Episode 274
Fascism is no longer aspirational — it’s operational. What 2025 revealed, and what 2026 demands. Featuring voices from the past year:
Thomas Zimmer (237)Thomas Zimmer, historian and writer: “Democracy Americana” (ep 237)
Sunsara Taylor, co-initiator of Refuse Fascism, writer at Revcom.us (ep 269)
David Smith, Washington DC Bureau Chief for The Guardian (ep 243)
Judith Levine, of Today In Fascism (ep 252)
Mary Anne Franks, George Washington University Professor of Intellectual Property, Technology, and Civil Rights Law (ep 266)
Moustafa Bayoumi, author, journalist and educator, author of How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (ep 260)
Nicholas Grossman, Senior Editor of Arc Digital. Poli sci prof at U. Illinois. Author “Drones and Terrorism.” (ep 272)
Michele Goodwin, Georgetown Law professor and host of “On The Issues” (ep 256)
John Donoghue, Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago (ep 271)
A.R. Moxon, The Reframe newsletter, author of The Revisionaries and Very Fine People (ep 240)
Sasha Abramsky, freelance journalist, author of Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America (ep 259)
Channyn Lynne Parker, CEO of Equality Illinois (formerly CEO of Brave Space Alliance, the pioneering Black-led, trans-led LGBTQ+ center on Chicago’s South Side) (ep 253)
Emily Van Duyne, associate professor at Stockton University, a 2022 Fulbright Scholar, Loving Sylvia Plath on Substack (ep 246)
Baltazar Enriquez, President of the Little Village Community Council (ep 269)
Michael Fanone, former MPD officer, Host of The Michael Fanone Show / Author of NYT Bestseller “Hold The Line – The Insurrection and One Cop’s Battle for America’s Soul” (ep 269)
Thank you to everyone who supported the show and participated in the movement this past year – we are so grateful to you all.
To get involved, text REFUSE to 855-755-1314, follow @RefuseFascism on social media (@RefuseFashizm on TikTok) and our YouTube channel: @Refuse_Fascism.
Support:
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Music for this episode: Penny the Snitch by Ikebe Shakedown
Episode 274 Live with Fascism – or Stop It
Mon, Dec 29, 2025 9:48PM • 1:03:34
From a fascism perspective, this has been a really great year. Tyranny is booming over here.
Sam Goldman 00:27
Welcome to episode 274 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers of Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism works to unite all who can be united in mass, relentless, non violent resistance to drive the Trump fascist regime from power. In today’s episode, we’re sharing clips from conversations we aired throughout this past year, voices that together reveal the central question that 2025 forced into the open and that we must answer decisively in 2026: Will we live with fascism, or will we stop it?
Before we get into the episode, I want to say something directly to you, and I want to be clear about what we’re asking of you. We are living in a deeply destabilized moment, and in times like this, we need more than headlines. We need community, a place to make sense of what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what it will take to stop it together. That’s what this podcast exists to be, but it only works if you’re part of it, not just as a listener, but as somebody who helps strengthen and spread this work.
So as you listen today, here’s what we’re asking: stay engaged, share this episode with people in your life who are uneasy, alarmed or searching for clarity. Share it to your outraged aunt and your anguished neighbor. Stay connected. Subscribe to our sub stack. Follow us on social media and stay plugged in to what’s coming next. And if you’re able, help sustain this work financially, join our Patreon community or make a donation to refusefascism.org. This is an all volunteer podcast. We have no sponsors, and at a moment when fascist repression is accelerating and silence is being all too normalized, independent voices like this matter, but only if they’re supported.
Over the past year, many of you didn’t just listen. You showed up. Some of you traveled to join us in D.C. to oppose the military parade. Some of you joined No Kings Day action. Some came to the nation’s capital on November 5 or before to help launch sustained non violent resistance demanding Trump Must Go Now! Some stayed. Some of you helped deliver the people’s indictment of Donald Trump to the White House, putting into the public discourse a clear truth that this regime is fascist, illegitimate and must be driven from power by the people themselves. Others spread the word. Shared episodes, donated or brought new people into this movement.
However you showed up. It mattered. For five years now, this all volunteer podcast team has worked to tell the truth plainly and to wrestle honestly with what it will actually take to defeat a fascist threat, not rhetorically, not symbolically, but in reality. Trump has now been back in the White House nearly a year. The dangers we warned about are no longer theoretical. They are unfolding in real time, and that’s why this conversation and your participation in it matters now more than ever. We’re grateful to be with you, and we’re so glad you’re here.
2025 was a horrifying year, and 2025 was a clarifying year. We should not lose sight of something essential. People in this country have done things the German people never did when faced with fascism. From small towns to major cities, people put their bodies on the line to defend the rights and lives of immigrants at a moment when the government is weaponizing the law against empathy itself. Millions stepped into the streets to declare No Kings, even as leading officials branded them as terrorists. That matters. And yet, the Fascists are fascisting.
They are preparing the ground for an unprecedented level of repression. Fascism is advancing, and you would have to be willfully blind to think otherwise. And yet, among decent people, even as fascism advances, even as the majority continues to detest it, what dominates is straight up delusion. People hope that their own eyes are lying to them, that we are wrong and that they themselves are wrong, that he’s done, he’s finished. He went too far this time. He’s weaker than ever. He must be failing, that there’s nothing that we can do, telling themselves to vote harder. Primary the collaborators win the midterms, that unpopularity alone will bring this regime down.
One of our producers recently suggested a tagline for this podcast, Telling Decent People What They Don’t Want to Hear. So here it is, plainly, many of our worst fears about the people running this country are true. There is no way to mitigate, conciliate or contain them, and there is a way to stop them decisively, but it will take work, sacrifice and the willingness to abandon comforting myths, and you, our dear listeners, have chosen to keep your eyes and ears open, to refuse compromise over people’s most basic rights, to refuse to accept a fascist America.
