The fascists are already here, and they’re in control

Mona Eltahawy has witnessed the dictatorship in Egypt, so she has some expertise in diagnosing what’s happening in the US. She says that the US has become a fascist state. She’s right.

I moved to the United States from Egypt in 2000 and I have spent the past 25 years watching the US turn into Egypt – from encroaching state power to the increasingly unchecked role of religion in politics.

After each travesty – the lies used to invade Iraq, the zealotry that destroyed abortion rights, the arming and financing of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza – I thought: “Any minute now, there’ll be a revolution, they’ll burn things down.”

And here is Trump, finessing that state power into a regime that, as with the regime in Egypt, is targeting culture, education, media, judges, students and any group or entity that poses a threat or even the potential of dissent to the regime. And I’m still waiting for the revolution.

Me, too. I was deluded, as were so many of my peers, into thinking it couldn’t get this bad, that the rule of law and our revered state institutions would put the brakes on the excesses of a tyrant. Boy, was I wrong. The Republicans undermined the judiciary, wrapped themselves in flags and waved a Bible, and took over congress. They just needed a president who would ride that power straight into hell, and they got one. Aided by the quislings who thought students shouldn’t allowed to protest and that DEI was a conspiracy to take away their privilege, academia and the education system as a whole are being trashed by a president who loves the uneducated and believes in a mythical genetic superiority of the white race.

The DEI-hatred was the hint to what this whole fascist movement was rooted in — it’s racism. It’s an inescapable observation. The Republicans have come to power by harnessing the resentment of millions of bigots, and they’re having a grand time using that power to do great harm to everyone who isn’t a white man. That’s all it is. That’s the key to understanding what they are doing. They’ve got God’s permission to oppress everyone who doesn’t look like them, think like them.

Mona Eltahawy sees it clearly.

White Americans are the largest voting bloc and the group most responsible for bringing Trump to power both times – and they are the least enraged. The privilege of whiteness means that for many in the US, the loss of rights only happens to people who aren’t white, far away somewhere, in places such as Egypt. Only Black and brown people in faraway countries end up with an authoritarian ruler. But, if anything, where the Trump regime is taking the US is infinitely worse than what is happening in Egypt, because Egypt’s footprint on the world is not nearly as damaging as that of the US. This is why I’m enraged at the lack of rage.

White people in the US have a delusional amount of confidence in their government and institutions. They are childishly naive in believing that institutions will save them from autocratic power. That stubborn belief in their exceptionalism undergirds the refusal to see the fascism that Trump brought when he was first elected and that he is now cementing. Black and Indigenous people and people of colour have no such delusions. They do not expect institutions to protect them because they are so often hurt by those institutions. To people like me and others who have lived in and survived autocracies, white state power and its institutions have always functioned like a regime – so we are well versed in scepticism of anything that politicians say.

No matter how often those of us from authoritarian countries, who know to be suspicious of state power, and those of us who have fought fascism – whether implemented through military rule or the rule of religious fundamentalists – warned and warned, white people in the US arrogantly shook their heads and said it couldn’t happen here. Because the US is like a teenager who is stubbornly determined in their own self-destruction.

As a white American man, I have finally moved into a state of rage. It took me a while, I tried to be complacent, and dream that this too shall pass, that we’d wake up and restore normality in the next election…always we’ll get it right next time.

I no longer believe there will be a next election. There will be martial law, and a state of emergency, and the appointment of MAGA party masters to guarantee total control of the state. Before that, there will be rising protests at the incompetence of the MAGA government, but those will just be used as the pretext for cracking down on the citizenry.

WAKE UP.

Police state confronts students at UCLA