Introduction:
The first three months of Trump’s return to power was a whirlwind of stupidity and horror. The federal government was eviscerated. Trump started a trade war with the rest of the world and especially China because Trump thought that the global financial system the United States created and benefited from was somehow cheating America. By April 2025 Trump had alienated so many US trading partners that the status of the US dollar as the global reserve currency was damaged beyond repair. The regime slowly tried to realize its dream of a misogynistic white ethno-state by attacking diversity at all levels of society. Their first and most vulnerable targets were members of the trans community. Trump and his allies tried to erase trans people from society and make it impossible or outright illegal for trans youth and maybe even adults from receiving gender affirming care. Bullying and extortion were acceptable tactics to pressure universities and other institutions into abandoning their diversity efforts (these tactics often worked, sometimes even preemptively). Deportation and banishment to a gulag in El Salvador became a regime favorite for migrants and undocumented immigrants. People with the humanity to protest the genocide in Gaza unwittingly painted a target on their backs. An increasing number of them also became victims of the immigration secret police. All of this and so much more was done by the time I write this in April 2025. The tempo of repression ramped up at an alarming pace and shows no sign of slowing down. If things continue at this rate without any meaningful resistance it bodes extremely ill for the future.
Two things are certain by this point. The United States is finished as the sole global superpower, and America of 2025 is a fascist state. That was obvious to me the day after the November 2024 election. That’s why this series has the title you see above. While I hope these two facts and the threat they represent would be obvious to everyone, I was sorely disappointed. Most people appear to have been gifted with incredible powers of myopia and denial. Like a horse with blinders on, they see only what is directly in front of them. Even if they see a giant cliff looming directly in front of them that they are galloping directly at, they do not worry. Everything will work itself out in the end. They’re not really interested in giant cliffs anyway, so there’s no reason to make a big fuss about it anyway. Not long before writing this I encountered a TS Eliot quote that I will never be able to forget: “humankind cannot bear very much reality.” Maybe it would be more accurate to say “humankind cannot bear any reality.”
In part 7 I will be focusing again on the topics that frighten and unsettle me the most, the attacks on migrants and protesters. Along with the attacks on trans people and diversity the repression of protest and vilification of immigrants are the parts of the Trump agenda that his regime was firmly committed to.
Terrorism is NEVER Acceptable…Except State Terrorism, Which is ALWAYS Acceptable
A group of armed masked men approach a civilian on the street. In broad daylight and in front of witnesses these masked men kidnap this person and force them into a vehicle. The kidnappers take their victim hundreds of miles from their home and isolate them away from anyone who might be able to help them. If I said that the masked men were members of a drug cartel there would be universal agreement that the above scenario was scary and bad. However, if I said that the masked men were government agents enforcing a draconian immigration policy that consensus would evaporate. A depressingly small number of people believe that armed men kidnapping people off the street is bad no matter who’s doing it or for what reason. Most people don’t care about the government kidnapping people so long as it’s not happening to them or someone they care about. Another minority will cheer government kidnappings and encourage more. Why the differences in attitude when both kidnapping scenarios are functionally the same?
One of the reasons is that states have always re-branded their terrorism and called it something else. When non-state actors do terrorism we call it…terrorism. In the 20th and 21st century when state actors did terrorism they called it “law and order.” This re-branding campaign was hugely successful. In the United States voters would cast their ballots for the “law and order” party. The Democratic and Republican party often competed with one another to see who could promise the most “law and order” if they gained control of the government.
In 2025 the Trump regime deployed some “law and order” to round up people opposed to the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Sure, some people might have been disturbed by video footage of ICE agents stalking college kids and kidnapping them for deportation or imprisonment. If the reader has seen some of this footage and felt uncomfortable, you can safely quash that discomfort. Don’t let your pesky eyes deceive you by letting them communicate information to your brain. What might look like a brutal kidnapping on the surface is for the benefit of everyone. Any person empathetic enough to oppose a genocide is obviously a public menace. If the United States started taking a principled stance against genocide imagine what could happen next. Those same subversive “empaths” might demand that unhoused people be treated like human beings, or that everyone should have equal access to healthcare, or that women should vote and be allowed to divorce. The mind positively reels at the horror. If the reader found themselves agreeing with any of those horrific ideas I would advise you to keep your thoughts to yourself. You just might have one of them thar empathetic thinking brains. It would be best if you cared only for yourself and believe everything the government tells you at all times forever. If you do too much of that “commiserating with the suffering of other people” the government might track you down and “law and order” that dangerous brain of yours all over a concrete wall (with a gun).
