The Fight Back

Nobel-prize winning, bestselling author Maria Ressa provides a frontline guide to understanding, defending, and rebuilding democracy in the age of AI, with 10 strategic goals broken down into 100 concrete actions citizens can take right now

The window for saving democracy is closing. Authoritarian elections around the world have taught us what happens when citizens don’t hold the line and Western democracies begin to fall. It’s time for the fight back.
As Maria Ressa knowingly writes, we face three convergent crises:
• The crisis of truth: Tech platforms and AI have destroyed our information ecosystem, making shared reality impossible.
• The crisis of order: The United States—the nation that built the post-war international system—is now dismantling it, launching illegal military operations, killing its own citizens in the streets, and arresting journalists who document it.
• The crisis of accountability: Institutions have been captured, law weaponized, and those with power answer to no one.

The Fight Back is a must-read resistance manifesto—written by someone who survived the dictator’s playbook firsthand, grounded in frontline experience from multiple continents, with specific frameworks for immediate action in the age of AI—and in a moment when the world order is being remade before our eyes.