Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

All across the United States, people are rising up–refusing to be complicit in the slow-motion annihilation of democracy. They march against a regime that strips away public goods, criminalizes dissent, vanishes students, and hollows out the very institutions meant to protect civic life. But these assaults are not new; they are the culmination of what I once called the scorched-earth politics of America’s four fundamentalisms: market worship, ideological conformity, religious zealotry, and educational repression. These fundamentalisms have steadily laid the groundwork for a society governed by violence, cruelty, and unaccountable power–where the market is sacrosanct, history is erased, justice is inverted, and knowledge is policed.

Today, these forces converge in a violent crescendo, a politics of cleansing intent on purging democracy of its ethical substance and moral vocabulary. The government is hollowed out, memory is criminalized, and the law is weaponized to serve the interests of those in power. Racialized others are marked for disappearance, as society sinks into a state of profound erasure. What remains is not merely authoritarian rule, but a theater of terror, where disposability becomes the guiding principle and silence is dangerously mistaken for peace.

Politics has become the extension of crime itself, with governance morphing into organized barbarism. At every level of society, militarization and repression have taken root, directed not only at critics but at entire communities. This is a state-sponsored culture of fear aimed at immigrants, dissenters, and marginalized populations. It manifests in overt abductions of U.S. citizens, targeted because of their race, their dissent, or their opposition to Trump’s domestic and foreign policies. As the fabric of democratic life unravels, the groundwork is laid for the rise of authoritarian rule, where resistance is met with violence, and the very principles of freedom and justice are hollowed out.

This is not governance in the democratic sense; it is the blueprint for authoritarian control disguised as order. The dismantling of public institutions, the suppression of historical memory, the dismantling of legal protections, the assault on higher education, the abduction of students, and the demonization of dissent all signal the emergence of a new mode of state terrorism. This machinery of domination no longer hides its contempt for democracy. It mimics, manipulates, and ultimately discards it. It channels the darkest moments of the past, echoing the brutality of slavery, the violence of the police state, and the horror of the camps. In this rising authoritarian landscape, the state no longer serves the people; it abandons them to a ruthless order in which solidarity is shattered, justice is privatized, and hope is exiled to the margins. This is fascism on steroids.

Resistance is rising, fierce, luminous, and charged with hope. Across the nation, people are pushing back against a regime that robs them of the very essence of life: security, care, sustenance, and dignity. University faculty, students, and more and more administrators are calling for Academic Mutual Defense Compacts to defend themselves against Trump’s attacks From city streets to university campuses, this defiance grows stronger every day. Workers, educators, artists, federal employees, and students, among others, are rising up against the erosion of their rights, the violence inflicted upon their bodies, and the assault on their sense of justice and agency. As fears mount over the collapse of retirement funds, immigration status, police violence, and job security, the crushing weight of scarcity, poverty, and powerlessness takes a toll, both emotionally and physically. With food prices soaring and........

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