Fascism Does Not Announce Its Arrival

It creeps up on us, step by step, so that once we notice how our country has been transformed, it may be too late.

Photo from Shutterstock.

I recently saw two sobering videos that I’d like to share. They both make a similar point: that the arrival of a full-fledged fascist state won’t necessarily announce itself with placards or tanks in the streets. Instead, existing legal structures will be (and already are being) quietly leveraged to institute and normalize the use of armed power within the United States, by the U.S. government, against U.S. citizens and residents.

We’ve already seen this in action. For example, immigrants have been arrested by masked, unidentified government agents armed with guns but not with valid warrants.

Now the Trump regime has issued an Executive Order directing the Department of Defense (DOD) and Department of Justice (DOJ) to coordinate with local law enforcement in deploying “national security assets” to assist with crime prevention. It gives DOD and DOJ 90 days to finalize those arrangements.

The complete Executive Order can be read here.

But as historian Tad Stoermer makes clear in this video, this is not actually a crime-fighting policy. This is the soft launch of domestic militarization.

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It’s the quiet normalization of embedding the Pentagon into your local police force — not in response to a disaster, not under a declaration of emergency, but as a matter of everyday internal governance…. What this regime is doing now is … embedding … military force into the daily operations of American government.

You don’t need a tank in the streets when you have a federalized police force trained by the Pentagon, coordinated by the DOJ, and armed by a memo signed in peace time.

You don’t need to declare war when you are already redefining resistance as crime…. That’s where we are. A 90-day clock has been set. Military and national security assets will be integrated into domestic jurisdictions. They won’t call it martial law. They’ll call it prevention, order, safety….

It’s worth watching and listening to Stoermer’s short video in its entirety. He provides some fascinating historical detail about the Insurrection Act, signed into law by Thomas Jefferson, and how it was never meant to defend democracy. It was meant to defend power, and of course that is exactly how this current administration intends to use it.

The other video, posted on Instagram by Igor Kryan, imagines the United States in 2051 — and makes clear that, from the perspective of a time traveler looking back from that year, there was no specific date when America ended.

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Instead, in a series of small steps, the country we thought we knew was transformed into something completely different.

There was no civil war. There was no invasion. There was no single moment when America ended. Just a slow fracturing that became too obvious to deny…. The transition happened in everyday moments. No one noticed. The most striking aspect of America’s end was how normal it felt. Each step seemed reasonable. Each region’s complaints seemed justified. A nation that spanned a continent disappeared while everyone was watching.

The warning signs are here. The wake-up call is ringing. Is anybody listening?