Autocracies now outnumber democracies, and nearly three-quarters of the world’s population lives under authoritarian rule. Over the past decade, dictators in China and Russia consolidated their control. Hungary, Turkey, and other fragile democracies tipped further into illiberalism. A wave of coups in Africa toppled legitimately elected leaders. Even in the United States, a democracy since its founding, the rule of law weakened and the threat of authoritarianism surged. This trend has crushed hopes that blossomed after the end of the Cold War about the permanent triumph of liberal democracy and has spurred much debate about what went wrong.

These developments can’t be understood, let alone reversed, without grasping a crucial element at the heart of the authoritarian wave: the persecution of women. Across cultures and continents, women champion democracy, and tyrants target them as part of their playbook for amassing power. Failing to treat the repression of women as the crisis it is all but guarantees that democratic erosion will continue unchecked.

More than 30 years ago, I declared at the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing that “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” It was a controversial statement at the time but reflected the reality that women were on the frontlines of the “third wave” of democratization that brought down the Iron Curtain and liberated millions of people around the world in the 1980s and 1990s. Across the Soviet bloc, women-led activism, from labor strikes in Poland to grassroots environmental and civic movements in East Germany and Hungary, helped erode communist control. In Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, women’s movements emerged from the shadows of dictatorships to reshape politics. Argentina was the first to enact a national electoral quota for female candidates, in 1991. Guatemalan women helped bring peace in 1996 after decades of civil war. The women of the African National Congress in South Africa helped end apartheid.

Today, with democracy in retreat, it’s clear that women’s rights have been a canary in the coal mine. Around the world, attacks on women’s rights, opportunities, and full participation in society have seemingly been ignored. What follows is rapid democratic decay: institutions hollowed out, dissent criminalized, and power concentrated beyond accountability. This is not by accident, but by design.

Authoritarian regimes systematically chip away at women’s rights because they recognize that women’s participation is both a catalyst for democracy and a bulwark against tyranny. This repression is both ideological and tactical—silencing women’s contributions that underpin democratic strength and enforcing patriarchal appeals that legitimize authoritarian power. As the scholar Saskia Brechenmacher observed in Foreign Affairs earlier this year: “Given the importance of civic freedoms and political space to meaningful progress for women, strengthening democratic institutions will be an important element. . . . Yet focusing only on democracy while neglecting specific initiatives to improve gender equality would be misguided.” This deep connection between women’s rights and democracy must be understood in order to combat and ultimately reverse the trends unfolding today. Women’s rights are still human rights, and autocrats know it.. . .

The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement arm is requesting unfettered access to what is considered to be the most comprehensive government database of people in the United States and their most private information, including sensitive details about individual children, according to six current and former federal officials.

It is called the Federal Parent Locator Service, and it’s meant for finding people who owe child support. Granting access to the Department of Homeland Security, the officials said, would violate a federal law that explicitly limits its use to determining and collecting child support payments and a handful of other narrow purposes. But DHS’ ask is being seriously considered within the Department of Health and Human Services, which maintains the database.

The database contains the name, address, Social Security number, employer, and salary or wages of every employed person in the country, as well as the equivalent details for anyone listed in state unemployment systems. It exists so that if someone owes child support, the government can pursue them for it even if they’ve changed jobs or moved to another state.

The repository includes these personal details and employment records, updated throughout the year, for all types of people — even those who don’t have any children. Only some who work exclusively in the gig or cash economy, or who are entirely self-employed, might not be listed.

The database also names every child in the U.S. who is the subject of a state child support case, including each child’s sex, birthday and Social Security number, as well as family members’ names and relationships. And it identifies when single mothers and kids who receive child support are domestic violence victims — alongside their address.

A battle over a data center complex in rural Western New York may seem like a purely local affair. But an analysis of the project’s owner reveals ties that include the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, the government’s crackdown on U.S. campuses, and the imposition of neocolonial rule over Gaza.

Over the past year, residents of Genesee County, New York — located between Buffalo and Rochester — have strongly opposed a proposed data center that is being pushed by county officials and backed by Stream Data Centers, a Texas-based developer of hyperscale data centers. Community members say the data center will bring noise, pollution, and higher electric bills, while endangering nearby wetlands and wildlife and threatening the sovereign territory of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation.

But opponents of the data center are up against a much bigger force than Stream Data Centers.

The parent company of Stream is Apollo Global Management, one of the world’s biggest private equity firms. The Wall Street giant has faced controversy over ties to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Moreover, the CEO and public face of Apollo, mega-billionaire Marc Rowan, is a powerful insider who’s shaped the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against universities and is helping oversee the new “Board of Peace” in Gaza.

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Authoritarians—whether MAGA-aligned in the United States or part of the global movement that includes Putin, Orbán, Modi, MBS, and others—­are not blind to the potential of AI. They understand it instinctively: its ability to pretend to be human, to deceive, to surveil, and to dominate. While progressives and democratic institutions are scrambling to get a handle on its implications, authoritarians in America, Russia, and around the world have already started weaponizing it with devastating efficiency.

A single AI machine can now generate millions of personalized political messages in seconds, each calibrated to manipulate voters’ specific fears or biases. It can (and currently is being used to) create entire fake news outlets, populate them with AI-generated journalists, and flood your social feed or web search with content that looks real, sounds real, and feels familiar, all without a single human behind it. Imagine the power of Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda machine, but with superintelligence behind the wheel and zero friction. That’s where we’re heading in the 2028 presidential election.

And that’s just the beginning.

