This Is Not A Drill
Our duty is to destroy the fascist state, not merely survive it.
We must begin with a clarity that dispenses with all bourgeois illusions. The world of liberal democracy, that thin, comfortable veneer stretched taut over the brutal dictatorship of capital, is not coming back. Let us be clear: for the exploited and the dispossessed, it was never truly here. But what we are witnessing now is the deliberate, methodical tearing away of that illusion, to be replaced by something far more honest in its cruelty. Donald Trump’s regime is not a cyclical turn in American politics, not the predictable swing of a pendulum between two wings of a single capitalist party. It is the consolidation of a fascist project, the structural transformation of the state into an apparatus of permanent, open terror. This is a declaration of war against the working class and all oppressed people, a war that is already being fought in the streets of our cities, in our workplaces, and in our homes.
The Diagnosis: Anatomy of the Fascist Project
The fascist revolution escalates daily, its pace accelerating with a terrifying confidence born of its opponents’ cowardice. To comprehend the totality of the threat, we must dissect its component parts not as isolated outrages, but as an integrated system of control. This is a multi-front war waged through direct military force, the weaponization of law and language, a parasitic economic logic, and the activation of a long-dormant historical and legal infrastructure of repression. The question is no longer if a fascist state is being built, but how quickly it can be completed and whether we will have the courage to meet it.
The Apparatus of Control: Militarization
The core of the project is the erasure of the line between foreign war and domestic policy. This is not simply a matter of increased policing, but the wholesale application of counter-insurgency doctrine to the American population. The regime understands that all nation-states are, at their core, militarily structured entities born from conflict. What we are seeing is the state shedding its liberal-democratic disguise to reveal its true nature. Fascism is not an alien presence imposed upon the state; it is the state in its purest, most unmasked form.
The military occupation of Washington, D.C., justified by the transparently fabricated lie of a “crime emergency” while actual crime statistics plummet, was the proof of concept. This is the new governing principle: power is truth, and reality will be manufactured at the end of a gun. The emergency exists because they say it does, and its existence is proven by the very troops deployed to address it. This creates a perfect, closed loop of logic where the solution justifies its own premise. The presence of armored vehicles is the only evidence needed for the crisis they were sent to contain.
This was not a one-off event but a calculated dress rehearsal for a permanent state of exception. The regime’s intentions were laid bare with chilling clarity on September 30, 2025, when Trump addressed nearly 800 generals and admirals at Quantico Marine Corps Base. This was not a routine speech; it was a mobilization order. “What they’ve done to San Francisco and Chicago, New York, Los Angeles… We’ll straighten them out one-by-one,” he declared. “It will be a major part for some of the people in this room. It’s a war too. It’s a war from within.”
These are not the ramblings of a buffoon. These are the words of a commander-in-chief openly framing American cities as enemy territory and the military’s job as domestic pacification. He boasted of creating “quick reaction forces” to “quell civil disturbances,” explicitly violating the Posse Comatus Act. He encouraged the high command to use “dangerous” cities as training grounds, to erase the line between a soldier and a cop. The silence of the officers was the sound of a final barrier crumbling. This was the moment the military was openly invited to become the political instrument of a fascist project, a Waffen SS for the American plutocracy.
This mobilization has since manifested in a series of militarized occupations that serve as laboratories for nationwide control. The coming deployment to Portland, Oregon, over the governor’s vehement objections, is a test of federal supremacy, a legal and operational experiment to see if the federal executive can fully override state sovereignty with brute force. The arrival of troops in Memphis is a form of political theater, a performative act of dominance designed to appease Trump’s ego and normalize the sight of soldiers on American streets. Each future deployment, each raid on a homeless encampment, each arrest of an undocumented immigrant, is a calculated step in a larger process of social cleansing. These are not random acts of cruelty; these are live-fire training exercises, the application of imperial counter-insurgency tactics brought home to the metropole, turning American cities into colonial outposts under Trump’s boot. The ICE agents who brutalized protesters in Broadview, Illinois, hitting a man with a truck and threatening the entire town with “a shit show,” were not rogue actors; they were the vanguard, testing the limits of their impunity and gathering data on civilian response patterns.
