Find A Way to Fight Back

On Who We Need to Be to Combat the Rise of Fascism

Photo by Jacki Drexler.

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I’ll shout until my breath bruises, until my throat is a clenched fist of thunder, but I will not stop. I will not stop saying we are in a moment that demands more than witness, more than nods and murmurs. We are in a moment that calls for hands that refuse stillness, for feet that do not idle, for voices that do not wane.

And I know I’m right because I’ve seen the slow burn of fascism catch like a match to dry bone. The smoke of apathy curling in doorways, exhaustion settling into the lungs like dust no one bothers to sweep.

It was so clear this past weekend, during a visit to Pittsburgh.

I arrived in the Steel City last Thursday—my first time there, though I had walked its streets in my mind for years. August Wilson’s Pittsburgh. The Hill District of Fences and Jitney, the place where he built a world from the bones of a city that had long since tried to forget the people who made it. I had always wanted to walk those streets, to see if I could catch a glimpse of what he saw, if the echoes of his words still lived in the cracks of the sidewalks.

I was there for three days. One spent speaking with high school students, the next giving a talk at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, and in between, sitting with the quiet realization that settled over me like dust—so many people had simply given up.

Pittsburgh is a nice city, in the way a lot of American cities are nice when you don’t look too hard. The bridges are beautiful. The skyline presses against the sky in a way that feels deliberate, like it is holding onto something. The streets rise and dip, the buildings clean up well for visitors. But you don’t have to go far to see the weight the city carries. The kind of weight that lives in neighborhoods still shaped by redlining, where economic disparity isn’t theoretical, where liquor stores and check-cashing spots sit where grocery stores should be. I have been in a lot of cities, but few where the divide is as obvious as it is in Pittsburgh, where Black and poor feel synonymous, where survival looks like stillness, and stillness looks like something worse.

I felt it most in the conversations I had.

I visited Westinghouse Academy on a Friday afternoon, the kind of afternoon where the air still carries the chill of the night before, where the streets seem quieter than they should be. The students I spoke to ranged from fifteen to eighteen, bright-eyed but already carrying the weight of knowing too much. We talked about the world as it is—mass incarceration, gun violence, transphobia, ableism. The kind of conversations that make you wonder why young people have to think about these things at all.

The school itself sits in the middle of what used to be something else. You can tell by the buildings—dilapidated, sinking into themselves, some boarded up, some still standing out of habit rather than purpose. Just minutes away, there is Squirrel Hill, tree-lined and stately, the kind of neighborhood where time seems to move differently, where the struggles of places like Westinghouse Academy feel theoretical rather than immediate. The contrast is impossible to ignore, so I didn’t. I asked the students about it, about what it means to go to school so close to wealth that it might as well be another country. I did this for two reasons—one, because I believe young people deserve honest dialogue, and two, because I wanted to see where the conversation would go, what truths they would unearth if given the space.

Their responses were sharp, observant. They understood the disparities between their school and the schools in wealthier neighborhoods, understood the way funding follows whiteness, the way certain zip codes mean certain futures. None of this surprised me.

What did surprise me—what left me unsettled—was what happened when I shifted the conversation from observation to action.

“So, what do you think you can do to change it?” I asked.

Silence. Not of contemplation, but of something heavier. A silence that felt like an answer in itself.

Finally, a boy near the back muttered, “Ain’t nothing we can do.”

A girl beside him scoffed, shaking her head. “We get out. That’s it.”

“But what if leaving isn’t the only way?” I pushed.

She exhaled through her nose, looking down at her desk. “Then tell me how. Tell me what we can do that hasn’t been tried. Nothing works here.”

Across the room, a student shrugged. “They don’t want things to change. Not for us. Even if we try, they’ll shut it down.”

Another voice, quieter, but no less certain: “You fight, you lose. That’s just how it goes.”

I thought about what it means to be disempowered so young. What it does to a person to see the world so clearly and yet feel so removed from any ability to shift it. I thought about how disappointment is learned. How it is passed down, embedded in the way people talk about their city, their country, their place in it. And I thought about how dangerous that kind of disappointment is, how it settles into a person and keeps them from even trying.

