© 2025 KALW 91.7 FM Bay Area
91.7 FM Bay Area
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

The Authoritarian Playbook: Trump's growing police state

Masked ICE agents detain an unidentified man in San Francisco.
Evan Roberts
Masked ICE agents detain an unidentified man in San Francisco.

On this edition of Your Call, we continue our new series, The Authoritarian Playbook, with Professor Barbara Walter, an expert on civil wars, violent extremism, and domestic terror.

In her latest Here Be Dragons Substack piece, she writes, "The thing that scares me most about America’s future isn’t the next election, the Supreme Court, or even the possibility of political violence although all of them scare me. It’s the police state being built around us, in real time, disguised as something meant to protect us."

We'll discuss Trump's threats to send National Guard troops to Chicago, Baltimore, Oakland, and San Francisco, and find out how people are responding. Some troops in Washington DC are now armed.

Water writes, "We have time. But if we stay silent and complacent until the police state is fully built, the only people left in the streets will be the ones with military gear. And they will feel emboldened to act because they will think that the rest of us really don’t care."

Guest:

Dr. Barbara F. Walter, Rohr Professor of International Relations at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego, author of How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them, and the Substack newsletter, Here Be Dragons: Warning Signs from the Edges of Democracy

Rose Aguilar has been the host of Your Call since 2006. She became a regular media roundtable guest in 2001. In 2019, the San Francisco Press Club named Your Call the best public affairs program. In 2017, The Nation named it the most valuable local radio show.
Johanna is a producer, and supports KALW's community engagement activities, and is a proud KALW Audio Academy Alum.