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Recently, Bill Newman of Northampton, an ACLU civil rights and civil liberties lawyer, gave a talk in Whately entitled “Stand Up! Fight Back!” He listed signs that our country is at the tipping point for “when an ostensibly free country becomes an authoritarian state.”

These included but are not limited to a leader taking total control of his political party, encouraging violence, controlling educational systems, universities and cultural centers, putting oligarchs in charge, ruling by fear, seeking revenge and retribution of political enemies and being an “omnipresent master propagandist.”

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