This Is Not A Drill
The revolutionary imperative is to destroy the fascist state, not merely survive it.
We must begin with a clarity that dispenses with all bourgeois illusions. The world of liberal democracy, a thin veneer over the dictatorship of capital, is not coming back. Yes, it was never truly here for the exploited but we are replacing it with something far worse. The current regimes machinations are not a cyclical turn in American politics but the deliberate consolidation of a fascist project, the structural transformation of the capitalist state into an apparatus of permanent terror. This is ann open declaration of war against the working class and all oppressed people.
The military occupation of Washington D.C., justified by the fabricated lie of a “crime emergency” while actual crime plummets, demonstrates the core principle of this new order: power is truth, and reality will be manufactured at the end of a gun. This is not merely deception; it is a profound assault on our shared existence, a weapon designed to atomize us, to make collective understanding and thus collective resistance impossible. It is the declaration that force, not evidence, is the final arbiter of what is real. This dictatorship assembles itself in daylight, using the component parts of the old system to build a new, more nakedly brutal whole. Each executive order, each loyalist prosecutor, each reallocated budget is a brick in the wall of our prison.
The spectacle of political drama, amplified by a captured media, serves only to distract from the methodical construction of the police state. This is the local franchise of a global authoritarian cancer, the political logic of contracting capitalism in its terminal decay. The shell of democracy is being preserved as a hollow mockery while its substance is systematically destroyed from within. To fail to see this is to willingly march to the gallows.
This analytical failure to see this trajectory has been a long time in the making, and it is a failure rooted in our own movements. For years, a significant and vocal segment of the anarchist and leftist milieu fell for the illusion that this could not happen. They posted self entitled arguments that Trump was too clownish, too chaotic to ever orchestrate a real fascist takeover. They held up a rigid, historical checklist derived from a shallow reading of 1930s European history and, when the current regime failed to tick every box, they confidently declared it a lesser threat.
This was not merely an intellectual mistake; it was a catastrophic strategic failure, a form of political denialism that served as a comfortable shield against a terrifying reality. Proponents of this view claimed it could not be fascism because it lacked a classical paramilitary, contemptuously dismissing street gangs while the state simply leapfrogged their historical checklist. Trump does not need to build new Brownshirts when he can federalize the National Guard and consolidate ICE into a secret police force.
Their analysis dismissed purges of the federal workforce as mere palace politics, failing to recognize the essential work of dismantling internal state resistance. They labeled attacks on trans people and Black history as culture war, ignoring the classic fascist tactic of creating internal enemies to unify a base around shared hatred and existential fear. Their entire argument rested on the dogmatic belief that if it does not perfectly mirror a historical form, it cannot be the thing itself. This is not analysis; it is an ideological comfort for those whose lives are not yet on the line, a betrayal that disarms the movement and cedes the initiative to the enemy.
The military occupation of the capital is the physical architecture of this new reality, a laboratory for nationwide control and colonial-style pacification. Thousands of National Guard members, deployed from loyalist states, patrol public spaces, transforming the city into a managed territory. This is not a response to a crisis but the deliberate creation of one. Trump’s strategy is to use a transparently false pretext to normalize military rule, to acclimate the population to the sight of soldiers on their streets, and to establish a permanent state of emergency where the distinction between policing and military action is erased. This occupation is the material fact that underpins the ideological fiction of a nation under siege, a fiction designed to justify limitless state power.
The presence of these troops is a constant, physical reminder that the rules of engagement have changed, a sign that the state now governs through overt intimidation, having discarded the illusion of consent. The streets, parks, and plazas are no longer a commons; they are surveilled and controlled zones where our very presence is conditional. Dissent in such an environment is pre-criminalized. The sight of a military patrol frames any protest not as a right but as a nascent insurgency to be crushed. The brutal, systematic raids on homeless encampments and immigrant neighborhoods are not random acts of cruelty but the opening salvos in a war of social cleansing. They are training exercises in urban pacification, the tactics of imperial counter-insurgency brought home to the metropole. They are the first victims in a campaign of extermination against surplus populations, a grim preview of the fate that awaits all who are deemed disposable by the fascist state.
This new apparatus we face rests on old foundations, drawing its strength from the historical infrastructure of racial control, an unbroken line of continuity that runs from the plantation to the present. It is no accident that states with long bloody histories of defending a social order built on racial terror are among the top contributors of troops for the occupation. The logic of total control over a designated, racialized underclass, the foundational logic of American capitalism, is being updated and nationalized for a new era of domestic conflict. From slave patrols to Black Codes, from Jim Crow to mass incarceration, the infrastructure of racialized control has always been a core component of order. This history matters now because that existing infrastructure is ready for immediate activation on a national scale.
The legal precedents for surveillance and control, established over decades of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, are already in place. The cultural normalization of certain bodies as inherent threats provides the social license for an escalation of state violence. This fascist regime does not need to build a system of racial control from scratch; it only needs to reactivate and weaponize the genocidal project that has been here all along. We are not witnessing the birth of something new, but the malignant culmination of that which was always present, dormant but never dismantled. The tools forged to control one population are now being calibrated for use against us all. This historical weight gives the current project a momentum that a purely ideological movement could never possess. It is the grim inheritance of a history we failed to confront, a history that now demands a revolutionary break, not a liberal reconciliation. The fight against fascism is inseparable from the anti-colonial struggle at the heart of the empire.
This infrastructure merges with modern profit motives and a strategy of legal capture, creating a durable and unholy trinity of fascist power. This is the fusion of the state and capital into a unified death machine, where repression becomes the most profitable sector of the economy. Racialized populations long treated as controllable are now treated as monetizable, generating contracts and profits for those invested in a permanent emergency.
This authoritarian turn has initiated a gold rush for the merchants of social control. Every emergency declaration will translate into massive contracts for private security firms, surveillance technology companies, and military hardware suppliers. Private prison corporations are witnessing their stock prices soar. Real estate developers see the military as their private sanitation service, clearing the way for luxury condos. Police unions see a future of bigger budgets and expanded impunity. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle of profit and power. The emergency generates contracts, the contracts generate profits, and the profits are reinvested into lobbying for policies that expand the emergency. This alliance provides Trump’s regime with a durability that ideology alone could never supply.
At the same time, the legal system is being exposed as what it always was a weapon of class warfare. The goal of Perdomo v Noem is to constitutionalize racial profiling and create rapid-response military units for domestic deployment. The street actions of federal agents create a manufactured emergency, which provides the pretext for court rulings that expand state power. Those rulings, in turn, provide the authority for even more aggressive street actions. This is the slow-motion fascist coup, a fortress being built around us while we are sent the bill, a debt to be paid with our lives.
Beyond the blunt force of the street lies a more insidious endgame: the weaponization of the bourgeois constitution against itself, a structural plan to permanently insulate the fascist project from any challenge. The architects of this new order are driving towards an Article V convention, a legalistic black hole for which the founding document provides no rules, no limits, and no guardrails. This would be a “runaway” event, where unaccountable delegates chosen by partisan state legislatures could scrap the entire fraudulent document, erasing even the flimsy protections of the Bill of Rights and replacing them with a new charter designed to enshrine authoritarian rule as permanent law.
This is the ultimate prize to transform their temporary terror into a permanent dictatorship, consecrated by its own founding charter of enslavement. This is not a distant threat; the machinery of this constitutional coup is already grinding. Reactionary fronts like the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council have spent years laying the groundwork, pushing state applications to the brink of the 34-state threshold. Their most audacious strategy is a procedural coup by lawsuit, using a twisted legal theory to argue the threshold has already been met, forcing the issue into the hands of a captured judiciary. This is a flanking maneuver designed to achieve a revolutionary outcome through the illusion of process.
It must be stressed, this is not a typical power grab, this is a holy war bankrolled by a death cult of Christo-fascist billionaires who see their immense wealth as a divine tool to reclaim America as a Christian nation. They are systematically funding a political machine to purge all dissent, ensuring a bloc of loyalists ready to trigger the convention. Their explicit goal is to embed biblical principles into a new founding document, to erect a de facto theocracy on the ruins of the secular state. This is the fascist endgame, a permanent legal lock on power, designed to make resistance itself illegal. It is the point of no return.
