A Dark Time For All of Us

Fascism is here, it's time to call it such.

Mar 20, 2025

The past week is, symbolically, the darkest period in the recent past, and it’s not getting any brighter. The fascist Trump administration has already begun purging the government of essential services and started setting the stage for a total corporate takeover. But things are not flipping on their head overnight. The ruling oligarchs and their corporate media pawns need time to delicately design half-truths, lies, false justifications, and plausible deniability. When you pay attention however, authoritarianism is rapidly closing in after just two months. Any average citizen who has mentally sheltered themselves from political realities to this point may find relief that nothing has directly affected them yet. But that’s the thing: yet. Musk has openly claimed, falsely, that Social Security is a scam and that essential programs like Medicare are rife with fraud, necessitating cuts. Increasing surveillance and privacy violations today are used to target who they call ‘anti-semites,’ but tomorrow, it means anyone opposing the government.

Americans have been raised in a uniquely individualistic way; our lifestyle is confined to single-family households, we are physically divided by parking lots, and we drive ourselves in single-occupant cars. An American is raised to be selfish, to pursue their personal desires, and to only care about others out of spontaneous charity, not to improve their community. So when it comes to illegal foreign wars or disappearing immigrants or someone’s disability benefits being cut, it’s natural to look the other way. It’s in accepting and ignoring these human rights violations that someone seals their own fate. This is captured in the final line of German pastor Martin Niemöller’s confessional poem, “Then they came for me. And there was no one left to speak for me.” That is to say, it isn’t too late to resist, but it’s far too late to pretend that Trump and his administration have any objective besides formalizing American corporatocracy, pouring more power into the hands of billionaires, and instituting Christian fascism. That said, here’s what’s going down and why it matters.

Trump Disappears Venezuelans to El Salvador Concentration Camp

Early on March 17th, the Trump administration invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport 238 Venezuelan detainees to a secret prison in El Salvador. These people were not given trial, which is a blatant violation of the Fifth Amendment and also goes against a federal judge’s court order to cease the illegal deportation. Such a blatant infringement of The Constitution and the judge’s orders puts the country into a de facto constitutional crisis where the judicial branch’s authority has been violated without recourse. The Secretary of State Karoline Leavitt stated that the court order was void because the plane was no longer on ‘American soil’ at the time of the order, which has no basis in law and wasn’t even a true statement. The law itself cannot be instated without proof of an ‘invasion or predatory incursion,’ but is, regardless, a gross overreach of executive power, according to historians and lawyers. The last time this ancient law was used was during WWII, when it was used to put Japanese citizens in concentration camps under suspicion they would revolt.

The White House put out a heavily choreographed video with drone shots of the men being taken off of the planes, hustled into military vehicles, and brought to the prison surrounded by American military personnel, many of whom have their faces covered to the eyes with balaclavas. Once inside the prison, the men are shown being stripped and humiliated as their heads are shaven. Since they have not been given a proper trial, it is entirely ambiguous whether the men have even committed crimes or if they’re gang members at all. In one confirmed case, Lindsay Toczylowski, the lawyer of one of the men, came forward stating that their client was targeted by ICE and detained based on their tattoos, which have no gang affiliation. The man is a queer tattoo artist who was granted entry into the United States to escape persecution. Another case of was of a soccer player who had no criminal record with a pending asylum case and was detained by ICE for having tattoos. Since then, more lawyers associated with these men have come forward, saying that they had no criminal history and were being targeted by ICE based on their ethnicity.

To reiterate, the State Department has not stated whether these people being brought to one of the most brutal prisons in the world have even been convicted of a crime. So far, we know at least some are not even convicted criminals but detainees from ICE raids. Regardless, making such an overt authoritarian move plainly for propaganda to demonize a minority is textbook fascism.

