Marketing for Power: Racism, Capital, and the Machinery of Fascism

What do you call a government that strips away rights, undermines its own institutions, and seeks to silence those who refuse to conform to its narrow views? What do you call leaders who promise salvation while sowing fear, scapegoating the vulnerable, and consolidating power for themselves and their allies? To put it plainly, this is fascism—an authoritarian takeover unlike anything the United States has seen before. We have reached a moment of reckoning: will we confront reality as it is, or allow apathy and self-delusion to lull us into compliance?

What we are witnessing today is the rapid dismantling of the federal government, the central aim of Project 2025. In its place, figures such as Donald Trump, Elon Musk, J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and Russ Vought are working to replace America’s pluralistic democracy with an alliance of white-nationalist ideology, unchecked technology, and state-sanctioned surveillance—an arrangement whose consequences grow more menacing by the day. This is not merely politics as usual; it is the merging of state power with vast private capital and technological control, all aimed at securing generational dominance over the American public. Companies like Palantir, which already provide surveillance infrastructure to governments worldwide, embody this new form of technofascism—a fusion of authoritarian politics and data-driven policing. In this system, billionaires across political lines join nationalist ideologues in mutual convenience: one side supplies the tools of control, the other wields them to subjugate anyone who diverges from their ethnicity, religion, or vision of America.

Sound familiar? It should.

We have seen this playbook before. Across the globe, leaders have risen insisting that only they knew which religion was “best,” which foreigners were dangerous, and how to “save” the economy or freeze a world changing too quickly for their liking. The most infamous examples—Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini—are nearly a century old, yet their fanatical ambitions plunged much of the world into war. In Latin America, Augusto Pinochet’s Chile demonstrated how military and corporate elites could crush democracy in the name of “order.” In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has hollowed out democratic institutions while stoking fear of migrants and rewriting history. Donald Trump has repeatedly praised Orbán and met with him, a pattern that underscores this ideological alignment. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro fused authoritarian politics with conspiracy, disinformation, and evangelical zealotry, bringing the country’s democracy to the brink of collapse. Again, Trump’s open admiration for Bolsonaro reflects a troubling pattern. Brazil’s institutions ultimately held Bolsonaro accountable, convicting him for plotting to undermine democracy—whereas in the United States, Trump has thus far faced little comparable accountability.

Regardless of where it unfolds, the story repeats: the machinery of the state, the weight of capital, and the poison of nationalism converge to suffocate democracy.

Although collective memory seems to grow shorter with each generation, we cannot forget: many alive today have already lived under the terror of fascism, while others continue to endure it. The path ahead is steep, but history offers a blueprint for resistance. Before we can fight fascism, we must name it honestly. What are its components? What language does it use? What are its intentions? I am not a scholar, but I aim to explain clearly and accessibly what is unfolding around us. Along the way, I will reference thinkers who have shaped my understanding of these dangers, in the hope that their writings might serve as guides for your own awareness and resistance.

If it is not already clear, Donald Trump and the Republican Party are working swiftly to dismantle the federal government and its institutions—the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Medicaid, Medicare, and countless other programs that provide essential resources to the American public. Though Trump attracts most of the scrutiny, Project 2025 is not his endeavor alone. It represents the unified agenda of the Republican Party, whose leadership, including Speaker Mike Johnson and key strategists like Russ Vought, have provided no meaningful opposition. Vought, a chief architect of Project 2025 and current head of the Office of Management and Budget, has publicly boasted about withdrawing federal funding from cities he politically disfavors—even as Americans struggle with rising costs, layoffs, and eroding access to healthcare.

Meanwhile, ICE has run rampant through U.S. cities over the past eight months, operating with impunity as it detains both foreign nationals and U.S. citizens. Under Trump’s renewed directive—crafted with advisers like Stephen Miller—the machinery of enforcement has become a weapon designed to sow fear, division, and chaos among the people.

This struggle, however, is not new. Writers and thinkers have long given us the language to understand and confront it. One of the most powerful among them is the late Toni Morrison. In The Source of Self-Regard, in her essay “Racism and Fascism,” she warns:

“Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another. Something, perhaps, like this:

1. Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.
2. Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy.
3. Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is profitable, because it grants power, and because it works.
4. Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit, or expel those that challenge or destabilize processes of demonization and deification.
5. Subvert and malign all representatives of and sympathizers with this constructed enemy.
6. Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and can sanitize the dispossession process.
7. Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of racial superiority in order to naturalize the pathology.
8. Criminalize the enemy. Then prepare, budget for, and rationalize the building of holding arenas for the enemy—especially its males and absolutely its children.
9. Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions: a few minutes on television, a few lines in the press; a little pseudo-success; the illusion of power and influence; a little fun, a little style, a little consequence.
10. Maintain, at all costs, silence.”