Another one of America’s favorite targets for state terrorism is immigrants and refugees. America has been criminally mistreating underprivileged immigrants for its entire history. Trump’s policies against migrants weren’t novel. However, Trump and his underlings plainly delighted in making people suffer. There is no better example of this than the April 14th, 2025 press conference in the White House with the “president” (really dictator) of El Salvador at the time, Nayib Bukele. This press conference was a terrifying display of fascist cruelty and arrogance. At every point Trump, Bukele, and the entire administration inverted reality, adamantly and repeatedly claiming that the people they deported to the El Salvadoran gulag were terrorists. If you ask me the only terrorists in this situation were the people kidnapping and transporting people to a foreign gulag. In the reporting at the time, media outlets spent a lot of time combing through the records and information of the first few hundred people deported to El Salvador to see who among them had a criminal record. Most of the people sent to the gulag had no criminal record at all, and at least one of them was sent there by accident due to an administrative error. This kind of information is useful and I’m glad to have it, but the mindset that the media had also validated the assertions of the Trump administration. Trying to figure out who is “guilty” or “innocent” implies that there are people who deserve to be sent to a foreign gulag. If future reporting or histories of these events don’t make this clear, sending anyone to a torture prison is a crime against humanity, regardless of criminal history or legal status.
The entire gaggle of serpents in the oval office that April day positively delighted in flaunting their power and their impunity. It was the easiest job in the world to deport several hundred people to El Salvador, the administration even ignored a court order to accomplish the task. When Trump, Bukele, and others were asked why they couldn’t release and return one man who had been wrongly deported, they claimed they didn’t have the power, it wasn’t in their purview. Fucking bullshit. Obvious, fucking, bullshit. There is no language to describe how unbelievable their lies were. It didn’t matter though. They all knew they could spit in the face of every reporter in the room and none of them would be challenged on it. Trump even joked to Bukele that US citizens would be the next victims to be sent to the gulag and that more of them needed to be built. Bukele responded to Trump’s comments by saying they still had plenty of room left in the first prison, and everyone in the room laughed. This is what the reader needs to understand about fascists. A lot of politicians in high levels of government are callously indifferent to people’s suffering. They use people’s lives as a currency to be bought and traded to achieve political goals. For fascists, suffering isn’t the byproduct of achieving political goals, it is a goal unto itself. Fascists want their victims to suffer. Their end goal is to kill enough people in an attempt to make reality match their fantasy. An impossible goal, but that will never stop them from trying. They can’t be bargained or reasoned with. Fascists have to be resisted, and they have to be stopped (preferably before they acquire absolute power).
In case anyone missed the vibe in the oval office on April 14th, Bukele made sure to make it clear. Sitting with Trump he said that there were three hundred fifty million Americans, and that Trump needed to liberate those hundreds of millions by imprisoning a few more of them. I know this is cliche to point out but that comment drips with George Orwell’s 1984. How much more dystopian can a man be before saying “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength” out loud? Bukele was deliberately inexact with the number of people that needed to be imprisoned to “liberate” everyone else. Is it ten thousand, six hundred thousand, twenty million? Who the hell knows the only way to find out is to try. Keep in mind everything I’ve discussed about this meeting was done in front of dozens of reporters and was being broadcast live all over the world. If they were all being this brazen and cruel on camera, imagine what was being said and planned behind closed doors.
