Appendix C — Chronology of Principal Events, 2016–2026

This appendix provides a chronology of the principal political and cultural events on which the book draws. It is not a comprehensive political history of the period; it selects the events that the book’s argument requires the reader to be able to place in time.

C.1 2016

Trump elected (US, November).
Brexit referendum (UK, June).
Failed coup in Türkiye and consolidation of Erdoğan’s purges.
Merriam-Webster names ‘post-truth’ word of the year.

C.2 2017

On Tyranny (Snyder); The Death of Expertise (Nichols).
First wave of academic literature on democratic backsliding consolidates.

C.3 2018

How Democracies Die (Levitsky and Ziblatt).
Kim Kardashian announces bar studies.
#Republic (Sunstein); cultural backlash literature consolidates.

C.4 2019

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff).
Cultural Backlash (Norris and Inglehart).

C.5 2020

Twilight of Democracy (Applebaum).
COVID-19; institutional stress test; misinformation crisis.

C.6 2021

The White Lotus season 1 airs (HBO).
6 January US Capitol attack.
Emily Ratajkowski, My Body (essays).

C.7 2022

Stolen Focus (Hari).
ChatGPT public release (November).
Onset of generative-AI period.

C.8 2023

Tyranny of the Minority (Levitsky and Ziblatt).
Crack-Up Capitalism (Slobodian).
Doppelganger (Klein).

C.9 2024

Autocracy, Inc. (Applebaum).
Anti-Scientific Americans (Motta).
US presidential election; Trump returns to office.
Kaia Gerber launches Library Science book club.

C.10 2025

C.10.1 Q1 (January–March)

January: Trump inaugurated for second term; rapid restructuring of federal civil service begins.
February: Karp and Zamiska, The Technological Republic, published by Crown; programmatic statement of the Silicon-Valley–national-security alignment that becomes a reference point for subsequent debate.
March: Title VI investigations against Columbia opened; federal funding freezes commence ($1bn Cornell, $790m Northwestern, $175m UPenn, $510m Brown threatened, $9bn Harvard threatened).
March: Levitsky, ‘The New Authoritarianism’ (The Atlantic).
March: Catch and Revoke social-media surveillance programme for international students announced.
Cartner-Morley Guardian article (22 March), the textual anchor for the book.

C.10.2 Q2 (April–June)

15% indirect-cost cap on federal research funding proposed by multiple agencies; subsequently blocked in court.
Harvard sues the federal government over funding freeze and visa policy.
May: revocation of visas for Chinese students announced; State Department targeting of pro-Palestinian campus speech expands.
May: Sternberg, ‘Gifted Education in an Age of Anti-Intellectualism’ (Gifted Education International).
June (and ongoing): Kosmyna et al. (MIT), Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt; first peer-reviewed empirical evidence of measurable cognitive-offloading effects under sustained AI-assisted writing.

C.10.3 Q3 (July–September)

4 July: Budget Reconciliation Act (Trump signs); endowment tax increased; student-loan caps tightened.
September: Burroughs J. rules Harvard funding freeze illegal.
September: NYFW shows (Proenza Schouler, Altuzarra) stage the literary-fashion turn analysed in Chapter 4.

C.10.4 Q4 (October–December)

1 October: Compact for Academic Excellence presented to nine universities (Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, Arizona, UPenn, USC, UT Austin, UVA, Vanderbilt).
October: Six universities reject the compact (MIT, Brown, UPenn, USC, UVA, Dartmouth); compact extended to additional institutions.
28 November: Northwestern $75m settlement.
December: Levitsky, Way and Ziblatt, ‘The Price of American Authoritarianism’ (Foreign Affairs).
V-Dem Democracy Report identifies 24 standalone autocratisations for 2025.

C.11 2026

C.11.1 January

Federal appeals court permanently blocks NIH’s 15% indirect-cost cap; the first of the four 2025 cap policies definitively struck down. ⟨N⟩
Higher Ed Dive ‘Trump 2.0 first year’ retrospective consolidates eight indicators of institutional impact. ⟨?⟩

C.11.2 February

FKA twigs at the 2026 Grammy Awards (cited in Cartner-Morley). ⟨?⟩

C.11.3 March

Cartner-Morley, Guardian article (22 March; the textual anchor of the book; the article is the occasion of the book rather than itself an event chronologically catalogued here). ⟨?⟩
Capoccia, ‘Countering Illiberalism in Liberal Democracies’ (Comparative Political Studies). ⟨?⟩

C.11.4 April

Anthropic, Palantir and Google senior executives clash publicly over the limits of military-AI deployment; first major intra-industry split on the question.
Palantir issues its “manifesto” describing a fused vision of corporate-state surveillance, predictive policing and military-AI integration; widely read as programmatic technofascism.
Hogenboom, ‘AI Chatbots Could Be Making You Stupider’ (BBC Future, 20 April); popularisation of the cognitive-debt hypothesis.
OpenAI publishes its “Our Principles” statement, signed by Sam Altman; companion piece to the Palantir manifesto in the broader genre of platform-political proclamation.
Jagielnicka, ‘Anti-Intellectualism Has a Hidden Target’ (Medium).

C.11.5 May

The Information briefing (Bratton, 3 May): quarterly profits of Palantir, OpenAI and Microsoft document the financial scale of the AI–defence–platform alignment. ⟨N⟩
Import AI 455: ‘AI systems are about to start building themselves’ (4 May); recursive-improvement debate enters mainstream technology press.

C.11.6 Ongoing

Routledge Handbook of Anti-Intellectualism in production for 2026 publication; chapter drafts due 15 December 2025; final submission 15 June 2026.

C.12 A note to the future reader

If you are reading this after 2026, several of the events catalogued above are likely to have been superseded by subsequent developments, and the structural argument the book offers is intended to remain intelligible after that supersession. Where the argument no longer fits the case, the book has been refuted in the way historical arguments are properly refuted: by the next thing happening.