On MSNBC's The Weeknight, Angelo Carusone discusses the “disturbing new trend in the right-wing media” of “rebrand the notion of authoritarianism to their own people”
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From the October 13, 2025, edition of MSNBC's The Weeknight
ALICIA MENENDEZ (CO-HOST): So, Angelo, that is like how it played out here on Earth one. If you were watching the right-wing echo chamber, what were the last few weeks?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS): Excitement. The vibes are great. They think that this is that, you know, there's this idea that Trump is doing comes to cracking down on these cities, that the backlash reinforces just how dangerous and lethal the Democrats are, liberals, the entire shadow network around them. The media is a big part of that according to them, and that this is Trump saying that he's gonna do what he's gonna do. It's a raw power grab. I think the one thing that is a takeaway, though, is there's this sort of new narrative that's percolating and being revised, something that's, to me, the most concerning piece about the story here.
It's not the excitement that I find disturbing. It's this thing that they've been introducing, this new concept called ordered liberty.
MENENDEZ: Ordered liberty?
CARUSONE: Ordered liberty is what they've been describing it as. That you can't have freedom unless you have intense structural order first or authoritarianism.
And it's this weird thing where they're actually trying to rebrand the notion of authoritarianism to their own people who are the ones that you would think would be the most reflexively opposed to it. That's been the weirdest part about it. That's been the one shift. They've been talking about this Insurrection Act for a long time. They've been fetishizing it since, you know, right after the 2020 election when Trump was still in office.
So five years now, this has been the thing they've been discussing. This is the first time they really meaningfully changed the story around it. And when you introduce a concept like that to an audience like this, that to me is a little bit of a concern because they're preparing them for something, to accept something that they ordinarily would not be willing to accept and giving them the tools to advocate and organize around it. Ordered liberty, it's a disturbing new trend in the right-wing media. So that's been what it's like for them.
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CARUSONE: I think that if — it's not just — and we shouldn't be academic at this point. It's earlier too we talked about President Obama. If the one thing that people can do now, especially business leaders, is to make sure they're calling Trump, lot of them talk to him, and people that are connected to him and say, by the way, martial law is bad for business. Just make sure that he knows that point because that is a real big — if nothing else, at least he should be aware that that it's bad for business.