You don't need a future dystopia. You’re already living in one.

This week alone:

• The Trump regime gutted the Flores Agreement, removing basic protections for migrant children in detention.

• Harvard lost its ability to admit international students—a direct attack on intellectual freedom under the guise of “national security.”

• Congress passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—a grotesque package slashing climate and healthcare funding while stuffing billionaires full of tax breaks.

• Tucked inside? Ten full years of amnesty for AI developers, just as job seekers like me are suing algorithmic HR goblins like Workday for discrimination based on race, sex, and age.

• The DOJ filed new charges against journalists accused of “inciting instability.”

Whew. There’s lost more, but… You know. It’s a lot. I know it’s a lot. Let’s take a breath.

And dive back in.

This Is Fascism

You’re not wrong. This is fascism.

And if it feels like Germany in the 1930s, it should. This is not hyperbole.

My father, a retired professor emeritus who taught history and sociology for six decades, doesn’t mince words:

“This is Germany, 1933.”

Several top scholars of authoritarianism have already left the United States, saying the writing is on the wall.

Jason Stanley, a renowned philosopher and expert on fascism, has departed Yale University to join the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. He cited concerns about the U.S. potentially becoming a "fascist dictatorship" as a primary reason for his move.

Joining him are historians Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore, both formerly of Yale, who have also accepted positions at the University of Toronto. Their decisions reflect a broader apprehension about the erosion of democratic norms and academic freedom in the United States under the current administration.

Additionally, a group of distinguished political scientists, all recipients of the prestigious Johan Skytte Prize, have issued a public letter condemning recent actions by the Trump administration that they believe threaten academic freedom and the foundational principles of American higher education. They argue that these measures undermine the rule of law, civil peace, and the United States' status as a global leader in education and innovation.

These departures and statements are not isolated incidents but part of a growing trend among academics who perceive an alarming shift towards authoritarianism in the United States. Their actions underscore the severity of the current political climate and serve as a stark warning about the potential consequences of continued democratic backsliding.

And yet, I scroll through social media and see people—especially wealthy white liberals—still stunned.

“This isn’t America!” they cry.

My dudes… yes, it is.

What’s more, it always has been—for some of us.

What the Nazis Learned From America

Fascism didn’t begin in Germany. It began right here.

In Hitler’s American Model (Harvard University Press, 2017), historian James Q. Whitman lays it out: Nazi race laws were directly inspired by Jim Crow, eugenics, and Indigenous removal in the United States. Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt even cited U.S. law as a model for building a race-based ethnostate under a legal framework.

So when people gasp, “This isn’t America”—they’re wrong.

It is.

It always has been.

The United States literally wrote the book on large-scale ethnocentric violent sociopathy.

However, the Spaniards Did Genocide Here First

Before the first English settler so much as set foot in what would become Virginia, Spain was already invading the Americas—up to and including what is now New Mexico.

Colorado, Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada, Montana: all Spanish words. Texas? A Caddo word, filtered through Spanish conquest.

They came clinking along in armor, clutching Bibles and muskets like holy writ and firewood. They were tiny unwashed men with big weapons, drunk on empire and misunderstood theology.

They came in the name of Christ and left a trail of enslavement, rape, cultural erasure, and mass death.

They were the prototype.

And America followed.

The Word Hispanic Remains. But Spain Is Gone.

Here’s the strange poetry of empire: it forgets itself, even as its language lingers.

The United States now refers to all people from Latin America—many if not most of them indigenous Americans (as in The Americas)—as “Hispanic.”

Let that sink in: Hispanic. It literally means “of Spain.”

Spain is long gone from the Americas, booted out by independence movements led not by Europeans, but by Indigenous, criollo, and mestizo revolutionaries and their allies—Simón Bolívar in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia; Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos in Mexico; José de San Martín and Bernardo O’Higgins in Argentina and Chile; Antonio José de Sucre, who delivered the final blow to Spanish power at Ayacucho; and in Cuba, José Martí, the philosopher-poet turned revolutionary, and Antonio Maceo, the brilliant Afro-Cuban general known as the “Bronze Titan.” These men lit the match—but they didn’t do it alone.

