Filmmakers Demid Sheronkin and Can Dündar step back from the daily torrent of headlines to examine free speech and democratic decline in the US in their DW documentary Democracy Under Attack: Can Dündar and Trump’s America, which premiered April 14 at the Human Rights Film Festival Berlin. They settled on the experience of academics as a focused lens ‘‘a microcosm’’ showing broader pressures on democratic institutions.
One of the central figures is Mark Bray, a Rutgers history professor and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook. Bray was placed on the far-right Professor Watchlist, created by Turning Point USA in 2016. After Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September 2025, and President Trump signed an executive order designating antifa a “domestic terrorist organization,” Bray received intensified death threats. Activists from Turning Point USA’s campus chapter publicly denounced him for allegedly advocating political violence. When his home address circulated in harassing emails, Bray and his family relocated to Spain; the film follows the couple describing frustrating, unexplained disruptions as they tried to leave the United States, including canceled flight reservations.
The filmmakers capture the charged atmosphere at AmericaFest 2025, Turning Point USA’s first convention after Kirk’s death, which drew roughly 30,000 people and treated Kirk as a martyr. Sheronkin describes the event as part political rally, part religious service, part festival. Speakers roused a MAGA-aligned crowd; former Trump adviser Steve Bannon declares, “We are at war. We are in a political and ideological war.” The documentary includes the Rutgers student Ava Kwan, who petitioned for Bray’s removal and was honored onstage at AmericaFest. Kwan says her action was intended to protect students, disavows responsibility for threats against Bray, and says her own private information was also doxxed.
Beyond these flashpoints, the film sketches a wider ideological split on campuses and in the public. It does not ignore the presence of far-right academics, including University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, who appears in the film expressing white supremacist views; Wax was suspended on half pay and removed from teaching for 2025–26 but retained tenure.
Can Dündar, a Turkish investigative journalist who survived imprisonment, an assassination attempt and forced exile to Berlin in 2016, anchors the film with a perspective formed by repression. He did not travel to the US for legal reasons and says he did not want to become “a good gift of Trump to Erdogan.” While traveling to Canada for interviews, Dündar was interrogated for hours at the border because of a “terrorist” label. In Toronto he meets Yale philosopher Jason Stanley, who has also left the US and warns bluntly that “the US is over as a project.”
Dündar draws parallels between warning signs he witnessed in Turkey and trends he sees in the United States: erosion of the rule of law, assaults on media freedom and other early indicators of authoritarianism. “I feel like a new wave of authoritarianism was tested in Turkey, and it’s now spreading all over the world; I can smell it, I can feel it,” he tells DW, urging Europeans and others to remain vigilant because “democracy shouldn’t be taken for granted.” Edited by Brenda Haas.