Again, one must ask: does this sound familiar?

Morrison’s insight is crucial. Rarely does fascism arrive fully formed; it advances step by step, each act normalized until resistance feels too costly—or too late. Project 2025, unusually, has laid out those steps in plain sight, a roadmap for authoritarian consolidation. Fascism begins by identifying internal enemies. Those enemies are then isolated, demonized, and stigmatized in public discourse. From there, laws criminalize them, institutions marginalize them, and, ultimately, the state constructs holding arenas and systems of violence to contain or destroy them. Already, we see the Trump movement’s efforts to demonize and round up immigrants—whether or not they have followed legal channels. We also witness the targeting of journalists, entertainers, and public figures who dare to challenge this dangerous slide toward authoritarianism. Citizens have been detained, sometimes for days, without due process, while the U.S. military’s visible patrols in multiple cities are treated as normal practice.

Morrison provides further insight into why fascism so often grows from racism itself. In The Source of Self-Regard, in the same essay “Racism & Fascism,” she writes:

“…racism may wear a new dress, buy a new pair of boots, but neither it nor its succubus twin fascism is new or can make anything new. It can only reproduce the environment that supports its own health: fear, denial, and an atmosphere in which its victims have lost the will to fight.
The forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems are not to be found in one political party or another, or in one or another wing of any single political party… Conservative, moderate, liberal; right left, hard left, far right; religious, secular, socialist – we must not be blindsided by these Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola labels because the genius of fascism is that any political structure can host the virus and virtually any developed country can become a suitable home. Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing – marketing for power.”

Her warning transcends partisanship: fascism is opportunistic, capable of infecting any political system that tolerates fear and denial.

Let us look at our current surroundings. Over the past eight months, ICE has intensified raids across the country, rounding up primarily non-offending immigrants. In one recent operation, roughly 300 South Korean nationals—here legally to assist in new factory construction—were detained in one of the largest raids to date. Meanwhile, major media corporations such as ABC and Paramount Global have quietly settled frivolous lawsuits to secure FCC merger approvals, effectively appeasing political pressure from the Trump administration. Within weeks, two late-night hosts lost their shows after airing clips that cast the president in an unflattering light. These developments demonstrate how rules are being rewritten in real time—and how easily institutions capitulate once authoritarian expectations take hold.

As Morrison observes, labels soon lose meaning when compliance becomes habitual. Even those who once opposed authoritarianism now make pragmatic accommodations to protect their profits or positions. In this environment, capitalism becomes the willing accomplice of racism and fascism—a triplet of forces reinforcing one another. To defeat fascism, we must confront both racism and the capitalist incentives that sustain it.

Morrison teaches us that racism is not an incidental feature of fascism but its foundation. Racism supplies the justification for authoritarian control, creating scapegoats that unify the fearful and disoriented. It is fascism’s oldest and most effective tool: dividing the working class, preventing solidarity across racial or economic lines, and ensuring that democracy weakens from within. Racism transforms neighbors into enemies, workers into competitors, and fellow citizens into threats. It convinces some that their safety and prosperity depend on the exclusion—or destruction—of others. This is why fascism cloaks itself in myths of racial purity and national greatness, glorifying a past in which “others” were kept in their place. Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan explicitly evokes that imagined golden era—a past defined by dominance, exclusion, and racial hierarchy.

In this way, racism is not just a symptom of fascism but its pinnacle. It is both the justification and the enforcement mechanism. Without racism, fascism loses its narrative engine: the story that repression is protection. Racism provides the scaffolding for fascism’s lies, allowing authoritarian leaders to frame violence as safety, oppression as order, and exclusion as patriotism. Morrison helps us understand that to confront fascism, we must confront racism directly. To ignore or minimize it is to misunderstand the very heart of the authoritarian project.

If Morrison’s ten-step list feels familiar, it is because we are witnessing it play out before our eyes. What distinguishes our moment is its speed: where past regimes took years to consolidate control, the current authoritarian movement moves with unprecedented velocity. Project 2025 presents itself as a restoration of “order” and “freedom,” but in practice, it identifies enemies—immigrants, LGBTQ people, educators, journalists, entertainers, and truth-tellers—and seeks to strip them of dignity and voice.

Trump and his collaborators are already isolating these groups through criminalization, censorship, and surveillance systems built by companies such as Palantir. A compliant media environment amplifies their narratives, portraying dissenters as “terrorists” or diversity programs as “indoctrination.” At the same time, the carceral state expands: ICE raids intensify, military units deploy domestically, and new detention centers rise across the country. Entire communities risk being transformed into holding arenas, while fear silences those who might otherwise resist.

The danger lies not only in Trump’s rhetoric or the Republican legislative agenda but also in how quickly these steps become normalized in daily life. When racism is tolerated as just another political opinion, when slurs and scapegoating are dismissed as “just words,” we are already far along the path Morrison described.

