What do a mailman in Brooklyn, a reporter in Louisiana and a Muslim woman in a DC library all have in common? All are recent high-profile victims of the ever-encroaching assault on our civil liberties.

Earlier this month, New York police arrested a postal service worker for shouting at police for nearly hitting his truck with their police cruiser. In Louisiana, Chris Nakamoto went to a government building looking for records on the mayor’s sudden pay raise and wanted access to audio recordings of the city council meeting. The police asked him to leave. When he refused, he was arrested.

The third incident occurred at the Shaw neighborhood library in Washington DC, where a police officer approached a Muslim woman and told her, “You need to take off your hijab.” There is no law in America against wearing a hijab in a public library.

“Bigotry or racism is an important point, but the thing that connects all of [these cases] is that the people in power are in charge. And they don’t have to follow the law, they just do whatever they want and you have to do what they tell you. But that’s not a democracy. That’s tyranny,” explained Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, who dedicated a segment on the arrests to his show's recent broadcast.

Watch the full segment below: