Page one of the American history book is stained with blood. The first lines tell the story of genocide against the continent’s original peoples—a campaign of dispossession and dehumanization. Colonists didn’t just steal land; they stole names, cultures, and futures. This erasure set the tone for centuries to come.
The brutality continued with chattel slavery, the forced labor and subjugation that built the nation’s wealth. Turn a few more pages and you’ll find Japanese American internment camps, the redlining of Black communities, crushed labor movements, and the relentless expansion of arguably the most complex security state the world has ever seen. The story of the U.S. empire is not one of a nation suddenly threatened by authoritarianism. The American dream has always relied on violence, exclusion, and control.
American fascism didn’t descend a golden escalator. Just crack open the history book—if you’ve got the stomach for it. This nation was founded on blood, dispossession, and state-sanctioned terror. American exceptionalism was born of genocide, carried out by the so-called founding fathers and their successors in wave after wave of deliberate extermination. The Mystic Massacre, Sand Creek Massacre, and Sullivan Expedition weren’t isolated incidents—they were state policy. George Washington, lionized as a hero, ordered the destruction of Iroquois villages, burning crops and homes and leaving entire communities to starve and freeze.
The U.S. didn’t just use bullets and bayonets. The state deployed every tool: forced removals, reservations as open-air prisons, weaponized disease and starvation, and the systematic destruction of cultures through boarding schools and forced assimilation. The message was clear—conform or die. If that’s not fascism, what is?
They say genocide was America’s original sin, and chattel slavery was its business model. For centuries, the American economy ran on the backs of enslaved people, bought, sold, and brutalized as property. These atrocities didn’t happen in spite of the state—they were engineered by it. Laws defined people as property, stripping them of humanity and unleashing a regime of terror to keep them in line.
Every institution played a part. Congress wrote fugitive slave laws turning white Americans into bounty hunters. Slave patrols—the forerunners of modern policing—stalked the countryside, authorized to brutalize or kill. If enslaved people rebelled, they faced public execution and mass reprisals. The abolition of slavery didn’t end the terror. Jim Crow laws, lynch mobs, and chain gangs ensured white supremacy remained the law of the land—North, South, East, and West.
The state’s appetite for oppression didn’t stop with Indigenous people or African-Americans. Anyone who threatened the established order—radicals, immigrants, workers—became targets. The machinery of surveillance and suppression was running long before the NSA or Patriot Act. During the Red Scare, the state waged war on leftists and labor organizers. Decades later, COINTELPRO was initiated as the FBI’s secret war on Black liberation, antiwar groups, and socialists. The message was always the same: step out of line, and the full weight of the security apparatus will crush you.
None of this is ancient history. Legalized violence, mass incarceration, surveillance, and criminalized dissent are the backbone of the American state. The capacity for repression has only grown more sophisticated and totalizing. Enter Donald J. Trump. Liberals and the “Blue MAGA” crowd claim Trump is a rogue president who warped the system. In reality, Trump is the system’s most authentic creation. Strip away the spray tan and gold-plated bravado, and you have a man wielding the same tools the state has always held: repression, scapegoating, and the rabid pursuit of executive authority. Trump’s authoritarian populism isn’t a break from American tradition—it’s an acceleration of it, following a playbook written long before he took office.
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