That’s why we keep sounding the alarm, why we keep making people uncomfortable, why we keep insisting that our best chance lies together in the streets, in our millions, uniting across differences in nonviolent resistance to drive this regime from power. Fascism is no longer abstract. It’s operational, but it’s not fully locked in. Fascism is not a personality or a vibe. It’s not simply the most extreme version of Republican policy. It’s a qualitative change in the form of rule. It obliterates norms. It eviscerates democratic civil rights, including the right to oppose it, and it governs through open terror and violence from the state and from mobilized mobs against all it defines as enemies or undesirables.
All of this in service of a core ideological package, white supremacy, patriarchy, male supremacy and xenophobia. Fascism has direction and momentum. It does not do halfway. It claims to speak for the real people, the real nation. Instead of claiming the support of the majority of people, it claims that only its supporters are people, which means that when its unpopularity becomes undeniable, it does not retreat. It only becomes more vicious. Some elements of its program, denying election results, prosecuting opponents, defying the judiciary, openly shred established rules. That is its war on the institutions.
Other elements, unleashing ICE, expanding police power, enforcing gender hierarchy, feed on injustices already embedded in those same rules. That is its war on the people. We need to understand both parts in action in order to see the big picture clearly, the fascist war on the people has already made horrific progress. To one degree or another, nearly everyone living in this country and millions around the world has been touched by it. But within that broad assault, two fronts have been central, immigration and gender. Regarding immigration, this is not about “border policy,” but ethnic cleansing. It is about ridding the country of anyone who doesn’t fit into the regime’s deranged vision of a white supremacist paradise.
This regime has expanded detention, deportation, surveillance and denaturalization at a scale and speed never seen before. They are opening concentration camps. People are being disappeared into detention, sent to countries they’ve never lived in, targeted for their speech, millions stripped of legal status. They’re preparing to surveil anyone who even applies to visit and deny them entry for anything they’ve said or done critical of the regime or in opposition to its dystopian ideals. They’ve challenged birthright citizenship in the courts and spoken openly about widely denaturalizing and deporting citizens and “homegrowns” with minimal or even no due process.
They’ve done all this while making a point to embrace certain white immigrants, most notably Afrikaners from South Africa, the white descendants of colonizers who perpetrated the horrors of apartheid and continue to benefit from its spoils. They’ve sent the National Guard and even the Marines into cities and small towns to back up the brutal ICE raids and threaten literally everyone. This is what they have already done in less than a year. Meanwhile, one of the clearest markers of Trump’s first year back in power has been the escalation of a coordinated war on gender freedom, a war that entered a new stage with Dobbs and has only widened since Dobbs stripped constitutional protection for abortion. U.S. vs. Skirmeti strips protection from trans youths’ bodily autonomy.
This is not about medicine, it is about power. Together, these rulings establish a principle at the heart of this regime; there is no right to bodily autonomy unless it conforms to a narrow, patriarchal, theocratic vision. Women are to be controlled. Trans people are to be erased. Gender is to be enforced by law. That is what the so called post Dobbs landscape actually, is a legal and political framework for reasserting patriarchy, for deciding whose bodies are governed by the state and whose lives are considered expendable. This is not incidental to fascism. It is central to it. Alongside this, the regime has slashed aid that kept millions alive, jacked up healthcare costs at home, and launched attacks on DEI, designed to declare unmistakably whose lives matter and whose lives do not.
This barely scratches the surface of the widespread fear and carnage these fascists have wrought. At the same time, the regime has moved aggressively against institutions. They have attacked the courts, purged, the military, Congress, mainly hollowed into a body of capitulation and paralysis. They have gutted the so called administrative state, any government function that serves people, including departments that oversee civil rights and public health. They have indicted their political enemies. Universities are under assault, not just their funding, but their independence, their mission. Their very existence as spaces for critical thought.
Major law firms have been compromised, media and social media consolidated under their lackeys, nonprofits targeted, and where the war on institutions and the war on the people converge most sharply, the criminalization of dissent itself through directives like nspm Seven, the regime is laying the legal groundwork to frame any protest, speech, satire, or even thoughts opposing them or obstructing their agenda as criminal, even terroristic. It is one cohesive program, one package. It is fascism. The Fascists have done many things over the past 11 months in power, but what they have done goes much deeper than just a list of atrocities.
To help us understand that more vividly, here are excerpts from our interviews with Dr. Thomas Zimmer, Sunsara Taylor, David Smith, Judith Levine, Dr. Marianne Franks, Dr. Mustafa Bayumi, Dr. Nicholas Grossman and Dr. Michelle Goodwin, in that order.
Thomas Zimmer 11:38
I don’t even know if this is still a constitutional crisis. 10 days ago, I would have said we’re in the midst of a constitutional crisis, but I defined constitutional crisis as a situation in which the constitutional order is under threat, and maybe sort of under threat of being subverted. But if this regime can just completely ignore the separation of powers, can completely ignore the power of the purse, of Congress, can completely ignore, just abolish agencies that had been established by laws passed by Congress, if that is actually where we are and they can get away with that, then we’re not in a constitutional crisis anymore, because the constitutional order has then already been suspended.
Sunsara Taylor 12:11
Before our eyes, the social and legal fabric of this country is being ripped right open. And then there’s the kidnappings. A year ago, if I said that word, you wouldn’t know what I’m talking about. But now everybody knows. Brown skinned people going about their lives, hunted, beaten, torn from cars. Their face ground into the pavement, their ribs cracked and broken. Their children left screaming. People disappeared into concentration camps, deported to countries they don’t know, to face danger and even death.