The Apparatus of Control: Legal & Symbolic Weapons
Parallel to the physical occupation is a campaign to conquer the terrain of reality itself. The fascist state cannot be built with guns alone; it requires the systematic destruction of shared meaning. This is achieved through the construction of reified symbolic mandates: abstractions that are made concrete through sheer assertion, backed by the force of arms.
The executive order designating “Antifa”, a decentralized, leaderless movement of anti-fascist resistance, as a “domestic terrorist organization” is the legal and ideological cornerstone of this project. It has no basis in law, as “Antifa” is not an organization one can join. Yet, its fiction is its function. It serves as a perfectly designed tool for vengeance, a floating signifier that can be attached to any form of dissent the state wishes to crush. This legal fiction allows federal agencies, now staffed by loyalist thugs like FBI Director Kash Patel and a weaponized Department of Justice under Pam Bondi, to target any perceived enemy with the full force of the state. It transforms protesters into enemy combatants, community organizers into terrorist financiers, and journalists into propagandists for the enemy. This is not merely deception; it is a profound assault on our shared existence, a weapon designed to atomize us, to shatter the common ground of factual reality that makes collective resistance possible.
The dictatorship assembles itself in daylight, each executive order, each loyalist prosecutor, each reallocated budget a brick in the wall of our prison, all while the captured corporate media dutifully reports on the “controversy” as if it were a political debate rather than a crime in progress.
This assault on reality requires a martyr, a sacred victim whose blood can be used to sanctify the state’s violence. In the assassinated fascist operative Charlie Kirk, Trump has found his Horst Wessel. In the hours following Kirk’s death, this millionaire fascist, whose career was built on spewing racist, antisemitic, and anti-immigrant filth, was posthumously elevated to the status of a national hero. The Trump administration, emulating the tactics of Goebbels, transformed Kirk into an icon of patriotic youth, murdered by the “lunatic left.” This narrative serves a crucial function: it manufactures a grievance that justifies limitless state violence. It provides the emotional fuel for the war from within, creating a simplistic morality play where the state is the avenging hero and its opponents are demonic, subhuman figures deserving of annihilation. Kirk’s manufactured sainthood is the symbolic counterpart to the “Antifa” designation; one creates the demon, the other the angel, locking in a Manichean worldview that short-circuits all critical thought.
The Apparatus of Control: The Economic Engine
The economic underpinnings of this project are as cynical as they are brutal. Fascism, for this regime, is good business. This is the fusion of the state and capital into a unified death machine, where repression becomes the most profitable sector of the economy. This project is greased by a death cult of Christo-fascist billionaires who see their wealth as a divine instrument for reclaiming America as a Christian nation and who view social chaos as a market opportunity. The “emergency” creates a gold rush for the merchants of social control. Private prison corporations like CoreCivic and GEO Group see their stock prices soar with every new domestic deployment, anticipating contracts to build and manage internment camps for dissidents and the dispossessed. Real estate developers see soldiers as a private sanitation service, clearing the streets of the homeless to make way for luxury condos. Police unions see a future of bigger budgets, military-grade hardware, and expanded impunity, a permanent war footing that guarantees job security and power. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle where fear generates profit, and that profit is reinvested into lobbying for policies that generate more fear. The planned government shutdown is the ultimate expression of this logic. It is not a failure of governance; it is a feature. It is a tool for a permanent, reactionary restructuring of the state. Its purpose is to permanently eliminate “nonessential” functions, social services, environmental protection, public education, scientific research, while fully funding the only sectors that matter: the military, ICE, the federalized National Guard, and the domestic surveillance apparatus. It is a form of shock therapy, designed to starve the parts of the state that serve human needs while force-feeding the parts that inflict human misery. This is the material basis of the fortress state: a society where the only public expenditure is on our own cages.
