Tony Chiado

I keep waiting, and waiting, and waiting for more people to be outraged to action against this fascist Trump regime. At one time a ways back, I was sure that Americans would collectively scoff at the scapegoating of immigrants in our modern age. I was wrong. So many rabidly agreed with Trump, and so many more suggested that it was just campaign rhetoric and nothing more. Last summer, I told myself that a playbook like Project 2025 would wake people up: the dismantling of public schooling, the demonization of Social Security and Medicare, and the whole of it all that was so clearly regime change from Democracy to something else entirely. But the media gave Trump cover with plausible deniability only for him to fully implement page after page of the playbook once in power. After the new year, I came to the conclusion that people would need to see the emergent fascism of this regime with their own eyes. And then there it was. Musk gave a Nazi salute on inauguration day and then a few more prominent conservatives did at CPAC a couple weeks later. I posted about it on social media thinking this was the moment people would really get it. Instead, I had longtime friends wave it off as the idiosyncratic quirks of individuals within the party. Nothing. Nothing is getting through.

I should have known better. I teach history and I read a lot of it. I know the power of propaganda on shaping mass opinion. Kowtowed mainstream media coverage and oligarchical social media control have raised a wall of misinformation in front of the American public. I also know the power of scapegoating in feeding the worst of our animalistic impulses. In convincing people that immigrants are their cultural and economic enemies rather than their neighbors. In telling people that LGBTQ students are a plague in our schools despite knowing in my heart that they are my students and have never wanted anything from me or their peers but to be a student and be respected for who they are. It breaks my heart to have students ask me how the Alien Enemies Act might impact their families or telling me that they’re going to school abroad so that they can simply be seen as themselves. This is what scapegoating is doing in our society to our youth, and it’s only early in the game.

Along with propaganda and scapegoating, I also know that fascism relies on broad societal apathy. Whether that’s driven by genuine indifference to what doesn’t directly impact us, an uncertainty about where to stand in the world, a hubris that it couldn’t happen here, or a fear that speaking out could have consequences, fascism depends on mass compliance to ever more draconian authority. There’s a reason Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel spent so much time discussing the “perils of indifference” and civil rights writer James Baldwin hammered that “it is not enough to be a liberal, to have the right attitudes and even to give money to the right causes. You have to know more than that. You have to be prepared to risk more than that.” Or why Martin Luther King Jr. said that “in the end, we will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” In Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free, his interviews revealed this about the mindset of typical German citizens under Nazism:  “You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.” The propaganda and scapegoating marched out by the elites for the purpose of their fascist power can only succeed if it meets indifference, uncertainty, and fear from the masses. History cautions us that we will not just become victims in our indifference, our fear, and our uncertainty. We will become complicit: an evil our souls can’t bear. We have an obligation to our own sense of humanity to challenge and confront injustice and fascist rule.

I’ve become more alarmed and alarmist in recent weeks. Everything is happening with greater severity and speed than I imagined in the worst scenarios I played in my head. I could litigate it all here, but you’ve seen it, too. To be honest, my family is carving out an exit with EU citizenship in case things continue down this path. I’ve begun talking to my colleagues about this fascist regime, weaving current events more and more into my history lessons, reaching out to friends almost every chance I get, and attending rallies and marches when able. We all have to speak out with whatever capacity we have. It takes the exercising of our courage, conscience, and passion. The time to speak was yesterday, the time to speak is still today. There is no guarantee that the time to speak will be tomorrow. We cannot hope to simply wait out fascism. Time is too precious and the casualties will be too great.