Authoritarian regimes can—and already are—using AI to surveil and intimidate their citizens. What China has perfected with facial recognition, social media, and loyalty scoring, MAGA-aligned figures in the United States are rushing to adopt and adapt. Right-wing sheriffs and local governments could soon use AI to track protesters, compile digital dossiers, and “predict” criminal behavior in communities deemed politically undesirable. If the government knows not just where you are, but what you’re thinking, organizing, or reading—­and it can fabricate “evidence” to match—freedom of thought (much less freedom of expression) becomes a quaint memory.

This isn’t theoretical. In 2024, Republicans deployed AI-generated robocalls impersonating Joe Biden telling voters to stay home, and millions did. In the next cycle, it’s safe to predict that we’ll see entire portions of election campaigns waged by AI bots masquerading as voters, influencers, news media, and even public officials.

The goal here for the hard right that doesn’t embrace democracy but wants America to become an authoritarian state isn’t just to win; it’s to delegitimize the democratic process itself as Orbán and Putin have done. Because once trust is broken—once people believe that “both sides lie” or that “you can’t believe anything anymore”—then, inevitably (history tells us), strongmen step into the void with promises of order, purity, and salvation.

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The geopolitical implications of $200-a-barrel oil are not any better from an American perspective. The country that would benefit most from a prolonged oil crisis is Russia. Unlike in the U.S., the Russian state directly controls most of its country’s immense oil resources, meaning that the spike in prices would produce a huge windfall for President Vladimir Putin’s government. That money could be used to dampen the impact of Western economic sanctions or directly fund the war effort in Ukraine. The fact that so many countries would be desperate for oil would also give Putin added leverage in negotiations over the outcome of that war, O’Sullivan said. Already, Donald Trump has temporarily waived some sanctions on the sale of Russian oil, and his administration is considering lifting more of them.

What about America’s greatest geopolitical adversary? In the short term, China would find itself in a more precarious position. It is the world’s largest importer of oil and buys more than half of its supply from the Middle East. That makes it extremely vulnerable to a global supply crisis. But in the long run, China has two big things going for it. The first is that it has accumulated the world’s largest excess reserve of oil—about 1.2 billion barrels, equivalent to nearly four months of seaborne imports—in anticipation of a moment like this one. The second is that it has spent the past three decades developing alternative energy sources. As Jason Bordoff, the founding director of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, points out in a Foreign Policy essay, more than half of the cars sold in China today are electric, it is home to nearly half of the nuclear reactors under construction worldwide, and almost all of the country’s growth in electricity demand has been met with green-energy sources.

For this reason, several experts told me, a prolonged oil crisis could ultimately strengthen China’s geopolitical position. A seismic shock to the global energy system would push world leaders to rethink their own dependence on foreign oil imports. Fear about energy security could accomplish what fear of climate change never could. “If oil remains on this roller coaster, folks will absolutely look for alternatives,” Bob McNally, the president of Rapidan Energy Group, a leading energy consultancy, told me. “The main selling point for oil has always been that it is stable. But it isn’t looking so stable right now.”

That kind of shift would make other nations more reliant on China. The country produces more than 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines, more than 70 percent of the world’s lithium-ion batteries and electric vehicles, more than 80 percent of the world’s solar panels, and about 90 percent of the processed rare-earth minerals that are essential inputs to those technologies. Europe and Canada have long considered the prospect of depending on China for those resources to pose an unacceptable risk. An extended oil crisis caused by an American-led war might change that calculus. “I don’t think it would be crazy after all of this for countries to start viewing China as the least bad option in a menu of lots of bad options,” Bordoff told me.

The Trump Organization filed several previously unreported trademark applications last week in connection with America’s 250th anniversary celebration, all featuring the president’s name as a centerpiece of the highly-anticipated festivities.

The trademarks were filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by DTTM Operations LLC, which manages several other trademarks used by Trump and his businesses, over the last several days.

In one filing submitted on Friday, a “Trump 250” image was trademarked to be used on a variety of merchandise — including bumper stickers, tote bags, drinkware, clothing items and golf balls. A wordmark application was also submitted for the name “Trump 250” on Friday.

The same merchandise items were also listed as potential uses for a number of variations of an image that features Trump’s name along with “a design of five aircrafts followed by converging contrails.” A trademark application for that image was also submitted Friday.

The researchers learned that globally, 85,000 women were killed by men in cases of intentional femicide in 2023.

In 60% of those cases, the killer was close to them. In fact the UN’s press release says that one woman is killed by their intimate partner or a family member every ten minutes internationally.

By comparison, 12% of male homicides were committed within family or intimate partner relationships across the globe.

In Europe, 64% of femicides were from intimate partners rather than family members. This is not consistent worldwide; in some nations, family members are more likely to commit femicide.

Perhaps that’s why the report found that, in global terms, the most dangerous place for women is in our own homes.

The CARE analysis suggested that women are, on average, less able to discuss politics openly without fear of harassment.

“These findings should concern anyone who cares about democracy,” Pankhurst said.

“When women feel less able to speak openly about politics, it’s a clear warning sign that civic space is shrinking. This isn’t just about confidence; it reflects growing hostility, restrictions and systemic barriers that are pushing women out of public debate.

“If half the population feels silenced, our politics becomes weaker and less representative. Our democracy is weaker for it. It is a warning light.”

In 2025, the United Nations (UN) said that deadly conflicts, financial cuts, and backlash to women’s rights led to “stagnation and regression” of women’s freedoms.