The Apparatus of Control: Historical & Legal Antecedents
This fascist fortress is not being built on a new foundation; it is being erected upon the grim inheritance of America’s original sins. There is an unbroken line of continuity from the slave patrols to the Jim Crow Codes, from the Palmer Raids to COINTELPRO, from the War on Drugs to the War on Terror. The infrastructure of racialized control, the legal precedents for warrantless surveillance, the cultural conditioning that treats certain bodies as inherently expendable, this entire genocidal project has always been a core component of the American order.
The Trump regime is not inventing a system of control from scratch; it is simply reactivating, nationalizing, and scaling this existing infrastructure for a new era of domestic conflict. The tools forged to control Black and brown people are now being calibrated for use against the entire working class. The legal architecture of the Patriot Act, once sold as a weapon against foreign terrorists, is now being turned inward. The militarized police forces built up through the 1033 program, which armed local cops with the cast-off weapons of the imperial military, are now being integrated into a national command structure. This slow-motion fascist coup is being legalized in real-time. The regime is not just breaking the law; it is rewriting the law to legitimize its own power. The lawsuit in Perdomo v. Noem is a dry run for a future where racial profiling is not just permitted but constitutionally protected. The street actions of federal agents create a manufactured crisis, which provides the pretext for emergency court rulings that expand state power. Those rulings, in turn, provide the authority for even more aggressive street actions.
But the ultimate prize is the Article V constitutional convention. This is the black hole into which all democratic pretense will be sucked. Reactionary front organizations like the Heritage Foundation and ALEC have spent years pushing state applications to the brink of the 34-state threshold. Their goal is not to amend the Constitution but to replace it. They aim to shred the Bill of Rights and enshrine a new, theocratic charter that makes Trump’s temporary terror a permanent dictatorship, codifying corporate power, Christian nationalism, and executive supremacy into the foundational law of the land.
The Enablers: Anatomy of the Failure to Resist
This project could not have advanced so far, so fast, without the active collaboration and catastrophic failure of those who posture as its opposition. The fascist state is being built not just by its architects, but by its enablers: a Democratic Party committed to managing our surrender, a corporate media that launders fascism as politics, and a segment of the left that chose theoretical purity over material reality.
The Controlled Opposition: The Democratic Party & Media
Let us be clear about the most sickening part of Charlie Kirk’s political canonization: the enthusiastic collaboration of the Democratic Party and the establishment media. By accepting the lie that Kirk died in the service of “democracy,” they participated in the fumigation of his vile career. The word “fascist” was effectively banned from the airwaves. MSNBC fired commentator Matthew Dowd for daring to state the obvious: that Kirk was a purveyor of “hate speech.” This was not an oversight; it was a political decision to enforce a consensus reality that serves power.
The Democrats’ response was a symphony of cowardice and prostration. From Chuck Schumer to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the line was the same: a ritualistic condemnation of “political violence” that deliberately equated the violence of the oppressor with the resistance of the oppressed. This is a classic liberal rhetorical trap, one that neutralizes any effective opposition by rendering all force morally equivalent. Their calls for “respect” for a man who championed the destruction of their constituents were not a plea for civility; they were a command to accept our own erasure for the sake of polite society. The ostensible liberal darling Ezra Klein, in his new role as fascism’s court stenographer, perfectly encapsulated this betrayal. He laundered Kirk’s fascist agitation as the mere practice of “persuasion” and argued we must “find what we can recognize in one another” with our would-be executioners. This is a moral truce that only flows in one direction: we are commanded to find the humanity in those who deny ours. The ultimate obscenity came when the US Senate unanimously approved a resolution marking Kirk’s birthday as a “National Day of Remembrance,” with not one Democrat, including the so-called socialist Bernie Sanders, objecting. Ninety Democrats in the House then voted to honor the “life and legacy” of this fascist provocateur.
