Thread by @derekjESQ

“Fascism” isn’t a slur for politics we don’t like. It’s a precise word with precise meaning. And in the face of what’s happening right now in America, it’s the most honest one we have.

I’ll lay it out as plainly as I can. 🧵

If you know me, you know I care about words. Not as provocation or flourish, but as a matter of integrity. I use them to tell the truth and want to get them right.

And you know I’ve spent my career working on threats that seem unimaginable until the moment they define our world.

So I understand why people flinch when the word “fascism” enters our discourse. It feels impolite. Overheated. Maybe a little unhinged.

But that instinct to recoil, to sound moderate, is exactly the problem. It keeps us from seeing clearly what’s happening right in front of us.

For the past 18 months, I’ve worked alongside experts who’ve studied fascism across time and place — and with movement leaders who’ve fought it in their homelands. Italy and Germany in the 1930s, yes. But also El Salvador, Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil.

The pattern is striking.

Fascism is a right-wing authoritarian ideology with key defining features academics widely agree on.

The signs are dishearteningly familiar:

✅ The myth of a golden past.

The nation imagined as once pure and powerful until outsiders weakened it. Redemption comes not through looking forward, but by turning backward.

✅ Hypernationalism and scapegoating.

There is always an enemy within: immigrants, minorities, intellectuals, journalists, activists. The circle of blame expands until dissent itself is suspect.

✅ The cult of personality.

Loyalty to the leader eclipses loyalty to nation or constitution. Civil servants are purged. Government becomes a tool of personal fealty. Careers rise and fall on proximity to a single figure.

✅ The cult of strength.

Fascism worships power for its own sake. The leader promises order not through community or support, but through domination and force. State violence is normalized, vigilantes are valorized, and brutality is recast as virtue rather than a last resort.

✅ Assault on the free press.

Reporters are branded enemies. Propaganda floods the zone. Sometimes the state censors directly, more often it pressures the private sector into silencing dissenting voices. Regime-aligned messengers are elevated as the only truth-tellers.

✅ Erosion of democracy from within.

Elections continue, but the field tilts. Courts are stacked. Voting rights restricted. Maps redrawn. The rules are rewritten to ensure that losing at the ballot box is no longer a risk.

✅ Rigid gender roles and family hierarchies.

Women’s autonomy is stripped away, LGBTQ people are criminalized or erased, and “traditional” family structures are enforced by law. Private life becomes political terrain, with gender and sexuality policed as matters of state power.

✅ Persecution of dissent.

Opposition becomes treason. The state’s machinery — sham hearings, investigations, legal and regulatory threats — is weaponized to intimidate and silence.

✅ 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 display of power and dominance over our own people.

✅ Collapse of shared reality.

Much depends on splintering the information environment and our shared sense of what’s happening. Public life is flooded with lies and conspiracies until conversation among people, living in alternate realities, can’t agree on the most basic facts.

What matters is the combination. Any society can show flashes of nationalism or polarization. Authoritarianism exists on the right and the left.

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

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.

Orwell was right: sanitize the language and you sanitize the mind. Euphemism is how society sleepwalks into tyranny.

That’s why 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.

We can’t allow Charlie Kirk’s horrific shooting to be twisted into cause 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.

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

This isn’t hysteria or alarmism, and it’s not incitement to violence.

It’s clarity in the face of real and escalating danger.

James Baldwin, in his deep wisdom, said 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.