James Baldwin put 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.

This isn’t hysteria or alarmism, and it’s certainly not an incitement to violence. It’s clarity in the face of real and escalating danger.

We already see the crackdowns on journalists, comedians, teachers. It’s an accelerating event the regime knows exactly how to exploit.

Believe me when I tell you that more accelerating events are coming.

We cannot allow Charlie Kirk’s horrific shooting to be twisted into a reason 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 societies sleepwalk into tyranny.

That’s why scholars and 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. Authoritarian states exist on the right and the left.

But fascism is a distinct phenomenon of the right: nationalism fused with hierarchy, patriarchy fused with state violence, democracy hollowed out.

✅ Collapse of shared reality. So much depends on splintering the information environment and our common sense of what’s happening. Public life is flooded with lies and conspiracies until people can’t agree on basic facts. Conversation with folks trapped in these alternate realities feels impossible.

✅ 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 show of dominance against our own people.