Welcome to Nazi America

The road to fascism is paved with "you're overreacting."

If you would like a representation of what sorts of things the government of Nazi Germany might have posted were social media around in the 1930s, you may look no further than the United States Department of Homeland Security’s X page.

The morning after the 2024 United States presidential election, I knew I had to get out of New York City. Not permanently — that realization would come later. But in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s shocking victory, the buzz and rush and honking horns and blinding lights of the metropolis I’d always dreamed of living in became too much. I needed to think.

My employer, being a leftwing nonprofit, graciously canceled the workday for all of us that Wednesday. So I hopped in my car, picked a direction and drove. On the Staten Island Expressway and the New Jersey Turnpike, I tried to wrap my mind around the staggering implications of what had just taken place.

Two days prior, I’d been at a point in my career where I was genuinely contemplating what it might be like to buy a condo in a few years, find some smart and charming boy to marry, maybe even adopt a child down the line. I’d grown accustomed to middle class comfort. I wasn’t exactly where I wanted to be in my career, but I was making enough money that I figured I’d be OK in the long run. If I couldn’t land a full-time job at a more prestigious news outlet in the near future, perhaps I’d just write a book or three. There was no reason to believe my life of general stability wouldn’t continue.

Now, I gripped the steering wheel considering the fact that a man who once refused to accept the outcome of an election loss, and who openly seeks to harm his political enemies — which is how he views all 75 million Americans who voted for his opponent — would once again be the man steering my country, perhaps into the abyss.

I knew the guardrails were gone now. Trump had explicitly picked J.D. Vance as his running mate because he believed Vance wouldn’t repeat Mike Pence’s “betrayal,” as it is now characterized on the White House website by the actual government of the United States of America. Passing over the Delaware Memorial Bridge into Wilmington, I considered what it might be like to turn the wheel and fly off into the river below — and how that might not be much different from the choice America had just made.

I’ve always been a bit too much of a stubborn jackass for suicide, though. Instead I continued through Delaware until I arrived in Rehoboth Beach, a seaside gay destination in the summertime that on this autumn evening was chilly and uninviting. I found a bar at which to sip a couple beers while I commiserated with a lesbian couple about the election results, at least until the bartender asked us to stop talking about politics. It was the first time such a request had ever been made of me in a place outside of an obvious Republican stronghold, and perhaps a worrying sign of what was to come.

In those days, I oscillated between feeling like I could see clearly what others could not, and feeling like I was insane. I had nightmares about murder in the streets and war and being unable to stop any of it. And then I awoke the next morning and was told by many people, many friends, many relatives, that I was overreacting. After all, he was president before and we all survived, right?

Tomorrow will mark one year since Donald Trump became the 47th president of the United States. And I now know that I was more right to be fearful than even I could possibly have guessed at the time.

Our president sends mad screeds to our allies demanding he be allowed to annex whatever territories he pleases because they failed to award him a prize he coveted.

Masked agents roam the city of Minneapolis demanding that random passersby on the street produce proof of citizenship, and kidnapping them if they can’t — or even sometimes when they can. They execute protesters and then are protected from even the pretense of investigation by the federal government.

That same federal government posts memes that could be described as flirting with Nazi ideology in much the same way one could be described as flirting with a person they’re in the middle of having sex with. It openly fantasizes about deporting 100 million people from America (there are only 51 million noncitizens residing in the U.S., the vast majority of them bearing legal status, so the conclusion one is forced to arrive at is that it’s not just immigrants who the Nazi government considers to be undesirables).

These are all sentences that would have sounded like they were taken from some absurdist dystopian fiction had you presented them to me in 2016 or even in 2021, and yet are now just facts.

In August as I wrestled with whether or not to leave the country, I stopped to see a friend in Denver. We both agreed that things were not yet that catastrophic. I registered it as a data point when I initially decided to stay.

Of course, I changed my mind and came to London anyway. A few weeks ago that same friend said these words to me on the phone: “Everything happened exactly like you said it would.” Things were indeed now that catastrophic, we both agreed.

It’s time for all Americans to consider what they would have done in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, because we are now living amidst the rise of Nazi America in the 2020s.

I made my choice as a journalist, knowing that a leftwing nonprofit news organization was no safe place in a country where the president of the United States freely uses the Department of Justice as a weapon to target his political opposition. I chose to leave anticipating that I would one day be silenced if I didn’t.

Not every American should leave, and many can’t. People have families and lives they can’t leave behind. And I feel more guilt than I can describe for leaving mine behind.

But the time has come for us all to consider what our place is in this fight, because the fight is here.