Step The Fuck Up or It's Over
Silence, Fascism, and the History Unfolding
I have spent the last few months watching and wondering what my place is in all of this, which is largely why I have not written here as much. In that time I turned somewhat inward. I worked on short stories, revised two novels, and busied my hands with sentences because the smaller worlds I could build felt easier to govern than the larger world I must live in.
But even in the brief refuge of fiction, the larger world found me—as it always does.
I was in Austin last week with my goddaughter for her twelfth birthday when the texts started pouring in. There were balloons, cookie cake, candles lined in a row. She closed her eyes, cheeks puffed, and blew with the seriousness of a child’s wish. All while five minutes away, a man walked into a Target parking lot with a Taurus .40‑caliber handgun and began to fire. Phones lit up with the vocabulary of American life: active shooter, lockdown, shelter in place. I stared at her and thought about how fragile it all was, how joy could be obliterated in less time than it takes to reload.
This is the America she is inheriting. A country where every public space is a potential graveyard. Where children rehearse lockdown drills as though crouching under desks could persuade bullets to turn aside. Where the sound of a balloon popping at a birthday party can make a child’s eyes flicker with fear. And what do we do? We send thoughts and prayers. We sigh, this isn’t who we are.
But it is. It always has been. Violence is the logic on which it was built.
And still, we are told to hush. To lower our voices. To keep scrolling. To act as if what is happening all around us is not happening at all.
Black men are being snatched off the streets of Washington, D.C. by the National Guard, disappeared as if their lives were loose change to be pocketed. Unhoused people are swept from sidewalks and subway benches, not cared for but hidden, treated like stains on the fabric of the city. In Gaza, children’s bodies are pulled from rubble while the world debates whether to call it what it is: genocide. Here at home, the Supreme Court entertains the possibility of erasing the right of same-sex couples to marry, as if families are experiments that can be undone by decree.
Libraries are being stripped of books, their shelves scrubbed of Black voices, queer voices, immigrant voices. Public broadcasting, once a fragile thread of collective truth, has been gutted by politics and money. Each day another institution collapses into the right-wing abyss, and we are told this is normal.
We are told to believe that silence is prudence, that silence is civility, that silence is safety. But silence is how fascism grows roots. Silence is how cruelty becomes custom. Silence is the lullaby sung to a nation while its freedoms are stolen one by one.
Though, naming the truths of America has also been dangerous. Because violence here is not an aberration, not a departure from some imagined purity. It is the foundation. It is the mortar in the bricks. To name truth is to risk exile, ridicule, even death. That is why so many choose silence, and why silence is so useful to the machinery of power.
The demand for silence is one of America’s oldest instructions. Nat Turner refused silence in 1831, choosing instead to speak with action, to lead one of the most significant slave rebellions in history. The rebellion was crushed, Turner executed, his body mutilated, his name cursed for generations by those in power. The violence of the state was not only about ending his life. It was about sending a message to the enslaved and to future generations: do not rise, do not speak, do not act.
John Brown refused silence in 1859 when he led the raid on Harpers Ferry, believing that slavery would never die without the sword. He was executed and hanged before a crowd that came to witness his body swing as a warning. His refusal to be silent was branded treason, madness, and terrorism. And yet in his final moments he declared that the nation could only be purged of its sin with blood. His death was also a message: this is what happens when you give a fuck.
But people stay silent for reasons beyond the threat of death. Silence has been repackaged in America as respectability, as professionalism, as wisdom. It is marketed as the careful path, the way to keep your job, your friends, your invitations, your brand. This, too, is by design. Capitalism demands that we think first of our livelihoods and our reputations before we think of justice. White supremacy demands that we call this restraint instead of cowardice. Together they make silence feel rational, even noble, when in truth it is a currency traded on the suffering of others.
Look no further than Gaza. Every day, children are starved, bombed, buried in rubble, and still entire industries of influencers, journalists, and celebrities whisper nothing. They calculate the cost of posting one sentence, of naming genocide, and they decide the cost to them is too great. What about the cost to the children? What about the cost to history? Silence is not neutrality here. Silence is collaboration in mass death.
And yet silence continues to be defended by countless people.
Though, in many online spaces, even mega stars such as Taylor Swift have become part of the conversation about complicity. She is one of the most powerful women in the world, capable of shifting economies with her presence, a billionaire whose career is structured so that she cannot be dropped, blacklisted, or silenced in the ways other artists can. She owns her catalog, her tours, her empire. She could say anything. And yet she chooses not to.
