Fascism Today

Remarks June 7 2026

This is a surreal time. On one hand, here in Poulsbo we’re having a lively early summer. Temperate weather, kids playing in the playgrounds, shops are open and the sweet corn is in at the grocery, joggers are jogging, and neighbors are pruning rosebushes and chatting with one another.

On the other hand…  We are now in fascism. A real, genuine dictator can say whatever he wants, or fall asleep, and his government supports whatever comes into his mind. He lies with abandon; yesterday, for example, he said he never pledged not to start new wars. He loots the treasury, he bombs and decapitates countries abroad, he pays off billionaire supporters and cronies with pardons and favors, he forms a private army that imprisons and deports people of color by the hundreds of thousands, he gets states to remove voting rights and stages federal raids on their voter rolls and records.

He owns the entire Republican party. The national legislature—Congress--is his puppet; the directors of the federal agencies are his loyal vassals, all incompetent and corrupt. The judiciary, at state and district levels, has shown some spine, but the ultimate arbiter, the Supreme Court, is a mad tea party, twisting the law and the constitution to his needs. The country engages in a pointless and sickening war, global energy prices and food prices are skyrocketing. The bottom 90 percent of Americans are beginning to suffer, and it will get much worse--while the President tells us that we’re in a golden age, that the economy is the best ever, gas prices will drop like a rock soon, and America, which used to be dead, is now the hottest country in the world.

Unlike any president before him, Trump and his family have now been officially released from any pending or future prosecution involving their tax returns. The IRS order proves that Attorney General Todd Blanche continues to act not as the chief lawyer for the American people, but as Trump’s personal lawyer. Just as the entire Department of Justice is now Trump’s personal retribution agency, the Department of Homeland Security carries out a racist and xenophobic purging of the population, the Department of Health and Human Services ignores science to advocate against vaccines, and the new director of national intelligence, with zero experience in intelligence, is putting national security in extreme danger with loyalty not to the nation but to the mad dictator.

The fascist state is evident in the government’s increasing stranglehold on the First Amendment and freedom of the press. Of the many examples in recent months, the one that stands out is the censoring and firing of Scott Pelley, presumably for his speaking truth, namely that Paramount and CBS’s actions are (as Pelley put it)  “murdering” 60 Minutes, the most trusted in-depth news program on TV over the last 50 years. Orwell’s 1984 is fast becoming our reality now. The Administration has already made it abundantly clear that dissent – protest, what we are doing as concerned, peaceful citizens right now—amounts to “domestic terrorism”.

The dictator Trump is increasingly unfit. His bruised hands. His swollen ankles. His three so-called routine annual visits over the last 13 months to Walter Reed Hospital. His sleeping through meetings, which we see before our eyes in video after video. His outbursts of rage with staff and his insults of women reporters. His unsteadiness as he walks on steps. His increasing incoherence and self-contradiction often within one and the same sentence. His confusing of countries’ and leaders’ names. His saying he doesn’t care what happens with Iran, and doesn’t care that the American people are suffering high prices. In his meeting with midwestern farmers on Friday, he talked not so much about their desperation at the inflated prices for fertilizer, seed, machinery, and fuel, but the reflecting pool and the arch and the ballroom in Washington. He’s conflating the 250^th birthday of the country with his own birthday—and celebrating it with a Trump rally, stock car racing through the streets of the capital, and UFC cage fights in front of the White House.

The war costs $30-plus billion so far, the slush fund for Trump supporters is still in play at $1.8 billion, and there have been gargantuan tax breaks for corporations that have bent the knee… While the people, the 90 percent, witness the gutting of their healthcare, foreign aid, environmental regulation, and education--in other words, all the real reasons to have a federal government.

So as we tend our gardens and play pickleball in Poulsbo, the fascist state has taken hold as surely as it did under Mussolini and Hitler and Putin. This fascism’s most insidious quality, aside from its overt corruption and vicious racism, is that it has established itself in a sufficiently gradual way so that many people still don’t seem to notice or care that they no longer live in a democracy. Will there indeed be midterm elections? Quite possibly not, at this rate. How do we help to awaken our neighbors?

One way, of course, is that we keep doing what we’re doing—being visible, demonstrating, showing up in the streets. A friend in Anacortes told me that each week about 150 people there stand at the downtown corners waving signs, maintaining a presence of protest. Our county’s towns do the same: Port Orchard, Bremerton, Kingston, and elsewhere. “You know,” she said, “like in all our towns and cities, we’re all doing this.” That reminder helps us feel not so alone and despairing. Second, we organize to monitor ICE’s raids on our immigrant brothers and sisters, raids that are occurring now more frequently in Kitsap. Monitoring and documenting is not difficult; each volunteer takes a couple hours’ shift per week—we’d sure welcome more help. And work to make sure the food banks are stocked for the ever-growing numbers of hungry families. Every contribution helps, in money or food. Continue to prioritize phoning our elected representatives to give them a piece of our minds, too.

Elections, while we still have them, are the most precious cornerstone of our democracy, and we must fight to maintain elections. No one but us is going to fight for us. Who ever thought we’d have to say this, that we have to fight to have free and fair elections? At the very least, we must be well-informed on our choices, and talk with neighbors and family about who are the candidates who will fight to defend democracy, for policies that are for the people. If you want to go beyond that, you volunteer for those candidates, as I’m doing for Tarra Simmons. If you can afford to contribute to campaigns you believe in, that’s sorely needed as well.

Show up not just in Poulsbo, but use your voice as many places as you can. Next week we’re not having a Sunday rally, but instead, we’re all going to Bremerton on Saturday June 13 for the Juneteenth rally and march. This is no ordinary year, when Juneteenth celebrates the emancipation of African Americans. It is a time in crisis. Our own government is not of and for all the people, but of the rich white people, and is systematically attacking the right to vote of black folks and other people of color. It’s removing fair housing protections. It’s limiting access to health care and education and a clean environment. The organizers of Bremerton’s Juneteenth have specifically asked us to help make this year a big demonstration of solidarity.

But the question remains: why, as the fascist state has now firmly taken root and as polls show that the president and his Administration do not reflect the values of the majority, why is the majority not rising up with more urgency? Where is the resistance, where’s the sense that our very existence is in peril? Have the media somehow normalized the ICE raids, the destruction of the Voting Rights Act, the crumbling of institutions, protections, and freedom of speech? Do people truly not care?

This is a real question. We do not have the answer. Why do you think the American people aren’t rising up? What are you doing to raise the collective outcry to fight fascism? How will you help get people to face our reality and act?