Is This Fascism? Yes

In 1922, 30,000 men in black shirts marched on Rome and demanded control of the Italian government. The King of Italy could have used the military to stop them. He did not. He handed power to their leader, Benito Mussolini, rather than risk a civil war. Within three years Italy was a one-party fascist state. Within two decades tens of millions of people were dead.Fascism didn’t die with Mussolini or with Hitler. It’s a system. It has a structure. It has tactics that repeat across every country and every century where it appears. And in 2018, former Yale philosophy professor named Jason Stanley published a book identifying exactly what those tactics are.Stanley was the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He is the child of refugees who escaped World War II Europe. He has spent his career studying authoritarianism and propaganda. His book “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them” identifies ten tactics that every fascist movement in history has used to take power. Not some of them. All of them.What Fascism Actually IsThe word fascism gets used loosely. It gets thrown at anyone people disagree with. That carelessness is dangerous because fascism is not an insult. It is a system with a specific definition, a specific origin, and a specific set of mechanics.Fascism is a system where one man has total power over everything. The government. The military. The courts. The economy. And it is enforced by violence. You submit or you are punished. There is no middle ground.Fascism has no policies. It has no economic plan. No vision for how society should function. It is purely a mechanism for one man to seize absolute power and keep it. Everything else, the rallies, the slogans, the scapegoats, the culture wars, is just a tool to get there.Benito Mussolini invented it in Milan, Italy in 1919. The country had just come out of World War I on the winning side but got almost nothing from the peace deal. The economy was in ruins. People had no work. The national mood was humiliation and desperation.Mussolini exploited that desperation with three claims: your country used to be great, someone took that greatness from you, and democracy is too weak to get it back. His answer was to concentrate all power in a single leader, himself, who would punish the nation’s enemies and restore its strength.The trade was simple. Citizens give up their freedom, their right to question, their right to disagree. In return, the leader gives them someone to blame.That transaction sits at the center of every fascist movement in history. The leader needs an enemy because rage is the only glue holding the system together. Without someone to hate, the entire structure collapses.Fascism also leads with violence. Mussolini built a private militia called the Blackshirts. They attacked socialists, beat union organizers, and physically removed political opponents from local governments. Violence was not a byproduct of the movement. It was the operating system. In 1922, Mussolini marched 30,000 Blackshirts on Rome and demanded power. The King of Italy handed it to him rather than risk civil war.Hitler watched closely. He took Mussolini’s model and adapted it. Where Mussolini used brute force to seize power, Hitler used democracy itself. He ran in elections. He exploited free speech, free assembly, and every legal right available to citizens of a democratic republic. He used the system to get inside the system. Then he dismantled every one of those rights so no one could use them to challenge him.This is the mechanism that makes fascism uniquely dangerous among authoritarian systems. It weaponizes the openness of democracy against itself. It walks through the front door, smiles at everyone in the room, and then locks the door behind it.The Ten TacticsJason Stanley’s framework is not a theory. It is a pattern extracted from the historical record of every fascist movement that has taken root over the past century. He drew on Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, Franco’s Spain, Orban’s Hungary, and dozens of other cases. He identified ten tactics that appear in every single one.What follows is each tactic, what Stanley found about how it operates, and what it looks like in practice in the United States right now.1. The Mythic PastEvery fascist movement begins with a fabricated golden age. The leader tells the public that the nation was once great, that the right people were in charge, and that a specific group of enemies destroyed that greatness. The historical accuracy of this claim is irrelevant. What matters is the emotional response it produces.Mussolini understood this completely. At the 1922 Fascist Congress in Naples, he told his followers openly: “We have created our myth. It is not necessary for it to be a reality or true.” The man who invented fascism admitted to his inner circle that the glorious past was a fabrication. He said it did not matter. The feeling was enough.Stanley’s research confirms that the mythic past serves a specific psychological function. It makes people feel robbed. And once people feel that something has been stolen from them, they will tolerate extreme measures to get it back. Mussolini promised to restore the Roman Empire. Hitler promised to restore a racially pure