David Smith 12:48
Well, I come at the Trump first term as well, so I suppose the first thing that’s standing out to me is that this time, they’re much better organized and intentional and determined in really trying to expand presidential power and chip away at the foundations of democracy in all sorts of ways. There was that sense in the first Trump term, everything was a bit haphazard. Make it up as you go along. And of course, there were more guardrails then too. You had seasoned political professionals, institutionalist, national security people who could step in and intervene and try and tame some of Trump’s instincts, perhaps, but they had four years to plan and plot in opposition.
We obviously know about Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation. I think Stephen Miller was working around the clock, and so they’ve hit the ground running in a second term. And there’s this Steve Bannon infamous phrase, flood the zone with actions and drama and announcements and news and knock your opponents spinning, leave the media scrambling to keep up, Democrats struggling to find what target to choose. And I think all that is in operation. And then you have this just breadth of targets from day to day. It can be the judiciary, can be Congress, it can be the media, even arts and culture with Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center. It feels like American democracy is under siege from Trump’s authoritarian instincts, and we know all about those from his attempt to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, 2021 and also from his ongoing affinity with Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and other autocrats around the world.
Judith Levine 14:22
Up until now, we’ve seen what I called soft authoritarianism. And that’s the kind of attacks and punishments on the institutions of liberal democracy, such as the press, the arts, the universities, law firms, and also, of course, kind of the takeover of the administrative state. And of course, laced into that is real violence against real people’s bodies, against pregnant people, against transgender people. But for the most part, this has been done, you know, with the instruments of the government and his just fight by fiat. But now we have moved into a stage in which the state is doing violence, as you said in the beginning, declaring war on on the citizens and residents of the United States, and that is a huge step. It’s a huge step into, you know, the perils that we can see ahead.
Mary Anne Franks 15:07
I think of it sometimes as how much commentary right now is focused on calling the Trump administration hypocritical, and by saying what you said you cared about free speech, and you said that you were anti cancel culture, this is hypocrisy, and I understand where those critiques are coming from, but I think they’re wrong in the sense that this isn’t hypocrisy, because Trump has always said what I mean by everything, whether it’s free speech, whether it’s democracy, whether it’s elections, is I win, that is the only thing he has ever meant. And he said as much when he was asked if he was going to respect the results of the election. And he says, I’ll respect them if I win. He told you everything that we needed to know about how this was going to go. Free Speech means free speech for Trump. Democracy means democracy for Trump.
All of these things only mean something with reference to whether he wins. So they are being perfectly consistent in that the only thing that was deceptive, and the only thing that is throwing people off is if you ever took him seriously when he said he cared about any of those values for any other reason, other than wanting to win and making sure that he comes out on top. So I think we really have to reorient ourselves around that idea, that we’ve got to stop thinking It’s hypocrisy. There is one very explicable principle that you can apply to everything the Trump administration has done, and it’s that he wins and people like him win and everybody else loses. So once we’ve done that, we then realize that that obviously is absolutely antithetical to freedom of speech and the First Amendment.
Dr. Moustafa Bayoumi 16:30
I think that what we’re really seeing is an attempt by Trump to essentially take over all of the different kind of law enforcement capabilities of the state and put them into his own hands. And we’ve seen that with the so called one big, beautiful bill, which actually gives ICE now the budget that’s larger than most militaries in the world. It’s going to be the largest law enforcement agency in the country by far. You know, it’s a federal agency, so we have the huge amount of power and control in the hands of one man in the federal government, namely Donald Trump, and then following down from his minions. And it’s really an attempt then to actually kind of take away the decentralized notion of the rule of law in this country, which is at the municipal level, which is at the state level, which is at the federal level, and then consolidate them all within the hands of Donald Trump. And that, to me, is a very frightening prospect that seems straight out of not just authoritarian, not just totalitarian, but really fascist playbooks.
Dr. Nicholas Grossman 17:32
The difference with the campaign in the Caribbean compared to previous things, the way that it would change is that the regime essentially claiming the right to kill anybody for any reason just because they feel like it, without having to justify that to anybody you know. So just as couple contrasts here of Iraq, Afghanistan and the drone program were all authorized by Congress, the Afghanistan one, and also which same authorization against terrorists with the drone program was bipartisan, was nearly unanimous. Only everyone in the Senate, only one member of Congress voted against it for the Iraq War. There’s about two thirds in Congress that voted for it. Both of those had public support. They had a debate leading up to it, at least public discussion.
It feels weird to say that the discussion over like Iraqi WMDs was better than this, but it actually was in that it was discussed publicly. It went to the UN the people in Congress, a number of Democrats voted for it. Both John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, prominent figures who both ran for president, both voted to authorize it. And not only do they not have Congress’ permission here, but they haven’t even asked and are in fact asserting the right to pretend that anybody is a terrorist, just because they say so, and the mere fact that they say so means that they can kill them for any reason, even if they are totally helpless, by asserting this right to just kill anybody just because they say so, even when other means would be available and those people pose no threat that is entirely unbound. I think it is reasonable, the concerns, to say that if they do that here, there’s no particular reason why they can’t do that inside the United States as well.
Michelle Goodwin 19:09
Dobbs has unleashed this chaos and riptide effect, and it’s women who’ve been caught in this Riptide, and girls. Not enough attention has been placed on the fact that these laws, they don’t build out exceptions for the little ones. And I can tell you that in my research and in meeting with doctors, meeting with prosecutors too, but I can tell you that in the wake of Dobbs, is there have been physicians in states like Louisiana who, multiple times, have appealed to the legislature saying we’ve had an eight year old, nine year olds coming before us, having been raped and pregnant.
