{"id":9305,"date":"2026-06-13T13:47:40","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T13:47:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/friscotimes.org\/?p=9305"},"modified":"2026-06-13T13:47:40","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T13:47:40","slug":"opinion-jon-ossoffs-anti-authoritarian-playbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/friscotimes.org\/?p=9305","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | Jon Ossoff\u2019s Anti-Authoritarian Playbook"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div id=\"\">\n<p class=\"css-8hvvyd\">There\u2019s a playbook to defeating autocrats. And no one in American politics is coming closer to following it than Georgia\u2019s senator Jon Ossoff. \u201cPolitics is coin operated. Money goes in; favors come out.\u201d Jon Ossoff talks constantly about corruption \u2014 \u201cSecret money, corporate money, billionaire money.\u201d \u201cThey\u2019re crooks.\u201d \u2014 and constantly tries to link it to the suffering that people are feeling in their own lives. \u201c1.6 billion of your tax dollars to fund and finance their mining project.\u201d And he sort of walks you through all the ways in which life has gotten worse and more precarious for most voters \u2014 \u201cAll this while you pay more for gas, for groceries, for health care.\u201d \u2014 as it has gotten ever more lavish for what he calls the Mar-a-Lago mafia. \u201cThe Mar-a-Lago mafia has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights.\u201d And in this phrase that he uses, it\u2019s impossible for me not to hear echoes of Peter Magyar talking about Viktor Orban\u2019s mafia state. In April, I went to Hungary to write about the election to dislodge Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party. \u201cWhat I think of Viktor Orban? He\u2019s a masked fascist. He is a traitor to the Hungarian people.\u201d Viktor Orban has been the inspiration to autocrats around the world. \u201cGreat leader.\u201d The American right, very much included. \u201cTo see Hungary as a beacon in the West.\u201d \u201cOne place where Hungary clearly has led Europe is in reasserting its national identity.\u201d \u201cMr. President, you are on with about 5,000 Hungarian patriots.\u201d Orban\u2019s cronies own the news networks. They own the newspapers. They were able to drive one of the most respected universities in Budapest out of the country. Really, it sought to make itself this kind of model to the international right. \u201cWe are kind of a special island of difference in a liberal ocean in Europe.\u201d Then there was this candidate named Peter Magyar. And he was talking nonstop about corruption. Before Magyar\u2019s rise, there had been a sort of consensus that an anticorruption message wasn\u2019t going to work in Hungary because people were so cynical about politics that they just assumed that everybody was corrupt. And I think that there\u2019s something kind of similar in the United States, where they see Donald Trump as corrupt but they also see the Democratic Party as corrupt. What Peter Magyar was able to do was to really tie it to people\u2019s material suffering, to the struggles that they were feeling in their daily life. \u201cThe Hungarian people are fed up with the corrupt government.\u201d He wrapped himself in the Hungarian flag, in Hungarian national mythology, in Hungarian poetry. \u201cMagyar\u201d literally means \u201cHungarian.\u201d The equivalent would be somebody running with the name Joe America. And that, it turns out, is kind of the formula. It\u2019s a combination of a laser focus on corruption and a reclamation of national mythology. As soon as I got home, it just seemed obvious that the person who was running the most similar playbook, whether accidentally or by design, was Jon Ossoff in Georgia. Jon Ossoff says he writes his own speeches. \u201cAtlanta!\u201d And they have this really simple two-part structure. So he talks about the rot at the heart of the American system. \u201cThis is the Epstein class.\u201d \u201cVengeance and enrichment.\u201d \u201cSo little effort to hide so much corruption.\u201d But then in the second part of his speech \u2014 \u201cBut, Augusta, it doesn\u2019t have to be this way.\u201d \u2014 he lays out this optimistic \u2014 \u201cPeople are telling me they\u2019re desperate for change.\u201d \u2014 pluralistic \u2014 \u201cBecause the power of the presidency is nothing compared to the power of the people.\u201d \u2014 liberal vision \u2014 \u201cWho came here today because you love our country?\u201d \u2014 of American identity that sort of runs through our history, parallel to the nativist, white-nationalist version that Trump and his allies draw on. Look, if you were going to cook someone up in a lab to run in 2028, he \u2014 and I\u2019m sad to say, it probably is going to be a he \u2014 would be someone who looked a lot like Jon Ossoff. Even if he doesn\u2019t run, the formula that he has perfected, this combination of a relentless focus on the regime\u2019s corruption and the need for reform, coupled with this very earnest and serious sort of patriotism is, I think, the formula not just for defeating Trump, who we assume is going to be gone in two years, but for defeating the whole reactionary, autocratic movement around him.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There\u2019s a playbook to defeating autocrats. And no one in American politics is coming closer to following it than Georgia\u2019s senator Jon Ossoff. \u201cPolitics is coin operated. Money goes in;&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1027,"featured_media":9306,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[9666,2255,57,9665,2733],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Opinion | Jon Ossoff\u2019s Anti-Authoritarian Playbook - Frisco Times<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/friscotimes.org\/?p=9305\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Opinion | Jon Ossoff\u2019s Anti-Authoritarian Playbook - Frisco Times\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"There\u2019s a playbook to defeating autocrats. 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