The question nobody seems to want asked in print: what would it actually take to win against fascism in America?

Not to resist. To win.

The question has ugly answers, due to the ugliness of Trump wanting to get as ugly as possible, which is perhaps why journalists avoid it.

We shouldn’t look at wrestling a big dangerous pig in the mud and think an article about stain remover for white socks is going to be our strategy.

What many seem to avoid saying: Trump is at war with America.

His team keeps saying they are waging war, calling innocent citizens domestic terrorists. Even those who defend innocent citizens being attacked by Trump are called domestic terrorists. Their war rhetoric is not by accident. They’re not stupid. “War on Christmas“, remember?

In the early 1920s, Ford’s Dearborn Publishing Company released a four-volume set of essays penned by Ford and a handful of aides called The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. […] In a sense, this was the first shot fired in the “War on Christmas” wars and a blueprint for how these arguments would play-out for the next century. At no point has Christmas or anyone’s right to celebrate it been under attack, yet this endures as a way to attack…

Trump wants his followers to believe they are fighting a very particular kind of war in America. A war that Henry Ford wrote about. Meanwhile the American “resistance” acts like a moral witness campaign, which is what you do to feel good about losing. You end up starving to death holding nothing but receipts, while Trump gorges himself.

Let’s be honest about the dangers, because this is the exact reason why we study the rise of fascism in the 1930s so carefully and thoroughly.

This is why it’s appropriate to make the parallels to Henry Ford and his disciple Adolf Hitler: by the time you’re organizing food deliveries to families in hiding and don’t let children outside, you’ve already lost the phase of the conflict where winning was still within democratic norms.

The SPD after the Nazis seized control kept publishing newspapers, organizing workers, believing that exposing the Trump-like brutality would matter in 1933. They were documenting their loss of democracy in real time while calling it a resistance.

Imagine measuring water rising inside the Titanic and saying shovel coal, pump faster. There’s a certain level of situational awareness that predicts whether you are calculating actual survival paths.

The Atlantic, for example, published a sedative disguised as a stimulant. It makes readers feel something is being done in America about Trump. That evidence of courage is being recorded, that some community is holding, that the arc is bending. You finish reading and feel… what? Inspired? Reassured some good guys exist?

Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong:
The pushback against ICE exposed a series of mistaken assumptions. By Adam Serwer

Has a Holocaust movie ever been made that didn’t include a positive angle somewhere about survival or a glimmer of humanity? We cannot culturally process atrocity without a redemptive frame. Schindler has to save some. The boy in striped pajamas has to represent innocence. We’re narratively incapable of confronting “and then it just got worse, and worse, until external force stopped it.”

I have two degrees in it. Go figure.

That need for positive emotional release, as displayed by The Atlantic, is the risk of obliterating signs of actual dangers. It substitutes for the harder but honest recognition that Minnesotans have been losing, badly.

Alex Pretti was unmistakably good. A real American hero serving his country, and he was publicly executed for it.

And that was right after Renee Good, also an innocent citizen, was publicly executed.

ICE killed as many people last year as the four prior years combined.

Tens of thousands are in detention already, with ICE concentration camp plans underway to detain hundreds of thousands without due process.

Families are hiding.

Children are being sent away and shielded from the horrors of ICE.

Three hundred forty-seven district court judges ruled against the administration’s detention policies, yet it didn’t amount to a hill of beans because Trump implemented a “Schutzhaft” court bypass method from… 1933 Germany.

The state brings guns and shoots people who dare to carry them. The resistance has whistles.

And the Atlantic piece frames all this disparity as victory because Bovino got fired after months of wearing a literal Nazi uniform while parading thousands of Trump stormtroopers through cities, beating, detaining and killing innocent people?

That’s the definition now of victory? At this rate by next year the definition will be a slice of bread on the table.

Let me tell you some Minnesota history that almost never gets told. I’ve personally confronted Nazis in Minnesota, I’ve spent decades working on this subject. Here’s some of what needs to be said.

The Silver Shirts came to Minneapolis in the late 1930s planning rallies, organizing, building the same momentum that their German counterparts had used. What stopped them wasn’t an ACLU or public solidarity or moral witness.

Nope. None of those made the difference.

It was Meyer Lansky’s networks coordinating with local Jewish communities to show up at Nazi rallies and beat them bloody. Repeatedly. Until organizing a fascist rally meant your people would end up scared for their lives and in the hospital.