Now place her beside Ms. Rachel. A children’s entertainer whose stardom is new, precarious, and built on the trust of parents who could turn away in an instant. When she chose to speak out about Gaza, she risked everything—her platform, her income, her reputation. She faced harassment, boycotts, and the full weight of coordinated online hate. And yet she stood in it. She chose her humanity over her comfort. She chose to act as though the lives of children abroad mattered just as much as the children who sing along to her songs at home.
That is the difference. Swift, with more power than almost any artist alive, claims feminism but practices a feminism that stops at the borders of her own reflection. She will rage against record executives who devalue her, but not for women and girls in Gaza who are bombed, starved, and erased. She will mobilize her base for ticket sales, but not for human survival. Ms. Rachel, with infinitely less insulation, understood something Swift refuses to: that silence is not neutral. That silence is violence when it comes from those who have the ability to be heard.
This is the anatomy of privilege such as white womanhood in America. It can be a shield for power, wealth, and branding, as it has been for Swift. Or it can be wielded as a risk, a disruption, a refusal, as Ms. Rachel has shown. One model protects the self at all costs. The other dares to spend privilege for the sake of someone else’s life.
And here is the deeper truth: one model is rewarded. The silent, respectable, marketable white woman is exalted, promoted, canonized. The one who risks, the one who gives a fuck, is dragged, attacked, made to pay. This is by design. Respectability is a trap set by capitalism and patriarchy alike. It convinces the powerful that silence is wisdom, that silence protects their bottom line, that silence preserves their seats at the table. It convinces the powerless that silence is the only path to survival.
But silence is not survival. Silence is surrender. Silence is the soil where fascism grows. And if silence is collaboration, then breaking silence is the only moral choice left.
The choice has never been safety versus danger. The choice has always been complicity versus struggle. Especially when hesitation becomes the language of a nation. Pastor Martin Niemöller, reflecting on Nazi Germany, told us plainly: first they came for one group, and I said nothing; then another, and I said nothing; then they came for me, and there was no one left. His words are quoted like poetry, but they are not poetry. They are diagnosis. And Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s prophet of chaos, has already confirmed that diagnosis still holds.
During an episode of Frontline on April 3rd, 2025, Bannon had this to say about how our adversaries view us collectively:
“Here’s what we know. If you take power and exert it, this system’s not so tough. You know why? They’re all gutless cowards. The university administrators, they’re not that tough. The big law firms, they’re not that tough. The media, look who’s cratered and how many times. Look how they’re settling with Trump. They’re not tough. We’re resilient, we’re anti-fragile, and we’re tough. The people around Trump are battle hardened, okay? You're not going to scare us and we’re not going to stop. And what we know is you guys are a bunch of pussies, you will crater. PBS is going to crater. You don’t believe actually at your core in what you’re trying to do, and you’ll fold like the law firms, like the universities, like the media, all of these institutions, you will fold because we’re relentless and we're not going to stop.”
Watch the full interview here.
They are banking on us not doing anything. They are telling us plainly what they expect: that we will fold. That when faced with the weight of their cruelty, we will look away, sigh, and return to our daily lives. That when we are tested, we will bend, the way we have bent countless times before.
And the truth is, history proves them right more often than not. Since the Civil War, when the Confederacy was defeated but not destroyed, white supremacy was never fully dismantled. It simply changed uniforms. It slipped into the robes of the Ku Klux Klan, into the benches of judges, into the pens of legislators. It embedded itself in police departments, in banks, in schools. We let the Confederacy rise again through Jim Crow, through mass incarceration, through the redrawing of maps and the rewriting of laws. We let them march in Charlottesville with torches, their chants echoing the old world order. We watched January 6th unfold, watched the flag of treason carried through the halls of Congress, watched elected officials shrug, and many of us returned to our lives as if it were another storm that would pass.
This is what Bannon is counting on. He is counting on the precedent. He is counting on us to cradle ourselves in the illusion of normalcy, to convince ourselves that fascism is temporary, that someone else will fix it, that it will burn out on its own. He is counting on us to choose our careers, our calendars, our comforts over confrontation.
And too often, that is exactly what we have done. We folded when Reconstruction was crushed. We folded when the Voting Rights Act was gutted. We folded when children were massacred at Sandy Hook and lawmakers offered only platitudes. We folded when Trump attempted a coup, and his enablers faced no real consequence. We fold, and fold, and fold again until the paper of democracy is thin enough to tear in their hands.
They expect us to keep folding until we are in chains. Chains of law. Chains of fear. Chains of silence.
But here is the warning sewn into every moment of capitulation: fascism does not stop on its own. It accelerates. Every concession, every shrug, every surrender is fuel. They are not waiting for our permission to rule us. They are waiting for our silence.
Just look around at everything I will state it all again so none of it is lost on anyone reading this.
