Why I Call It Fascism

Moral clarity starts by calling things by their proper names

Photo by Mike Newbry on Unsplash

I spent an hour of my life listening to Ross Douthat interview Allie Beth Stuckey, and I learned a lot. I peered into a window into a building where complete epistemic closure has manifested. And it's pretty terrifying, really. What I witnessed wasn't crude fundamentalism but something far more dangerous: a sophisticated theological charlatan who has weaponized Christian language to create a system where moral reasoning itself becomes pathologized. But Stuckey's intellectual framework is just one manifestation of a broader pathology—the systematic transformation of American democracy into something that would have been recognizable to the architects of European fascism in the 1930s.

The contours of fascisization of American society are emerging with crystalline clarity, and yet a chorus of voices insists we temper our language, moderate our analysis, find gentler terms for what we’re witnessing. While some commentators will insist that fascism is an inaccurate term, that perhaps “populist” or “authoritarian”—or both of those words together—is a more intellectually honest take, rather than invoking comparisons to the political forms which took hold in Europe in the 1930s, in Italy and Germany, one struggles to see the point they’re trying to make.

ICE has been turned into a secret police. They wear masks, they don’t identify themselves, they arrest people without judicial warrant or due process, they rendition people to foreign gulags outside of the reach of US law—dozens of whom are completely innocent and have broken no laws—and you want to argue we haven’t seen a return of fascism? Well, the hair-splitting is not unlike what this conservative Supreme Court majority does. Such as when it decides that the disqualification of office for supporting insurrection against the United States is “not self-executing” and can’t be applied by the states. Or how the president is immune from criminal prosecution, and even in cases where he technically isn’t, the evidentiary standards these black-robed pallbearers of this American political dark age make bringing a case practically impossible. Or Barrett’s personal contribution to constitutional doctrine: the presumption of constitutionality on anything the president does, such that the Constitution’s plain language establishing birthright citizenship shall not apply in jurisdictions of federal court circuits where nobody has yet to bring a lawsuit. The kinds of people who defend the Federalist Society and conservative legal jurisprudence will tell you this is about protecting principles like the separation of powers and upholding the founders’ vision of a vigorous executive. Well, I will tell you that these people are all imposters and arsonists of the American project. I advance this charge unapologetically.

What we are witnessing is civilizational vandalism on a scale that is hard to hold in your head all at once. This is not mere political extremism or policy disagreement. This is the systematic demolition of every institution that might place democratic constraints on private power, the deliberate construction of a state apparatus designed to terrorize human beings into submission while enriching the oligarchs who fund the entire grotesque spectacle. There is no institutional preservation here, no considered constructive policy, no coherent governing philosophy beyond the acquisition and maintenance of power through the systematic destruction of everything that makes democratic civilization possible.

The barbarians are inside the gates. They wear suits and judicial robes and carry crosses, but they are barbarians nonetheless—vandals who have discovered that there is profit in destruction, entertainment in cruelty, and political power in the systematic elimination of the frameworks that constrain them. And the most horrifying thing is that millions of your fellow Americans find this entertaining because they finally get to watch their political enemies being punished for assorted cultural grievances—from progressive cultural overreach to trans people using public bathrooms—while the country burns around them.

Twenty heavily armed federal agents in military gear, some on horseback, descended on MacArthur Park in Los Angeles just minutes after children had been playing there. When Mayor Karen Bass arrived to confront this paramilitary occupation of her city, Border Patrol El Centro sector chief Gregory Bovino delivered a message that should have triggered immediate mass resistance: “I don’t work for Karen Bass. Better get used to us now, cause this is going to be normal very soon. We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.”

This is how fascism announces itself in America—not with dramatic proclamations but with the casual arrogance of jackbooted thugs who know they’ve crossed every line and no longer care who notices. Federal agents on horseback, patrolling American parks, telling elected mayors they answer to no local authority, recognize no constitutional constraints, and will operate wherever they choose. This isn’t immigration enforcement—this is the normalization of military occupation, the establishment of martial law by another name, processed through the bureaucratic machinery of a government that has abandoned even the pretense of constitutional constraint.

