Photograph Source: Casa Presidencial – CC0

We inhabit a historical moment that resurrects, with chilling familiarity, the state terrorism once made visible under Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, Pinochet, and other dictators who transformed cruelty into a governing philosophy. Central to such regimes lies a single, devastating truth: the law collapses the moment violence becomes its substitute. In this descent, due process evaporates, political opponents are rebranded as “terrorists,” and violence becomes the organizing principle of power. Independent media are smeared or silenced, universities are targeted for their critical capacities, and the spectacle of brown-shirted, goose-stepping thugs hunting down racialized others slips back into public view as a normalized, even celebrated, form of civic life.

Policies soaked in blood are repackaged as entertainment, folded into a culture industry that echoes the aestheticized fascism of Leni Riefenstahl, spectacles designed to numb, seduce, and train the public in the pleasures of violence. The brutality unleashed by the Trump administration against critics, immigrants, cities, political enemies, and so-called terrorists is more than an echo of fascism’s mobilizing passions; it is a signal of what is to come. Its endpoint can be found in the........

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