“I Was Always Here.”
~ Fascism
You say fascism arrived with Trump.
You say 2016 changed everything.
You say it’s “never been this bad.”
But fascism didn’t arrive.
You just stopped being spared.
For 500 years, this hemisphere has run on domination — colonization, racial sorting, land theft, slavery, extermination, resource extraction, global policing.
That wasn’t democracy.
That was fascism scaled through law.
You didn’t notice it because it wasn’t aimed at you.
It gave you comfort. Gave you status. Gave you safety.
It built your house and protected your borders and made your privilege feel earned.
That’s not an accident.
That’s the architecture.
You didn’t see fascism.
Because it was serving you.
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People talk about fascism in America like it’s a recent infection.
Like it came with Trump.
Like it arrived with flags and chants.
Like it showed up one morning and rewrote reality.
That story is comforting. It absolves the past. It preserves innocence.
But fascism doesn’t appear from nowhere. It needs scaffolding. It needs law. It needs a public trained to accept hierarchy as normal.
America has had that training for centuries.
Trump is not the origin of American fascism.
Trump is American fascism with the mask off.
And the most revealing part of this moment isn’t Trump’s cruelty. Cruelty has never been rare here.
The reveal is how many people only recognize fascism when it threatens their comfort.
They didn’t call it fascism when Indigenous nations were erased.
They didn’t call it fascism when enslaved people were converted into capital.
They didn’t call it fascism when coercion was exported abroad and renamed “stability.”
They called it progress.
They called it law.
They called it the American Dream.
Now the machinery turns inward, and the beneficiaries finally learn the word.
Not awakening.
Entitlement catching fire.
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1) Fascism Isn’t a System. It’s a Bond.
Fascism is not a system.
Systems regulate. Systems balance. Systems adapt.
Fascism is a chokehold — a collapse of complexity into purity, of difference into threat.
It isn’t just uniforms or chants or political aesthetics.
Fascism is a bond formed through absence — a counterfeit belonging that gathers people through grievance, humiliation, and resentment.
It doesn’t unify through love or shared responsibility.
It unifies through enemy-making. Through loss weaponized into identity.
Fascism flatters its followers into believing they are righteous.
That they are chosen.
That their enemies are less than human — and that their own dignity depends on someone else’s destruction.
It doesn’t need a coherent ideology.
It just needs an emptiness to fill — and a target to punish.
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2) America Was Warned About Its Own Fascism
This isn’t a new diagnosis.
In 1944 — while the U.S. was still fighting European fascism — Vice President Henry A. Wallace warned that fascism was already incubating at home. Not as theater. As method.
Wallace described American fascism in its functional form:
Propaganda. Division.
The corrosion of truth into tool.
The fusion of state and market into a single grip.
He warned that fascism’s objective was not to inspire hate. It was to normalize it — by calling it realism.
That’s the point: fascism doesn’t begin with boots.
It begins with permission.
With a public trained to see some humans as obstacles.
With elites trained to call domination “order.”
With law trained to bless what should never be blessable.
Wallace matters because he proves this is not hindsight.
Fascism was visible before America was willing to see itself.
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3) The Doctrine of Discovery: Conquest Made Legal
The doctrine of discovery is not dusty history.
It is software that still runs.
It translates conquest into legitimacy. It says:
We found you. Therefore we own you.
Your sovereignty is decorative.
Your land is negotiable.
Your future is ours to distribute.
This is Manifest Destiny in courtroom form — entitlement sanctified as virtue.
Some readers will object: isn’t this “settler colonialism,” not fascism?
Fine. Use whatever label soothes you.
But the structure is clear:
When conquest becomes law, and law becomes moral cover, what else should we call it?
This is how domination survives: not through spectacle — but through violence stabilized into legality, until theft becomes tradition and empire becomes culture.
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4) Removal, Assimilation, Erasure: The Domestic Lab
The Indian Removal Act wasn’t a mistake.
It was policy.
The state decided entire nations could be erased for settler expansion.
Violence became law. Law became justification.
Then removal evolved. It became assimilation.
Boarding schools. Language bans. Family separation.
Not just taking land — but breaking continuity.
Preventing a people from reproducing themselves as themselves.
This is fascism’s second phase:
Not just controlling the body.
Rewriting the mind — until the victim thanks the system for disappearing them.
That’s not ancient history.
It’s a template.
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5) Empire Abroad: Domination as Foreign Policy
America didn’t keep these tools to itself.
It exported them.
• The Philippine-American War: conquest dressed as civilization
• Coups and proxy wars: sovereignty treated as optional
• Sanctions: populations punished while officials call it “pressure,” as if starvation is a lever instead of a crime
These aren’t isolated incidents.
They’re continuity. A pattern of entitlement turned outward.