But street-level brutality is just the visible manifestation of a deeper project: the systematic destruction of every institution that might serve as a check on private power. Foreign students are being deported for their political views—not for criminal activity, not for visa violations, but for expressing opinions that the government finds inconvenient. Universities are being transformed from spaces of intellectual inquiry into instruments of political control. The Kennedy Center has been seized and brought under direct political control to suit the cultural aesthetics of this American fascism wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

And the systematic capture of American media institutions through the weaponization of frivolous lawsuits reveals the full scope of this institutional destruction. ABC News settled with Trump for $15 million over George Stephanopoulos correctly identifying Trump as someone found liable for sexual abuse—which a jury did find, and which a federal judge clarified would be understood as rape in common usage. Six media lawyers told NPR that ABC had “an exceptionally strong case,” yet Disney folded like a cheap suit because the company has “a heck of a lot of business interests” that could be threatened by regulatory retaliation.

This isn’t legal settlement—it’s systematic extortion. Trump himself made this explicit: “I shouldn’t really be the one to do it. It should have been the Justice Department or somebody else, but I have to do it... we have to straighten out the press. Our press is very corrupt.” Days after Stephen Colbert called CBS’s $16 million settlement with Trump a “big fat bribe,” his show was cancelled. Trump celebrated the cancellation: “His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next.” This is the systematic elimination of critical voices through corporate intimidation and the credible threat of regulatory retaliation.

Trump is suing CBS, Bob Woodward, the people behind the Pulitzer Prizes, a retired pollster for The Des Moines Register for getting a poll wrong. This isn’t about correcting false information—it’s about creating a climate of fear where journalism becomes impossible, where criticism becomes prohibitively expensive, where the mere threat of litigation forces media companies to self-censor rather than risk the costs of defending basic press freedoms. This is how authoritarianism captures media systems in the 21st century—not through dramatic state seizures but through the systematic elimination of the economic conditions that make independent journalism possible.

The corruption goes straight to the top. It’s blatantly obvious that Trump is in the Epstein files in ways that don’t look good for him, but that shouldn’t have been revelatory. Trump called Epstein a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” He socialized with Epstein for years, entertained him at Mar-a-Lago, and according to multiple witnesses, was present at parties where very young women were in attendance. The man who promised to expose elite predators has become the architect of systematic predation against the powerless while protecting the very networks of corruption he promised to expose.

And he’s violating the Constitution’s most basic constraints with impunity. Trump’s acceptance of gifts from foreign nations—including a luxury jet from Qatar for his personal use—represents a direct violation of the Emoluments Clause. Yet this systematic foreign corruption is processed as routine political news rather than the constitutional crisis it represents. When presidents can accept valuable gifts from foreign governments while conducting foreign policy, constitutional constraints on corruption become meaningless.

The Supreme Court provides the legal architecture for this demolition project. These black-robed arsonists deserve every ounce of moral condemnation we can muster. When they rule that insurrection clauses aren’t “self-executing,” they’re not interpreting law—they’re nullifying it. When they create presidential immunity out of whole cloth, they’re not protecting separation of powers—they’re eliminating it. When Barrett invents a presumption of constitutionality that means the Constitution doesn’t apply until someone successfully challenges it in court, she’s not being a textualist—she’s being a vandal.

These moral cowards apply different standards depending on which political party benefits. Constitutional provisions that advance conservative goals must be enforced regardless of consequences. Constitutional provisions that threaten conservative power must be ignored to avoid chaos. This isn’t constitutional interpretation—it’s constitutional vandalism disguised as jurisprudence.

The human cost of this institutional destruction is staggering. According to the Cato Institute, at least fifty Venezuelan nationals who entered the United States legally and never violated immigration law have been shipped to El Salvador’s prison system. Not deported to Venezuela, but imprisoned in a foreign country with which they have no connection, based on nothing more than executive decree. The majority have no criminal record. Their families have no information about where they are or why they were taken. This is not immigration enforcement—this is state-sponsored kidnapping, human trafficking disguised as policy.

