Fascism In America

We will have a short piece on the LA Uprising shortly, however in the mean time here is a prescient piece from the pages of Organise 101.

In the intervening time between today, the 22nd of November 2024, and the election of Donald Trump earlier this month, on the 5th of November 2024, much has been said and written about what is to come. From policy proposals which read as so comically evil as to seem dreamt up by the maddest of satirists, to potential Cabinet appointments which might as well have been lifted directly from a bad high school play on the death of historic republics, there has been little room to breathe and less so still to express the feelings which this barrage of horrifying news invokes. It has been only a little over two weeks now, and already the shape of the coffin of the Republic has started to make itself known through the fog of the future. It is true that I would term myself an anarchist whose political ideology is best described as an amalgamation of Bonanno and Malatesta, of Goldman and Graeber, of some of our earliest examples in the Diggers and some of our latest in our non-anarchist comrades in Rojava and Chiapas, and yet I find myself swirling in a pool of despair at this manner of death with which the Republic, in which I grew and found myself, has come to suffer. It is hard to take joy in the death of that which you oppose when what will arise in its place is most similar in color to the “Republic” of Sulla rather than the Free Territories of Ukraine.

Perhaps it is a vestige of reactionary, for our time, republicanism that remains in me and twinges with sadness at its passing; perhaps it is a harsh twinge of fear at the retribution that will, undoubtedly, be paid to those who have bravely risen up, albeit without arms, in opposition to the policy of murder which this country has enacted at home and abroad. At the moment I cannot say for sure. What I can say is that my heart weeps blood for those among us who, so reliant upon the minuscule social safety nets, will suffer and perish when those safety nets are destroyed in totality by the oncoming regime. It weeps for those of us who will again know the fear of the threat of kicked in doors for being where we shouldn’t be according to those who wield the baton. It weeps for those who will, as the tariffs take hold, be forced to labor less as workers and more as indentured servants for their bosses without even the slightest whimper of remediation available to them, though that as it stands barely exists now. Most of all, however, it weeps for whomever this new regime decides it is most politically expedient to lash out at at any given moment: the Migrant, the Queer, the Indigenous or Black people who do not meet the expectations of the reinforced white supremacist structure.

Let me run down what it is that people within the United States now face: a militarized mass deportation of up to some ten million; the revocation and outright annihilation of the many hard fought and won gains of queer people; the unhindered violent suppression of dissent, which heretofore had been at most met with “less than lethal” munitions (excluding the murder of Michael Reinoehl); the confiscation of land and the destruction of free expression broadly, but with a particular eye to universities; and the construction of new concentration camps on a scale not yet seen in this century, with undoubted expansion to the currently existing network. Already 1,402 acres of land has been offered expressly for the purpose by the State of Texas to the President-Elect, and already he has said that deployment of National Guard units, under the guise of a “national emergency,” from Red states to Blue states will occur to ensure that his program of genocidal deportation is carried out without hindrance. That is to say nothing of the promised purges of the military structures of those deemed “disloyal” in a country where the military’s command is explicitly meant to exist separate of the political structure so as to prevent this exact case from occurring. I say again that this election, whose results cyber security and data experts already have raised alarms about, reeks of an electoralized version of Sulla’s capture and purge of Rome.

Where are those who cannot fight meant to go? To whom are they meant to turn? In this country all forms of effective left wing organization have been forced so deeply below the surface as to be less than trivial in their ability to oppose a security state so thorough as to know when you sleep. Are we to expect them to turn to cultist organizations such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), or to parties so riddled with Feds that it is now a common joke such as that CPUSA? If they flee, where to? Canada and Mexico, the only countries which border the US, will slam shut their borders as soon as the flood of refugees begins.

The conservatives succeeded in freezing the Constitution in time, and they, abetted by a craven opposition more beholden to norms than actual opposition, opened wide the door for a truly fascist regime to take power. While the “communists” in the various parties and their splinters decried the United States as already being fascist, they blinded themselves to the actual fascist creep that began long ago and grew decadent on the donations of those they fooled while doing nothing to organize any actual resistance or revolutionary action. The anarchists, few in number and separated by vast distances in rural areas, organized support systems and methods of fighting back only to, out of necessity, ally themselves with said parties and find their projects co-opted while they became sidelined and pushed away. The urban anarchists have done much better, by virtue of being greater in number and closer together, but still we are too few to do more than perhaps raise hell and be a minor inconvenience.

2020 showed us the necessity of resilient, lasting, methods of organization and infrastructure, and yet in four years what have we to show for it?

