Stop Normalizing Fascism

If not now, then when?

A note on who I am: I’m an investigative journalist who’s spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I called the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: a tech bro oligarchy, aka the Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.

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I’m back to mocking up my own front pages

I did this in the first weeks after the inauguration last year when it felt like the mainstream media and the political establishment was wholly failing to meet the moment. It was the most graphic way I could think of to spell out what was happening.

That’s overwhelmingly how I feel tonight after the news from the weekend and after getting off a Zoom with the historian Robert Kagan, more on that below.

I know it’s hard in a roiling news cycle of daily new crises, but we have no hope of taking the actions necessary, if we refuse to see what’s plainly before our eyes.

All through this year, moments of Trump-induced crisis have brought me a personal sense of relief: a relief that, at least, the crisis was now visible. That the stakes were now unignorable. And yesterday, that’s what I thought would be the outcome of Trump’s latest statement in which he said he would hold Europe financial hostage until Denmark bequeathed him Greenland. At least, I thought, we, here in Europe, would be shaken out of our stupor.

But today, it’s been business as normal.

It’s actually unfair to pick on the New York Times on this one though their strategy of making the chocolate chip cookie recipe as big the today-in-fascism story is not, I feel, a very helpful example of communicating news priorities.

Unfair, because the crisis today is squarely in Europe too and our newspapers are no better. We are in a profound geopolitical crisis. The world that we have known is no more. Not that you’d get this from the front page headlines.

We are now facing an aggressor in the East - Russia - and an aggressor in the West - the United States. Aggressors, who we now know beyond doubt, are not just aligned but working together.

And here we are in a crushing suicidal embrace with a country which has openly declared hostilities on us, its NATO allies.

Yet today, our prime minister announced a policy of appeasement.

And the newspapers have simply followed his lead.

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Read his lips

If you heard the news on the radio or TV or saw a headline on a passing social media post, I recommend reading the actual text of Trump’s Truth Social post.

Language matters. Tariffs will start at 10% and rise to 25%, he says, “until such a time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

I read it on Saturday night and woke Sunday morning from a dream in which I was fleeing a wildfire. Actually, it was the moment just before, when it engulfed a cliff above my house and I had to make the split-second decision on whether to run.

We have neither cliffs nor wildfires in North London. I don’t even live in a house. Later, I found myself Googling “What did Hitler say about the Sudetenland?” and found this:

“My patience is now an end.” The Fuhrer had made an offer to Herr Benes and it is now “peace or war in his hands”.

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Trump’s patience is now at an end

Some people still believe and even quote Godwin’s Law - the formulation that the longer an online discussion goes on, the higher the probability of someone invoking the Nazis. They would find the analogy above facetious.

I wish. For starters, Mike Godwin, the originator of that law, suspended that law back in 2017 when neo-Nazis paraded through Charlottesville with flaming tiki torches.

And while, it wasn’t across the front banner headline, even the New York Times is now saying the F word. It ran a good piece this week headlined “The Resistance Libs were Right” by Michelle Goldberg (gift link).

It begins:

“For the last decade there’s been a debate, among people who don’t like Donald Trump, about whether he’s a fascist,” she begins. “It’s striking how much the arguments that Trump is not a fascist have suffered in just the first few days of this year, in which we’ve plunged to new depths of national madness.”

It was a historian of fascism who pointed out the article to me. A historian who’s faced repeated online abuse and academic backlash over the last decade for warning about Trump and what he means.

I hope people have said sorry, I texted back.

This is true. And the New York Times’s headline helpfully sums up the scathing language and ironic minimization that so many academics, historians, journalists and ordinary people who could see what was happening faced. In the US, they were “resistance libs”, in the UK “remoaners”.

And even now, there is still an inability to process what our eyes and ears are telling us. To take just one example of this, the extreme brutality of what is happening in Minneapolis is undercut by extreme ridiculousness.

Have you seen the man dressed as a fox being tackled to the ground and cuffed by masked militiamen?

Or the disabled US military veteran being dragged out of her car and beaten?

The absurdity is as hard to process as the brutality. But that’s the point. The what-the-fuck-is-this of everything happening in Minneapolis is the point of it.

This outfit went viral on social media yesterday despite any half-decent scriptwriter telling you that dressing a violent militia commander in an SS trenchcoat is just too on-the-nose.

But that’s where we are. In some weird fucked-up loop in the space-time continuum between an Internet meme and the clearing of the Warsaw ghetto. Back in 2017, many people couldn’t get beyond the Charlottesville tiki torches. There were entire satirical columns about the lameness of the guys who’d shopped at Target for their klan accessories. That’s what stuck in the memory not the violent white supremacy that’s festered underground and that had now surged to the surface.

Godwin’s new law: by all means call the shitheads, Nazis.

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Please ignore the pundits

It’s the Beltway “experts” and Westminster blowhards who’ve failed us. It’s historians we need right now. This is the best thing I’ve listened to all week. It’s an interview with Robert Kagan, a conservative historian and former Republican, who wrote a column about for the Washington Post in 2016 headlined “This is how fascism comes to America”. It’s an astonishingly prescient piece written before Trump had even won the nomination.

Kagan insists he wasn’t prescient. He says he was just a historian who recognised what he was seeing. And he’s the first person I’ve heard this week who’s clearly and viscerally articulated the situation facing both America and Europe.

We are past the Trump is a “threat to democracy” stage. Kagan is clear that there will not be free and fair elections in 2026, because that is what Trump and his team is saying.

“Unless they got up on the rooftops and said they were going to subvert the 2022 election, they could not be more obvious.”

And the danger of the current moment is the people who are still refusing to recognise what we are all now seeing.

“The world we’ve known is completely shattered. It will not be repaired until some global catastrophe that leads to some kind of reset.”

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Out on the fringes

That’s where I am now. I’m here on Substack and with my ex-Guardian and Observer colleagues at our insurgent new news outlet, The Nerve (our indie grassroots response to the interlocking media and political crises we’re facing).

Except, this isn’t the fringe. 150,000 people read last week’s newsletter on Palantir and the disastrous £240m deal that the UK government has just signed to embed Peter Thiel’s data surveillance machinery at the heart of the our government.

To put that into context: it’s substantially bigger than the circulation of the newspaper that used to employ me. And not a single national outlet has been on this story. It’s perhaps not a shock, therefore, that the only vaguely mainstream figure to show an interest was the closest thing Britain has to Zohran Mamdani.

Zack Polanski is the new rising star of UK progressive politics. The 43-year-old leader of the Green party, Polanski is attracting a majority young audience with an unashamedly left-wing agenda. Last week, he invited me on his podcast, Bold Politics and among the subjects covered was Palantir and Starmer’s disastrous tech deals.

There’s a clip here though consider these words muted compared to what they’d have been if we’d recorded it this week:

The whole thing is here on YouTube:

On Apple, here, and here on Spotify:

It was frankly a bit weird to be interviewed by a politician rather than to do the interviewing but what Polanski is doing could be described as “podcast politics”. He’s on a listening brief and taking his audience on a journey. It’s a clever show-not-tell strategy and it’s clearly working.

Still, it could be worse. We could be Denmark. A commenter on last week’s article (thank you!) also pointed out another user of Palantir’s services: Denmark.

The country is in the extraordinary position of having the software owned by one of Trump’s closest allies embedded into the heart of its intelligence operations. What could go wrong?

This is where we are now. And this is where the UK will be if Keir Starmer continues with the policies he’s pursuing. An article in Intelligence Online this week says that Denmark is “discreetly” seeking options to replace Palantir. Let’s hope so. And fast.

Especially since one military intelligence account I follow on Twitter is suggesting that the 11th Airborne Brigade, the 1,500 troops that reports say are being transferred to Minnesota, may actually be heading to Greenland. Let’s hope not.

Your final reminder:

Note: I removed an AI-generated video from this post after a reader correctly identified it.