Senator Tommy Tuberville’s advice to American citizens swept up in immigration raids was bureaucratically perfect in its moral emptiness: “Don’t hang around illegals.” A United States Senator is telling American citizens that their constitutional rights are conditional on their choice of associates. Freedom of association—a fundamental constitutional principle—is now subordinate to the administrative convenience of federal agents operating under arrest quotas. This is collective punishment operating as official policy, guilt by association elevated to constitutional doctrine, the casual abandonment of everything that distinguishes constitutional government from police state tyranny.

Marines now guard detention centers where human beings drink from toilets because they’re dying of thirst. American Marines—trained to defend freedom and democracy—are standing guard while human beings are reduced to drinking toilet water. The Posse Comitatus Act has been shredded through bureaucratic euphemism, but semantic games cannot disguise operational reality. This is the kind of systematic dehumanization that should make every American hang their head in shame.

Trump toured “Alligator Alcatraz”—a detention facility built in the Florida Everglades specifically designed to maximize psychological terror. The facility is located fifty miles from civilization in swampland known for its “treacherous terrain and wildlife.” DeSantis was explicit about the deliberate cruelty: “They ain’t going anywhere once they’re there, unless you want them to go somewhere. Because good luck getting to civilization.” This is not detention infrastructure—this is a deliberate torture facility designed to terrorize people into abandoning their legal rights. Trump found the cruelty amusing, joking that detained individuals would be taught “how to run away from an alligator if they escape prison.” This is sadism elevated to state policy, systematic cruelty that would make concentration camp architects nod with approval.

The silence of Silicon Valley’s oligarchs is deafening—and damning. These are the very people who spend millions lobbying for skilled immigration reform, who pontificate endlessly about the global flow of talent, who build their entire public personas around attracting the world’s best and brightest to American shores. Yet when legal immigrants are being shipped to foreign prisons like cattle, when federal agents march through public parks announcing they’ll “go anywhere, anytime” they want, when foreign students are deported for their political views—Marc Andreessen says nothing. Elon Musk says nothing. Peter Thiel says nothing.

Their silence isn’t accidental—it’s strategic. It’s calculated. It’s the kind of moral cowardice that would make medieval indulgence-sellers blush with shame. These moral vampires built their fortunes on immigrant labor and international talent, yet when those same immigrants and students face systematic terrorization, they develop acute cases of political laryngitis. They don’t want immigration reform—they want immigration control. They don’t want immigrants with constitutional rights—they want grateful, compliant, deportable workers who can be discarded the moment they become inconvenient.

Meanwhile, these parasites are busy building alternative systems to escape the very legal framework they’re watching collapse around the people who built their fortunes. Palmer Luckey and Peter Thiel launch cryptocurrency banks designed to operate beyond traditional regulatory oversight while constitutional protections dissolve for everyone else. They want American military protection for their global operations, American legal frameworks for their property rights, American infrastructure for their supply chains—but they want digital governance systems to avoid American taxation, regulation, and constitutional obligations. This is oligarchic secession in real time: building parallel systems of governance and finance while maintaining access to the benefits of democratic institutions they’re helping to destroy.

The fascist project depends on what can only be called a grift economy—a systematic business model built on exploiting people’s worst impulses while making them feel virtuous about it. Benny Johnson, one of the leading “conservative” influencers, is a serial plagiarist, conspiracy theorist, abusive manager, and Russian asset who took nearly $10 million in foreign money to produce propaganda videos. All of this is documented and publicly available. Yet his audience doesn’t see his record as disqualifying—they see it as credentials. The product isn’t information—it’s permission. Permission to abandon civic responsibility, to hate without justification, to feel victimized while supporting actual victimizers, to call yourself a patriot while taking money from foreign adversaries.