The Office of Strategic Services (later, the CIA) in fact employed the Syndicate in some covert operations. During World War II, the Syndicate helped with the invasion of Sicily and in protecting the Eastern waterfront against German sabotage. Some of the Syndicate’s major drug traffickers were used as informants and assassins in the Cold War. As one White House official described the government’s relationship with Lansky, “The government turned to him because hiring thugs was what government and business had been doing for a long time to control workers, and because it could conceive little other choice in the system at hand.”

This is the history that doesn’t fit the narrative. American fascism in 1930s Minnesota wasn’t defeated by democratic norms or courageous nonviolent resistance. It was defeated by private organized pro-democratic violence that the state permitted through selective blindness.

Berman learned that Silver Shirts were mounting a rally at a nearby Elks’ Lodge. When the Nazi leader called for all the “Jew bastards” in the city to be expelled, or worse, Berman and his associates burst in to the room and started cracking heads. After ten minutes, they had emptied the hall. His suit covered in blood, Berman took the microphone and announced, “This is a warning. Anybody who says anything against Jews gets the same treatment. Only next time it will be worse.” After Berman broke up two more rallies, there were no more public Silver Shirt meetings in Minneapolis.

The Jewish community in the 1930s didn’t write articles about the Silver Shirts. They busted heads and broke bones until organizing fascist rallies became physically dangerous. That history is so uncomfortable to tell precisely because it’s instructive. It’s also almost impossible to find evidence, for a good reason.

So what’s the 2026 connection? Reversal. They threatened to “ice” the Nazis. Now ICE is the Nazis.

The state holds a monopoly on legitimate violence. When the state becomes fascist, any effective resistance is illegitimate by definition – the fascist state controls what “legitimate” means.

That’s the trap.

Trump understands this. That’s why he fraudulently pre-labels innocent nurses and moms as “domestic terrorists” so his troops can murder them before they’ve done anything. Hegseth fraudulently invokes “enemy within” and “wartime footing.” They’re building bogus justification frameworks now, so everyone sees any level of resistance is already authorized for extrajudicial execution.

In 1930s Minnesota, the state looked away while communities defended themselves against people who talked like Trump. That selective blindness made extralegal defense against Nazism possible.

Now? The guys in masks with guns ARE the state. The Klan, Nazis, Boogaloo and Proud Boys operate wearing federal authority masks. The institutions that might have looked away have been captured. There’s no third party. There’s no one to appeal to. Trump talks about governors and mayors like they are just one button-press away from detention or assassination.

Nonviolent resistance works when there’s a third party appeal, a conscience to shock, an institution to intervene, an ally with power. When the state itself is the aggressor and also controls the narrative, all the valor means little more than defeat.

What’s the theory of change that isn’t just “bear witness until something external comes to our rescue”?

The next six months will tell. If Trump continues trying to lower his popularity before summer to invoke military dictatorship and cancel fall elections, you will see how and why The Atlantic was wrong to spin sugary tales of success.

The courts have not been defeated. They have been bypassed. In 1933, this distinction did not matter. There is no evidence it matters now.

A federal judge wrote Sunday that the Trump administration is attempting to “coerce perpetual, infinite detention” by defying court orders. Three hundred forty-seven district court judges have ruled against the administration’s detention policies. Twenty have ruled in favor.

Does a 95% win ratio sound good? It’s not enough, in a system designed to operate faster than judicial review. It is documentation of abuse, executive power operating without check.

The win ratio is both damning and the kind of success that failed to stop Hitler.

This requires explanation.

The Schutzhaft Mechanism

On February 28, 1933, Germany’s Reichstag Fire Decree suspended constitutional protections including habeas corpus. The decree enabled Schutzhaft (“protective custody”): administrative detention without judicial warrant or review. As the infamous saying went:

If you cannot recognise the will of the Fuhrer as a source of law, then you cannot remain a judge

Schutzhaft had three structural features:

1. Administrative classification. Detention was ordered by police, not courts. No judicial finding was required.
2. Speed. Detainees were moved to camps before legal challenges could be filed. Within two months, 25,000 people were detained in Prussia alone.
3. Parallel track. Regular courts continued to function for ordinary matters. Schutzhaft operated outside their jurisdiction entirely.

German courts were not abolished, packed, or corrupted. They became irrelevant to the detention system. Judges continued to rule. The camps continued to fill. These two facts did not contradict each other.

