My Current Plan in the Face of All This Fascism

Currently an 8 point plan, hopefully useful to you but subject to change as the situation shifts.

Today I joined with millions of other Americans, notably large groups appearing in rural areas like mine, to protest the current situation. Protests are not nuanced. Thankfully we can be more nuanced here at Old Truck Good Coffee. Please reach out with thoughts and questions.

This is what I see we face and how to be a part of the path back:

1. This is fascism. It is deliberate.

2. Act like the fascists are smart

3. Act like no one has the job of saving me

4. Believe that failure is possible, that further loss is probable

5. Know that victory is possible and we have everything we need.

6. Community is victory. Tend the path back to us.

7. Promote caring

8. Touch grass

Some of the 130+ local citizens, including the amazing Teresa in the wheelchair, who attended the 2025 Jefferson County (OR) Hands Off rally.

Call it fascism. OK. Now what?

I need to put down on paper what I am seeing and how I plan to be in the coming season. For my conservative readers, this might be a labor for you to read. I would very much like for you to hear how I am thinking right now. It would mean the world to me if you reached out with your thoughts.

I hope you are surprised that this article is not about how to defeat you but join together with you.

These points are why I am doing what I am these days. And they are why we will beat back the fascist ideas.

1. This is fascism. It is deliberate.

That means a lot, and I hesitate to get into the mire of talking about what that means and how I see proof of it. If you don't believe that, I would like to have a conversation with you.

By fascism, I mean, the political pitch someone else is at fault, and that we can burn them up then all will be better. It is a way to manipulate people. If you don't think it is fascism, it is possible that you are being manipulated.

But fascism has to promise so much to get people that angry. They have to offer them the end of their own struggle.

And there is no end to struggle.

So perhaps that is why we see the extent of hate that fascism must market. How much hate. Never-ending hate.

To those blamed, never ending threat.

And fascism eventually runs out of people. People to burn up and people who believe in the burning.

But I would rather no one burns this way at all. I would prefer that we struggle alongside each other in the true hard trails of living.

So how do we interrupt fascism and tell people that life is hard?

How do we offer a better alternative, particularly when our political story does not want to say such things?

Fascism in America 2025 has true believers who recognize what they are doing, who are modeling it after historic fascist attempts. They require two things of us to be successful:

1. Believers who at first do not consider this fascism, but a person who will solve their problems. They have actual problems.

2. Weakened resistance who are disconnected, distrustful, and losing hope.

The true believers will use force eventually — from threatening violent language to mob violence to organized violence — so they won't at some point need majorities. But currently they do require supporters.

2. Act like the fascists are smart

There is a habit of those who are scared (including myself) to say that the fascists are dumb. That Donald Trump is an idiot. That they "don't understand how tariffs work" and that their immigration policy will drive up inflation.

"How tariffs work" is an obvious and findable piece of information. I presume that they know very well that the outcome will be disastrous for the economy.

What looks to me as intelligent and highly competent is the rollout of the fascist agenda over the last few months (writing this in April 2025). I am in awe at the scale and timing and precision of the project. Executive orders, DOGE, third party hate groups rising. To me, this is all done extremely competently. It seems reasonable to consider that this competence will continue.

What I hear you trying to do when saying they are stupid; suggesting that this will all blow over and you don't have to do anything.

3. Act like no one has the job of saving me

I don't know everything to do, but I certainly will not allow myself to be powerless. I get the sense that some people think that their best bet is to write a one star review of the Democratic Party and wait for them to fix this. Guilt others into doing something because it is "literally their job." The professional politicians in the Democratic Party have some power, but it is not enough. Their power has been deliberately undermined.

I hate doing things outside my competence and outside my comfort, but I think I will have to, things like protesting. To center myself when thinking about it, I think of the future as containing many "interesting" things to do. I am curious what I will have to do to be a part of my own rescue — of our rescue.

4. Believe that failure is possible, that further loss is probable

I am 50 and American. I have not lived through complete governmental failure or the breakdown of society. But what little history I know tells me that it is possible, and it is not just a thing that happens to brown people or people in scratchy old films. We could fail to stop the fascists.

They have already caused suffering globally and within our nation for no other reason than to further the injury that will enable them to take power over a crippled nation. The cost in pain, spread across the people they necessarily need to blame, will increase the longer this goes on.

As a friend told me, if stopping them costs five dollars today, it will cost fifty dollars down the line. Extending that metaphor, we have lost the opportunity to spend five dollars. We need to spend fifty now to avoid paying five hundred later. There will be loss, it is too late. It will be like nothing I have ever seen in my country, but I have to think clinically about how to minimize future loss.

I so hate that discipline of clinical thought.

5. Know that victory is possible and we have everything we need

I believe in the vital nature of humans.

Let me say that more accurately. I know that humans have a vitality that is intrinsically related to community bonds.

I know that we are living in an era that has weakend our greatest power, elevating rationality over our vitality. The personalities at the fore of the fascists, coming from the idylls of the tech industry, reflect fractured, data-driven thinking. They believe in the highly inaccurate thin veneer theory that when order breaks down we will all turn to animals. The idea captured in the very fictional book Lord of the Flies,

That theory is incorrect, it has never been true. They are wrong. The human way is more powerful than their wishful theory. Their model of us as some amalgam of computer programs and insect patterns is false. We function as energy and creation.

We have our hands and hearts. We hold to a view of the world that is far more powerful than theirs. That is everything we need.

6. Community is victory. Tend the path back to us.

For me, the word community is not the easy feeling of people gathering in agreement. Community is when we hold together and ride out discord.

Americans are separated. We are separated by some flukes of economy, politics, and geography. We separate ourselves because we seek to protect ourselves from the hurt of what others say. Fascists encourage the separations because it really works for their cause.

By creating harsh lines between those with us and those against us, we drive supporters to fascism instead of creating coalition. We need to provide path back to humanity.

Often clumsy and kludgy at first, I practice language to stay connected with those who I disagree with. I practice language that could be part of a pathway back from this brink.

We have to navigate toward pluralism, not an equally fascist-but-left-leaning view that verbalizes the desctruction of American cultures we don't like. I have suspicions that part of the groundwork accidentally formed for these fascists was when liberal mindsets from the recent past suggested we could subsume conservative thinking in our nation. Our new future is not coming from Overton window territory won. It is not some progressive Valhalla, but the multiple, discordant voices that have always been the song of America.

Building pluralistic community is anti-fascist. It is the opposite of seeking someone to burn to alleviate your own suffering. The better we know each other, the more fascism will struggle to turn us against each other.

7. Promote caring

Care for those hurt or afraid. Their spirits lifted disables the hopelessness that the fascists are wishing we would assume.

I am having coffees and beers with friends, texting them and calling them. Every time I have a 30 minute drive into town, I think of who I can call. If someone says something in despair, I think of how I can help acknowledge and disempower that feeling. As above, we have hope and power and the fascists are dead wrong.

Care doesn't scale, but one person heart-warmed or made to feel less alone is of value every day after. Care does not scale, but it multiplies.

8. Touch grass

I lose perspective at times, these questions and speculations and horrors wrap me up. I lose my reasoning mind to worry. It makes me reactionary or freeze up. I seek to recognize when I am not operating from my heart. I know that time with friends and family, petting a dog, fishing, or eating delicious chicken wings can bring me back to whole mind, whole body, whole heart thinking.

In the light, with you,
Joel.