Morrison also helps us see another essential point: fascism cannot tolerate independent truth-telling. One of its most persistent enemies has always been a free and independent press. Journalism that exposes lies, corruption, and abuse makes it harder for authoritarianism to take root. For this reason, the media is almost always among the first targets—discredited, intimidated, censored, or destroyed outright.

Yet in the United States, our press has not consistently recognized its duty to defend truth against authoritarianism. Too often, mainstream outlets have parroted the language of power, repeating Donald Trump’s falsehoods verbatim, amplifying his conspiracies, and normalizing his tactics under the guise of “balance” or “both sides.” In chasing ratings and preserving the illusion of neutrality, much of the press has failed to interrogate the deeper architecture of Project 2025 and the white-nationalist agenda it enables.

This is not simply poor coverage; it is a dangerous abdication of responsibility. When journalists repeat lies without context, when headlines flatten authoritarian power grabs into “partisan disputes,” they become participants in the very process Morrison warned about. They transform propaganda into acceptable discourse, making the outrageous seem ordinary. In doing so, they weaken the public’s ability to recognize danger until it has already taken root.

Today, one of the most chilling manifestations of that danger is the convergence of authoritarian ideology with technology and surveillance—what can rightly be called techno-fascism.

At its core, techno-fascism represents a power alliance where state authority merges with unregulated private capital and advanced technology. Figures such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Alex Karp—and companies like Palantir—do not merely influence policy; they engineer the infrastructure of control itself. Their systems enable mass surveillance, predictive policing, and data-driven exclusion. These tools are not speculative; they are being deployed in real time.

“Alligator Alcatraz,” a recently opened detention compound in the Florida Everglades, stands as a stark physical symbol of this new order. Built on a remote airstrip within the Big Cypress National Preserve, the site can hold up to 2,000 people, with plans to expand to 5,000. Constructed in July 2025 under Florida’s state leadership and politically supported by Trump and Ron DeSantis, it has become a monument to dehumanizing detention. Lawsuits note that it was built without environmental review and that conditions are unsanitary and unsafe—including reports of minors held alongside adults and flooding in hurricane-prone zones. Despite judicial orders to wind it down, federal appeals courts have allowed it to remain operational, a stark illustration of how co-equal branches of government have abandoned their constitutional role of restraint.

Meanwhile, ICE has reached historically unprecedented levels of detention. As of late July 2025, nearly 60,000 people were held in ICE custody—many without criminal convictions. By late August, that figure exceeded 61,000, with roughly 70 percent detained despite no criminal record. In late June 2025 alone, ICE booked nearly 927 individuals per day with no convictions—the highest rate in the agency’s history, according to data from Syracuse University. These numbers reveal a system designed not for lawful immigration enforcement but for mass internment.

What is even more chilling is how technology enables this scale of repression. Palantir’s surveillance software allows authorities to track, profile, and target individuals with unprecedented precision and speed. The participation of private-sector technologists underscores that this new regime is not solely political—it is co-engineered by capital, code, and ideology.

Yet fascism, by its nature, is self-defeating. When the state rounds up immigrants and disrupts labor systems, it inflicts harm on itself. Farms lose workers, food production falters, harvests rot. The very consumers who depend on those goods see prices rise as supply shrinks. The economy decays alongside the oppressed.

In Georgia, a recent ICE raid at a Hyundai battery-plant construction site led to the detention of 475 individuals, more than 300 of them South Korean nationals. Many were skilled technicians essential to installing specialized machinery and training staff—work that now cannot easily continue. The raid not only halted production but also caused foreign investors to question U.S. reliability and fairness in labor policy. The United States has become, metaphorically, the ouroboros—the snake devouring itself.

President Trump even offered those South Koreans the option to remain if they chose to, exposing the contradictions of a regime that preaches order and productivity while enacting policies that destroy both. Workers now fear showing up for essential jobs, weakening the industries that depend on them. The ideology driving these policies refuses to recognize that by destroying livelihoods, it destroys the nation’s own economic and moral foundation. Tariff policy, too, fits within this self-defeating cycle—designed more to posture politically than to sustain economic stability.

Before we can move toward solutions, we must ask: why has fascism gained such ground in the United States, and why has the public grown less informed—and more vulnerable—to manipulation? Part of the answer lies in a political culture that has steadily rewarded ignorance instead of competence.

Andy Borowitz, in his book Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber, traces this decline across three stages: ridicule, acceptance, and celebration. He shows how politicians once mocked for ignorance were slowly normalized—until ignorance itself became a political asset. Figures unable to answer basic questions about history, science, or policy were no longer disqualified from leadership. Instead, their lack of knowledge was rebranded as “authenticity” and “relatability.” We, the public, have too often allowed this shift to happen unchallenged.

