Today I grieve for my country, which has become a brutal authoritarian state that has declared war on its own citizens.  It’s surreal and heartbreaking to witness my worst nightmare coming true, but my eyes and ears don’t lie to me.  This horror is real.  I have shed many tears over my country’s collapse.  We are a failed state, no better than some despotic banana republic.  But with a lot more military power. We’re a country that has slipped into fascism.

When the federal response to accusations of police brutality is more police brutality and demands for further violence to be inflicted on protesters who are doing nothing but exercising their First Amendment rights, we are dealing with a fascist government.   When we are called terrorists by Trump and his heavily armed minions who always seem to get a pass and avoid accountability, that is fascism.  When the paranoid malignant narcissist president erects hurricane fencing around the People’s White House (which our taxes support), it’s a message that we no longer matter.  That we are seen as the Enemy, to be shut out.    That is fascism.

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

Only now is the mainstream media and political pundits beginning to call what Trump and his hijacked GOP have been doing fascism.  What took them so long?

Perhaps if more of us had been willing to admit that what we were seeing was fascism, long before military police and Trump’s paramilitary thugs started physically attacking peaceful protesters (illegally) with teargas, rubber bullets, and fists, we might have been able to stop the decline.   We still can stop it, maybe, but it is going to be much harder than it would have been a year, two years, three years or four years ago, when this slide into the dark night of fascism began.  At least we’re finally beginning to flood the streets.  We need to stay there, for as long as it takes to take down this horrific regime of cruelty and chaos.

Here is a good article I just finished reading.

This is America’s Fascist Collapse. 

God help us all.