Trump is openly declaring war on the people. By systematically closing off every avenue for peaceful dissent, he is writing the script for the conflict he will later condemn. In the face of this terror, organized revolutionary violence is not a choice but a necessity for survival. It is the only rational response. This is not a moral endorsement; it is a description of the material conditions created by the state itself. The question is no longer if there will be violence, but whether it will be the disorganized, futile violence of the desperate, easily crushed by the regime, or the disciplined, strategic violence of a revolutionary movement rooted in the working class.
The state understands this dynamic perfectly and has prepared a trap. It wants to goad small, isolated groups into spectacular but ultimately futile acts that can be easily contained. It wants a street fight where it holds every advantage. This path of clandestine adventurism, disconnected from a mass social base, is a death sentence. It provides the state with the perfect propaganda to justify escalating its repression against everyone. Our response must be the opposite. Any serious talk of armed struggle is meaningless unless it is an expression of mass social organizing. Without that popular foundation, we are not building a revolution; we are choosing martyrdom.
We must also reject the liberal peace-policing that has disarmed us for decades. For too long, even as we claimed to oppose the system, we unconsciously relied on its institutional safeguards to contain the worst outcomes. Now that those guardrails are gone, we are forced to confront the necessity of building our own power, a power capable of meeting and defeating the organized violence of the state.
Clear sight now requires clear tactics, and our tactics must be those of a revolutionary army in enemy territory. We cannot out-gun a siege state in a direct military confrontation, but we can out-organize it. We must build a new world in the shell of the old, not as a utopian dream but as a material necessity for waging war. This begins with the construction of autonomous social infrastructure, the essential logistics for a sustained struggle. Robust mutual aid networks that keep people fed and housed are not charity; they are our supply lines. When communities organize their own systems of food distribution, childcare, and housing defense, they are not just creating systems of care; they are building dual power, rendering the state’s coercive “protection” irrelevant and building the capacity for self-governance.
We must also build effective systems of community defense. This is not a plea for play-acting with toy militias but the disciplined labor of wresting territory from the grip of the state, forging strongholds in communities where fascist terror cannot penetrate, defended with the courage and unity of the people themselves. It means creating networks to document state violence, building integrated legal support pipelines to sustain our comrades, and strengthening sanctuary efforts to protect the most vulnerable. This infrastructure is the foundation from which we escalate the conflict. It is the material base that sustains the fight, allowing us to absorb blows and continue the struggle. This is not prefigurative politics; this is the slow, unglamorous, and absolutely essential work of building a revolutionary movement capable of protracted war against a fascist state.
The ultimate leverage lies where it has always been. In the power of the organized working class to grind the entire machine of state and capital to a halt. Our task is to transform this potential power into a revolutionary weapon. Strategic sectors in logistics, healthcare, agriculture, and education have the power to create crises that the regime cannot solve with force alone. We must move beyond defensive strikes over wages and conditions and toward offensive political strikes aimed at sabotage and the total disruption of the fascist economy. Every strike has the potential to not just be a labor dispute; it can be a direct blow against the fascist state.
This work begins with daily practices that break the cycle of isolation and fear. Every connection we make removes a brick from their fortress. The struggle is not in some distant future; it is in every choice we make today to build autonomy, interdependence, and militant solidarity. By building alternative structures of care, defense, and organizing production, we create a viable alternative that is ready when the state overreaches. The regime draws its strength from our fear and despair while our strength comes from our collective refusal to be governed.
The goal is not merely to resist fascism but to annihilate the capitalist state that produced it and build a new world from its ashes. We must be uncompromising in our commitment to total liberation and relentless in our pursuit of a world where the oppressed can finally breathe free. This is the revolutionary struggle of our time. We must be prepared to bear its costs, for there is no honor in funerals, but there is no future in submission. The only question is whether we have the courage to meet this historic moment. The fight is here. This is the fight for everything. This is not a drill.