The result is a vicious cycle. Leaders who are proudly uninformed cannot produce coherent or ethical policies, leaving space for demagogues to fill the vacuum with fear and resentment. The public, seeing ignorance elevated as virtue, becomes less expectant of substance and more willing to accept slogans in place of solutions. This erosion of intellectual expectation has weakened democracy itself, which depends on an informed citizenry to hold power to account. A society that treats knowledge as elitism and ignorance as strength creates fertile ground for fascism to thrive.

Borowitz’s work exposes a deeper truth: the rise of fascism is not only the product of authoritarian ambition but also of a culture that allows ignorance to masquerade as common sense. Without reversing that cultural tide, every effort to defend democracy remains incomplete.

If fascism builds itself step by step, then resistance must be equally deliberate. The antidote cannot be symbolic; it must be sustained, collective, and rooted in moral clarity.

First, we must recognize that passivity is complicity. Morrison’s warning about incremental steps reminds us that each silence, each shrug, each refusal to challenge lies becomes another brick in the structure of repression. Combating fascism means refusing normalization—calling things what they are, even when doing so is uncomfortable or dangerous. When we speak out together, we dilute the risk and strengthen one another. Language matters. Truth matters. Resistance begins with the courage to name what we see.

Second, informed awareness must become collective action. Fascism thrives when people feel isolated or powerless. The opposite is true: solidarity is fascism’s greatest weakness. Communities can build mutual-aid networks, local defense organizations, and cross-racial, cross-class coalitions. Where fascism divides, resistance unites. In workplaces, unions, neighborhoods, and schools, ordinary people wield extraordinary power when they act together.

Third, the battle must be fought within institutions themselves. We must defend public education, libraries, independent media, and democratic processes from erosion. That also means reforming—or dismantling—institutions already corrupted by authoritarian influence, such as policing, immigration enforcement, and compliant media conglomerates. History teaches that fascism collapses when its instruments of control lose legitimacy. Protecting voting rights, ensuring transparency in government contracting, and regulating surveillance technologies are not peripheral issues—they are front-line defenses of democracy.

Finally, we must reclaim a culture that values knowledge over ignorance. As Borowitz argues, when ignorance is celebrated, fascism finds oxygen. Combating this requires cultural renewal: education, science, art, and critical thinking are not luxuries—they are the infrastructure of freedom. A society that encourages people to question, imagine, and learn is far less vulnerable to authoritarian manipulation.

Fascism is not inevitable. It is powerful and frightening, but also fragile—built on lies, fear, and division, all of which can be overcome. Each time we reject those tools, organize across the lines they harden, and insist on truth, justice, and solidarity, we chip away at fascism’s foundation. Resistance is not optional; it is essential. And it must be as persistent and strategic as the forces seeking to undo democracy.

The story of fascism is not confined to history books. It is being written now—on our soil, in our institutions, and in our neighborhoods. The names and technologies may change, but the tactics remain constant: identify an enemy, isolate them, dehumanize them, criminalize them, and then pretend it is all for “order” or “tradition.” Humanity has seen these steps too many times before.

We stand now at a decisive point. For generations, Americans have lived with a sense of relative stability—but every generation is tested, and this is ours. The question is not whether fascism is rising; it already has. The question is whether we will confront it or surrender to it. Apathy is surrender. Silence is surrender. Hoping it will pass is surrender.

The path ahead is uncertain, but one truth remains: fascism cannot survive without our cooperation. It thrives only when we choose not to notice, not to speak, not to resist. Democracy, by contrast, demands that we notice, speak, resist, and act.

So what does that action look like? It begins close to home. Talk with your neighbors. Support your coworkers. Join or create organizations that defend human rights and democracy. Refuse to let racist jokes, slurs, or lies pass unchallenged. Protect the vulnerable when they are targeted—whether in streets, schools, or workplaces. Small acts of solidarity accumulate into a force greater than fear.

It also means reengaging in public life. Vote, yes—but do not mistake voting for the entirety of democracy. Attend local meetings. Defend libraries. Support independent journalism. Demand accountability from elected officials. Protest unjust laws and policies. Boycott corporations that bankroll authoritarian movements and support those that uphold justice. Build mutual-aid networks so that when the state withholds care, communities still endure.

And finally, it means holding fast to imagination and joy. Fascism feeds on despair, convincing people that no alternative exists. But alternatives always exist—they are built when people believe and labor for them together. The civil rights movement, the labor movement, the struggles for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights all remind us that victory comes when ordinary people refuse silence and refuse to surrender their hope.

The future of this country—and the promise of democracy itself—depends on whether we can see clearly, name honestly, and act decisively. The work will not be easy, but it is necessary, and it belongs to all of us. Let us each do our part.