Trump Threatens War With Iran

In January, a ceasefire deal was negotiated with the help of the US State Department, overseen by Qatar and Egypt, outlining hostage exchanges and aid entry. Although Yemen was not a part of the negotiation, the Houthis stated that they would cease any attacks on Israel and Israeli ships going through the Red Sea so long as Israel abided by the deal. In early March, Israel violated the agreement by blocking aid, including food and medical supplies, from entering Gaza, prompting Egypt, Qatar, and the United Nations to raise alarms. After a warning period, the Houthis then resumed attacks on Israeli ships, destroying a few trying to pass their blockade. Trump decided to order airstrikes across Yemen targeting residential areas, which killed 31 people, the majority of whom were civilians. Images from a Saana hospital showed children with missing limbs and melted flesh. Since then, there have been three more attacks on Yemen by the United States, raising the death toll to at least 53 as Trump vowed ‘complete annihilation’ of the Houthis. This is despite the fact that the Houthis are essentially the government of Yemen controlling many major cities and the capital, along with popular support for their blockade against Israel.

Trump’s administration immediately tried forming a connection between this attack and Iran. Trump posted to TruthSocial saying, “Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon from this point forward as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of Iran.” On its face, this accusation has zero basis in reality; Iran does supply and fund the Houthis, but Iran has no control over them in the same way that the US and Israel have deeply intertwined funding, intelligence, and coordination. Warhawks such as the neocons in the State Department have been trying to legitimize this connection for decades to justify a war with Iran. This escalation is a clear continuation of Trump’s previous term, where he ordered the unlawful assassination of Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani in January 2020.

Leaked Pentagon documents show that the Trump administration is already setting plans for a large-scale conflict with Iran, suggesting that we are already at war in the mind of the Defense Department. Trump himself has done a rhetorical one-eighty on an Iranian nuclear agreement. Until getting back in office, Trump politically postured against Obama’s greatest foreign policy achievement, ripping it up out of spite. Now, he claims an agreement is necessary to prevent Iran from getting a nuke. Such a deal today would be far different than Obama’s mutual agreement; it would necessitate serious concessions from Iran, which they would never agree to. All of this is, of course, entirely to Israel’s benefit; such a conflict would in no way make the United States safer. Another war in the Middle East would mean a total collapse in domestic support, so consequences are preventing this from happening in the same way the Iraq War did. A major facade would need to be established, something bigger than the WMD narrative.

The White House Press openly admitted that Israel asked for and received approval from the US to launch a brutal air assault on the Gaza Strip early Monday, officially breaking the ceasefire. The strikes overnight killed at least 400 people, including 174 children. On Wednesday, Israel relaunched into a ground invasion, pushing into the Netzarim Corridor, which divides Gaza in half, and murdered a reported 70 more Palestinians through airstrikes.

Mahmoud Khalil, Leader of Columbia Palestine Protests, Has Been Disappeared by the State

At Columbia University last year, students from multiple campus groups organized a high-profile encampment protest against the genocide in Gaza. This spread to many other campuses across the country and led to brutal police-orchestrated violence and suppression of these student’s right to speech. Despite not one legitimate instance of anti-semitic violence or speech at these protests and despite the leading group of the protest being Jewish Voices for Peace, the establishment media of both wings harshly condemned the demonstration. A common theme was falsely associating the student’s support of the Palestinian people with the actions of Hamas, the rebel group fighting Israel’s occupation.

Again, it is a plain fact that the student protestors committed no significant crimes besides petty vandalism and occupying private space. In fact, at UCLA was an event where pro-Israel protestors (most of whom were not students) violently assaulted the encampment while police stood by, and none of them faced consequences. Initially, Columbia University tried to maintain fair relations, but as soon as this hit the national media, they called the police on their own students and threatened expulsion. This crackdown was still not enough for the rabidly pro-Zionist right-wing media even as the university underwent a leadership change. The Trump administration took it upon themselves to punish Columbia by pulling funding and issuing an executive order to prosecute ‘anti-semitic’ protestors.

On March 8th, student protest leader Mahmoud Khalil was detained by ICE agents in his home without reason and brought to an undisclosed location. Mahmoud has been disappeared by the state. We would later learn from a letter he wrote that he was held at an immigration facility in New York, where he was forced to sleep on the floor. Then, he was transported to Elizabeth, New Jersey, and then down to Louisiana. Mahmoud has still not been charged with a crime.

