There’s an old adage regarding dangerous behavior: It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt. One could say the same thing about fascism denial, particularly when it comes to privileged individuals in the United States who have — until very nearly this point — wished away warnings about rising fascism in their country as fanciful thinking.
But it seems increasingly difficult to characterize what’s happening in American politics in 2025 through fascism-denial goggles when the nation’s president laments, using eugenics-style rhetoric, that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the country” – particularly as the federal government brutally cracks down on immigrants through legally dubious and politically motivated revocations of visas and deportations. Nowhere is this clearer than in the targeting of international students who have been involved in protests of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza.
