How we got to fascism

Let’s make a note of Thursday, April 17, 2025.

That’s the day when there was no longer any excuse for missing that fascism—yes, let’s call it that—has arrived in America.

Let me backtrack a bit.

On Tuesday, we recorded the episode below of NEXT COMES WHAT. A few minutes in, Andrea Pitzer said words that will haunt my frontal lobes until this crisis is over or I’m numb to what my country has become:

The worsening situation that Trump has created in El Salvador with the enthusiastic help of its current president, Nayib Bukele, is as grave a threat that the country has faced, as grave a threat as has happened in my lifetime.

There were two reasons I knew that as soon as Trump won the last election, I needed to work with Andrea Pitzer: 1) her masterful global history of concentration camps has exposed her to how authoritarians work at their worst, and 2) her remarkable skill as a writer and communicator give her a singular gift.

Andrea applies her knowledge of atrocities that created this world with respect for the victims and for those of us who can do something to prevent more tragedies.

In short: I knew we’d hit a moment—or a constant series of moments—where people needed to see the threat we face in the most useful yet least alarmist way possible. And we are in the most significant escalation of this regime’s fascist power grab.

I knew I needed to get this episode out as soon as possible.

But before I could, this dropped:

I felt both scooped and relieved. Because of Ezra Klein’s platform, more people will hear Klein’s essential warning about the emergency we face in a minute than will probably ever see any NEXT COMES WHAT. But I pray people see both.

Klein’s telling of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s story is vivid and heartbreaking. The details matter as much as Abrego Garcia’s significance in American history after Donald Trump brought El Salvador’s self-professed dictator to the Oval Office to rub America’s nose in his Intolerable Acts.

The intention was clear: He wants to say he can disappear anyone, and we’re just getting started.

And that’s why you need to listen to Andrea Pitzer and the new NEXT COMES WHAT, to understand how fascists and those with fascist leanings inside democracies have used “disappearing” as a tool of terrifying and silencing an entire population.

Just as Trump’s attempted humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office seems to have backfired, Monday’s shameful appearance in Trump’s new home base—now decorated to look like a plastic Vatican—seems to have woken people up instead of blasting out the chill he hopes will overcome us.

Klein gets it. Even David Brooks gets it. And that helps politicians like Senator Chris Van Hollen, who stayed in El Salvador until he could see Abrego Garcia, get it. Because there’s no intellectual space left to hide.

The choices are clear: freedom or cowardice.

So I’ll close with Andrea’s last words from this week’s podcast:

The gift of time is still with us. We are still, for the most part, free to act. The urgency is increasing pretty dramatically and no one is going to act in your place. So find that place and fill the spot that you choose because the world that Trump wants to build will be hard to undo. And the further along that we let him get, the more damage he will inflict before we can even begin to rebuild.