Authoritarianism / Fascism

Most people detained by ICE are being housed in sprawling complexes in rural areas, where the land is cheap and the protests are few. Akiv Dawson, a criminologist at Georgia Southern University, has been conducting research at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, which can hold up to 2,000 people at a time. She said that since Trump took office, courtrooms have been packed with immigrants whose experiences would, according to polling, trouble the average American—people who have lived in the U.S. for decades, have American-born children, and have never been convicted of a serious crime. She told me about a lawful permanent resident of 50 years whose child is a U.S. citizen and whose deceased wife was as well. The man explained in court that ICE agents had mistaken him for someone else when they arrested him. But he admitted in court to having a single criminal conviction—simple marijuana possession from 30 years ago—so the judge decided to let the deportation case against him proceed. The man told the judge that his belongings would soon be thrown into the street if he wasn’t released; he needed to go back to work and pay rent. “He began to panic,” Dawson told me. “He said, ‘My people don’t even know that I’m here. They came and took me from my bed.’” Dawson said the man asked the judge why this was happening after he had spent so many decades in the United States. She replied, “Sir, this is happening across the country.”

Dawson also told me about a young mother from Ecuador who had followed the legal process for requesting asylum and pleaded to be released on bail so that she could be reunited with her 2-year-old son, whom she had left with a neighbor. “She begged,” Dawson said, and recalled the woman saying, “Please, give me an opportunity so that I can do the process the right way.” The woman said she wouldn’t be able to continue with her asylum case if she was going to have to do it from inside a detention center. “I have a child. I can’t be here too long without him,” she said. With that, the judge said the woman had waived her right to relief, and continued processing her for removal from the country.

“Are you going to deport me with my son?” the woman asked. “I don’t have anyone to keep him here.”

“You would need to talk to your deportation officer,” the judge replied, according to Dawson. “I’m only handling your case.”

Andor ruined the rest of Star Wars for me. The original trilogy was one long homage to cinema, fittingly for the nostalgia-drenched 1970s and 80s. Everything since inadvertently commented on commercial culture. Andor deliberately told an urgently relevant story about our current time, made more powerful by shifting the setting to a very familiar galaxy long ago and far, far away.

The Trumpists want the escalation. They are convinced it is the only path to defeating the “enemy within” and imposing their vision of “real America” on a society they know does not want to comply. That is one major goal of the militarization of American cities: Create situations that are likely to result in violent escalation sooner or later. This is the context in which Charlie Kirk was murdered. The Trumpists believe they may have found their Reichstag fire moment. And if it is not this one, then how long until something else happens that might serve as pretext? When those who are controlling the levers of state power are itching for violence, how long until mass violence follows?

Over the past few months, I have been thinking about a different moment from the Nazi period, and as imperfect as it may be as a potential analogy, I find it terrifying: The assassination of Ernst vom Rath. On the morning of November 7, 1938, a 17-year-old Jewish boy named Herschel Grynszpan shot German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in the German embassy in Paris. Grynszpan was the son of Polish Jews who had fled to Germany in 1911. Herschel emigrated to France by himself in 1935, at the age of 14, trying to get away from Nazi repression. In November 1938, he found out that his family had been deported to a border region between Poland and Germany, robbed of almost everything they possessed. The details of the story are contested, but it seems he decided he wanted revenge. Vom Rath died in the afternoon of November 9. In reaction, the Nazi leadership ordered stormtroopers and party loyalists to vandalize and destroy synagogues across the country. What followed was the so-called Reichskristallnacht, a nation-wide pogrom in which the Nazis killed 1,300 people, arrested tens of thousands, and destroyed over 1,400 Jewish synagogues and town halls. The Nazi propaganda presented it as a spontaneous eruption of the anger of the German people. But the regime had long planned this next escalation, and the killing of Ernst vom Rath offered a welcome pretext to radicalize the persecution of German Jews.

Anti-immigration rallies that have drawn out tens of thousands of Australians in capital cities are being secretly controlled by neo-Nazis – part of a co-ordinated “fraud on the public” experts say could become even more violent when they march again next month.

An investigation by this masthead can reveal how neo-Nazi leadership is using far-right influencers to sell the March for Australia rallies as a “spontaneous” groundswell of “everyday Australians”, while they stack crowds with plain clothes Nazis and send key members interstate to headline rallies. Some neo-Nazis have even donned yellow vests to act as official safety marshals in order to bring marches under the group’s control.

Leaked chatlogs, recordings and insider accounts tell the full story of how the March for Australia rallies grew out of a mysterious TikTok video in early August and descended into a day of chaos and violence across the country on August 31.

And they lay bare the strategy of Australia’s most prominent neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist Network, as they move to radicalise the right to their dangerous fascist ideology under the cloak of the Australian flag.

