A Few Basics About Fascism And How To Deal With It

Anonymous May 2025, Bas-du-Fleuve [ Version pdf – French /// Version pdf format livret – French]

We are witnessing the most documented genocide in history in Palestine and the consolidation of a fascist regime in the United States. Many of us are wondering what to do about it. Here’s a conceptual framework for understanding what’s going on and how we can respond. This synthesis draws upon material from Kelly Hayes and her Organizing My Thoughts blog, the thinking of Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie of Interrupting Criminalization, Ejeris Dixon and his podcast Fascism Barometer, Scot Nakagawa’s The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook blog, Anne Archet’s blog flegmatique , the YouTube channel Thought Slime, and Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook , among other sources.

Fascist movements, parties, and regimes can be recognized by:

Fascism can seize state power through elections, a coup d’état, or a combination of both, as in the case of the Trump administration, which won the election and used its ascension to power to carry out an “administrative coup”—the illegal usurpation of congressional power and various state department powers by Elon Musk and the DOGE.

Once in power, fascism uses a well-known operative approach: criminalization. It passes laws that make certain activities criminal and deploys the police, the justice system, and prisons against the people who engage in them. For example, it criminalizes:

Beyond laws, criminalization is politicized to designate entire groups of people as threats:

These threats are nurtured by fascist narratives and presented as existential threats to the nation’s future, thereby:

It is through this process of criminalization that fascist regimes create popular consent for the violence deployed against certain groups (physical and psychological violence, disappearances, forced labor, denial of care, murder. . .). People are made to believe that:

However, what is defined as a crime continuously grows.

This process also exists in so-called liberal democracies, which have developed expansive judicial and prison apparatuses. Fascists need the infrastructure and the legitimization that liberal democracies readily provide for the industrial-carceral system to function.

Fascism is not so much a break with liberal democracies as a form its panic takes. As a result, the fascism currently consolidating in the United States and taking shape in Canada and Québec is characterized by:

Here are a few other important facts about fascism:

Historically, state apparatuses, opposition parties, the justice system, and the mainstream media have all failed to prevent the rise of fascist regimes. The neoliberal elites who run democracies may appear to oppose fascism, but faced with an increasingly unlivable world in which it becomes impossible to sustain both capitalism and liberal democracy, they too will adopt increasingly fascistic policies. For neoliberals, the criminalization and/or abandonment of ever-larger groups of marginalized people will be articulated as a matter of pragmatism and inevitability, while fascists will present it as the desirable return of a violently unequal natural order. In short, don’t expect the support of the neoliberal elites.

Popular organization is the best form of resistance. If the normalization of police, prisons, and mass surveillance has made this effort more difficult, presenting these tools of control as necessary, even natural, there are nonetheless multiple avenues for collective resistance.

We must build and maintain collective people’s power: the power to keep our communities safe; the power to prevent any of our own from being disappeared; the power to make sure everyone has food. We must begin by exploring all the ways in which we can participate in building this power, for example, by working to:

To explore this issue further, I suggest the zine Block and Build: But Make It Abolitionist by the Interrupting Criminalization organization. Then it’s a matter of determining what makes sense for us, what we’re able to do, and how we understand our social context and the overall situation. For this, I recommend the zine Making a Plan, also an Interrupting Criminalization publication.

It could start with a union, a local chapter of Food not Bombs, a group that organizes people’s assemblies, a housing committee, a group of friends who make engaged art, a women’s group, and so on. All of it is relevant. these groups must:

Then, when the time comes, it will be possible to fight a fascist regime on a large scale thanks to:

If we join forces to fight fascism and the criminalization process that underpins it, anything is in our reach.