Do you understand how traumatic this will be for those children to become mothers at eight, if they survive, or maybe they survive, but they’re injured for the rest of their lives, their body completely changes, and only for lawmakers in Georgia, then to put forward bills that, fortunately have not passed yet, but have had signatures saying, well, we should impose the death penalty against any women or girls or medical providers who terminate pregnancies. There should be no exceptions for rape or incest. I mean, it’s that level of barbarism. And we’re in a space that, a decade ago, these would have been bridges too far.
A decade ago, the very idea that there would have been a lawmaker who would have others signing on to legislation saying, well, let’s just kill them. Let’s kill the little girls, and let’s kill the women. I mean, a decade ago, the very idea that in Idaho, women would have to be helicoptered out of the state in order to save their lives. People would have said, Of course not, that’s not going to happen. But how quickly? How swiftly? And aren’t there lessons for us in all of that? I mean, the title of your podcast is Refuse Fascism. Look at how quickly these changes have taken shape.
Sam Goldman 20:59
There’s the speed, and there’s the ferocity of it, and there’s also the how quickly the atrocity becomes normalized, and part of it is, as you were indicating, is they keep upping the ante. They keep escalating. We’re just trying to catch our breath, and they continue the assault. And I think that it’s stunning, and it’s hard to see how far they’ve gone. Dobbs very directly made women and all those with the capacity to give birth into second class citizens with their bodies subordinate to potential. Or even, as you’ve indicated, even hypothetical fetuses. At one point, this would have been unfathomable, and now it is what exists in over half the country.
Michelle Goodwin 21:41
Oh, no, that’s absolutely right. So what does exist and the rapidity? So what exists now is that we have little girls who are going into middle school as mothers or have had to flee state. We have women being helicoptered out of states, driving out of states, fearful that their license plates will be tracked, fearful of criminal prosecution, fearful of communicating with loved ones. So let’s be clear about what this represents from the start. In the term in which Dobbs was announced, at the beginning of that term, the Supreme Court weighed in on Texas’s SB 8 law, which weaponizes citizenry to go after individuals that they believe have aided or abetted someone in terminating a pregnancy. Now that’s straight out of a page from the Fugitive Slave Act, where citizens were incentivized to go and find people that they believed had escaped slavery and those who had aided and abetted those who had escaped.
I had mentioned that I was actually writing an op-ed for a publication that I did a lot of writing for prior to Dobbs, and I sent it to my editor, who would often green light, and he wrote back. He said, Well, this just sounds like some lefty stuff, and you need to send this someplace else. But of course, what was revealed was exactly that. He was not paying attention to what was coming. And I saw this and its connection to its historical roots and foundations, and that is, in fact, where we are, this sense of weaponizing people such that it means that people who are suffering can’t communicate to others.
So imagine the 11 year old who’s become pregnant, who then has to worry that if I tell my teacher, if I tell my mother, if I tell my aunt, they could get in trouble. So I better keep this to myself, what this condition I believe that I’m in and who put me in this condition, because I don’t want them to get in trouble if they tried to help me. This from a country where the very first amendment to the Constitution is one that grants the freedom of speech, the freedom of association, the freedom of assembly, and that being eroded, and you spoke to how rapid these things can happen.
Well, you know, Sam, something that has been in my mind for some time is what happens to a people when it starts on one day that they’re bidding on people. They raise a billet, and they say, you know, $5, $10 and then it goes on, not just for a day. They get a taste for it, such that it happens another day, and such that it happens for a week, and then they really get a taste for it. Let’s try this for a month. They really get a taste for it, and let’s try it for a year. And those years flow into decades and into centuries. So in some ways, Sam we have practiced this in this country. We’ve practiced this sense of dehumanization against others. We are a nation where so many of us love the soil on which we garden, the soil which our loved ones came to, whether by force or voluntarily, leaving someplace else, and we have relatives who have then fought for the maintenance of this country’s security or others around the world, but at the same time, this is a nation that did practice slavery for centuries.
This is a nation that did have Jim Crow. This is a nation that did reject Jewish people as they were suffering and experiencing genocide abroad, and said, We don’t have doors open for you. This is a nation where there was the Trail of Tears. This is a nation wherein there was coercive sterilization against white people, tens of thousands of them coercively sterilized between the 1910s and the 1940s with this idea that somehow we could weed out poor white people from the United States. Being able to hold space with the complexity of who we’ve been as a culture, as a society, within law is important.
Sam Goldman 25:57
So what have we seen in response? Most major institutions have adjusted, some quietly, some openly, even where resistance exists, it is all too isolated and defensive. I say this not to underestimate the millions who have taken to the streets, but to make clear, fascism advances fastest when institutions choose order over justice and when people choose career over conscience, and what we have seen has been far, far too much capitulation, and among the tens of millions who despise Trump’s vision, the dominant, most consistent response has too often been silence, compliance or rationalization. 2025 made something painfully clear.
Waiting for normal channels is not neutral. The danger has never only been Trump, but how many people have adjusted to him? This year makes clear that the Trump MAGA regime governs through intimidation and force. It thrives on people’s subordination. Listen now to John Donahue, A.R. Moxon, Sasha Abromsky and Shannon Lynn Parker on the stakes of conciliation.
John Donahue 27:04
Every fascist regime that gains power can be likened to a cancer, which will metastasize unimpeded, unless met with some kind of effective therapy. There is no therapy for fascism except its absolute and abject defeat. I mean, this President staged a coup to stay in power and ran in the last election on the big lie that the election was stolen from him, treated the insurgents, these violent seditionists who tried to overthrow the U.S. government by overturning the election of 2024, calling them patriots and pardoning them. That’s about the clearest language we can get from a fascist saying, I don’t care a) about elections. I’ll lie about them, and I won’t respect the results. So there’s a moral failure here that we need to rectify with our activism, to call not only the regime to account, but to challenge this milquetoast framing of the situation as somehow just a matter of conventional politics and a more intense framework.