The Trump Version

The American detention apparatus today shares the exact same three features.

1. Administrative classification. In July 2025, DHS issued an internal memo reinterpreting existing law to classify most undocumented immigrants as “applicants for admission” subject to mandatory detention. No legislation. No judicial approval. A memo.
2. Speed. The administration provides detainees 12-24 hours to express intent to challenge detention. Physical removal frequently occurs before judicial review. When Judge Boasberg issued a restraining order halting deportation flights to El Salvador, the planes had already departed. The detainees are now in CECOT prison. DHS officials transfer Minnesota detainees to Texas within days of arrest, removing them from the jurisdiction of Minnesota courts before cases can be heard.
3. Parallel track. Immigration courts are executive branch entities under the Department of Justice, not Article III courts. The administration has fired immigration judges and is replacing them with military lawyers. Cases pending in immigration court are dismissed; detainees are immediately re-arrested and placed in expedited removal, an administrative process with minimal judicial oversight.

The Relevant Numbers

District court rulings on detention policy: 347 against the administration, 20 in favor.

Supreme Court emergency stays of district court orders: 17 granted to the administration, 1 denied.

ICE detainees as of December 2025: 66,000, a record.

Deaths in ICE custody, fiscal year 2025: 23. Previous four years combined: 24.

The Logic

District courts rule against detention policy. The administration appeals. The Supreme Court grants emergency stays. Policy continues during appeal. Appeals take months. Deportations take days.

The 347 district court rulings create a record yet do not prevent detention. The detainees those rulings concern have frequently been transferred out of jurisdiction or removed from the country before the ruling issues.

A system in which courts rule correctly but after the fact is a system in which executive action goes unconstrained.

The Nazi Schutzhaft of 1933 is the entire Trump bypass story of 2026.

Judge Davis, in his Sunday ruling, identified the mechanism: the administration is “stretch[ing] the legal process to the breaking point in an attempt to deny noncitizens their due process rights.”

Stretching the process to the breaking point is not the same as violating the process. The process continues. The detentions will ramp even faster.

The 2026 Reality

The German legal profession in 1933 observed that courts were still functioning. This was true. Cases were heard. Rulings were issued. The Schutzhaft system was not subject to those rulings. We know how the concentration camps evolved after that.

The question is not whether American courts are ruling correctly. They are. The question is whether those rulings have any hope of constraining the American detention system tomorrow if not today.

Current evidence, based on Nazi history, indicates they do not.

Grant’s Enforcement Acts were designed to do one thing: prosecute the Klan.

The Supreme Court gutted them within a decade.

United States v. Cruikshank (1876) established that the Fourteenth Amendment only restricts state action. The federal government cannot protect Black citizens from private white violence. That’s a state matter.

Southern states, well, you know, “declined” to prosecute Klan.

The Klan’s members often were state actors—sheriffs, deputies, judges—who refused to prosecute themselves. And the doctrine gave them an obvious loophole: put on a hood, become a “private” actor. The same men who wore a badge by day wore a sheet by night. Federal law couldn’t reach them in private citizen garb, and the state law wouldn’t because the state was them.

It’s why ICE wears masks today.

This protection of domestic terrorists worked exactly as intended. Trump’s father was arrested at a violent Klan march in 1927. Look how that turned out.

Black Americans died by the thousands without federal remedy. In Tulsa, 1921, white mobs murdered war veterans and dumped bodies into unmarked mass graves. The Klan built a celebratory hall on the ruins of Black Wall Street.

Trump talks about his destruction of the White House East Wing the same way.

Now watch what happens when you reverse the polarity, and put the enemies of President Grant in the White House.

The Trump administration is using an anti-Ku Klux Klan law to prosecute Minnesota activists for demonstrating… charged with conspiracy to deprive rights—a federal felony under Section 241, a Reconstruction-era statute enacted to safeguard the rights of Black Americans to vote and engage in public life amid the KKK’s racial violence. Levy Armstrong and Allen are both prominent Black community organizers.

Black organizers protested violence by a federal official. The state is acting. No doctrinal barrier applies. Section 241, as the fragment of Grant’s law that survived, activates instantly to target the very people it was meant to protect.

The law was carefully stripped of power by jurists who saw Reconstruction as the crime. It couldn’t protect Black Americans from private violence.

