So, here’s the bad news: fascism isn’t coming to America; it’s here.
We are long past the warnings of an approaching existential threat looming on the distant horizon of our story. The nightmare is no longer a future improbability but a present reality.
The current President kept his 2024 campaign promise to be a “dictator on day one,” wiping out decades of protections and partnerships with the stroke of a pen.
He filled his Cabinet with the absolute moral dregs of humanity, people committed to nothing but him, and the power and wealth that sycophantic devotion affords them.
He and his soulless accomplices have quickly dismantled every system and safeguard that, up until a couple of years ago, were established givens.
And the only question left is: do we have the strength to stop them?
History is a really good teacher.
If we pay attention to her, she reminds us that populations don’t become monstrous overnight, that nations don’t abandon humanity in a single moment, and that generational human rights atrocities don’t form in an instant or a vacuum.
Collective sickness is never sudden. There is always a slow, deliberate, almost imperceptible pattern, and we’re seeing it now:
Manufacturing fear: misinformation, fake emergencies, and abject lies all designed to create an unnecessary urgency in the heads of easily manipulated people and to make them feel hopelessly assailed.
The crafting of surrounding enemies: encroaching threats to tangibly embody the nightmares they have made in their heads; someone to go to war against, to take back their country from—someone these leaders can save them from.
The weaponizing of religion: making the manipulated believe that their mission is not just important or right, but holy; that they are being obedient to God while eradicating other human beings.
In that state of frantic, perpetually terrorized self-righteousness, they begin to allow everything. They can justify all manners of cruelty, all denials of care, every act of violence, because they are purifying and protecting their divinely curated country.
Once this happens, once-ordinary, rational, even compassionate people begin to lose their ability to see the humanity in front of them—it’s too late to help them see clearly.
This is how holocausts and genocides happen.
This is where historic national malignancies grow.
These are the first steps down a road that at the beginning seems unthinkable.
Decent Americans, we need to listen to History right now.
She is warning us that we are on the precipice of a free fall.
We can’t afford to go to sleep now.
We need to wake ourselves up.
America is not yet near where Germany was at the peak of Hitler’s power, but Germany wasn’t always there either, and that is the point.
That hideous transformation (like so many before) required targeted propaganda, fake news streams, dehumanizing rhetoric from leadership, an uninformed electorate, coercive religion, and a marginalized population to serve as the focal point for the holy war.
Most of all, it required a large number of decent people to be silent, which is why we will not.
It would be completely irresponsible and reckless to suggest that the United States in 2026 is Germany in 1941, but it could very well be Germany in 1933.
We cannot let the myth of American exceptionalism numb us into imagining we are above devolving into inhumanity. We have every ingredient in place to abandon the best of ourselves and to become something monstrous, something History records as yet another shocking failure of the center. It can and will happen here unless we refuse to allow it.
It’s not a foregone conclusion that America will give birth to something as tragic and sickening as we have seen. Still, we’re stupid and arrogant if we don’t believe ourselves capable, and that we aren’t already seeing the warning signs of bigotry and prejudice irreversibly taking root.
The question is whether or not we have enough good people who are willing to push back and to move together across lines of politics and religion and race and nation of origin and orientation and to declare our independence from fascism.
Do we have the energy, the diligence, and the courage to join our disparate voices into a single, furious choir that refuses to stop singing songs of freedom for everyone?
Do Americans have the attention span and intestinal fortitude to fight as they’ve never had to fight before because they’ve never had to go to war with their government in this way before?
Will we refuse to tolerate injustice in the name of national greatness or divine will, to reject and oppose denials of people’s worth and humanity even when it comes from our party or our church or our families?
And perhaps most of all, do we have the humility not to imagine that we are too intelligent or spiritual or informed not to become as monstrous a nation as we have seen others become?
My money says we do.
Yes, the bad news is that fascism is here, but the good news is that so are we.
Dictators don’t oust themselves, horrible regimes don’t leave on their own, and oligarchs don’t tire of devouring up nations, but fortunately, decent, brave, and organized human beings like us aren’t gonna wait around for that.
We have a month left to transform the what is into the what will be.
May we be our best selves in this moment, so that History one day tells our story as one where disparate humanity twisted the plot.
Now that fascism is here, let’s make sure we drive it back to the hell it came from.
We can. We must. We will.
Take heart, good people.
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