I’m speculating but I’m guessing one of the reasons the Trump regime was so determined to deport people to El Salvador was because trapping them in a foreign country made the legal process of freeing them more difficult. The regime could (and did) claim that since the people deported were no longer in the country, the US legal system had no authority to dictate what was to be done to them. The “legal” argument of people around Trump was basically anyone not on US soil has no rights and anything can be done to them without consequence. Which is alarming, but also amusing in a maddening way. Even in the midst of a trade war to “bring jobs back to America,” the United States decided to outsource its concentration camps to a poorer country (at least initially, there may be new “homegrown” concentration camps after this is written). Which if you ask me is a damn crime and Trump should be ashamed. Those El Salvadoran torturers are taking perfectly good jobs away from American torturers. I say we bring those jobs back to America. American torture prisons for American torturers.
Opposed to Opposition: Legacy Media
There are probably hundreds of social and political variables that make a fascist takeover possible. Within the last few years I have begun to realize that one of those important variables is a meek and obsequious media. I’m not referring to media outlets that were openly propaganda for the right, there were plenty of those around, and they certainly played their part. What I’m referring to is media outlets that were ostensibly independent or referred to themselves as “neutral.” Unwittingly all these “neutral” media outlets became not right-wing propagandists, but right wing enablers. To explain what I mean I’ll use an example I already mentioned above from 2025, but this enabling has been going on since at least 2015.
Above I mentioned how after the first few hundred people were deported from the United States to El Salvador in early 2025, there was a lot of time and attention spent on figuring out who among the deported had criminal records. Most of them didn’t and most major media outlets reported that fact widely. On the surface that sounds like a win and good journalism, and as I mentioned it is useful information. Unfortunately, that entire line of inquiry was also a massive win for the Trump regime. Parsing out who had a criminal record implied that there were people who deserved to be deported to a foreign gulag. It also completely ignores the fact that in America everyone is supposed to have rights, and even those guilty of crimes are entitled to due process under the law. Every media outlet left of fascist should have been screaming bloody murder after the first deportations. Instead of wasting time seeing who had a criminal record, there should have been headlines like: “Trump Regime Commits Crime Against Humanity.” The media should have been saying that everyone deported should be returned immediately, and everyone responsible at every level should be immediately prosecuted. Anything less than that is journalistic malpractice. Yet none of the large major media outlets grasped the true scale of the threat.
Right after the April 14, 2025 oval office press conference I saw a headline from the associated press that made me want to rip my hair out in a rage. Referring to Trump’s remarks to Bukele about deporting US citizens, the AP released an article titled: “Trump says he wants to imprison US citizens in El Salvador. That’s likely illegal.” Really? What brilliant legal scholars did they have to hunt down for that noncommittal response? Who even gives a shit about whether it’s strictly legal or not, the very concept is so fundamentally immoral and authoritarian the legal question is irrelevant. Deporting anyone to a gulag for any reason is wrong, and an attack on the very concept of human rights. That should have been the headline. That’s what was at stake. A lukewarm, milquetoast response of “Uhh that’s probably illegal” misses the gravity of the moment so badly that it should have been satirical. The Trump regime could announce that they want to take unruly children away from their families and grind them up into dog food and the AP would still say: “Trump wants to turn children into dog food. That’s likely illegal.” Thank goodness the free press is such a strong bulwark against tyranny. Where would we be without it?
What baffled and angered me to no end was the extent to which legacy media buried their heads in the sand and refused to acknowledge what they were seeing. Whenever Trump and his cronies did something blatantly illegal and dictatorial the media always deployed handy euphemisms like “unprecedented” to describe events. Here’s some wisdom for journalists and editors of the future: If it walks like a fascist, talks like a fascist, and puts people into concentration camps like a fascist, you’re looking at a fascist.