Leaving the school, I carried that weight into the evening, wondering how defeat settles into a person before they’ve even had a chance to try. I found myself replaying the silence in that classroom, the way it wasn’t emptiness but something fuller—an accumulation of things unsaid, of lessons learned too soon. I kept thinking: who teaches us to give up before we begin? It wasn’t until the next day, after my talk at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, that I started to understand.

The event itself was good—engaging. The kind of event where people nod along, take notes, linger after to ask questions. I was grateful for that. But the real conversation happened in the spaces in between, in the quiet exchanges before and after, in the small talk that wasn’t small at all. People asked how I was enjoying Pittsburgh, what I thought of the city. I told them the truth—that it was nice, that it had history, that it had potential. But I also shared my observations, my thoughts on the deep divides I had seen, the opportunities for change, for growth. Almost every response I received was the same: an eye-roll, a shrug, a joke about the city being beyond saving.

Everyone wants to leave, they told me, some with a laugh, some without. Nothing changes here, they told me.

I tried to push back, gently at first. I talked about the students I had met, the conversations I’d had, the ways in which I could see something worth fighting for. They would nod, maybe out of politeness, maybe out of something else. But their faces told another story. We’ve seen this before, they seemed to say. You’re not from here.

I left the library unsettled, not by their words alone, but by what they revealed—by the way they mirrored the very same hopelessness I had seen in the students the day before. The young people at Westinghouse Academy hadn’t come to their resignation alone. It had been handed to them—by the weary, by the ones who had fought and lost, by a city that told them, in a hundred ways, that some battles weren’t worth fighting.

It hurt. Not just because I wanted better for them, but because I had seen this before, in other cities, in other people. A quiet surrender that starts small and spreads. A slow settling into the belief that nothing will change because nothing has.

There is a comfort in saying nothing will change. In saying the game is rigged, that the system is too broken to fix, that fighting back is futile. There is a comfort in rolling your eyes, in the knowing shrug, in the certainty that the worst will happen no matter what you do. Cynicism is a kind of self-protection, a way of shielding ourselves from disappointment. But it is also a tool of the powerful.

But that belief, that slow surrender, is itself a choice—one we do not have the luxury of making. If resignation spreads like an infection, so does defiance. And I have seen defiance before, too. In the teachers who show up despite it all. In the organizers who fight for a better school budget. In the neighbors who carve out small sanctuaries of hope, refusing to let their city be swallowed whole. It is there, even in places that seem beyond saving.

Because it is a mistake to think fascism happens all at once. That one day the sky splits, the streets flood with boots and banners, and suddenly, it is over. This is how we like to tell the story—how we imagine fascism, autocracy, the fall of a nation. We frame it as a singular rupture, a clear before and after, something we could have stopped if only we had been paying closer attention. But that is not how it works.

The reality is quieter. It begins with a populace losing faith in community. Lies become truth—about why there are no jobs, why their schools lack textbooks, why their struggles must be blamed on someone else.

Then comes the slow turning of the screw. Medicaid gutted, leaving millions without care. Thousands of federal employees—public servants, regulators, those who keep the machinery of government running—fired in one swift, punitive purge. Oligarchs like Elon Musk handed unthinkable power, their fortunes shielded while workers scrape by under systems designed to keep them desperate. Racial hierarchies reestablished, not whispered but written into policy, into hiring, into the quiet reshuffling of power. A judge appointed for life, ready to dismantle rights piece by piece. An election nudged just enough to plant doubt like dust in the lungs.

The shift does not come with a declaration. It arrives through the erosion of the ordinary. The courts function, but not quite. The government operates, but only for the wealthy, only for the obedient, only for those who already have. People disappear—not in the way of dictatorships past, but into the margins, into prisons, into the silent, terrifying space between poverty and survival.

I have watched this happen before. I have read about it in books, seen it in places I have traveled, in countries where democracy exists only as a whisper. And now, it is here, in America, this country that has long lied about supposedly being different.

