Is This the Moment We Become a Fascist Country? Not If We Say No!

I think I’ve read five hundred articles in the last four months asking: Is this the moment that we became a fascist country?

A better question to ask is: Is this a teachable moment? And yesterday we had one, so stark in its imagery and so perfect in its timing that it should help us for many years in the drive against authoritarianism.

By now you’ve seen the images of California Sen. Alex Padilla pinned to the ground and handcuffed by federal agents for the crime of Asking Questions at a Press Conference. Every decent American looking at those images should think: “That’s not how it’s supposed to work.” (It’s hard to imagine what Hispanic Americans looking at the scene must think). But what makes the scene so exemplary is what happened right before, and what will happen shortly after.

They allow people everywhere, from many different backgrounds, to join in what till now has always been the basic American message: No Kings. Not George, Not Elon, not Don.

The before: Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, previously best known for gunning down her puppy and for posing in front of caged prisoners in El Salvador, had just finished the most un-American sentence imaginable. She and her various neck-gaitered federal agents in LA, she explained, “are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

The Trump administration, in other words, considers it its right to “liberate” Californians from their elected leadership. And it demonstrated that prerogative by tackling and handcuffing one of the Golden State’s two Senators—a man who had received 6.6 million votes (compared with, say, the 217,000 votes cast for Noem the last time she ran for governor of South Dakota, and second only to his California colleague Adam Schiff for the most votes any Senator has received). No federalism, no respect for other branches of government, just the raw exercise of power through the use of troops and police. I can think of no starker challenge to America’s basic freedoms in my life.

And, happily, it comes at the right moment. Because we are now just a few hours away from what may be the biggest outburst of antiauthoritarian sentiment in America since—I don’t know. Maybe the uprising against the Intolerable Acts in 1774, when King George closed Boston Harbor and began the process of uniting colonial America against his rule.

Tomorrow is No Kings Day, a loosely organized set of protests set for every corner of the nation. Scheduled to coincide with his absurd tank parade through the streets of D.C., it’s now the perfect opportunity to react to the LA mess. If you don’t know where to go in your community, here’s the map. The demonstrations will be different across the country (I’m going to be in a rural corner of Elise Stefanik’s upstate New York district, a red region). But they allow people everywhere, from many different backgrounds, to join in what till now has always been the basic American message: No Kings. Not George, Not Elon, not Don.

And Sen. Padilla has reminded us of how to play it: firm, dignified, and peaceful. Had he started swinging at police he would have lost the day; instead he demonstrated yet again the power of courageous nonviolent resistance. His image now hangs next to those of John Lewis and Rosa Parks in the pantheon of entirely civil and entirely powerful disobedience. It may not be easy tomorrow—one Florida sheriff threatened to “kill” protesters “graveyard dead.” But I have no doubt it will be overwhelmingly peaceful, dignified, and crucial.

Once the day of demonstrations is past and the grind of steady opposition returns on Monday, we’ll be able to think in the slightly longer term.

If you don’t like what the assault on Sen. Padilla represents, then help build the power of states and cities everywhere to run themselves on the energy that falls nearby.

There is a very real chance that President Donald Trump’s plummeting popularity will start changing the political dynamic. We’ll know as we watch the fight over the Big Beautiful Bill (a phrase I confess, given my first name, to feeling some affection for…) It’s the dumbest piece of legislation advanced in my lifetime, on so many counts—in a moment of gross inequity it accelerates the distribution of wealth toward the richest. And it also threatens to, as the Center for American Progress put it yesterday, “crush America’s energy system” by removing the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funding for clean energy just as it began to hit its stride. Solar and wind are what we can build fast—and the BBB will stymie all that. (Here’s an excellent guide to organizing against the repeal of the IRA).

Which, in turn, lets us think a little about the political meaning of different kinds of energy. The best reason to build lots of clean power is to slow catastrophic global heating, and the second best is to spare the 9 million humans who die each year from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel. (That’s one death in five). But the third best reason is because, by its nature, this is liberating energy, in sharp contrast to coal and gas and oil.

Indeed, fossil fuel has an inherent quality that we focus on too rarely: It’s only available in a few places around the world, where the biology of ancient times (all those plankton and ferns) piled up to create the deposits of coal and gas and oil on which we currently depend. In the real world, that means that the people who control those small and scattered deposits have way too much wealth and power—which they have used to dominate the rest of us.

How did we get to Trump and Noem? No one played a bigger role in degrading our democracy than the Koch Brothers, and they got their power from their sprawling network of refineries and pipelines. Or think about Russian President Vladimir Putin; were it not for oil and gas, he’d have no way to intimidate Europe and the world. Or think about the rulers of the Middle East, so awash in oil cash that they’re able to bribe our leaders with spare 747s. As Samuel Miller McDonald pointed out in his 2024 book Progress, as the 19th century began the richest 1% held just 8.5% of America’s wealth; by the time it ended, the top dogs had 50% of the money, “partly thanks to fossil fuels, which could be easily concentrated, controlled, and transformed into liquid capital by a small management class.”

By contrast, the sun is everywhere, a liberating force precisely because it can’t be hoarded or held in reserves. No one will ever fight a war over the sun (worth thinking about as oil prices spike this morning on news of Israel’s attack on Iran). No one will ever be able to embargo it; decentralized power is a key part of the fight against the centralized power that Trump represents. Gandhi used the spinning wheel as a symbol (and tool) of the fight against centralized British power—it represented the ability of people and communities to make what they need on their own. If Gandhi were alive today, I have no doubt that his symbol would be the solar panel.

Which, of course, is a good reminder that No Kings Day won’t be the last important date on the resistance calendar. One to circle right now is September 21, SunDay—in no small measure because it celebrates the potential freedom that sunlight represents. If you don’t like what the assault on Sen. Padilla represents, then help build the power of states and cities everywhere to run themselves on the energy that falls nearby—register an event at the SunDay website. To inspire you, here’s the Sun of the Week, from the ten thousand now available in the global gallery, and it gets across the message of the moment.