Women fought, organized, and died in these revolutions, too. In Mexico, Leona Vicario funded and coordinated rebel networks from behind the lines. In Colombia, Policarpa Salavarrieta—“La Pola”—worked as a seamstress by day and a revolutionary spy by night until she was executed by firing squad at 22. In Peru, Micaela Bastidas, of Afro-Indigenous descent, helped lead the great Andean uprising of 1780 alongside her husband, Túpac Amaru II, and was brutally executed in the main square of Cuzco. And in Cuba, Mariana Grajales, the mother of the Maceo brothers, turned her home into a rebel field hospital and raised a family of warriors.

All of this nuance, all this fight, is lost in the ignorant US sociopolitical lexicon. The word Hispanic is used for everyone who looks somehow “brown from down there” to Bubba. Hilarious.

The face seen as Hispanic in US news and entertainment media is not Spanish. It’s indigenous American. It’s a holy affront to the conquistadores who are long gone and didn’t count on: Indigenous patience and adaptability. Spain was not only kicked out of the Americas, indigenous Americans took their very name and made it their own, in a glorious syncretic sleight of hand most beautifully embodied in the rebirth of the Goddess Tonantzin as The Virgin of Guadalupe.

This kind of survival—the matrilineal, the subversive, the quiet appearance of submission that is actually the patient erosion of empire as water on stone—defines the Americas.

Indigenous people don’t conquer through war and flags. They conquer through time. Through incorporation and respectful coexistence. Through creative, subversive storytelling. Through outstaying.

That’s not assimilation.

That’s poetic, quiet, humble justice.

That’s Spider Grandmother, resetting the gears of the universe to her own lullaby song, while the demons roar themselves hoarse.

My Ancestors Survived This Already. Three Times.

I am descended from Puebloan people, specifically the Tewa. We’ve lived in what’s now called New Mexico for at least 20,000 years.

We’ve survived three colonizations:

1. The Spanish, who brought the Inquisition and demanded our gods bow to theirs.

2. The Americans, who imposed boarding schools and “civilization” programs to wipe out our songs, our language, our kinship structures.

3. The Atomic Age, which arrived not with flags or crosses, but with plutonium, stealing our land to build the bomb. Then testing it on us.

And still—we are here.

And we will still be here when America and its bombs are gone, too.

We Don't Protest. We Wait.

When the Spanish invader (and, unfortunately, my ancestor) Juan de Oñate arrived in New Mexico, he claimed he was looking for the Seven Cities of Gold. Spoiler: they didn’t exist. What he did find were people—and he brutalized them.

And yet, more than 400 years later, those people still exist. The Pueblo nations still stand.

One of them even built a casino and named it—yes—Cities of Gold.

That’s Pueblo humor. That’s survival.

My Native side doesn’t rage.

We wait. We integrate the Other into ourselves. We outlast. And then, we joke about it.

That’s it. That’s our resistance.

Here’s Puebloan artist, writer and philosopher Roxanne Swentzel, who embodies these qualities:

What We Do Now

We are not going to vote, tweet, or beg our way out of this.

What we can do is this:

• Build small circles of trust.

• Preserve what we love in secret.

• Speak the truth quietly but clearly—to those who deserve it.

• Protect the vulnerable.

• Create stories, music, art, and systems that don’t depend on the state.

• Remember what was lost.

• Learn from what survived.

• Abide.

• Endure.

• And, when the time comes, rest assured, your many-times great granddaughter will name something truly beautiful after something despicable the fascists tried to do but could not sustain. MAGA, perhaps. Or the Big Beautiful Bill.

A Last Word

This will not end soon. It will not end well.

But some of us will survive it.

Not because we scream. But because we go unnoticed. Because we gather—like rabbits in the dusk—quiet and alert in the sagebrush, waiting for the empire to pass.

The wolves have come.
And they will take some of us.

But they cannot take us all.

If You’re Still With Me

If this essay meant something to you, I hope you’ll subscribe to this newsletter—paid if you can swing ten bucks a month—or buy my novel Where Rabbits Gathered, a historical epic based on my Tewa family line. It follows six generations of Pueblo women surviving Spanish colonization with language, memory, motherhood, and grit. I'm a chronically ill single mom with no safety net, a teacher with no income for the summer, looking for work but ghosted by every AI HR system out there. This newsletter, my books, and the occasional book edit or psychic reading are how I pay rent at the moment, and it’s not easy. So if you’re able: subscribe, share, support. And if not? Just the fact that you’re still here means more than you know.

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