Far too many believe in this nation’s permanence, insisting on America’s virtue even as it crumbles from the inside. They have looked at the slow collapses of other nations, the gradual ascents of strongmen, the erosion of civil liberties, and thought: not us. Even now, after everything, there are still those who believe in the durability of our institutions, who cling to the idea that what is written in the Constitution is enough to protect us.

But the truth is, institutions do not save themselves. Words on a page do not hold power on their own. They require belief. They require enforcement. They require people willing to say no, to refuse, to push back. Otherwise, they are just relics, historical artifacts of a country that never truly was.

It is no accident that the first thing oppressive regimes seek to crush is imagination. The ability to think beyond what is, to dream of something different, to believe in a future that does not yet exist—these are dangerous things. They are the foundation of every movement, every revolution, every moment of transformation. This is why they are banning books, widening education gaps, and using chaos as a barrier to solutions.

Because Trump and countless others know that change does not come from the certainty that it will happen. It comes from the belief that it could.

We are a country obsessed with pragmatism, with realism, with the language of what is feasible. But history does not belong to the realists. It belongs to those who dared to dream beyond the limits imposed upon them, to those who saw what did not yet exist and moved toward it anyway.

There is no luxury in passivity. Not now. Not ever. What is pragmatic about watching the slow, deliberate erosion of our rights? What is realistic about surrender? There is nothing rational about inaction when the world is shifting beneath our feet, when the ground we stand on is being carved away piece by piece by those who thrive on our fatigue.

Audacity is not a virtue in a country that worships compliance. It is an inconvenience, an interruption, an offense. To be audacious is to believe in something beyond inevitability. It is to refuse resignation, to insist that something else is possible. And so, audacity is not just necessary; it is urgent. Because change does not come from waiting. It does not come from hoping. It does not come from the idea that someone else will take care of it. It comes from the people who refuse to stop speaking, stop pushing, stop moving—even when the path forward is unclear, even when progress feels like a rumor.

There is a reason the powerful fear collective action. Because it works. Because it always has. Because history is not written by those who shrug and say, “It’s just the way things are.” It is written by those who refuse to accept that answer. Every right we have was fought for—pried from the hands of those who swore it would never belong to us. The right to vote. The right to a fair wage. The right to an education. To clean water. To autonomy over our own bodies. There is not a single freedom in this country that was given freely. And there is not a single freedom in this country that cannot be taken away. We are watching it happen in real time.

What, then, is left to do? The answer is simple, but it is not easy. Organize. Build. Invest in the people and places where change is possible. Start where you are. In your neighborhood. In your friendships. In the conversations you are afraid to have. In the silences you have let stretch too long. Recognize that silence is itself a language, and it is rarely neutral.

The problem is not that we do not know what to do. It is that we are tired. We are worn thin from fighting battles that should have already been won. But exhaustion is not an excuse for inaction. It is a reason to move faster, to push harder, to refuse the comfort of detachment. Because the people who benefit from our exhaustion are not tired. They are relentless.

Do not wait to feel ready. Do not wait for someone else to give you permission. Do not wait for a moment that will never come. History is happening now, in the choices we make today, in the things we refuse to accept, in the way we decide to show up—again and again, even when the weight of it feels unbearable.

Hope is work. Resistance. A decision, every day, to see beyond the chaos and insist on something better. It is the only way forward. And if we are lucky—if we are willing—we will find that we are not alone in the fight. That there are others who have been waiting, ready, watching, hoping for someone to make the first move. And together, we will move.

Apathy will whisper that it’s too late. Exhaustion will try to convince you that fighting is futile. They are both lying.

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Here are a few photos from a recent anti-fascism event at Revolution Books, where I had the honor of performing—a reminder that you are not alone in this struggle, that others stand with you, refusing to yield.

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Please consider becoming a paid subscriber of my Substack, it is crucial for sustaining my work. I make my writing accessible to all, but I will have to change that structure without paid subscriptions.