I don’t know where to lay the blame for the failure of legacy media to condemn the rise of American fascism. Many publications were owned by wealthy corporate interests, but not all of them. Was it something about the culture of American media that made everyone unable to see what was happening, or maybe unwilling to admit it? By 2025 were media publications afraid of backlash and reprisals from the regime? If they were, why did they wait so long to become fearful? Trump’s assault on the media began as soon as he began his first presidential run. That’s when the free press should have begun a concerted campaign to defend itself and the rights of everyone. If they had responded sooner they might have been able to help avert disaster, or at least made themselves less culpable in that disaster. Because make no mistake, large media outlets share the blame for Trump’s capture of power. You support what you don’t condemn, anyone who refused to take a principled stand against fascism tacitly supported it. Any media outlet that thinks cowardice or an apish devotion to the concept of “neutrality” will save them from repression might literally be dead wrong. Worse still, the media giving so much ground to tyranny without a fight damns the rest of society too.
There needs to be a renewed commitment to the qualities that make a good political journalist, or any journalist. The first and most important character trait a good journalist should possess is a fury towards injustice that burns so brightly in their souls that they will never truly know peace. Being literate is less important than having that fury, and I mean that with the utmost sincerity. Someone who is illiterate but compassionate is preferable to an ivy league educated journalist with the spine and convictions of a jellyfish. Someone who is illiterate but dedicated contributes more to the struggle for human equality than an ivy league jellyfish who might, for example, refuse to condemn the rise of fascism.
“The End is Always Near”
The quote above is the title of the book written by Dan Carlin, creator and host of the Hardcore History podcast. I’ve always enjoyed Carlin’s work both audio and written. Ever since reading The End is Always Near I’ve thought a lot about the title and themes of the book. In a nutshell, Carlin discusses the collapse of civilizations. People never imagine that their civilization will collapse, yet civilizations are always collapsing. Sometimes the fall is so quick and violent it’s recognized by people at the time as a collapse. Sometimes the process of decline takes place over so many generations it only becomes apparent in hindsight that a collapse has taken place.
Why are civilizations always falling? No system, however well designed, can survive forever. Some of this is due to events outside anyone’s control, like an earthquake, severe drought, or anything else that strains a system past its breaking point. Human failings like corruption, incompetence, and shortsightedness are also key causes for decline and collapse. If you combine human failings with uncontrollable events the chances of a government or society failing multiply.
In the 21st century (and beyond) the world faces a unique situation. Humanity’s corruption, incompetence, and shortsightedness have created (or at least contributed to) natural disasters that are beyond any control. Climate change will cause drought in some areas and floods in others. Rising air and ocean temperatures will create more powerful storms. In places that are dry, wildfires will become more frequent and harder to contain. All of these disasters and a lot more besides will make some parts of the world so uninhabitable that people will be forced to move if they want to survive. The unavoidable movement of climate refugees will create political instability. Nativists and ethno-centrists will see refugees of a different culture or skin color as a threat to the “purity” of their homogeneous fantasy, and agitate violently against accepting refugees. That kind of internal hostility coupled with external pressures will severely strain nation states all over the world, and it remains to be seen how many will weather the literal and figurative storms.
Trump’s time in power certainly accelerated the death of the American republic (if we’re lucky maybe history will call it the first American republic) and contributed mightily to America’s downfall as the sole global hegemon. If the US was a car rolling downhill by the force of gravity, Trump turned on the engine and stomped on the accelerator, and strapped a rocket motor to the back of the car for good measure. Even if Trump had never existed, could the United States have survived to the end of the 21st century? Could the corrupt, slow, and bureaucratic system have ever adapted quickly enough to deal with the change in technology, the disasters caused by climate change, and the migrations of people seeking a better life? I’m not so sure. I don’t think there’s a lesson here either. If telling those in power not to be corrupt or stupid helped I think we would have seen some results by now. Instead of offering advice I’d encourage the reader to reflect on the nature of power and the ultimate frailty of human institutions.
Coda Collection 2
I was listening to an episode of the Weekly Show podcast hosted by the comedian and news presenter Jon Stewart that was released on April 17 2025. Stewart was speaking with Heather McGhee, author of the book The Sum of Us about the history of segregation in the United States and how the Trump regime’s attacks on diversity was attempting to roll back what little progress had been made to address systemic and institutional racism. During the discussion Stewart asked McGhee if there was a way to diplomatically approach white Americans who might also be economically disadvantaged and explain the history of white supremacy in America, while emphasizing the point that everyone is harmed by a racist and patriarchal society.