A. R. Moxon 28:09
When we think about the fascist offer, your question, it’s an offer of false unity. This was by no means unique or original to me, but I think fascism can be understood to a degree by looking at the dynamics of bullying and of narcissistic abuse and of enablement of the same. A bully needs a system that enables them. I think that the fascist offer is very much also the bully’s offer, right the narcissist’s offer, that there would be some peace or some unity or some comity that is available if you are willing to find common ground, not because fascists care about common ground for any reason other than as leverage to use against those that they intend to harm, but because the fascist or the narcissist or whatever other metaphor you might want to use to describe this ideology, is always going to point toward some good thing.
You know, who doesn’t like peace, who doesn’t like comity, who doesn’t want to find common ground? How could you say that those are bad things? And yet, the formulation for this piece is to ignore all of the people that are currently being targeted. And the truth of the matter is that the fascist intention and the fascist system is a machine that eats people, and it’s not going to stop until it has run out of people.
Sasha Abramsky 29:41
Let me use stronger language, because illegitimate sort of implies that it’s sort of, you know, reasonable political discourse, but we just think you’re a little bit on the edge. What these guys are doing is normalizing behavior that is shameful and degrading and involves everybody who gets co opted into it in rolling around in the moral mind. God, so when you’re talking about the creation of Alligator Alcatraz, you know, you can use a funny name and call it Alligator Alcatraz, and it sort of sounds like a Disney theme park thing. What is Alligator Alcatraz? Alligator Alcatraz is a concentration camp. We don’t call it a concentration camp, but to all intents and purposes, it is a concentration camp in the Everglades.
It would have been familiar to the residents of Dachau, which was the early concentration camp in Nazi Germany, when we have armed, masked, nameless officers taking old men from their workplaces, wrestling them to the ground and throwing them into vans, and I’ve seen videos of this from L.A. in the last few days. That is not just mildly illegitimate. Anyone who is involved in that operation is as morally culpable as the torturers of apartheid South Africa, the disappearance people, the specialists who drop people from helicopters and everything else in dictatorships in Latin America, it is not just that it’s marginally illegitimate, it’s that they are creating a political spectacle that falls outside the boundaries of anything that is morally acceptable.
Channyn Lynn Parker 31:02
We’re so fixated on what I call the blip, B, L, I, P. What I mean by the blip is we’ve enjoyed 50 ish years of unprecedented movement, Brown versus Board of Education, Sandra Day O’Connor, Thurgood Marshall, Roe v Wade, Bostock, my God, Obergefell, all of these things. But if we look at the broader picture of this country, you’re talking about a very narrow sliver of time, the broader picture of the country has been slavery, has been women’s suppression, has been internment camps, has been all of these things. So we’re just going back to this country’s original standard, and we need to decide, are we going to let them do this? Because no one’s coming to save us, y’all.
It grates my skin to hear someone say, well, they’re gonna get sued. What? What? Are you kidding me? Stop saying that to me. Well, the courts are never gonna allow this. What? Trump’s gonna get to he doesn’t care. Well, when the midterms come, we’re gonna take this back over. Oh my gosh. Please stop it. Wake up. That slapping you hear is me slapping my knee. Wake up, everyone. These people don’t fight fair. Hell, I’m not even sure they won this election for real. You know, just stop, stop it. They’re afraid of us for a reason, because we do, in fact, have the numbers. Look around! But again, they want you to believe you don’t. They want you to buy into the myth of white supremacy.
Sam Goldman 32:49
Waiting for normal channels to correct this, courts, elections, midterms, is not a neutral stance. It is a choice with consequences. Fascism doesn’t pause while society deliberates. It uses time to consolidate power, normalize cruelty and shut down, violently, avenues of resistance. What we saw in 2025 was not chaos or overreach. It was direction, repression intensifying, lawlessness becoming routine, militarized forces like ICE expanding their reach, targets being isolated to test how much the rest of society will tolerate, one of the most popular and most foolish methods of conciliation has simply been to deny reality, to deny that what is currently happening, even could happen, let alone that it is, and I just got to say that we have to stop underestimating the threat facing this country.
Countless times over the past decade, up to and including the events of January 6 and then onward, every time Trump and his allies openly projected and continue to project their intent to do something outrageous, illegal, destructive, every time, the common response was that they weren’t serious or that they could never succeed. And this has continued this year, and we just got to ask, How many times will we have to be proved wrong before we take it seriously? Others believe that maybe something is happening, but it’s not something new, and it’s not going anywhere. Maybe we have to vote a little harder this time, or donate a little more money to the opposition parties so they can do a little more of what they’ve always done, or at the extreme end, maybe we do need to primary a few of the most egregious collaborators, but will we succeed or even slow things down by sending slightly more combative candidates into gerrymandered elections with troops on the ground in the places where opposition is strongest and which the President and his MAGA enablers throughout the government have proven they will not respect if they lose?
How exactly does that play out? Well, meanwhile, Trump’s consolidation of power is advancing on a wildly different time frame than the standard election cycle can deal with. He barely left office last time around, and the power, support, strategy and organization that has coalesced around him since then makes the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers all but obsolete. The plan in 2021 was to use their wild and chaotic supporters as pawns in order to force the military and national guard into a position to secure his power. And now the handful of top generals that prevented that from happening have been purged and replaced by the Christian fascist, macho Crusader Pete Hegseth and his loyal minions. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has enabled him to act with impunity and immunity, and is now acting both as bludgeon and a getaway car. What happens if we achieve even the best case scenario that comes out of relying on electoral action, installing a Democratic party majority in most likely one house of Congress? Fascism cannot be contained.