Actually, the Kimmel story mattered quite a lot – both diagnostically (meaning: as a window into the state of American politics) and politically (in terms of how it is impacting the ongoing struggle). Regardless of its outcome, it pointed to what is one of the key differences between the first Trump administration and his second presidency. While the Trumpists were never defenders of free speech, there was no systematic attempt during Trump I to nullify the First Amendment or use the levers of state power to suppress protest and public dissent. They simply didn’t know how to use the government in that way, and they didn’t have the people in place who could have systematically used the state machinery as an instrument of repression. This led to a pervasive frustration within MAGA, and it is precisely what animated the big planning operations the Right launched during the Biden era – most infamously Project 2025. In fact, Brendan Carr literally wrote the chapter on the FCC in Project 2025’s policy agenda – in which he envisioned using the agency exactly the way he has since taking over as chairman in January: As an instrument to put pressure on business and media, threatening regulatory action or lawsuits against anyone not sufficiently deferential to Trump’s will.

The FCC’s attempt to coerce ABC into canceling Jimmy Kimmel was a reminder that the Trumpists intend to use the federal government as a machine that serves only two purposes: To impose Trump’s will and desire for retribution – and to impose a reactionary societal order against the will of the majority. It was also a demonstration of how an authoritarian transformation of a democratic society tends to work in the twenty-first century. Kimmel’s cancellation sits right at that intersection of open state repression – and pre-emptive self-censorship and complicity by businesses and civil society actors. No need to send the thugs in boots and brown uniforms to rough the place up, or to send the secret police to arrest everyone, if you can also “nudge” these institutions to comply by… less untidy means.

While the National Socialist Network might be “deluded in thinking they can get a Nazi elected”, researchers at the White Rose Society say “you just have to look at the way [some] mainstream conservatives” have latched onto the Shrine booing stunt, to question Welcome to Country ceremonies, “to get a preview of how a Nazi political campaign will be used to push the Overton window”, referring to efforts to bring extreme views into the mainstream.

Far from deflating their party launch, researcher Dr Kaz Ross expects the publicity from the stunt will boost it. “They’re eating One Nation’s lunch,” she said. “And they’re growing.”

In the UK one can barely turn the page of a newspaper without coming across some article written about transgender people. Such articles rarely tend to be trans‐supportive. Sensational stories about trans women invading women's spaces, appropriating female “sex‐based rights”, and trans women dominating women's sports can be found in print, online, and on television. What is happening in the UK is somewhat paradoxical. On the one hand, the country has strong protections for trans people, but, on the other, hostility toward trans people is becoming more common. We seek to find out why. By using an online survey of UK residents, we found that anti‐transgender views tended to be held most strongly by those people who scored highly on a scale of authoritarianism. What these results mean in a country currently in the grip of an anti‐trans moral panic has yet to be fully determined.

Senator Eric Schmitt took the stage at the National Conservatism Conference this past weekend and declared that America is “a nation and a people.” With those five words he threw aside the pluralism that has defined this country since before its founding and embraced an ideology rooted in blood and soil, in exclusion and hierarchy. He put it in context:

   “That’s what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike: He knows that America is not just an abstract ‘proposition,’ but a nation and a people, with its own distinct history and heritage and interests…

   “When they tear down our statues and monuments, mock our history, and insult our traditions, they’re attacking our future as well as our past. By changing the stories we tell about ourselves, they believe they can build a new America—with the new myths of a new people. But America does not belong to them. It belongs to us.”

It’s not new to hear Republicans peddling this kind of racialized “us versus them” rhetoric, but it’s still shocking to see a sitting United States senator parrot phrases that would be more at home in the speeches of European fascists or Confederates in the years leading up to the Civil War than in the halls of Congress.

In the days since [Charlie Kirk's] killing, the US right wing has fallen over itself to blame trans people or, as Alex Jones put it to his almost 5 million followers, “the tranny death cult”. Similar formulations can be found across social media. Trans people are terrorists, a death cult, like the Taliban, need to be socially ostracised and banned from transitioning. And we all know there is only one type of trans person most of these people are imagining when they call for us to be electroshocked, shunned, and – let’s be real – beaten and killed. And that’s trans women.

It's over. There and here in the UK. Today I doubt I will see another progressive measure (either in legislation or healthcare policy) put in place for trans people in my lifetime. Who knows what may yet be taken away. In the UK, the terf campaign groups make their goals quite clear: they would like transition banned before the age of 25 and for trans women to be compelled to carry male government ID in all contexts. Once the EHRC guidance banning us from all women’s groups and spaces across society is in place, they intend to sue organisations and service providers that don’t exclude us. Right now, I think it’s best to assume all these things are a likely prospect in the next ten years.

In the community itself there’s been a definite shift in the way we speak about the future. The middle-class trans micro-economy that boomed in the 2010s: Pride month corporate sponsorship, jobs at LGBT charities, DEI talks and panels, diversity modelling and ad campaigns, progressive theatre, educational books about being trans etc, which some of us used to make a living, has gone. A friend and I used to riff on the old Susan Stryker joke that as a trans woman you must commodify yourself one way or another: it’s either escorting or the diversity and inclusion panel. The friend (a sex worker) always said she found more dignity (and better money) in the former.