At its center lies a machinery of state violence: abductions, the erosion of due process, and the weaponization of government to punish critics and institutions deemed enemies of the people.

Fascism is now in full bloom in the United States. It reveals itself not only in its drive to purge the last traces of democracy, but through the contradictions that sustain it: the destruction of ethics joined with the worship of the strongman, the elevation of corruption, incompetence, and ignorance paraded as virtue, and the demand for loyalty masquerading as patriotism— when at its core it feeds on fear, complicity, and cowardice.

At its center lies a machinery of state violence: abductions, the erosion of due process, and the weaponization of government to punish critics and institutions deemed enemies of the people. This is authoritarianism masquerading as law and order, a grotesque theater where justice is conscripted to legitimize injustice. The irony is staggering: the rhetoric of legality becomes the mask for criminal rule, transforming terror into policy and repression into civic virtue. Yet the legacy media refuses to confront Trump’s mode of governing through crime, to expose not only the cruelty it produces, but the profound contradictions it conceals: the use of crime itself to sanctify fascist politics and bind them to the predatory logic of gangster capitalism. What emerges is not simply the decay of democracy but its perverse inversion: the rule of law recast as the rule of terror; the state’s moral authority collapsing into the spectacle of organized cruelty.

It should come as no surprise that the Trump regime sought to discredit the No Kings protest by branding it a rally of communists, America-haters, and pro-Hamas radicals. The authoritarian implications of which were largely ignored by the media. In addition, the legacy press, ever cautious, offered scant coverage of the turnout—one of the largest in U.S. history—and even less of Trump’s grotesque response. As historian Heather Cox Richardson recounts:

Then last night, after the protests, the president’s social media account posted an AI-generated video showing Trump in a fighter jet with ‘KING TRUMP’ painted on the side. The president sits in the airplane in front of something round that could be seen as a halo. He is wearing a gold crown; weirdly, the oxygen mask is over his mouth and chin, rather than mouth and nose. Once in the air, the plane drops excrement on American cities, including what seems to be New York City. The excrement drenches protesters.

This is more than vulgarity, Trump, steering a plane that showers his own citizens in shit, embodies the obscene theater of power, where the urge to humiliate becomes the currency of rule. Such imagery is not simply juvenile, it exposes a governing ethos rooted in contempt, one that exalts cruelty as spectacle and turns hatred of the American public into policy. Yet the press largely averted its gaze. What it dismissed as mere vulgar excess was, in truth, a warning flare from the heart of authoritarianism, a glimpse of power’s deepest desire to humiliate, to dominate, to make cruelty look ordinary. By refusing to name it for what it is, the media once again launders tyranny into common sense, turning the grotesque into the permissible and indifference into a civic virtue.

And yet, amid the moral wreckage and spectacle of cruelty and violence, resistance persists. Across the nation, people are taking to the streets, refusing to surrender conscience to the machinery of fear. Their courage reminds us that the struggle for justice has not vanished, it waits for collective form. The No Kings protests may be the beginning of that transformation, a spark capable of becoming a movement rooted in solidarity rather than submission. Let us hope that our children inherit not this dark spectacle of deceit and decay, but a future reclaimed from the ruins, a future where justice, equality, and freedom once again define the meaning of a real, not camouflaged, democracy, a socialist democracy grounded in memory and moral imagination, where resistance becomes the language of renewal and the future is wrested from the hands of those who would destroy it

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