Understand what this means. The Democratic Party is not the opposition to fascism; it is its enabler. Its structural function is to manage dissent, to chloroform the population with the false promise of an electoral solution that will never arrive. They exist to suppress any mass opposition that might threaten the underlying capitalist system they, too, serve. They fear a mobilized working class far more than they fear a Trump dictatorship, because a mobilized working class might not stop at merely deposing a single tyrant. Their role is to plead for a return to norms while the executioner sharpens his axe. They are the loyal opposition to a revolution they have no intention of stopping. They demonstrate that liberal democracy is not the opposite of fascism, but another strategy of domination implemented by the same ruling class. This nation’s democracy is as much a strategic choice as another’s fascism, two masks worn by the same face of capital.
The Strategic Failure: The Denialist Left
This catastrophic turn was also enabled by a profound failure of analysis within segments of the American left. For years, a vocal faction in anarchist and leftist circles clung to the illusion that “it could not happen here,” because the form did not perfectly match their rigid, academic checklist of 20th-century European fascism. Articles like “Why Trump’s 2025 USA Is Not Fascist” exemplify this dangerous misreading. Adhering to a historical template, they dismissed Trump as too buffoonish, too disorganized, too reliant on the existing state apparatus. They failed to see that he did not need to build new Brownshirts from scratch when he could simply federalize the National Guard and weaponize ICE. This was not merely an intellectual error; it was a strategic betrayal that disarmed movements, encouraged a wait-and-see passivity, and ceded the initiative to the enemy at a critical moment.
This denialism revealed an even deeper contradiction: the hidden guardrail illusion. For decades, the stated position in many radical circles was that “electoral politics changes nothing.” This was, and remains, a correct assessment. However, this contempt was often propped up by a quiet, unexamined faith in the stability of the very liberal system we claimed to oppose. We unconsciously relied on its institutional safeguards, the courts, the bureaucracy, the norms of civil society, to contain the worst outcomes. We outsourced the duty of building real power to the system we disdained.
Now that those guardrails have been systematically dismantled, we find ourselves without the countervailing structures of class power needed to stop this onslaught. Our theoretical critique of the state was not matched by the practical work of building an alternative to it. This dynamic is a product of what has been called out many times as a fatal flaw in pro-revolutionary thought. The liberal state uses the spectre of totalitarianism to defend its own iniquities and by constantly threatening a transformation into a police state, it forces revolutionaries onto the back foot, compelling them to defend existing “civil liberties” rather than fighting for something entirely new. We were trapped into defending the terrain of the liberal state, a terrain that was collapsing under our feet. The state, in turn, loves isolated militants who react to this collapse with spectacular but disconnected actions. It used their heroism as the perfect propaganda to justify the broader crackdown on everyone, proving its own narrative that all dissent is incipient terrorism.
The Prescription: Building Material Counter-Power
In the face of this integrated assault, our response must be equally integrated and ruthlessly pragmatic. The time for comforting illusions is over. The path forward demands a ruthless honesty about the tools at our disposal and a disciplined strategy for using them. We must move from a posture of protest to a strategy for protracted war. This strategy must be built on three pillars: a clear-eyed acceptance of confrontation, the construction of autonomous social infrastructure, and the wielding of our ultimate weapon, the power of the organized working class to halt the machine.
The Strategic Imperative: Confrontation and Discipline
First, we must state it plainly: organized revolutionary violence is not a matter of ideological preference; it is a material necessity for survival. When a state systematically closes off every avenue for peaceful, lawful dissent, when it militarizes its cities, declares dissent to be terrorism, and assassinates its opponents, it does not eliminate resistance; it changes its form. This is not a romantic celebration of violence; it is a cold calculation based on the reality the state itself has created. The state, by its own actions, has made violence the only rational choice for a people who refuse to be enslaved.