And once a nation learns to dominate abroad, it doesn’t unlearn domination when the target shifts.
It just brings the tools home.
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6) COINTELPRO: Domestic Counterinsurgency
People point at ICE and say, “That’s fascism.”
Sure. But it’s deeper than deportation.
COINTELPRO showed what the U.S. does to dissent: infiltrate, discredit, destroy.
Especially movements that threaten white supremacy or imperial policy.
This wasn’t a malfunction.
It was the state defending its foundations.
Fascism isn’t just what you do to enemies abroad.
It’s how you treat truth when it becomes inconvenient.
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7) Liberal Empire: The RBG Problem
Here is where the liberal comfort story collapses.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is treated like justice incarnate — the conscience of the court.
But empires aren’t maintained by villains.
They’re maintained by institutions, idols, and ordinary procedures.
In City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation (2005), Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion denying sovereignty to Indigenous nations who had legally reacquired their land.
Why?
Because restoring justice would be too disruptive.
That’s not justice.
That’s empire management.
Supporters say she was bound by precedent.
Exactly.
If your justice collapses when you try to restore stolen sovereignty, then you’re not defending law.
You’re defending the theft that law was built to protect.
This is what liberalism becomes inside empire:
Domination with manners.
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8) The Left’s Failure: Neutrality as Enforcement
Fascism is not just sustained by conservatives.
It’s sustained by technocrats and professionals who hate Trump, but protect the foundations: policing, empire, extraction — because those foundations bankroll their comfort.
It’s the NGO class that manages pain without threatening the system that causes it.
It’s the centrist delusion that process is morality.
This is the left’s recurring failure inside imperial states:
It thinks it can humanize domination without dismantling it.
It cannot.
The machine accepts reform the way a furnace accepts a tablespoon of water:
It hisses. It steams.
It keeps burning.
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9) Moral Fading: How a Public Learns Not to See
Moral fading isn’t a philosophy.
It’s a skill. A cultural adaptation.
It’s what happens when ethical clarity disappears behind administrative language:
“Security.”
“Complexity.”
“Necessity.”
Not because everyone becomes monsters.
Because the empire trains you to ration empathy.
To see some suffering as tragic.
And some suffering as the background noise of order.
Here’s the contract:
You may call yourself good —
as long as you agree that some lives don’t count.
Once you accept that abroad, it becomes available at home.
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10) Trump: Fascism Without Camouflage
Trump is a fascist.
Not because he’s uniquely evil.
But because he speaks the system’s logic without disguise.
Law is optional.
Institutions are tools.
Suffering is negotiable.
International norms are irrelevant.
Possession is destiny.
He’s not new. He’s just crude.
He doesn’t lie elegantly.
He can’t keep the machinery hidden behind decorum.
Stupid fascists are dangerous.
But stupid fascists are visible.
They brag.
They confess.
They expose the blueprint.
And visibility is the only advantage we get.
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11) Fascism Flatters Before It Controls
Fascism doesn’t arrive as hatred.
It arrives as certainty.
It convinces people that they are good — and that goodness requires an enemy.
It doesn’t scream at first. It whispers.
It says: you are right.
They are wrong.
You are loyal.
They are traitors.
You are strong.
They are the threat.
That’s the trap.
It doesn’t take power by violence.
It takes power by moral clarity so complete that contradiction becomes treason — and nuance becomes weakness.
Once you accept that bargain, you will justify anything.
And once you can justify anything, you’re already lost.
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12) Late Recognition Is Not Innocence
The ugliest sentence in American politics is:
“We can’t let fascism come here.”
It’s already here.
It’s been here since the first land claim.
Since the first human was categorized as less-than.
Since the first time law was written to bless conquest as order.
If you only notice fascism when it reaches your neighborhood, that’s not insight.
That’s proof you were protected.
Because fascism doesn’t always wear a swastika.
Sometimes it wears your values.
It speaks your language.
It tells you justice requires obedience.
That safety requires sacrifice.
That peace requires punishment.
Fascism flatters.
It tells you that your anger is righteousness.
That your enemies are less human.
That your dignity depends on their disappearance.
And once you believe that?
It doesn’t need a camp.
You’ve already built it. In your mind.
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Epilogue: The Void or the Rhizome
Fascism is not strength.
It is collapse — the Boötes Void of society.
Not emptiness as silence.
But emptiness as gravity.
People with hate inside them drift toward each other.
They call it truth.
They call it justice.
They call it home.
But it is only the Void — finding a voice.
And the only cure for the Void is belonging.
Belonging generates dignity.
Dignity makes justice possible.
Justice reinforces belonging.
This is the triad of coherence. The rhizome of life.
And every society must choose:
A civilization that cultivates belonging.
Or a civilization that bonds through absence.
Between the rhizome and the void.
Between life and its antithesis.
Choose wisely.