Yet it retained full power to punish Black Americans if they dared to confront state violence.

The local courts, reversed from history, now try to provide some protection, while Trump intentionally tries to overwhelm them with frivolous and empty attacks. Minnesota magistrates have rejected warrant after warrant because of no probable cause, no evidence of crime. One judge threw out a complaint about an egg thrown at a car. Another rejected the charges, and then saw Bondi loudly announce them anyway.

Trump doesn’t care about laws. They don’t matter to him. The terror of an arrest, the harm of publishing charges, is the punishment. The waste of time and money in a painful process is the point.

“It’s our fucking city,” his CBP commander Gregory “SS Mantel” Bovino told masked men geared up to storm a neighborhood. “Arrest as many people that touch you as you want to.”

Imagine what Fred Trump said after being arrested at a 1927 Klan march, apparently for violence against police, and then look at that rhetoric.

See the long game? They call it QQQ.

This is the Lost Cause over three generations waiting for their Klan to rise yet again, repeatedly defeated yet never fully prosecuted.

This is using the legal system to be as racist as the legal system will allow. The Klan’s descendants didn’t repeal Reconstruction. They protested it and sabotaged it until they could capture it.

Prosecuting Black civil rights organizers under anti-Klan statutes was always the game plan. Whatever is architected for safety will be weaponized into a tool of terror.

It fits with decades of saying registration of guns would be the end of freedom, and then forcing registration. Or more recently, after decades of open carry being a sacred right, wearing a holstered gun in public is now a crime so severe it’s punishable by immediate state firing squad execution.

The BBC is spraying disinformation about Monroe Doctrine history in order to normalize Trump’s rejection of doctrinal frameworks entirely. Some reporters mistake this for historical analysis. Here’s an example from Allan Little:

When it was announced by the fifth president of the US, James Monroe, the doctrine that bears his name was widely seen as an expression of US solidarity with its neighbours… But the doctrine quickly became an assertion of Washington’s right to dominate its neighbours and use any means, up to and including military intervention, to bend their policies into alignment with American interests. President Theodore Roosevelt, in 1904, said it gave the US “international police power” to intervene in countries where there was “wrongdoing”. So could it be that President Trump’s re-interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine is simply part of a continuum in US foreign policy?

No.

Little’s piece does something sophisticated and dangerous: it uses a valid critique of American hypocrisy to launder an analytical collapse.

The piece opens with a Pakistani student’s observation from 2002 that the rules-based international order was “partially false”—that the strongest exempted themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, that international law applied with varying rigor depending on identity. This critique is correct. American hypocrisy is real. Guatemala, Chad, Indonesia, Somalia, Iran, Grenada, Panama—the record is damning.

But Little makes a fatal logical leap: because the US violated rules it claimed to uphold, Trump’s rejection of rules entirely is just “more of the same.”

That’s the sleight of hand. The Pakistani student’s critique depends on there being rules to violate. Hypocrisy requires a standard being betrayed. You can only call American intervention hypocritical if there’s a framework against which to measure the betrayal.

Trump’s National Defense Strategy announces there is no standard. It explicitly purges the “rules-based international order,” calling it “cloud-castle abstractions.” It replaces doctrine with “concrete interests first”—the sovereign decides, justification follows.

That’s not Monroe perverted. That’s Monroe rejected.

The difference is categorical: a policeman who takes twenty dollars to look the other way is corrupt. A policeman who announces “I am the law” is something else. The Nuremberg Trials drew this distinction for a reason.

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Little pulls historian Jay Sexton into his frame, asking whether Trump’s “unpredictability” gives America “a 19th century feel.” Perhaps excited to discuss his expertise, Sexton accepts the premise and speaks about Great Power rivalries from 1815 onward.

Wrong question, wrong century.

Nineteenth-century balance-of-power politics had rules—that’s what made it a “balance.” Monroe created a framework. Roosevelt perverted that framework. Trump says framework? What framework? There’s only me.

It’s like the BBC asking whether Bernie Madoff’s interpretation of retirement savings represents a continuum on Wall Street. Madoff was committing fraud while claiming to invest. The crime isn’t an aggressive interpretation on an infinite slope. The crime is that no interpretation was happening at all. The activity being claimed wasn’t the activity being performed.