Mahmoud is a Palestinian American with a valid green card, which means he is a documented permanent resident. The Trump administration claimed that they have the right to revoke a green card at any time they please without trial and is trying to change, implicitly through propaganda and legally, the definition of citizenship through their attacks on the 14th amendment. Conservative pundits have deflected criticism for their racist attacks on immigrants, claiming they are only concerned with ‘undocumented immigrants,’ but it’s as obvious now as it was then that it was a lie. Judges have attempted to move his case back to New York, but it’s unclear if any checks can compel the current administration. There ought to be no doubts about what is happening— Mahmoud is a political prisoner facing retaliation for his activism against Israel’s genocide.

Musk and DoJ Declare Tesla Vandalism to Be Terrorism

Elon Musk, the richest person in the country, has allied himself so closely with the Trump administration that he is given essentially free reign to dismantle whatever government agency he sees fit. The justification for this is, of course, the Reagan indoctrination that the government is the enemy of the people and that “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” The irony is that Reagan was in the highest position in government and used it to strip union rights from people and inflate the power of the wealthy at the people’s expense. Parallel to that is the irony of Musk claiming to fight ‘corrupt unelected bureaucrats’ despite being an unelected bureaucrat who spent $250 million to get this corrupt position.

Unsurprisingly, the first things Musk went after were not the rampant corporate influence in government, the private sector revolving door, the multi-billion-dollar military contracts, or agencies’ failure to hold companies responsible for abuses. It was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board, two agencies that were not only preventing his own companies from acting with impunity but whose primary function was serving the public interest. Eight workers at SpaceX were fired in retaliation for criticizing Musk, which was being investigated by the NLRB, an agency that protects labor rights. As for Twitter, Musk wanted to implement a payment processing system but was slowed down by the CFPB, which was created after the 2008 financial crisis and protects consumers from predatory businesses.

Musk has targeted many more agencies, including Medicare/Medicaid Centers, the Department of Education, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Emergency Response Administration, the National Institute of Health, and USAID, slashing thousands of federal jobs. This aggressive attack on institutions that protect and support ordinary people in many small or large ways is being met with intense backlash. Weekly protests have been seen in Washington and across the country, mobilizing citizens and fired government employees alike.

The disdain for Musk is amplified by the fact that he openly did two Nazi salutes at his inauguration day speech. On top of that, Musk openly supported and even spoke at a rally for the AfD, a far-right nationalist party in Germany. Musk’s Twitter behavior in recent years has taken an overt fascist turn in recent years, supporting the far-right ‘great replacement’ myth, being aggressively transphobic to his daughter publicly, and using his power as CEO to boost racist content and unban racist accounts.

Due to this justified hatred for Musk, European activists have taken to vandalizing Tesla dealerships and cars in protest, in some instances burning entire showrooms. This quickly spread to the United States, where the focus of the vandalism was on the CyberTruck model, which represents the ‘tech bro’ side of the Tesla fanbase: a wasteful vanity item that defeats the purpose of an electric vehicle. To outline the absurdity of this, MAGA conservatives were the exact people to passionately hate electric vehicles and Tesla precisely one year ago when it was associated with liberal environmentalism. Today, conservative pundits treat it like the greatest company on Earth because it’s ‘American made’ and shut up about their (legitimate) criticisms that Tesla is built purely on government subsidies. Due to the overwhelming criticism, Tesla investors began feeling fearful as the stock price fell 34% in one month. Trump tried to bail Musk out by staging a PR event where he would ‘buy’ a Model S, which seemed to have minimal impact.

On Tuesday, a Tesla dealership in Las Vegas was vandalized with paint that read ‘RESIST,’ and multiple cars were burned with molotovs. Many similar instances of vandalism toward Tesla facilities have also occurred this week. In a conference, White House’s Press Secretary Pam Bondi was furious, promising ‘severe consequences’ for those involved. Bondi even said that this was ‘domestic terrorism’ even though it was literally vandalism on cars and was clearly not targeting people. Trump himself invoked the term ‘terrorism’ to describe the events even though not a single person was harmed. Musk himself, in a Fox News interview, blamed Democrats for the attack, claiming that “Tesla is a peaceful company, we’ve never done anything harmful,” referring to what he described as a hateful attack. Musk went on to claim that there was “mental illness involved” and vaguely that there are “larger forces at work.” Musk stated meekly that people “wanted to kill [him],” so conservative pundits ran with it, expanding to threats against his family as well, despite no actual attempts or credible threats against him ever being made. The reality is that this was political vandalism, not terrorism. No one is terrorized when a billionaire loses money, except for maybe the billionaires that are afraid of people rising up against them.

