Historian Timothy Snyder, a leading researcher on authoritarianism, has warned that a “cult” has developed around President Donald Trump and his allies, arguing that some of the world’s wealthiest figures are working to expand their fortunes at the expense of basic constitutional freedoms.

In an essay published on Wednesday, Snyder—an expert on tyrannical regimes whose books on the subject include “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century”—said oligarchs associated with Trump had moved their illiberal project into a new phase in recent weeks. He described what he viewed as a coordinated pattern involving Ukraine, U.S. elections and control over political speech. Snyder’s essay is available at his Substack.

“Freedom to speak. Freedom to vote. Freedom to live. These basic liberties were blatantly violated by irresponsible and self-centered tech billionaires this month,” Snyder wrote. He identified Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin as government allies of the billionaires and pointed to the dispute over Starlink’s role in Ukraine as a central example.

“As the Trump regime has executed an open turn towards the Russian aggressor,” Snyder wrote, “Elon Musk chose to deprive Ukraine of access to a system that they needed for their own defense.” Starlink, the satellite internet service operated by Musk’s company SpaceX, has been a critical communications link for Ukraine’s military and civilians since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. He said Russian attacks subsequently killed Ukrainians while Trump and Musk intensified claims that responsibility lay not with them or Putin, but with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Snyder then cited what he described as an attack on voting rights involving Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. “On October 17th,” he wrote, “Americans gathered at about three thousand sites in all fifty states to encourage early voting and celebrate their right to vote. Millions of people joined together in the largest such action in American history, which was organized by a number of civil society organizations working together as the No Kings Coalition.”

During the event, Meta suspended the Instagram account belonging to the No Kings Coalition, causing the page to disappear and preventing its administrators from accessing it. “The forum that was being used to organize support for the American right to vote was suspended by a private company – for no reason, or for no plausible reason that Meta was able to provide,” Snyder wrote. The episode sits within a long-running debate in the United States over how much power private platforms hold over political speech, given that major social networks have become primary channels for civic organizing.

He also pointed to several social media platforms’ refusal to carry material related to a documentary critical of Musk. “Tiktok suspended the account which advertised it, and kept it down the whole following weekend, thereby suppressing the movie during what was to be its first big weekend,” Snyder wrote.

Snyder said TikTok is partly owned by Musk’s friend Larry Ellison, the co-founder of software company Oracle, who, in the film, offers Musk billions of dollars to help him buy Twitter. A few days later, Musk invested a billion dollars in Ellison’s large entertainment conglomerate, according to Snyder. “The film makes a good case, now borne out even more strongly by these events, that the point of these media monopolies is to suppress freedom and control the political sphere,” he wrote. “It is worth noticing that these two oligarchs were helping one another at exactly the same time as Musk was helping Putin.”

Snyder argued that denying responsibility is a central part of the pattern he described. “In each case the wealthy and powerful relevant denied that they had done anything, that they could have done anything, that anything could have possibly been their fault,” he wrote.

“Even Putin, who is waging the largest war since 1945 [said] that the Ukrainians made him do it by existing,” Snyder continued. He said that, as Trump increasingly aligns himself with Putin, Trump claims Zelenskyy forced him to act by refusing to surrender. Snyder also wrote that when Musk enabled Putin to strike Ukraine, “thereby taking charge of US foreign policy,” Trump and Musk made unclear statements suggesting that the other might have been responsible.

Snyder added that TikTok representatives said the platform was merely following unexplained standards when it limited viewership of the documentary, while Meta attributed its action to its own artificial intelligence system. “Great power with such extravagant irresponsibility is inconsistent with any freedom – including the rights to live, to speak, to vote,” he wrote.

“The more powerful these men become, the more they embrace a cult of irresponsibility, making it our fault when they take our rights to speak, to vote, to live,” Snyder warned. “Something is emerging which can, should, and indeed must be stopped.”

He described a system in which “one oligarch’s drones kill you because another oligarch helps, and in which a third oligarch then suppresses the discussion.” Snyder said such developments had been emerging for some time, but argued that the timing of what he characterized as three assaults on freedom made “our new Matrix or Skynet impossible to miss.” Whether Meta restores the No Kings Coalition’s account, or TikTok elaborates on the standards it cited, remains to be seen.