The "Handmaid's Tale" TV series has a great variation on that moment, which chokes me up every single time.

(spoilers in video title) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oKZgXvpm0c

Gotta love the way German sounds to English ears. Always good for a chuckle.

This guy is a hacker hero - do the engineering needed, get the proof of concept built, move fast, break things, start over and go big, then scores a victory over the commies and saves his family.

Both those movies, and a bunch more, are all listed at the end of the article.

And much of the public library books were a couple generations old, plus there was the Cold War, which meant lots of exposure to anti-fascism messages, and to anti-Soviet-like messages.

So, today, people of a certain age, who paid attention in school, have been programmed that the secret police saying, "Your papers, please" and sending people off to concentration camps, are obviously the very bad guys, and America is the good guys who don't do that. People with that upbringing would see certain textbook political maneuvers and tactics coming from a mile away, and be concerned.

To counteract that IMHO great programming, you'd need something extreme, like Rupert Murdoch and others pounding large swaths of the electorate with propaganda for decades -- to get them to support some politicians that are stereotypes we were told for decades before are outright evil.

Way too often, connected ("powerful") people manage to escape proper punishment, sometimes in the name of a "peaceful transition of power".

It seems authoritarians that know how to use their authority to force the populace to accept (some forms of) freedom can perform better than democracies. To the point the reigning monarch of Lichtenstein is basically a straight up fuedal prince, although one that has a sort of half libertarian/ancap flavor to how he wields power. Yet very few people describe Lichtenstein as a dystopia, it just kind of quietly gets ignored as an example of authoritarian success in both wealth and freedom.

Wait till you hear how sinister its precursor state was

I still remember the two gentlemen in their black, faux leather jackets who rang our doorbell and demanded to see our dinghy. (dinghies where registered products too) We showed them our dinghy, they said thank you and left.

Probably someone fled over the Baltic sea to Denmark in a dinghy. So the secret police went from door to door until they found someone who could no longer show it to them...

This was in the late 80s.

Pretty much all the highest % immigration countries are monarchy that I can think of, since in those country another tax payer is an easy win and immigrants that cause problem can be instantly booted so there is very little downside to taking anybody with $1 or a job who cares to come.

  Top Countries by Percentage of Immigrants (approximate recent figures):
  Qatar: Around 77% (or 76.7%).
  United Arab Emirates (UAE): Around 74-88% (some sources   show higher figures for earlier years).
  Kuwait: Around 69-73%.
  Bahrain: Around 55%.