I don’t disagree with that line of questioning entirely. Outreach and messaging are important, and there are people who are a lot more patient and understanding than me who might be willing to undertake the difficult work explaining systemic racism to aggrieved white Americans. My style of expletive ridden moral grandstanding isn’t going to convince someone who’s already defensive to reexamine what they believe. If anything it would achieve the opposite and make someone double down on their beliefs. A diplomatic and compassionate approach has its place, at least as a part of a strategic political strategy. What bothers me about Stewart’s question was that it still comes from a place of white dominance. Why is it the job of marginalized people to soothe and massage the paper thin egos of white Americans, and white men in particular? Why does everyone have to walk on eggshells lest they risk offending white people? Why are white Americans given understanding and sympathy when they embrace a hateful ideology and political movement? When white Americans are hurt by neoliberal economic policies, job outsourcing, and government corruption of the ruling class is it okay for them to blame immigrants and other oppressed groups? Why are LGTBQ+ people, women, and people of color forced to politely beg white Americans to hate them a little less as long as it doesn’t upset them too much? I think the question that Stewart asked also demonstrates an old naivete. If only the light of education could blot out the darkness of ignorance then hatred would disappear, or something like that. It’s a nice idea, and it is true to an extent. Education and exposure to diversity is a good way to prevent radicalization, and can even de-radicalize some people away from white supremacist views. Not everyone can be saved through diplomatic education though. Some people just like being hateful. They enjoy hurting other people, they revel in their ignorance and no amount of outreach will change them.
The fact that white Americans feel entitled to being coddled and are offended when their prejudices are challenged (or even acknowledged) is another example of white supremacy in America. Supremacists of any kind, race, religion, gender, or anything else proclaim that their supremacy is divinely or naturally appointed. Projecting strength is a central focus of any supremacist ideology. This strength is a fiction, however. If there was a divinely superior demographic they would not need violence to enforce that supremacy, but violence is always necessary. Enforcing the privilege of one group requires the oppression of all others. The projections of strength and invulnerability are a mirage, designed to mask overwhelming insecurity and fear. That doesn’t mean supremacists aren’t dangerous, quite the opposite in fact. Insecurity and fear are the root causes of countless atrocities. Anyone who secretly feels insecure but wants to appear strong usually does so through cruelty.
Conclusion
Hatred, indifference, injustice, these are vices humanity will never be rid of. This is an unfortunate truth, but also an important one to accept. It reminds us that in the struggle for human rights there are no victories because the fight will never end. Any gains that are made need to be guarded with eternal vigilance because someone someday will try to undo them. Part of why Trump was able to amass so much power so quickly in 2025 is because so few people were paying attention or cared. They took their rights for granted and assumed that they couldn’t be taken away. By the time they realize that their rights aren’t some immovable law of the universe, and something that has to be fought for, it will be too late.
There were tens of millions of Americans who were eligible to vote in the 2024 election but didn’t, because they weren’t interested in politics. They didn’t care about the outcome. Everyone that didn’t vote chose fascism. Someone saying that they don’t care about politics when a fascist is running for office is an endorsement. Not caring about politics is a political stance, not choosing is a choice. Apathy and ignorance are not excuses, they are condemnations. I can better understand someone born into a country with generations of authoritarian rule. Like Russia for instance. Russia had what one might call democratic rule for about five minutes after the overthrow of Nicholas II and again after the downfall of the Soviet Union. Before and after both of those events Russia has known the tyranny of the Czars, the Soviets, and Vladimir Putin. A Russian who develops a detached fatalism as a coping mechanism makes sense, because there aren’t a lot of other choices. Fighting for a free and democratic Russia usually ends with falling out of a poisoned window. Americans had a choice though. The neoliberal status quo offered by the Democratic party wasn’t a good choice, but it was better than the alternative. Every American that voted for Trump (and everyone that didn’t vote at all) chose fascism.