It's Time to Start Thinking About Your Safety

The fascists may be on the verge of winning their biggest battle yet. The time to protect yourself is now.

Unless it is stopped, extremism gets more extreme. There is no such thing as static extremism. It is defined, in many ways, by its insatiable desire for more. More power. More control. More authority.

It is like a cancer. It can’t be satiated, and that is precisely why it grows and spreads.

In order to sell people on the idea that they must give up their agency as well as justify the need to oppress others, an extreme authoritarian must always promise them that all he promises is just on the horizon. That they are so close, but the enemy is destroying their progress which is why they must fight back even harder, give up even more. 

The trans people are coming to destroy your families. The Black people want to turn your country into a non-white third country wasteland. The brown immigrants are importing their inherently criminal ways. 

Every day, there is a new enemy. Every day, the enemy gets worse. So they must fight harder, grab more power, oppress more. This means giving more power to the authoritarian and giving up on their own choices and freedom in the process. But the leader provides a sense of meaning as well, a sense of destiny and hope. Because the promise is just on the horizon, and only he can get them there.

So the extremism spreads, worsens, eats at the world around it. The vulnerable are sacrificed on the altar of power. In many ways, it is no different than the human sacrifice of the past.

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The 2020 election in some ways slowed the expansion of this form of extremist authoritarianism. But as a cancer, a growth and blight on our society, it cannot be stopped just in one place. A presidential win cannot solve the Supreme Court. It cannot solve our growing oligarchy increasingly led by a new age of billionaire techno fascists. It can stem but not stop the way extremism can spread among its devoted followers. 

The wealth gap continues to grow. Funding for police has increased.

This means that not only has extremism grown, the power of the authoritarian system we already live in is expanding. Which means that if the presidency falls to the extremists, their power will be far more expanded than it was in 2016.

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You may already know much of this, but I don’t know if the implications have truly hit many people. In particular, how it will affect us on a personal level.

Our discourse tends to focus on the global, the big, the federal. That makes this all very scary, but it also makes it theoretical. Some people may be concerned with the state of the world, but they’re not necessarily thinking about the state of their lives. At the moment, it is more the structural inequality that we are feeling more than the extremism side of things. 

But remember: extremism is never satiated. You may think the end of the story will happen when Trump takes over. Or that Project 2025 is the “goal” they want to achieve. That’s not actually true. Because even the extremists themselves don’t understand that they are suffering from cancer. Even Trump doesn’t know what he has made himself into, what he is. Even the Nazis didn’t know what they would become.

All this to say that you should stop thinking of the potential of an extremist takeover as an end but rather part of an ongoing process.

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That means that the big picture is only part of the story, and the part you should start concerning yourself with more as the potential looms is the other part.

Project 2025, not to mention Trump’s previous presidency, as well as the history of every other extremist authoritarian takeover, should help you see what I mean: power at the top will not be enough. Control over institutions will not be enough. 

Control over us will be the next steps. The fall of Roe was just one of the early steps. It is not a coincidence that the some court that ruled to control women’s bodies also ruled that to be without a home is a criminal act.

As the federal government exerts its power, even the liberal states will be under pressure from above. Police will be empowered to oppress even further than they already do. Tech giants will no longer need to concern themselves with pretending to care about our privacy and safety. The courts will continue to be rigged with chosen judges. And, perhaps most importantly, the grassroots extremist movement will be emboldened and face fewer and fewer consequences.

You can see this playing out elsewhere. In Israel, extremist minister Itamar Ben Gvir is arming “civilian security teams” (aka militias not beholden to laws). The Islamic Republic of Iran, for all its extremism, has found new ways to oppress, new ways to control the every day lives of its population (especially women) as well as quell dissent. And the classic authoritarian, Putin, is maybe the perfect example of the cancer that is extremist authoritarianism, a man who simply can’t stop destroying both outside and inside his own country in his race to power.

What this means, in short, is that we are all less safe. And will be far less safe after January if things go the wrong way. 

Not theoretically less safe. Not in the big picture. In our daily lives.

There are populations who are already well aware of this and who may already be living in states where they are feeling this. Trans people, Black people, asylum seekers. But extremism doesn’t stop its march. Not until we are all oppressed, and even then it marches on.

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On a practical level, this means that you have to start thinking about your safety. I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, as I have tried my best to make sure we keep hope alive (and I have a lot of hope) in these pages, but this is not a matter of a theoretical future but a concrete reality we must face as it becomes more urgent.

This is particularly true if you plan to publicly dissent. You should be more thoughtful about how. You should be more thoughtful about where. You should be more thoughtful about who. 

You should operate with intent and strategy. You should plan ahead, not wait until things get worse. You should coordinate with others, not operate alone. You should be part of and build community. You should understand that your family comes first. 

I promise you this is not theoretical. Some of us who have spoken out in our ways have already felt the effects. Some have been feeling it for years or their entire lives, depending on where in the caste the country has deemed them fit to serve.

Which is why, most of all, you should build solidarity. Black people who have dissented know all these things far more than most of us others do. They don’t only deserve your solidarity, you have much to learn. This is not “woke” talk, it is a lived reality that if you are lucky enough to have some privilege, it would be worth learning about.

None of this, I emphasize, is to cause you to feel hopeless. Even if you feel that way at the end of this, I share all this because I expect and hope that dissent and solidarity will continue and strengthen whatever happens next. Because while we may not be able to control every step of what happens next, part of what will allow us to move forward is to understand that we can adapt to anything. Hopefully we won’t have to, but we can.

Because what I am describing is, unfortunately, nothing new. Humans have had to struggle quite a bit for the slivers of freedom we have attained over time, and a lot of the freedom we are lucky enough to have now is due to those who looked at far darker situations than the ones we are faced with now and adapted, built, joined with others, and transformed the world around them.

What I suggest now is not to scare but to inform. If you want to enter the next stage of dissent, if (God forbid) what may come to pass comes to pass, then you should be thinking about what comes next. Because it will affect you and those you love. Don’t look away.