They’ve successfully inverted all moral categories. The people who actually study climate science are “alarmists.” The people tracking democratic erosion are “hysterics.” The people documenting fascist tactics are “extremists.” Meanwhile, the guy selling gold coins and survival gear—he’s the voice of reason. The Russian asset manufacturing outrage for clicks—he’s the truth-teller. This moral inversion isn’t confusion—it’s strategy. The grift economy can’t survive actual expertise, can’t profit from chaos if people maintain the capacity for rational assessment, can’t sell fear to people who understand reality.

The fascist project succeeds through the systematic corruption of language itself. When “empathy” becomes “toxic,” when moral complexity becomes evidence of compromise, when the very capacity for democratic deliberation becomes pathologized—you’ve created a population inoculated against the basic requirements of democratic citizenship. When “insurrection” doesn’t mean insurrection, when “birthright citizenship” doesn’t mean birthright citizenship, when “equal protection” doesn’t mean equal protection—you’ve destroyed the shared epistemic foundation that makes democratic discourse possible.

This is why the hair-splitters who insist we can’t call this fascism are so dangerous. They’re not protecting analytical precision—they’re providing cover for the very forces that are destroying the analytical frameworks that make precision possible. These intellectual cowards have abandoned their moral obligations in favor of comfortable lies and professional advancement.

We inhabit a moral universe so inverted that accuracy has become incivility, where calling sedition “sedition” is treated as a greater transgression than committing sedition, where documenting systematic corruption is considered worse than perpetrating it. The professional moderates want us to treat obvious moral bankruptcy as mere “rational calculation,” to pretend that systematic enablement of authoritarianism is just another valid perspective in the marketplace of ideas. These people are moral cowards who have sold their souls for the illusion of sophistication and the comfort of neutrality in the face of systematic evil.

I understand that many Americans are “tuned out” and many will say, “yes, this is all bad. But both sides have their problems.” You can say that. But know that your moral abdication and historical stupidity are prodigious in scope. Your detachment from the responsibility of citizenship is damning. You are not some objective observer who can see that all politicians are equally corrupt, that Trump is good on some things and bad on others. You are not reasonable. You are the antithesis of reason. You are tuned out, unconscious, and allowing yourself to feel comfortable in detachment from the moral horrors being visited upon this country with reckless abandon.

When Marines guard detention centers where people drink from toilets, when legal immigrants are shipped to foreign prisons without due process, when American citizens are told their constitutional rights depend on their choice of associates, when foreign students are deported for their political views, when the president accepts luxury jets from foreign governments while building torture facilities in swamps, when media companies pay millions to avoid criticizing power—there is no “both sides” to this equation. There is civilizational vandalism and there is the defense of civilization. There is systematic evil and there is the fight against systematic evil.

Your comfortable detachment isn’t wisdom—it’s complicity. Your false equivalencies aren’t sophistication—they’re moral blindness. Your cynical dismissal of the stakes isn’t realism—it’s the kind of willful ignorance that makes atrocities possible. When you shrug and say “both sides have problems” while watching systematic destruction of democratic institutions unfold before your eyes, you’re not demonstrating intellectual balance—you’re demonstrating moral bankruptcy.

What makes this systematic destruction particularly insidious is how it has been normalized through the mundane processes of democratic governance. The Senate vote to create the largest domestic police force in American history was a regular legislative process, covered by mainstream media, defended by elected officials. The construction of detention facilities designed to maximize psychological trauma is celebrated in public tours, defended in press conferences, funded through official channels. The deportation of foreign students for political views is processed as routine immigration enforcement. The systematic intimidation of media companies is treated as business disputes. This is civilizational vandalism hiding in plain sight, institutional destruction masquerading as policy, fascism wearing the costume of democratic procedure.

When federal agents are encouraged to arrest “collaterals”—innocent bystanders swept up in enforcement actions—we are witnessing the systematic abandonment of constitutional principles in favor of state terror operating under administrative quotas. When detention facilities are built in swamps surrounded by dangerous wildlife to maximize psychological trauma, we are seeing the deliberate construction of torture facilities. When students are deported for political views, we are witnessing the systematic elimination of intellectual freedom. When media companies pay millions to avoid criticizing power, we are seeing the systematic capture of press freedom. This is the kind of systematic destruction that should make every American citizen sick to their stomach.