Germany. Neither past ever existed as described. Both populations believed in them anyway because the emotion was real even when the history was not.The Trump movement is organized entirely around four words: Make America Great Again. The slogan never identifies a specific era. It never points to a year, a decade, or a policy framework. It does not need to. It points to a feeling, the feeling that the country once belonged to a certain kind of person and that someone, immigrants, Democrats, intellectuals, took it from them.2. PropagandaFascist propaganda operates differently from ordinary political dishonesty. Standard political lies attempt to convince people that a false thing is true. Fascist propaganda does something far more destructive. It rewrites the shared framework through which people interpret reality so that the very concept of agreed-upon facts ceases to exist.Stanley found that the core function of fascist propaganda is to divide the world into friends and enemies. The political opponent is not merely someone who holds a different view on tax policy or foreign affairs. The political opponent is framed as a mortal threat to the survival of the nation itself. This distinction matters because it is the line between democratic politics and fascism. In a democracy, you disagree with your opponent. In fascism, your opponent is an enemy who must be eliminated.Hitler understood the role of media control in this process. He coined the term “Lugenpresse,” the lying press, and used it to discredit any outlet that reported unfavorably on his regime. Once the independent press was delegitimized, he replaced it with a state-controlled propaganda apparatus that told the German public what to think, who to fear, and who to hate.The parallels in the current American media landscape are difficult to ignore. Trump has called the press “the enemy of the people.” He has called Democrats “the enemy from within,” “vermin,” and said they are “more dangerous than Russia or China.” Fox News, Newsmax, and an ecosystem of aligned social media accounts repeat and amplify these characterizations nightly, labeling the political left as domestic terrorists, protesters as thugs, and anyone who dissents from the leader as a traitor. The result is not a news environment. It is a propaganda infrastructure operating around the clock, systematically constructing an enemy out of the leader’s own citizens.The language matters. When a political leader calls his opponents vermin and says they need to be rooted out, that is not hyperbole. That is the specific language fascist leaders have used historically in the period immediately before they began killing people.3. Anti-IntellectualismIn a functioning democracy, truth is determined by evidence, expertise, and institutional processes designed to separate fact from fiction. In a fascist system, truth is determined by the leader. Scientists, researchers, professors, and career civil servants are not just sidelined. They are cast as enemies of the people because they possess the tools to challenge the leader’s claims.Stanley found that fascist movements target education with particular intensity because critical thinking is the single greatest threat to fascist ideology. If citizens can evaluate evidence, weigh competing claims, and recognize propaganda, the entire system becomes vulnerable. The fascist response is to discredit the institutions that produce critical thinkers.The Trump administration has operationalized this tactic against American higher education with striking precision. It froze $2.2 billion in federal research funding to Harvard and demanded a $1 billion settlement when the university refused to comply with political demands. It cut $400 million from Columbia University. It fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for producing a jobs report that contradicted the administration’s preferred narrative and replaced him with a political loyalist.Beyond universities, allies of the movement have pushed book bans across the country, removing titles from school libraries that address race, gender identity, and periods of American history that conflict with the mythic past the movement requires. The goal is not merely to silence current critics. It is to ensure that the next generation lacks the intellectual framework to recognize what is being done to them. In a fascist system, you do not just control what adults are allowed to say. You control what children are allowed to learn.4. UnrealityStanley identifies this as the most dangerous tactic on the list, and the research supports that assessment. Democracy functions on a foundation of shared truth. Citizens do not need to agree on policy, but they need to inhabit the same factual universe. They need to be able to point to the same set of facts and argue about what those facts mean. Fascism destroys that foundation deliberately.The mechanism is not simply lying. It is flooding the information environment with so many contradictions, conspiracy theories, and fabricated narratives that citizens eventually stop trying to determine what is true. They give up on the project of shared reality and retreat into tribal loyalty. Once that happens, the leader can say anything and it will be accepted by his base, not because they believe it is factually