I'm aware this term has been around for a while, but it has spiked in usage during the george floyd protests and now again with the arrest of the bodega clerk in New York after he stabbed someone trying to rob him, and was subsequently charged with murder. It's defined as "A stage of governmental dysfunction in which the state is anarchically hopeless at coping with large matters but ruthlessly tyrannical in the enforcement of small ones".
The term was coined by Samuel T. Francis (a noted racist and hate group member), originally relating to how violent gangs were not prosecuted while other, smaller crimes were, particularly against the people who would be most affected by gang violence.
They’re discussing collapse politics and throwing in the term anarchy because to them it just means “bad.” The phenomenon they’re discussing though is a real and interesting one. To me it’s the result of system collapse or at the very least decay as large scale political projects become non-viable and thus the political apparatus begins to lose its legitimacy. A key part to legitimacy theory is the understanding that the veil of legitimacy that is placed over power is there to protect power from having to exert itself (and therefore exhaust itself). As legitimacy crumbles and the bare power - ie violence - structures remain they exert their power with more and more vigor to make up for the lost ‘soft’ power of legitimacy. ‘Anarcho-tyranny’ is the state (or whatever political project) reaching its limits and receding, more and more violently over time. It’s collapse politics, I imagine it’s what many great empires experiences on their deathbeds as well
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Fair point though I still think it’s a misapplication here. Anarchy defined that way might be a rising trend in these collapse states but it’s the dialectical other the collapse politics are forming in response to rather than the formation itself