On this day in 2011, after over two and a half weeks of mass nationwide anti-regime protests, Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak resigned from his nearly three-decade-long rule.

This past spring, in an interview with Jacobin, an Egyptian photojournalist named Hamada Elrasam referred to the strongman’s resignation as “the so-called step down.” At the time, Mubarak had recently been acquitted of conspiring to kill 239 protesters during the 18 days of the 2011 revolution. His acquittal symbolized the grim continuum between his military-backed government and that of his political heir, the army general Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who’s been called “the most repressive dictator in modern Egyptian history.”

Sisi’s Egypt is a torture epidemic against political detainees at the hands of police and National Security officers. It’s “Generation Jail,” with tens of thousands of dissidents enduring his prisons  including activist blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah, who’s serving a five-year sentence for violating the country’s draconian anti-protest law. It’s “one of the world’s biggest prisons for journalists,” with some newsgatherers like Shawkan — “I’m a photojournalist, not a terrorist!” — spending years in pretrial detention. It’s state censorship by means of blocking hundreds of websites, the vast majority of them news and media platforms such as independent muckrakers Mada Masr. It’s “rainbow raids,” or the largest crackdown on the Egyptian LGBTQ community in roughly two decades. It’s forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings in the name of Egypt’s US-backed war on terror. It’s political oppression so total that Sisi, who in 2013 presided over the bloodiest political massacre in modern Egyptian history, won the country’s presidential election the following year with an impossible 97 percent of the vote. Now, he stands for reelection as virtually the sole candidate in next month’s race: his competitors have dropped out one-by-one citing violence and corruption, and his last main challenger, the former armed forces chief of staff Sami Anan, was arrested by military prosecution and sent to a military prison only days after announcing his candidacy.