accurate, but because he is the one saying it.The 2020 election is the clearest example. Trump told the country the election was stolen. More than sixty courts reviewed the claims and rejected them. His own Attorney General said there was no evidence of widespread fraud. His own Director of Cybersecurity called it the most secure election in American history. Trump repeated the claim thousands of times anyway. Millions of Americans now believe something happened that did not happen. The lie became reality for a significant portion of the electorate.And the pattern has not stopped. When the Los Angeles wildfires broke out, Trump blamed Democrats and diversity programs before any investigation had been completed. Before the fires were even contained. The cause did not matter. The blame had already been assigned. The explanation arrived before the facts, which is exactly how unreality functions. The leader decides what happened, and the information environment rearranges itself to match.5. HierarchyEvery fascist system is built on a rigid hierarchy of human worth. Citizens are sorted by race, religion, gender, and national origin into a ranked social order. The purpose of this ranking is not merely prejudice. It is control.Stanley found that once a hierarchy is established and internalized by the population, people are governed by a single mechanism: fear of losing their position. You do not need to physically restrain people if you can convince them they occupy a rung above someone else. They will defend the hierarchy voluntarily. They will police it for you. They will fight against any change that threatens it, because their entire sense of identity is built on the existence of someone beneath them.This is why fascist movements are obsessed with questions of belonging. Who is a real citizen. Who is a real American. Who deserves rights and who does not. The categories must be clear and they must be enforced, because if the lines blur, the hierarchy loses its power and the system built on top of it becomes unstable.Trump’s entry into national politics was the birther conspiracy, the claim that a Black president was not legitimately American. This was not a minor rhetorical flourish. It was foundational. It communicated to a specific audience exactly where they sat in the hierarchy and exactly who was threatening their position within it. Years later, Trump told a rally crowd that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” a phrase that appears in Mein Kampf and carries the same function: defining who belongs inside the national body and who is contaminating it.On his first day back in office in January 2025, Trump signed an executive order eliminating all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the entire federal government. Every agency, every department, every contractor. The policy position was explicit: any institutional effort to move toward equality is itself a threat. The hierarchy is not merely preferred. It is enforced by executive power.6. VictimhoodThis tactic is the psychological engine that converts hierarchy into political energy. Once people believe they sit above another group in the social order, any movement toward equality is experienced not as progress but as persecution. Equality becomes the threat. The dominant group becomes the victim.Stanley found that fascist victimhood operates through three distinct mechanisms. First, the leader frames a narrative of national decline. The country has been stolen. The culture has been corrupted. Someone did this to you deliberately.Second, the leader inverts aggression. Every act of state power directed downward, every deportation, every crackdown, every use of force, is reframed as defensive. The dominant group is not attacking anyone. It is protecting itself from enemies who left it no choice.Third, and most critically, the enemy must occupy two contradictory positions simultaneously. The enemy must be weak enough to be mocked and ridiculed, dismissed as pathetic, degenerate, and inferior. But the enemy must also be powerful enough to constitute an existential threat to the entire nation. This contradiction is not a flaw in fascist logic. It is the engine. The simultaneous contempt and fear is what keeps the base in a permanent state of agitation.Every element of this structure is visible in the current political landscape. Trump framed the peaceful transfer of power in 2020 as an attack on his supporters personally, then used that manufactured grievance as the emotional fuel for January 6th. He describes undocumented immigrants as simultaneously subhuman, calling them “animals,” and as an overwhelming invading force sent to “replace” native-born Americans. He labels the free press, the judiciary, and the nonpartisan civil service as a “Deep State” whose sole purpose is the persecution of conservatives.When Trump told Fox News that the “enemy from within” should be handled “if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military,” and then named sitting members of Congress as examples, he framed the deployment of military force against American civilians not as authoritarian aggression but as necessary national self-defense.The victims are always his people. The aggressors are always everyone else.7. Law and OrderIn a democracy, the