However, this necessity must be met with the utmost strategic clarity. The state wants us to choose the path of isolated, clandestine adventurism. It wants small, spectacular acts that it can easily crush and use as propaganda to justify a wider crackdown. It salivates at the prospect of a few heroic militants providing the pretext for the mass imprisonment of thousands. To fall into this trap is to choose martyrdom over revolution. The only form of violence that has any chance of success is violence that is an expression of mass social power, disciplined, strategic, and rooted in the organized working class. We must unequivocally affirm militant tactics as vital and necessary forms of direct action, but we must tether them firmly to the broader struggle. The goal is not to create a vanguard of heroic militants but to forge a unified front where the confrontational power of the few amplifies the collective power of the many. We must reject the liberal peace-policing that has disarmed movements for decades, those who would turn activists over to the police to maintain a facade of non-violence that only serves the state. Our discipline must be to each other and to the revolution, not to the moral sensibilities of our executioners.
The Foundational Layer: Autonomous Infrastructure
Confrontation cannot be sustained without logistics. Therefore, our primary practical task is to build the revolutionary infrastructure that can sustain this fight. This begins with the construction of autonomous social structures, the essential material base for a protracted war. Robust mutual aid networks that keep people fed, housed, and healthy are not acts of charity; they are our supply lines. When communities organize their own systems of food distribution through community gardens and free pantries, they build resilience against the state’s weaponization of hunger. When they organize childcare collectives, they free up comrades for other revolutionary tasks. When they create housing defense networks to resist evictions, they are directly fighting the social cleansing projects of the developers and the state. These are not merely systems of care; they are the construction of dual power. They render the state’s coercive “protection” irrelevant by demonstrating, in practice, our capacity to organize life on our own terms.
This must be paired with effective systems of community defense. This does not mean play-acting militias engaged in fantasies of rural guerilla warfare. It means the disciplined, neighborhood-by-neighborhood labor of wresting territory from the grip of the state. It means creating rapid-response networks to document and interfere with ICE raids. It means establishing secure communication channels that are resistant to state surveillance. It means training community medics to treat injuries when state services are withdrawn or become instruments of repression. It means forging strongholds in our communities where fascist terror cannot easily penetrate, zones where our collective power is the only law that matters.
The Ultimate Weapon: The Political Strike
Building this parallel infrastructure is the defensive half of the battle. It allows us to survive. But survival is not victory. To win, we must go on the offensive. Our greatest leverage lies where it has always been: in the power of the organized working class to grind the entire machine of state and capital to a halt. Our task is to transform this potential power into a revolutionary weapon. We must move beyond defensive strikes over wages and benefits and toward offensive political strikes aimed at sabotage and the total disruption of the fascist economy. A coordinated strike by dockworkers could halt the flow of goods that feed the military-industrial complex. A strike by tech workers could disable the surveillance apparatus. A strike by healthcare workers could cripple the system of social control that uses medical debt and access to care as levers of discipline. Every strike must be framed not as a narrow labor dispute but as a direct blow against the fascist state.
This requires a new form of organizing, one that moves beyond the sclerotic, collaborationist structures of the mainstream unions. It requires building clandestine networks within critical industries, politicizing the workforce, and preparing them for a struggle that goes far beyond the bargaining table. The objective must be the creation of a revolutionary crisis, where the state’s ability to govern is undermined, and our ability to offer an alternative is demonstrably superior. This crisis can be precipitated by a general strike, but it must be accompanied by a mass uprising of the people, an explosion of popular anger that seizes the means of production, dismantles the repressive apparatus of the old state, and begins the process of creating a free and socialist commonwealth.
The Fight for Everything
The fight is here. The fortress city is not just a physical space; it is a psychological state, a manufactured reality designed to induce paralysis and despair. We are living through the death throes of one era and the painful birth of another. The old world of capitalism, of hierarchy, of ecological devastation, is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. The new world, the world of socialism, of liberty, and equitable survival in an era of ecological collapse, is struggling to be born. The outcome is not predetermined. It depends on the choices we make now, on the infrastructure we build, on the discipline we forge. We are the agents of history. And our goal is not merely to resist fascism but to annihilate the capitalist state that produced it and build a new world from its ashes. Let there be no mistake about it: this is not a drill. This is the fight for everything.