The Supreme Court, stacked with reactionaries, prepares to revisit whether love itself should be a right, as though dignity can be stripped away by legal argument. Trans people are being legislated into erasure, their care criminalized, their bodies turned into battlefields. Books are ripped from shelves, libraries gutted, history rewritten to soothe the fragility of whiteness. PBS and other public institutions are starved because truth is dangerous, and art is not profitable. The climate collapses in fire and flood, oceans rise, and still the drills bore, still the profits grow.
And across the globe, strongmen flourish: Orbán in Hungary strangling dissent, Modi in India stoking Hindu nationalism, Netanyahu turning Gaza into an open-air tomb, Milei in Argentina dismantling rights with a smile, and Trump restored to power in the United States, proving that fascism need not creep when it can march openly. The rise of fascism is not anomaly. It is contagion. And everywhere the bet is the same: people will do nothing.
But people have done something. They always have.
History is a war between silence and those who refuse it. Between the machinery of power that demands our obedience and the ordinary people who insist on shouting anyway. Between those who say nothing while the fire spreads, and those who run into the smoke carrying nothing but their voices.
This is why the stories of refusal matter. Not because they ended neatly or brought easy victory, but because they remind us that silence has never been inevitable. Nat Turner knew the risk and still rose. John Brown knew the rope was waiting and still led his raid. Baldwin wrote from exile, refusing the luxury of safety. King marched even as the threats piled high. Audre Lorde declared her poetry was not a luxury but a necessity, knowing full well what it cost her to speak as a Black lesbian feminist in a world that sought to erase her.
Every act of refusal is a ledger entry against despair.
And despair is exactly what fascism wants.
I think again of my goddaughter, cheeks puffed, blowing out birthday candles, the wish still secret on her tongue. I imagine her in a future classroom where the books are censored, where the teachers are muzzled, where the lessons are hollow because truth itself has been outlawed. I imagine her scrolling in silence, taught by example that silence is survival, that safety lies in shrinking her voice. I imagine her inheriting not the freedom to dream but the discipline to endure.
And I cannot allow that to be the legacy I hand her.
Fascism is not a distant threat—it is already here, breathing down the back of her neck, stalking the halls of her school, shaping the laws of her country. It is in the courtroom where marriage is debated as though love were a hypothesis. It is in the police van that swallows Black men whole. It is in the bulldozer that razes tents of the unhoused. It is in the drone strike that severs a child’s body in Gaza. It is in the algorithm that decides which truths are buried and which lies are given oxygen. It is in the smirk of Steve Bannon, confident that we will fold again.
And maybe he is right. Maybe we will. Maybe we will keep folding until nothing is left. Maybe history will remember us not as a generation of resistance but as a cautionary tale. Maybe we will be another stanza in Niemöller’s poem: and then they came for me.
But what if we don’t fold?
What if, instead, we rupture the script? What if the wager is wrong this time? What if silence is broken not by the few, but by the many—by enough of us that the machine begins to stutter?
Imagine it. Teachers refusing to strip their shelves. Artists refusing to brand silence as wisdom. Journalists refusing to call genocide by any softer name. Corporations forced to reckon with the fact that people will no longer buy silence packaged as civility. Communities refusing to let the unhoused vanish. Parents refusing to accept that their children should rehearse for slaughter instead of recess.
Imagine the fracture line of refusal running through every institution, widening until the old structures cannot hold.
This is not naïve hope; it is survival. Because silence will not save us. Silence never has. Silence did not save the enslaved. Silence did not save the children of Jim Crow. Silence did not save Matthew Shepard or Emmett Till. Silence has always been the accomplice of cruelty.
So what will save us? Our refusal to fold. Our refusal to let them write this story without us. Our refusal to be quiet while the fire spreads.
I am speaking now to you, whoever you are, reading this on a phone, a laptop, a flickering screen in the middle of your morning. Maybe you are tired. Maybe you are afraid. Maybe you feel small in the face of everything collapsing. But I need you to know this: history has always been written by the tired, the afraid, the small, who chose to speak anyway.
This is the wager before us. They are certain we will fold. They are counting on our silence. Let us show them a different ending. One written by people who posted, reposted, donated, volunteered, protested, strategized, welcomed in those in need, built community with those nothing like them. One written by people who did SOMETHING.
So pardon me while I give a fuck. Pardon me while I refuse to fold. Pardon me while I raise my voice even if it cracks, even if it costs me. Pardon me while I remind you that history will not remember your brand deals. It will not remember your neutrality. It will remember whether you stood still while the fire spread—or whether you fought to stop it.
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SING IT FOR THE BABIES!!!! 🙌🏾
Thank you for your words. I give a fuck too. As an English and Journalism teacher, I know what my job is and I will not cave. My students have the right to read and write about what they want, learn the truth, and share and discuss it.