The current Congress has openly ceded the power of the purse and their authority over the power to go to war. But more fundamentally, Trump has shown that even if Congress was unwilling to go along, what power do they actually have to stop him? It’s not that election results simply don’t matter, and we’re not telling people not to vote, at least I’m not. But the only force that can actually stop this is the power of millions of people in determined, sustained, non violent action, demanding the end of the regime. No, this is not guaranteed, but it’s our best chance. Countless people have ended up in cells and graves thinking that they could wait for change rather than force its occurrence.
Many thought they could hide, be quiet, comply enough to avoid their destruction when that wasn’t true, there is no great rescuer coming to save us if we behave long enough what we know should be taken seriously. This year has shown our enemies are relentless and only a relentless opposition willing to fight is commensurate. It’s true that the Democratic Party and the people who are generally invested in maintaining orderly, loyal, ineffectual opposition have a lot more power and influence right now than those calling for millions in the streets becoming ungovernable. And if things were to maintain this level of horrors, or smoothly transition to a full fascist lockdown, there would be no chance for the strategies to succeed.
But that’s not how the world works. The big question is, what happens the next time that Trump follows through on any number of his promises that shock the conscience of the tens of millions? Do all those people find the ways to swallow their emotions, accept the unacceptable every single time, or just once, will the courage of a few, become contagious just once? Will enough of them get angry, enough to get organized, enough to get loud, enough to inspire an even bigger wave of resistance, powerful enough to call forth more opposition and non compliance, knocking over one domino after another until the whole regime falls? If we succeed, it will be because these fascism have done something, or a series of things, that cause millions into the streets and determined opposition.
As it is now, those millions are finding ways to evade that historic responsibility, a responsibility to change everything that so rarely does a generation face they’re not going to come out, if there isn’t a force of people working to break down those excuses and those delusions, a force that, when they do come out, that refuses to compromise with fascism, a force that paints the path forward. And the longer we wait, the harder it will become until this strategy ultimately runs out of time,
As you heard from our guests this year, this is fascism and it’s moving faster than we can tolerate. There is a window to stop it. That window is closing, but it is not yet closed. History shows there is a point where it becomes too late to stand up, and that point doesn’t arrive all at once. It creeps in, repression expands, resistance contracts. Avenues for dissent are violently shut down. The press is muzzled. Even elite opponents are threatened or jailed, and everyone else is left far more exposed. Fascism becomes normalized, or normalized enough, people adjust their lives around it.
Accommodation turns into quiet collaboration, and fascism doesn’t need everyone’s support. It only needs enough people to adjust. That’s when the regime gets the space to drop the hammer. Repression that’s so sudden, so violent and so overwhelming, it shocks people into total compliance, and the truth is we are already frighteningly far down both of those roads. You hear a lot of talk about Trump’s poll numbers, about Republicans being scared of the midterms, but this is fantasy politics, and it’s dangerous. Between extreme gerrymandering, voter intimidation through ICE and the military and Trump loyalists installed in key state positions, there is no rational reason to assume that the Democrats carry the election.
Besides, even if, despite all of his efforts to lay groundwork to steal the election, if Democrats were to win, you think he would accept the results? Come on. And even beyond that, look at the damage they will inflict every single day they remain in power. Look at how their awareness of their own unpopularity makes them more dangerous, more willing to terrorize people, escalate wars and clamp down on the press and the flow of information. Waiting is not neutral. Waiting helps the fascists. So the real question isn’t whether things will get bad enough for people to act.
The real question is whether people will act before repression and normalization lock this into place. The future is not written. We know this because people have changed it repeatedly under conditions that looked impossible. Around the world, tyrants have been forced out through sustained, non violent mass protests and in the United States, the Civil Rights Movement won victories no one predicted, were never likely, until people made them real. That’s why we say we need a movement demanding Trump Must Go Now! like nothing we’ve ever seen. Look to the small country of Bulgaria, which joined the ranks of South Korea, Armenia, Tunisia and elsewhere, in ousting their Prime Minister through massive, unrelenting, non violent protest.
This year, Refuse Fascism told the truth that Fascism is upon us now, not creeping, that it is illegitimate, that it cannot be lived with or contained, that it must be non violently driven from power, and we put forward and modeled the strategy to defeat it, by repeatedly bringing thousands into the streets of the nation’s capital, especially this fall, and pointing the way to millions rising in determined, relentless resistance, demanding Trump Must Go Now!, because one of the deepest lessons from struggles for justice worldwide is this: victory was rarely expected. What made the difference was that people stopped waiting, they confronted the atrocity unfolding in front of them, and acted with courage and conviction anyway. They accepted risk and overcame fear and uncertainty. They were willing to sacrifice, and in doing so, they changed what was possible.
What we need now is shared clarity about the danger and about each other, about the need for unprecedented unity and that together, we are our greatest strength. We cannot allow the people this regime is targeting to be isolated. We cannot ask people to fight alone while the rest of society watches. History shows that reactionary forces were not stopped only by those they targeted. They were disrupted when people not yet in the cross hairs refused to stand aside, when white people broke with the loyalty to whiteness, when beneficiaries of the system withdrew consent. 2025 gave us important flashes of that again.