The horrifying reality is that millions of Americans are not sick to their stomachs—they are entertained. They are thrilled to finally see their political enemies being punished for cultural grievances both real and imagined. They don’t care that the barbarians are inside the gates as long as the barbarians are targeting the right people. They don’t care about constitutional constraints as long as those constraints are being eliminated to hurt people they don’t like. They don’t care about institutional preservation as long as institutional destruction serves their cultural resentments.

This is how civilizations die—not through external conquest but through internal vandalism, not through the failure of institutions but through their deliberate destruction by people who mistake demolition for governance, who confuse cruelty with strength, who cannot distinguish between entertainment and democracy.

I call it fascism because that’s what it is. Not fascism-adjacent, not fascism-lite, not proto-fascism—fascism. The systematic capture of democratic institutions and their transformation into instruments of authoritarian control. The elimination of the legal and epistemic frameworks that make resistance possible. The conversion of law from a constraint on power into a weapon of power. The systematic destruction of every institution that might place democratic constraints on private power. The Federalist Society calls it “unitary executive theory”.

When democratic institutions are being systematically captured and turned into instruments of authoritarian control, when the law becomes a weapon against the vulnerable while providing immunity for the powerful, when citizenship becomes conditional on ideological compliance, when press freedom becomes subordinate to corporate interests, when universities become instruments of political control, when the very concept of constitutional government is being systematically eliminated by those who claim to be its guardians—calling that fascism isn’t hyperbole. It’s accuracy. It’s moral clarity. It’s the only honest description of what we’re witnessing.

The people demanding we use gentler language are engaged in the same intellectual dishonesty as the Supreme Court justices who insist the Constitution doesn’t mean what it says. They’re not protecting analytical precision—they’re providing cover for the forces that are destroying the analytical frameworks that make precision possible. These people are moral cowards who would rather maintain their comfortable illusions than face the horrifying reality of what America has become.

This is America in 2025: a country where Marines guard detention centers where people drink from toilets, where legal immigrants are disappeared into foreign prisons, where American citizens are told by senators that their constitutional rights depend on their choice of associates, where federal agents march through public parks announcing they’ll “go anywhere, anytime” they want, where foreign students are deported for their political views, where media companies pay millions to avoid criticizing power, where the president who promised to expose elite predators has become the architect of systematic predation against the powerless while accepting luxury jets from foreign governments, where his Supreme Court creates doctrines that make legal challenge nearly impossible. This is civilizational vandalism so complete, so systematic, so thorough that it defies adequate description.

The center cannot hold when the very concept of constitutional government is being systematically eliminated by barbarians who wear suits and carry crosses. This is the circus at its most terrifying: the transformation of American democracy into a performance of democracy, with all the forms intact but none of the substance. This is evil triumphant, institutional destruction institutionalized, fascism normalized through the banality of bureaucratic procedure.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And what we’re witnessing in America today is fascism. Pure, unvarnished, systematic fascism. The refusal to name it doesn’t make it less real—it only makes resistance more difficult. The barbarians are inside the gates, and they are destroying everything that makes America worth defending while millions of Americans cheer because they finally get to watch their political enemies suffer.

This is fascism. This is evil. This is the systematic destruction of everything that makes democratic civilization possible. And anyone who refuses to see it, to name it, to fight it with every fiber of their being, has abandoned their basic obligations as a human being and an American citizen. Your comfortable detachment isn’t wisdom—it’s complicity. Your false equivalencies aren’t sophistication—they’re moral cowardice. Wake up. Choose a side. Because neutrality in the face of systematic civilizational vandalism is itself a form of vandalism.

The barbarians are inside the gates. The question is whether we still have the courage to defend what they’re destroying, or whether we’ll continue to mistake their demolition work for entertainment until there’s nothing left to defend.