We've lost the United States.

The founding fathers, men of immense vision and selective blindness, drafted liberty into ink while slavery rattled its chains just beyond the parchment’s edge.

The nation was born to the rhetoric of freedom, yet tethered to an economic engine of bondage; equality was declared self-evident while millions were rendered invisible.

Race, from inception, was both scaffold and shackle.

In the grand experiment of democracy, whiteness became the unspoken requirement for full participation. Enshrined in law and cloaked in compromise, racial hierarchy shaped the Constitution’s silences.

The founding, then, was not merely flawed—it was calibrated, with deliberation, to exclude. The irony was not lost on contemporaries; it was simply ignored. The republic’s roots were not only revolutionary—they were, unmistakably, stained.

Women found themselves even lower on the totem pole — within and outside of racial systems, the intersectionality even more piercing.

Freedom only ever truly existed for white men, and our systems and structures, though intermittently challenged, remained the same.

The echo that reverberates across the American landscape today—ominous, steady, familiar—is that of fascism’s final push toward control after centuries of waxing and waning. The revival of male, white supremacy through radicalization is reminiscent of another cautionary tale.

There is a quietness to the unraveling, a bureaucratic banality—a sense that the dangers come not as thunderclaps, but as flickers in the corner of the room, just out of focus.

In early 1930s Germany, the economic dislocation of the Weimar Republic was the fertile soil in which fascism took root.

Inflation was not merely a number—it was a thief that crept into pantries, reduced savings to ash, and shattered faith in liberal democracy. That collapse of confidence—the sense of a nation being betrayed—became a powerful rallying cry. And who better to blame than the intellectuals, the foreigners, the press, the so-called “degenerates”?

Fast forward to the United States of the 2020s. A pandemic exposes the brittle infrastructure of governance; income inequality yawns like a canyon; conspiracy theory seeps into the bloodstream of civic life. The rallying cry shifts, but the melody persists.

“Make America Great Again” is not unlike “Deutschland erwache”—a nostalgic invocation of a past that never was, filtered through selective memory and grievance.

It is not ideology that fuels such movements so much as identity, resentment, and a yearning for order—anointed order, from a leader who promises to bulldoze institutions that feel remote and hostile.

When Donald Trump labeled the press “the enemy of the people,” the phrase was not new. Lenin used it. So did Hitler.

Fascism does not begin with violence. It begins with language—coarse, delegitimizing, dehumanizing. In Nazi Germany, the “Lügenpresse,” or “lying press,” became an object of ridicule and threat.

Reclaiming the language, rewriting the narrative to reflect the reality then becomes a critical part of resistance.

Especially today, as calls for the ethnic cleansing of all Hispanic and Latino people from the United States, are plainly stated online my members of Trump's inner circle.

When Florida’s Ron DeSantis started selling merchandize to advertise the Everglades makeshift concentration camp “Alligator Alcatraz,” we answered swiftly and sharply.

We are seeing but a glimpse of the specter of the Nazi state's early machinery—legal, even surgical in its precision—before the camps, before the trains, before the genocide.

But fascism rarely declares itself with a swastika and a salute. It enters instead in stages: contempt for truth, adoration of strength, scapegoating of the marginalized, corrosion of norms. It walks through the door not with a bang, but on the shoulders of applause.

The past is not dead; it is always scribbling in the margins of our present. The question, then, is whether we will read the annotations in time.

My fear today is that we are too late. The concentration camps have been built and will be receiving innocent men, women and children any day now.

And those who stand against this regime — whether in Florida or New York — cannot shelter in the freedom of speech we have so long enjoyed.

In the last five years, we've all witnessed weaponization of law enforcement. I was the canary in the coal mine for authoritative abuse of police to target political dissidents.

Despite the outrage and a brief reprieve during the early years of the Biden administration, the drumbeat resumed with a furious pace when attacks on students protesting genocide in Gaza went not only unpunished, but wholly unaddressed. Worse, the media echoed the most vile of impulses toward these students- demanding the students be punished, not their attackers.

Once Trump took over, he accelerated these abuses, kidnapping and threatening to deport students who took part in the demonstrations - legal American residents, international students, anyone on the list of targets provided by Zionists.

Trump ushered in a new era of cruelty toward those he deemed “unamerican.”

Targeted retaliation morphed into indiscriminate punishment.

Kidnappings in broad daylight of anyone suspected of being “unamerican.” For now, the color one’s skin appears to be the sole-determining factor.

They have built the camps. It has already started. That is beyond sufficient to declare the American experiment a failure.

Or perhaps, when weighing the atrocities of the American experiment, we were doomed from the start.