But what’s required right now is far bigger than isolated acts of courage. What’s required is mass refusal, because the regime is coming after everyone. It’s coming after dissent itself, and whether or not we’re already in their direct cross hairs, we have to link arms, refuse to stand aside while fascism consolidates power. Because if there is even a chance to stop a regime that threatens all of humanity and the Earth itself, then it is worth throwing everything into. Sometimes, it’s precisely the necessity of the moment when people truly face what must be stopped that opens up freedom to act that didn’t exist before. So in the rest of the episode, we’re sharing crucial insights on how to organize across real differences, drawing from the work of scholar and organizer Emily Van Dyne and voices from our November 5 protests, including Balthazar Enriquez, Michael Fanone and Sunsara Taylor, speaking to the kind of movement that needs to be brought into being. They speak in that order.
Emily Van Dyne 43:49
We have to be out in numbers, and that’s where you meet your people. That’s how you build community. As Audre Lorde said, there is no liberation without community. Like collective liberation is about having your community of people having mutual aid, that’s the first thing. And the second thing is those people are not always going to be your best friends, and that’s okay. The amount of times in the last like four months that someone in our little Stockton group has said something that’s like, irked me, or I’ve talked over someone and they’ve been irked and and it’s like, at any given point, any one of us, or all of us, could have just been like, I can’t do this.
There was one brief moment where I was like, I’m leaving the group chat. And then I was like, this is asinine. I’m gonna leave the group chat because someone’s something I disagreed with? Give me a break. You got to get over the whatever those little like bitchy moments are, because those people are your comrades, and they are who you’re going to be working with, and that is, until we begin to do that on a mass scale, it’s going to fail. Because I just think that’s been a really valuable lesson for me where, like, there was one particular person who they kind of drove me a little crazy, and then I realized at a certain moment, I was like, it doesn’t matter. That person would probably jump in front of a car for me, and I would do the same for them.
Balthazar Enriquez 45:03
On this dark anniversary I stand before [you] shocked, disgusted, heartbroken. We are here to condemn the horrific fascist behavior of Donald Trump and his regime. Since January, my community, in Little Village has lived in terror. We have patrolled our own streets. We have handed out these whistles to alert our neighbors that ICE and the modern day Nazis are coming to tear our families apart. I have seen the cruelty firsthand, and now Trump boasts about his deportations. He says they need to ramp it up.
How much more? We have seen a six year old child handcuffed! We have seen a diabetic denied medications. We have heard the threat of Alligator Alcatraz and we warned of the murder of Silvero. This is not immigration enforcement. This is a systematic inhumane treatment of human beings. It’s proof of a racist fascism regime. What happened to justice and liberty for all? That promise has been broken by an orange dictator, the man we bend at the knee. To every person who has come to Washington to stand with us today, to every ally who has shown solidarity with Little Village: We see you and we thank you.
Alright, your courage is a light in the darkness, and to those who enable this cruelty, cruelty, we condemn you. We condemn Kristi Noem, Greg Bovino. We condemn every politician, every agent, every single American who stays silent watching children who are being caged, people who are being murdered by these ICE agents. Your silence is complicity. But hear me now, and hear me clearly: with the blood of Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa running through my veins, I will never, never live on my knees for a fucking clown.
We demand deportation stop. We demand all the abuse conditions in ICE facilities to end now. We will not be silenced. We will not be broken. We will fight for the dream that was promised, and we will win! Hasta la victoria siempre, unity! Victory always, and for my Latino brothers and sisters, this administration has launched a war against people that are my color, not because we’re criminal, just because we’re brown, and it’s okay, because we know how to fight back, and we are not scared. And if they bring 100 of them, we’re going to bring out 1000 of us. If they bring in 1000 of them, we will bring 10,000 of us. We will fight back. And every minute and every moment in Little Village, they had came to terrorize us, and it put fear in my community, and we say, Fuck you. Fuck you.
Michael Fanone 48:46
Right here in our nation’s capital, we’re drawing a line. This movement, Refuse Fascism is this for moments like this one, when the powerful think they can get away with anything, when corruption becomes routine, and when cruelty and lawlessness become government policy, that’s when the people need to rise up and say, Trump Must Go!
Refuse Fascism is not about slogans. It’s about survival. It’s about saying we will not normalize the destruction of democracy, the silencing of journalists, the rewriting of history, brick by brick. We’re done watching from the sidelines. We’re done hoping someone else will fix this. We are the fix, and what is our demand? Trump Must Go! And it’s going to take all of us, and I mean all of us, to meet this moment and stop this fascist regime in its tracks. Trump must go isn’t a distant hope. It’s a goddamn demand, and it will only happen if we meet this moment together, if we keep showing up, if we stay louder than the lies. I have seen what hate can do, and now I’m betting on what courage can do. So hold that anger, turn it into action, and let this city hear you from the Capitol dome to the White House gates. We Refuse Fascism, we choose freedom, and we’re just getting started. Thank you.
Sunsara Taylor 50:50
We have gathered here today because we are standing on three profound truths that I want you to remember and I want you to return to when it gets hard. The Truth Number one, that a lot of people sense but are not yet willing to confront, and we need to go out there and make them confront this. Number one, there is no living with this fascism. If we allow Donald Trump to stay in power, his atrocities will multiply. Trump is already ordering assassinations. He is already threatening war. He is already escalating the danger of nukes. He is already defying the courts. He is already destroying science and medicine and the legal sphere and the institutions of the Academy. He is coming for everything that is moral and decent and good. He has already categorized non violent, peaceful protesters as terrorists. He is already indicting and seeking to lock up his political rivals. If this regime is not removed from power, they will violently shut down all the space for anybody to stand up against them, and they are moving fast. Trump has to go now!