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The interventions Little lists—Iran ’53, Guatemala ’54, Grenada ’83, Panama ’89—were all justified through frameworks. Anti-communism. Protecting democracy. Fighting drugs. The justifications were often lies, but the lies mattered. They created accountability surfaces. You could argue the US was violating its stated principles.

Trump’s “concrete interests first” eliminates the accountability surface. There’s no principle to violate. The justification is generated after the decision—by algorithmic slop if necessary.

Check the simple math. Trump applying Monroe would mean China is the threat to keep out of the Western Hemisphere. That’s foundational to Monroe. Yet the Pentagon was ordered to deprioritize China. The Trump NDS downgrades threats to the hemisphere while prioritizing “credible military options” against American neighbors and allies. China is opening trade with Canada and cementing itself in Latin America, yet Trump targets Canada while ignoring the thing Monroe would have worried about most.

That’s not Monroe extended. It’s Monroe inverted.

Monroe 1823	Trump 2026
Drafted by Adams, debated in cabinet, presented to Congress	Unilateral executive, note-card attention span
Welcomed by regional leaders as solidarity against colonization	Threatening neighbors and allies with military force
Framework to keep external powers out	“Concrete interests first”—no framework, external threats deprioritized
Created predictability by design	Unpredictability by design
Middle power proposing defensive solidarity	Superpower rejecting all constraint
Progressive. Embraced order and institutions	Regressive. Explicit rejection of “rules-based order” as abstraction

Little spends considerable space on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech, where Carney called for “middle powers” to unite against Great Power politics. Little frames this as a response to Trump abandoning the rules-based order. He doesn’t notice the irony: that’s exactly what Monroe was doing in 1823.

The US wasn’t a superpower then. It was a post-colonial republic barely four decades old, addressing other post-colonial republics, proposing mutual defense against the actual great powers—European empires. Monroe Doctrine was middle-power solidarity against imperial aggression.

Carney is the one who actually calls for a return to Monroe’s original posture. Trump is the empire Monroe organized against. Little cites both without seeing that his “continuum” runs in the wrong direction.

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The actual American lineage for Trump isn’t Monroe at all if you are familiar with Jackson’s Florida campaign in the 1810s. The future President manufactured security pretexts, delegitimized indigenous governance, deployed overwhelming force, ignored legal constraints. Mussolini studied this playbook for Ethiopia in 1935. Hitler industrialized it for the Sudetenland in 1938. Each iteration refined the template.

What we call this today is decisionism—Carl Schmitt’s theoretical framework that made Hitler’s foreign policy formally unpredictable by design. The sovereign decides the exception. All justification flows from that decision rather than constraining it. This is Trump, who calls it his “weave.”

Little’s piece won’t see this. His 19th-century goggles are what you wear when 1933 is too frightening to face. Trump prefers the misdirection, as he doesn’t want to be recognized: Those teenage Epstein girls were just for massage.

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Monroe was admittedly very racist, in the typical elite way of 1823—ambient, paternalistic, fearful. He wasn’t choosing a regression to centuries before him when he proposed a way forward. He was creating a progressive framework to be measured against.

Trump in 2025 is also very racist yet inverted to Monroe, consciously regressive. After the documented American genocide. After the Holocaust. After decolonization. After Civil Rights. After the science demolished race theory. After Reagan knew through the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s that he had to launder his racism through dog whistles.

This is the deliberate choice of race-based regression backed by infrastructure to enforce it at scale. The BBC normalizes this hate platform by grounding it in something it is not.

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Three reasons Trump could never be Monroe, and everyone should stop the precedent laundering:

1. Monroe Doctrine was drafted by John Quincy Adams, debated in cabinet, presented to Congress. Trump doesn’t care about drafts, debates, or separation of powers. He lights fires and focuses on the fire trucks.
2. Monroe Doctrine was welcomed by regional leaders as forward-looking solidarity against past colonial threats. Trump is the threat that Monroe was trying to prevent. Let that marinate.
3. Monroe supported law, order, institutions, procedures, consultation, and predictability. He didn’t reject progress; he built and sold solidarity to regional allies. Trump announces an abolition of frameworks, bullying allies, while wearing Monroe’s corpse as costume.

Criticism of rules is grounds for improvement. Rejection of rules is their total loss—just loss.

The BBC’s “continuum” is a slippery slope fallacy. There’s no slope when discussing Trump and Monroe. There’s a cliff, because Monroe evaporates under Trump.

That’s not precedent. That’s laundering.