Fascist governments ban websites. Fascist governments limit, restrict, and control the flow of information. We are less than a week away from precedented times and a staggering amount of people in my life are content committing themselves to a near-silent indignation. I empathize being a part of some greater fight is not feasible to many and can be downright exhausting for the rest. But obstinate compliance cannot be the path that we take.
It is my belief that fascism will not arrive in the US wearing military boots and riot shields – it will creep in through hostile legislation and oligarchical interference. It will wrap itself in the language of safety and order, of protecting children and preserving “values”. The screens in front of us have become both windows to watch our democracy erode and the very tools being used to dismantle it. The most terrifying part isn’t the speed of the changes, but how easily they’re being normalized. Every day I watch another friend shrug off another restriction, another limitation, another piece of our digital liberty carved away in the name of “necessary oversight”; a means to “preserve our domestic interests”. They say that if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear. That’s what they said when they began profiling at the airports. That’s what they said when they surveying our personal devices.
The coming days, weeks, and months will test our resolve, not in grand moments of defiance, but in the small daily choices we make to resist the quiet slide into acceptance. When they begin restricting access to encrypted messaging, when they start requiring ID verification for “problematic” websites, when they implement “safety measures” that just happen to silence dissent – what will we do? Some will say it’s already too late, that the machinery of control is too vast to dismantle. But if history has taught us anything, it’s that systems of oppression rely on our collective surrender to hopelessness. They want us to believe that small acts of resistance are meaningless, that our individual voices don’t matter in the face of institutional power. But the truth is, every VPN we help a neighbor set up, every piece of digital literacy we share, every time we choose to speak instead of shrug – these are the seeds of resistance. The question isn’t whether we can stop what’s coming. The question is who we choose to be as it arrives.