As much as Donald Trump desires power and is ruthless with his opponents, he’s always had an unbreakable ego, even when someone tried to assassinate him. On the other hand, Musk is deeply insecure and desperately wants to be liked. I’d argue this makes him far more terrifying; someone who is intensely afraid is someone who could find irrational and cruel solutions to perceived threats, like people resisting his government, for example.

Trump Abolishes the Department of Education

On March 20th, President Trump signed an executive order which plainly states that they will be “closing the Department of Education.” Trump told the media that “We’re going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible.” Analysts have noted that only Congress has the authority to fully eliminate a federal agency but as it’s brutally apparent, there is no such authority over this administration. Journalists covering politics have always fixated on the little details of government but that approach right now is next to useless and misses the forrest for the trees. According to the law Trump does not have the authority to do this, it must go through Congress, it’s very clearly laid out in the Constitution. So to not over explain what is going on, that will not happen. If a judge makes a court order to prevent it, the Trump administration will not listen. Although that is a prediction at the end of the day, there’s no reason to believe otherwise; the Department of Education has been abolished.

This department is responsible for providing supplemental funds to K-12 schools nationwide along with other tasks such as enforcing civil rights law, conducting research on education, funding colleges, supporting special education, disability catered education funding and managing student loans. This is one step in achieving Trump’s Project 2025 agenda written by the Heritage Foundation: to privatize schools.

In January, Trump signed a significant order to direct funding to school choice programs which aims to divert funding provided by taxes from public schools and gives it to for-profit private schools. By aggressively pushing privatized K-12 education, conservatives desire to first, give more money to wealthy private school owners and second make school more selective and less secular. Half of Americans last year thought that the country’s education system was going in the wrong direction and over half also thought that schools were underfunded. A major effect of these orders is that about 14% of total public school funding will be cut and around 180,000 teaching jobs could be lost. The worst affected by this is going to be disabled students who rely on special education funding as almost 95% of those student attend public school. Further privatization efforts will also harm rural and poor communities the worst especially in right-leaning states who get less state-level funding. Since public schools are funded mostly by property tax, poorer areas with already disproportionately worse education outcomes will get even less funding. Also since the majority of existing private schools operate in cities and suburbs because they are more profitable there, children in rural areas will have to travel longer distances or pay more. Public schools with the help of state and federal aid are able to operate anywhere, and are more equally divided between urban, suburban and rural populations. More significantly though, this is championed by religious schools and parents who want government to subsidize them with vouchers. Despite it being against the plain text of the Constitution which explicitly separates church at state, they nonetheless want to fund nonsecular Christian schools at the expense of minority religious and non-religious students.

This effort by the Trump administration is in line with far-right principles that everything should be itemized and paid for individually regardless if such a thing should even be a commodity in the first place. Education is not a commodity. It’s something that every person needs to live a dignified life. No one child deserves a worse education because of their economic status but the Trump administration is trying to justify an unequal distribution of education.

To wrap, I don’t share this to scare people or to be pessimistic; quite the opposite. It’s my hope that people are vigilant and don’t succumb to establishment liberal sugarcoating or conservative fantasies. We are slowly progressing into fascism; it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s long overdue to call it what it is. With that in mind, it’s only us who can save ourselves through mass action and solidarity. The Democratic Party cannot save you, especially when the prospect of there being legitimate elections in the future becomes more unlikely each day. There’s no better time to join your local DSA, labor union, tenants union, Communist group, mutual aid network, leftist book club, or any other organization for grassroots work. History is calling us, the worst thing we can do is give up and pretend this is normal. We resist for no other reason than that it is necessary; we have nothing to lose but our chains.