To my American friends,

In a land built on the blood of its Indigenous people, on slavery, on white supremacy, perhaps this was always the direction the current would flow.

I write this because I care about you, and because I think of you whenever I see the news. I know you are already carrying so much, and I don’t want to add fear to your shoulders. But I can’t stay silent either.

January 6th showed the mask slipping — a president turning violence inward, onto his own government, his own citizens. Since then, the ground beneath you has been shifting. What was once unthinkable has become ordinary, and that is how fascism always advances: step by step, until people are too tired, too frightened, or too numb to resist.

And yet none of this has come from nowhere. In a land built on the blood of its Indigenous people, on slavery, on white supremacy, perhaps this was always the direction the current would flow. What is happening now is not separate from that past; it is its continuation, the same logic sharpening its teeth in a new century.

And people are already dying. Migrants at the border. Protesters in the streets. Those abandoned to poverty, prisons, and neglect. Fascism doesn’t begin with mass graves. It begins with a steady stream of “acceptable” losses, lives dismissed as unworthy, deaths explained away. That has already been happening.

Please don’t underestimate this. Every regime that descended into brutality was underestimated at first. People told themselves it wouldn’t go further, that institutions would hold, that someone else would stop it. But fascism feeds on doubt and delay. It counts on disbelief.

History shows the pattern clearly. Outsiders are blamed. Raids and intimidation become routine. Mobs are unleashed to test the limits of violence. And then, inevitably, the state’s weapons turn inward. America is already far along that path.

But history also shows something else: people do not always surrender. Even in the darkest times, they resist. In Chile, people banged pots at night so their neighbours knew they were not alone. In South Africa, years of defiance and international solidarity broke apartheid open. In Poland, workers organised whispers into a movement that cracked an empire.

Hope, in moments like this, is not optimism. It is a discipline — the decision to act as though a different future is still possible, even when fear insists otherwise.

So here is what you can do now, in small ways that matter:

Find each other. Know who you can call. Build trust with neighbours, friends, colleagues. Solidarity is the ground on which resistance grows.

Document everything. Film raids, write down names, save stories. Authoritarians thrive on erasure; truth is a shield.

Practice mutual aid. Share food, rides, skills, childcare. Survival networks are resistance networks.

Protect yourselves. Don’t go alone. Learn your rights. Use encrypted apps. Safety is not paranoia; it is wisdom.

Refuse despair. Even small acts — a meal shared, a hand held, a pot banged in the night — can keep hope alive.

I don’t write this to frighten you, but because I want you safe, awake, and ready. Fascism escalates — but so does resistance. The story is not only about those who seize power. It is also about those who refuse to abandon one another, who carry hope like a lantern, and who survive together until the tide turns.

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” — Antonio Gramsci

But the new world is not yet written. You, the people, will decide what it looks like. I hope you choose the end of empire. I hope you choose solidarity over supremacy, care over cruelty, freedom over fear. I hope you build a world where no one is disposable, where no one is caged, where the earth is not consumed for profit but tended for life.

You carry the possibility of that world, even now, in the smallest acts of defiance and love. The monsters rise in the cracks of a collapsing order — but so does resistance, so does imagination, so does the stubborn light of those who refuse to give in.

Be safe. Stay awake. Hold on to each other. The danger is real, but so is your power.

With love and solidarity, I see you,

Rebecca