about the current moment, but on the upside, the US has much deeper traditions, much stronger institutions. So it’s not like Turkey always had a thin democracy, so to speak, and US has been through a lot, and it has more to rely on in a moment of crisis like this. But I think it needs to be recognized. It is a moment of crisis. Because it’s a multi decade process of distortion of how the government is supposed to operate with oversight, if the administration, and it’s like accelerating like an ambulance. So here we are.

John Torpey 

So here we are. I mean, it seems to me, for for once, the term crisis is entirely appropriate, a term that I think is tends to be overused, but in this situation, it’s entirely appropriate. And, yeah, I mean, the guardrails seem to be weak at best. Congress is supine. The courts are holding up relatively well, but, you know, they’re just saying that many of the things that the administration is doing to, you know, eliminate agencies or personnel in the government are legal, but they’re not necessarily.

Zeynep Tufekci 

One parenthesis to this on my own area, is that, so with the this whole DOGE team, which is, like, super secretive, but we know that they got demanded and got access to extremely sensitive, private data with practically everyone, like the IRS, the Social Security Administration, the, you know, the OMB, which is all the federal employees. So if you sort of combine all of this, is an extremely important thing, and how we got to the government having so much data with so little oversight is another story, but here we are, and when one of the judges who ruled against, like there was one judge who ruled against some part of what the administration was doing, which is their job, they’re supposed to say it’s oversight, and eventually goes to the Supreme Court, which we have already discussed is, you know, the judiciary has been distorted because it’s the Senate, and Senate’s distorted. But let’s leave that aside for a second. Elon Musk posted the daughter of that judge with a name and a photo and allegedly employed at the Department of Education, right. And now I’m just so shocked that this did not create a huge outcry because the world’s richest man allied with the government, with a small, secretive team of mostly young, no government experienced people, unclear how they were vetted, and he is publicly targeting the family member, the young daughter, which just happens to, you know, being this judges child. The judiciary is not made of magic. I don’t know if there’s a judge out there who’s not thinking, whoa, who in my family is vulnerable here, right? This is like everybody is vulnerable when you have this kind of power and when you go after families like this, it’s, to me, pretty clear what the message is. And I think this is where being from a place like Turkey, Middle East helps, or having studied authoritarians and elsewhere, helps is that I think Americans just look at this and they don’t recognize it, like they just are like, oh, he posted the photo and name of the daughter of a judge. Like the rest of the world recognizes this as exactly what it is. And Americans kind of look at it and say, oh, he’s just like posting and like, no, this is not a minor event. And what happens in such situations is that, you know, judges are human. They know their family might be targeted like this. And so the idea that the judiciary will somehow magically stand up to something like this, I think is helpful, but somewhat naive, because this is exactly what happens elsewhere.  Right. Your colleague, Kim Lane Scheppele, recently said on I guess, the PBS NewsHour that, you know, Americans aren’t familiar with this, so they don’t know what to make of it, you know…  No and we have seen, the rest of the world, we’ve seen this movie. The powerful people start going after family members so brazenly, and when they also have all the tools of government and all this private data, like we know what this plot point is. And I think Americans just look at it in disbelief and not really sort of absorb what this means, which I think is scary, because you want to oppose this as early as possible, because once it gets started, what you have is silence and you don’t even know why it’s there.

John Torpey 

Well, I fear we’re going to have to think about these issues more seriously, and I appreciate you coming on and talking about them on international horizons, but I think we have to respect your time, and I know you got a busy day. So I want to thank Zeynep Tufekci of The New York Times and Princeton University for sharing her thoughts about some of the developments regarding the internet, free speech and the second Trump administration. Look for International Horizons on the New Books Network, and remember to subscribe and rate International Horizons on Spotify and Apple podcasts. I want to thank Claire Centofanti for her technical assistance, as well as to acknowledge Duncan McKay for sharing his song International Horizons as the theme music for the show. This is John Torpey saying thanks for joining us, and we look forward to having you with us for the next episode of International Horizons.