law applies equally to every citizen regardless of power, status, or political alignment. In a fascist system, the law is a weapon. It is pointed outward at the leader’s enemies and never turned inward toward the leader himself.Stanley found that fascist “law and order” rhetoric serves a dual function. It casts minorities, immigrants, and political opponents as inherently criminal, dangerous, and deserving of punishment. Simultaneously, it places the leader and his allies above the law entirely. The result is not a justice system. It is a loyalty system. Compliance is rewarded. Dissent is criminalized.Trump campaigned on law and order while facing 91 felony charges across four separate indictments. On his first day back in office, he pardoned every defendant charged in connection with the January 6th attack on the Capitol and called them patriots and hostages. He rewrote the most significant assault on the seat of American government since the War of 1812 into a heroic act of patriotism.In January 2026, ICE agents conducting immigration operations in Minneapolis shot and killed two people: Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Pretti was a VA nurse. He was filming the agents with his phone when they pepper sprayed him, wrestled him to the ground, and shot him. No federal agent involved in either killing has been criminally charged.The law applies to everyone beneath the leader. It never applies to the leader or to those acting in his name.8. Sexual AnxietyEvery fascist system in the historical record is rigidly patriarchal. The hierarchy requires strict gender categories: men dominate, women submit, and anyone who exists outside traditional definitions of masculinity and femininity is treated as a structural threat to the social order.Stanley’s research shows that gender equity is not merely opposed by fascist movements. It is treated as a civilizational emergency. The reason is mechanical, not moral. The fascist pyramid depends on fixed categories. If those categories become fluid, if gender roles are questioned, if reproductive autonomy is asserted, the entire hierarchical structure becomes unstable. Policing gender is not a side project of fascism. It is a load-bearing wall.This explains the intensity of the current movement’s focus on gender and sexuality, an intensity that has no proportional relationship to the actual policy stakes involved. On January 27, 2025, Trump signed an executive order banning transgender people from military service, removing service members who were already serving, people who had volunteered to risk their lives for their country, on the basis of their gender identity alone.Trump has repeatedly identified the overturning of Roe v. Wade as one of his greatest accomplishments. In the states that subsequently banned abortion, the consequences have been measured in human lives. Women in states with abortion bans are now twice as likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth compared to women in states where abortion remains legal. Public health researchers have documented at least 59 deaths directly attributable to denied or delayed emergency abortion care. Several states have disbanded their maternal mortality review committees, the bodies responsible for investigating these deaths, to prevent the data from becoming public.The movement targets drag performances, transgender children, and reproductive freedom with an energy that cannot be explained by policy disagreement alone. It is structural. Women are dying as a direct consequence of these policies. And the system producing those deaths continues to describe itself as pro-life.9. Sodom and GomorrahFascist movements require a geography of virtue and corruption. The nation must be divided into two moral territories: the pure heartland, where real citizens live and do honest work, and the decadent city, where elites, immigrants, and moral decay have taken root.Stanley found that this geographic division serves a specific political function beyond cultural resentment. It designates half the country as enemy territory. Once a city is labeled as corrupt, infested, or fallen, whatever is done to that city and its residents is preemptively justified. The people who live there are not fellow citizens with legitimate political differences. They are the other. They are the infection. And the leader’s base has been given permission to view their suffering as deserved.Trump has called American cities “war zones” and “infested.” He has described urban areas as being controlled by “radical left lunatics.”In June 2025, the administration deployed 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines into Los Angeles over the direct objection of the governor of California. A federal judge ruled the deployment illegal. Regardless, over 5,000 troops occupied the city for months. In the first 40 days of the operation, those troops made exactly one temporary detainment. The deployment cost taxpayers $120 million.The operation was not designed to address a security threat. It was designed to demonstrate that the leader possesses the power to send the military into any American city that does not fall in line. That is the message. And it was received.10. Dismantling Labor and Public WelfareStanley titled this chapter after the phrase