_ April, 2025 _

It has been nearly six months since I last touched this document. Honestly, I never intended to finish it, and I am still questioning whether I want to or not. The situation here has developed rapidly and in several previously unexpected ways. Where to even begin?

On the international front, the Trump regime has burned centuries old alliances and begun an economic war with the rest of the globe. He has threatened military action to seize Greenland, he has stated he wants to annex Canada, and he has declared the cartels in Mexico to be international terrorist organizations to give his government carte blanche to conduct military interventions in our southern neighbor. At home, he and Elon Musk have ravaged the existing bureaucracy to the point that even if the departments remain, it will be in name only. Those social safety nets mentioned in the first portion are either dying or else being threatened with death. The poorest and most vulnerable among us now stand facing down the combined barrels of isolation, forced autarky and inflation, disease, and the culmination of forty years of austerity.

This is to say nothing of the work of the rest of his administration, even. Pam Bondi, the United States Attorney General, has openly defied court orders, sparking conversation among the politically neutered of constitutional crisis; she has also openly stated that the Federal prosecution will be seeking the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, likely as a tactic to poison the jury during interviews as they will have to unanimously not be opposed to that sentence. ICE has continued black-bagging and disappearing people, though now with alarming publicity, gall, and results, acting more and more every day like what they truly are: American Geheim Staatspolizei. They don’t even need to make use of the aforementioned 1,402 acres offered the administration by Texas: they can simply send you to El Salvador, where you have zero recourse or ability to return as the courts have no jurisdiction there. Just yesterday it became a national headline that ICE finally admitted to “accidentally” deporting Kilmer Abrego-Garcia, a man whose claim to asylum under international law had already been upheld by one of Trump’s own judges in 2019. This is just one more in a series of abductions by ICE, though particular attention should be paid to the fact that international students are also being abducted, oftentimes in broad daylight, because they are accused of using their “guaranteed rights” to voice opposition to the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

Eggs, whose price Trump famously ran on, have continued to balloon in price as Robert Kennedy Jr. has allowed, purposely, for the bird flu epidemic to burn its way across the country completely unmitigated. Tuberculosis is back in style and so is the measles, both of which have had large scale outbreaks across the country from North Carolina and New York to Texas. Then again, it’s a miracle we know that much considering the administration has gagged the CDC and DHHS from issuing alerts or news about disease outbreaks. Children have died of the measles and their parents have publicly said they were thankful they didn’t vaccinate their child. I have no words that would accurately explain my disgust and horror.

In Florida, a devoutly Catholic transgender woman was arrested and sent to a men’s jail for using the women’s restroom in the state Capitol to pray the Rosary; that same Rosary the police then seized from her. She could not even keep an item of her faith as they took her to be humiliated and abused for using the correct bathroom. Stories like this, often without the explicit religious element, are more and more common every day. Waking up and looking at the news is like watching a newsreel from a horror movie; as a trans woman myself, I am increasingly feeling the urge to flee, but there is no where to go. We are alone.

You want to know what fascism in the United States would look like? Put down the fucking alt-history novels, put away the manifestos, and turn on the news. When I first started writing this piece I mourned the death of the Republic, not out of any actual love for it but for fear of what would come next, and every day we goose step closer and closer to the actual death thereof. The skies seem greyer, the people are tired and hungry and angry and beaten down, even the uninformed are starting to crack. Your run of the mill liberal, the voter of norms and checks and balances, now openly speaks that there will be civil war. This isn’t merely the death of a republic, it is the outright collapse of an empire. Shouldn’t I feel some form of satisfaction in the death of empire? It feels like I should, but all I feel in fear and sickness.

I cannot afford to eat. I cannot afford rent, or my car payment anymore. I work as much as I am able, and still I am hungry. I cannot openly be who I am, and if I am I am made all the more alone in the real world, off the message boards and outside of the chats. If my situation is this dire, I cannot even begin to imagine how dire it is for those who have been laid off or else had their benefits abruptly stolen out of their hands by robber barons and fascist ghouls. This piece came with an offer of $50, which I have declined and asked be given to someone without a roof. I still have that, for now at least. I am not a model anarchist, I am no great organizer of workplaces or speech giver or even that good of a fucking person. I am just a trans college student who has watched the walls close in for years, who tried to make people aware, and who will now suffer the consequences for their inability to listen.

To the rest of the world, I am personally sorry for what this country has done and is doing. I hope that my apology will be enough as I fear there is not much else I will be able to give much longer. I won’t let these bastards take me without a fight. You shouldn’t either.

Cheers.