The greatest danger to human civilization and the planet is the inability to believe that tomorrow can be different — the idea that we are individually powerless in the face of colliding existential threats. My latest in @TheNation:

“I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.” —Clarence Darrow

“Fascism” isn’t a slur for politics we don’t like. It’s a precise word with precise meaning. And in the face of what’s happening right now in America, it’s the most honest one we have. I’ll lay it out as plainly as I can. 🧵

This is a must read thread.

I missed this important thread. Read it. Share it

I got so much shit from various sources when I used the F-word, but I have not been using it to be hyperbolic. It’s accurate. See this excellent thread for details 👇🏻

The Roberts MAGA Court is just ripping up two centuries of precedent and starting from scratch to let Trump do whatever he wants. There’s no legal philosophy to it, they’re just corrupt partisan operatives.

“I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.” —Charlie Kirk, April 2023

https://t.co/S0KondKNFk

James Baldwin, in his deep wisdom, said it best: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” It begins with the courage to call fascism by its name.

We already see the crackdowns on journalists, comedians, teachers. It’s an accelerating event the regime knows exactly how to exploit. More are coming. This isn’t hysteria or alarmism, and it���s not incitement to violence. It’s clarity in the face of real and escalating danger.

We can’t allow Charlie Kirk’s horrific shooting to be twisted into cause for self-censorship. Fascist movements seize on moments like this not to prevent violence, but to weaponize it — to twist it into political advantage, expand repression, punish dissent, and tighten control.

Orwell was right: sanitize the language and you sanitize the mind. Euphemism is how society sleepwalks into tyranny. That’s why historians tell us to be careful and also to be clear. Avoiding the uncomfortable truth doesn’t make it less real. It just makes it harder to confront.

I get why people recoil from the word. It’s ugly, it sounds extreme. But you know what’s uglier? Pretending this isn’t happening until it’s too late to stop it.

What matters is the combination. Any society can show flashes of nationalism or polarization. Authoritarianism exists on the right and the left. But fascism is a distinct phenomenon of the right: nationalism fused with hierarchy, patriarchy fused with violence, democracy gutted.

✅ Collapse of shared reality. Much depends on splintering the information environment and our shared sense of what’s happening. Public life is flooded with lies and conspiracies until conversation among people, living in alternate realities, can’t agree on the most basic facts.

✅ Militarization of civic life. Civic space infused with force: paramilitary cosplay as patriotism, secret police with sweeping powers, armed troops deployed into neighborhoods as a display of power and dominance over our own people.

✅ Persecution of dissent. Opposition becomes treason. The state’s machinery — sham hearings, investigations, legal and regulatory threats — is weaponized to intimidate and silence.

✅ Rigid gender roles and family hierarchies. Women’s autonomy is stripped away, LGBTQ people are criminalized or erased, and “traditional” family structures are enforced by law. Private life becomes political terrain, with gender and sexuality policed as matters of state power.

✅ Erosion of democracy from within. Elections continue, but the field tilts. Courts are stacked. Voting rights restricted. Maps redrawn. The rules are rewritten to ensure that losing at the ballot box is no longer a risk.

✅ Assault on the free press. Reporters are branded enemies. Propaganda floods the zone. Sometimes the state censors directly, more often it pressures the private sector into silencing dissenting voices. Regime-aligned messengers are elevated as the only truth-tellers.