Truth Number two, we cannot rely on the elections. Now, I know a lot of people are feeling really good today because of what happened in the elections yesterday. But while yesterday showed yet again that millions and tens of millions hate everything Trump is doing and everything he stands for, yesterday’s election results do not change the nature of fascism and the nature of Trump. This is important. Trump incited an insurrection. Trump pardoned the insurrectionists. Trump is moving now to steal the next election. He is gerrymandering on a scale far beyond prop 50 in California can keep up with. He has already threatened to deport the new mayor of New York City, and he is threatening New York City as a whole.
The truth is, yesterday’s election results will only further embolden Trump’s determination to lock in his rule and defy any future elections. Counting on Trump to respect elections he doesn’t like is like counting on Dracula to guard the blood bank. It’s not in his nature. He must be driven from power. The energy, the hope, the determination we saw in the elections yesterday, needs to join us in these streets, driving Trump from power.
Truth Number three, there is a way to defeat this fascism. They are not all powerful. They are not God. We have power too. It is in the millions and millions who have shown themselves in protest and in other forms of opposition. We have the power to unseat this regime and this movement, Refuse Fascism and our partners, the movement we are launching today, we have a strategy that really can win. When millions of people rise up, not just once, but with sustained determination, we can compel and enable those within the halls of power to do things that they would never do otherwise. We have seen the potential for this in the millions who have protested again and again.
But it’s not just our numbers. I want you to think back to the divides I spoke of that go all the way up the divides even within the ruling institutions of this country. Right now, those within the halls of power and the ruling institutions who oppose Trump’s shredding of the Constitution, his trampling of our rights, his degrading of America’s standing in the world. Those who are opposed to Trump are on the defensive, and they are overwhelmed. This does not change by calling them or lobbying them, or even periodic protests, as positive as they might be, this changes when we stand up in our millions, centered in the nation’s capital, coming back again and again, not relenting, demanding that Trump must go! This changes when we create such a crisis in the legitimacy of Trump that we compel his removal. We need to change who has the initiative in society and even in the halls of power. This has to be driven from below.
It is possible, but it is on us. Now look, it would be much better if we were launching this movement today with millions, but the fact that we are thousands and not yet millions, does not change the truth that I have just spoken. So in a very real sense, we are a lot like the abolitionists back before the Civil War. They were small in numbers. They were ahead of where even most decent people in society were at. But they were right. They said slavery could not be compromised with. It had to be abolished. We say the same of fascism today. It cannot be lived with. It cannot be contained. It must be defeated. It must be non violently driven from power.
They lived in a country whose contradictions had reached a breaking point. So do we. When those in power are this bitterly divided and at each other’s throats, when people in their millions are in motion, when the whole fabric of society is being ripped apart, a minority that is right, that acts with conviction, that does not relent, that minority can move millions and change history. This is what we aim to do. This is what we are launching today. We did not come here to make a statement. We came here to make history. So as we go forward, there are people who will try to divide us, and we cannot let them.
We have to unite all who can be united from different perspectives. It’s going to take us all to stop Trump fascism. Some will try to attack us, and we need to use every attack to further expose the illegitimacy and bankruptcy of this regime and to rally more people to join this movement, to drive it from power. Some people will get frustrated and give up on moving the millions, but we cannot give up on this, in bringing them forward in nonviolent, sustained protest here, because this is how we can win.
Not every generation lives through times as momentous and consequential as these ones, but we look back in history at people who lived through turning points. We look at those who rose to abolish slavery, and we celebrate their courage and bravery. We look back at those who sat back and allowed Hitler to rise to power and carry out unspeakable atrocities, and we judge them, and we never forgive them. Future generations are going to look back at us, and they are going to judge us by how we handle this moment when a fascist tyrant came to power in the most powerful, militarized country in all of world history. We have a huge responsibility. Let us not fail those future generations. Let us make good on our solemn vow that we are embarking on. Today, I ask you to put your fist in the air and join me! In the Name of Humanity. In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept. We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America. Trump Must Go Now! Trump Must Go Now! Trump Must Go Now! Thank you so much.
Sam Goldman 1:00:47
When people ask how this regime could be legitimately removed from power, the mistake is looking only upward to courts, party leaders or elections, instead of outward to society itself. Those in power do not act in a vacuum. They act when the ground shifts beneath them. Right now, many in power who are not part of the regime, are defensive, cautious and accommodating, not because they support Trump, but because they do not yet see a force strong enough to back resistance. That condition can change. History shows that when millions take to the streets, non violently, not once, but again and again, the political terrain shifts.
What once seemed unthinkable becomes necessary. Collaboration becomes untenable. You start to see fractures, officials hedging institutions distancing themselves, leaders searching for exits they once ruled out. A political earthquake does not bypass institutions. It forces them to act. It creates the conditions where those now cowering or accommodating to the regime are enabled and compelled to decisively break with it, including taking steps to legitimately remove this illegitimate Trump regime. What 2025 revealed is that this is possible. What 2026 demands is that we bring it into being.
Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism, and thank you to all our patrons who helped make this show happen. We seriously could not do it without you. I hope you’ll become a patron today and fuel the power of the people to drive out the Trump fascist regime. Whether you can give $2 or $25 a month, it all makes a difference in producing and promoting this independent weekly, all volunteer podcast. We have no sponsors, and count on you so give today at patreon.com/refusefascism, or give to support the work of Refuse Fascism by visiting refusefascism.org and hit the donate button.
You can also head on over to one of our stores and get a t shirt, hoodie, beanie and more. Stay connected by subscribing to our sub stack. Follow us on social media @refusefascism or text refuse to 855-755-1314, to get on our list. Much, much, much appreciation to Richie Marini, Lina Thorne and Mark Tinkleman for helping produce this episode and all the episodes of 2025. We will be back next Sunday, until then, in the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America.