inscribed on the gates of Nazi concentration camps: Arbeit macht frei. Work shall make you free.In a fascist economy, the working class is not protected. It is exploited and redirected. Minorities and the political left are framed as lazy, parasitic, and undeserving of public support. Labor unions, the primary institutional vehicle through which workers exercise collective power, are branded as subversive organizations and dismantled. Public services are gutted. The only recognized virtue is hard labor by the underclass, the economic output of which flows upward to the people at the top of the hierarchy.Trump has attacked organized labor. He signed a tax cut that delivered the overwhelming majority of its benefits to the wealthiest Americans. His administration used DOGE to fire over 6,000 veterans from federal service across multiple agencies and reduced VA staffing to the point where 1.2 million veteran patients lost access to their assigned doctors.The political figure who most aggressively wraps himself in the American flag cut services to the people who fought under it.The oldest and most reliable trick in the fascist economic playbook is misdirection. You convince the working class that the threat to their livelihood comes from below, from immigrants, minorities, and people receiving public assistance, so they never look up. Because if they ever looked up and saw who is actually extracting wealth from their labor, the entire arrangement would collapse overnight.The Experts Who Wait Until It Is Too LateThere is a class of expert, credentialed and cautious, who insists it is premature to apply the word fascism to what is happening in the United States. Their position is that fascism can only be identified after democracy has been fully and irreversibly destroyed. After every institution is gone. After the courts have been captured. After elections have been formally abolished. After the last door has been shut.That position is analytically useless.If the only moment an expert is willing to name fascism is the moment after there is nothing left to protect, then the expertise serves no protective function. It is not a warning. It is an autopsy.The entire purpose of identifying fascism as a system with recognizable tactics and stages is to create the possibility of intervention before it reaches its terminal phase. Waiting for certainty is not intellectual rigor. It is a way of avoiding the professional and social cost of saying something uncomfortable while it still matters.F**k The experts who wait to call it Fascism. This should not be a debate conducted on the model of climate change, where an industry of paid denialism was allowed to masquerade as legitimate scientific disagreement for decades while the damage compounded. The scholars who study fascism as a historical and political phenomenon are not evenly divided. The ones who recognize the pattern are raising the alarm. Some of them have left the country. The ones who say “not yet” are waiting for a finish line that, by definition, can only be crossed after it is too late to act.Fascism is a process. Not an endpoint. The people who insist on waiting for absolute confirmation before speaking are, historically, the people who lose everything.Jason Stanley did not write this book about Donald Trump. He wrote it about fascism as a historical system. He drew on Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, Franco’s Spain, and dozens of other movements across the twentieth century. He published it in 2018, before January 6th, before the pardons, before “vermin,” before “poisoning the blood,” before troops were deployed into American cities, before inspectors general were fired for insufficient loyalty, before the free press was labeled the enemy of the people.He described exactly how fascism works. And then he watched it happen.The scholars who study fascism for a living are not being hysterical. Some of them have already left the country. They are not leaving because they are prone to drama. They are leaving because they recognize what they are looking at.They have seen this before. And they know how it ends.SourcesJason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, Random House, 2018Jason Stanley, “The Ten Tactics of Fascism,” Yale University lecture and Big Think, 2021Jason Stanley, “America Is Now in Fascism’s Legal Phase,” The Guardian, December 22, 2021American Oversight, “Trump’s Illegal Firing of Inspectors General,” April 2025U.S. News, “Trump’s Higher Education Crackdown: Visa Revocations, DEI Bans, Lawsuits and Funding Cuts,” August 2026Governor of California, “Trump’s Illegal National Guard Deployment in Los Angeles Cost Taxpayers $120 Million,” September 2025Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, “Cuts, Cover-Ups, and Chaos: Report on Trump Administration’s Assault on Veterans,” January 2026Congressional Oversight Report, Fatal Shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2026Gender Equity Policy Institute, “Maternal Mortality in the United States After Abortion Bans,” April 2025Ms. Magazine, “Say Their Names: The Women Who Died After Being Denied Emergency Abortion Care,” April 2026Scripps News, “Trump’s Threat to Use Military Against ‘Enemy From Within,’” October 2024 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe