Writing in the Age of Fascism
- Kal Inois
- May 9
- 8 min read
People sometimes ask us why we go so deep into federal policy, Supreme Court rulings, counterterrorism strategies, and congressional maps. Some claim we are wasting our time. Here is the honest answer.
We want to be direct with you about something. When we sit down to write about a Supreme Court ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act, or a counterterrorism strategy that classifies transgender people alongside ISIS, or a reconciliation bill that funnels a billion dollars of your money into a White House ballroom, we are not doing it because we enjoy cataloguing the ways this country is being broken. We are doing it because we believe, deeply and without apology, that an informed person is a dangerous person to the people in power who are counting on our exhaustion, our confusion, and our silence.
This is not academic for us. We have watched this unfold in real time, and we have watched people around us shut down under the weight of it. The news cycle is relentless. The crises stack on top of each other so fast that by the time you have processed one outrage, three more have replaced it. Exhaustion is a governing strategy, and it is being used deliberately. When people feel overwhelmed, they disengage. And when people disengage, the people doing this win without a fight.
We have never been good at looking away. Writing is how we refuse to, and our hope is that everyone who reads these words stays engaged in our fight for a free and fair nation.
The Federal Picture
Every article written for Citizens Against Tyranny Network focuses on large federal issues because that is where the architecture of what is happening to this country lives. The Supreme Court that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act was built over thirty years by one man and a billion dollars in dark money. The counterterrorism strategy that named anti-fascists and transgender people as terrorists was written by the President's own senior director and signed as official government policy. The gerrymandered maps erasing Black congressional districts were drawn under direct pressure from the White House. Elon Musk and DOGE were handed control of Treasury, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security data with no legal authority and zero accountability. NPR and PBS were defunded by executive order, and journalists across the country have been targeted, sued, and intimidated for doing their jobs. When the Supreme Court guts voting rights, your Black neighbors lose their congressional representation. When a counterterrorism strategy classifies dissent as terrorism, your friends who protest can be surveilled, mapped, and targeted. When a billion-dollar dark money network installs judges for life, your community loses its ability to seek justice in court. None of this stays in Washington. Every one of these decisions has an address, and that address is yours.
We write about all of it at the federal level because that is where it originates. But we want to be very clear about why we write about them at all, because this is the part that matters most to us personally:
We write about the big picture so that when you walk into your local voting booth, you know exactly what you are walking into and exactly what your vote means.
Every federal policy we write about lands somewhere closer to home. A Supreme Court ruling lands in a Tennessee courtroom where Black voters just lost their representation. A counterterrorism strategy lands in the inbox of a federal agent who can now legally map the membership of your local activist group. An executive order defunding public media lands in the newsroom of your local public radio station. These decisions are made in Washington and enforced in your neighborhood, by people your neighbors elected, or failed to elect. The people sitting in those local seats right now are either fighting what is happening or enabling it. Many of them are running for reelection in November 2026. Many of their opponents are running to replace them. And most people have no idea who any of them are, because local races do not get the coverage that federal races do, and because the exhaustion of following the national news leaves people with nothing left for the races closest to home.
The Local Picture
We want to push back hard against the idea that local elections are somehow less important than national ones. They are not. In many ways they are more important, because they are the elections where your single vote has the most direct and immediate impact, and because the people who win local races today become the state legislators, the attorneys general, the governors, and the members of Congress of tomorrow.
The Republican supermajority that repealed fifty years of redistricting law in Tennessee in three days did not appear out of nowhere. Those legislators were elected in local and state races that most people did not pay attention to, in years when turnout was low and the outcomes felt abstract. They built their power in the spaces progressives left uncontested. And now they are using that power to carve up majority-Black cities, strip transgender people of legal recognition, and hand †rump's regime everything it needs to stay in power indefinitely.
That is what happens when we ignore the issues close to home. It ultimately stems from a federal policy, and we must treat our local elections accordingly.
Every vote cast in a local election is not just one vote. It is a vote that shapes the political landscape for years, sometimes decades, to come. A school board member who bans books and attacks teachers today becomes a state legislator who restricts voting rights tomorrow. A county commissioner who gerrymanders local districts today helps elect a congressman who votes to gut Medicaid next year. The connections are direct, documented, and devastating when we ignore them.
These decisions do not stop at your state line. What Tennessee's supermajority did to Memphis this week is already being replicated in Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina. One local election, one state legislature, one gerrymandered map spreads like a blueprint across the entire country.
The Demand for Blue Votes
We are going to be direct about this and say it plainly. If you are looking for where to put your vote in November 2026, the evidence points clearly in one direction: Democratic, up and down the ballot. Not as a matter of party loyalty. As a matter of survival. What we are facing is not a policy disagreement or an ideological divide between two parties with different visions for the country. What we are facing is the organized construction of a fascist state, funded by billionaires, built through captured courts, and enforced by a Republican Party that has made its choice and does not intend to reverse it. The Democratic Party is not perfect. No party is. But it is the only electoral force currently standing between this country and the permanent consolidation of authoritarian rule. That is why we ask for Democratic votes. Not out of enthusiasm for a party. Out of clarity about what we are up against.
Yes, in fact we are within a fascist state today. We are using that word because it is the accurate one, and because we think the discomfort people feel when they hear it is part of what the people doing this are counting on. They count on us being too polite, too careful, too worried about sounding extreme to name what is actually happening. Being careful with our language has gotten us nowhere and even further within the authoritarianism. What is happening in this country right now is authoritarian governance in service of white supremacist goals, funded by billionaires, executed by a captured judiciary, and protected by a Republican Party that has classified political opponents as terrorists and is living with it.
Being moderate or neutral in the face of fascism is not balance. It is complicity. We owe this country more than careful language. We owe it the truth. The answer is not sitting this one out because you are tired, or because you feel like nothing ever changes, or because your candidate did not make it through the primary. The answer is voting, organizing, showing up, and bringing everyone you know with you.
November 2026 is less than six months away. That is not a long time, and the people trying to lock in permanent authoritarian rule know it. They are drawing maps, suspending primaries, and passing laws right now specifically to make your vote count less before you even get to cast it. Which is exactly why you must cast it. And when you do, the choice is binary in practical terms. Third party candidates exist, but they have never broken through the structural barriers of the American electoral system, and in close races their votes have historically handed victory to the side furthest from their values. The 2000 election was decided by 537 votes in Florida, where third party votes exceeded that margin many times over. In 2016, third party and write-in votes in key swing states exceeded †rump's margin of victory in several of them. A third party vote or an empty ballot is, in practical terms, a vote for the continuation of everything described in this article. The choice in November 2026 is Republican or Democrat. One of those parties is building a fascist state. The other is the only force with the electoral power to stop it. That is not a complicated calculation. That is the reality we are living in.
Our Needs
Here is how we fight this together:
If our writing hits home and you know others who would benefit from it, share it with them.
Use this information to start conversations with people in your life who have checked out, who feel hopeless, who think their vote does not matter.
Tell them what is actually at stake. Tell them what the Supreme Court just did to the Voting Rights Act. Tell them what the counterterrorism strategy says about their neighbors. Tell them what the gerrymandered maps mean for the next generation of Black political representation.
We will be voting Democratic, up and down the ballot, in every election on our ballot in November 2026. We hope you will too.
Show up for local races. Know who is running for your school board, your county commission, your state legislature. Those seats matter as much as any Senate race.
Contact your U.S. Senators and your U.S. Representative and demand they support the Freedom to Vote Act.
Bring everyone you know with you to the polls.
Refuse to be exhausted into silence.
Because here is the truth we keep coming back to: the people doing this to our country are not a majority. They have never been a majority. They are a well-organized, well-funded minority that has built institutional control precisely because they understand that power does not go to the people with the most votes. It goes to the people who show up, stay organized, and refuse to be exhausted into silence. They have been doing that work for thirty years. We can do it in six months if enough of us decide to.
Every single vote cast in November 2026, from the race for the United States Senate down to your local school board, is a vote that multiplies. It multiplies into the political will to pass the Freedom to Vote Act. It multiplies into the Senate majority that confirms the next Supreme Court justice. It multiplies into the state legislature that refuses to gerrymander a majority-Black city out of existence. It multiplies into the school board that keeps books on shelves and teachers in classrooms. It multiplies into the future we are either going to fight for or surrender by default.
We write this so that you know what you are fighting for. Now go fight for it.
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