The catalyst for my curiosity was when I sat in on a high school class as a middle school student called New Czar in the Kremlin: Putin’s Russia which studied authoritarianism and dictators around the world. In this class, there was an in-class debate regarding if there was a point to the facade of democracy in Russia. This opened up a whole new facet of politics for me. Interestingly, it was not the terms of democracy that was being debated but the very existence of democracy. This was both fascinating and horrifying for me, as I grew up accustomed to democracy and firmly believed that it was the path towards a better society at all times. I became even further interested in this topic when I witnessed the continued political polarization and the erosion of democratic norms in American politics. Since then, I have have joined Ballers for Ed Reform to blog about the impact of authoritarianism of public education and intellectual freedom and have also been selected for the National Youth Advocacy Corps at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights to more deeply explore this topic.