If You Think This Is Just Another News Cycle, Read a History Book.

This isn’t a blip. It’s a warning.

There’s a difference between being informed and being awake. Most of us scroll the headlines, absorb the shock, and go back to our inboxes. But if you’ve been paying attention, not just reading, but registering, you may have noticed a pattern forming over the last few days. And it’s starting to look a lot like history repeating itself.

City Comptroller Brad Lander was confronted and detained by masked federal agents while at immigration court in Lower Manhattan. Photo by Dean Moses. AM/NY

A Democratic mayoral candidate was just arrested and detained by ICE—inside a courthouse, while helping an immigrant whose case had been dismissed. Less than 48 hours earlier, a top Democrat in Minnesota was murdered in her home by a man with zip ties, a gun, and a hit list of Democratic officials and abortion providers. At the same time, the VA quietly approved a rule allowing doctors and dentists to deny care to Democrats based on their political beliefs. In a single week, a Democrat was arrested, another was assassinated, and now it’s legal to refuse Democrats medical treatment.

These weren’t isolated incidents. They weren’t accidents. They were part of a political reality that is rapidly hardening: where state power is being weaponized not just against activists or journalists—but against elected officials who don’t align with the regime. Where violence isn’t condemned, but minimized. Where targeting your opponents isn’t a scandal—it’s strategy.

What’s even more disturbing than the violence is how quickly it’s being dismissed. Trump refused to call Minnesota Governor Tim Walz after the murder of Melissa Hortman. Utah Senator Mike Lee responded with jokes about the killing on social media. The posts were only deleted after public outrage. But the damage was done. This kind of response isn’t clumsy—it’s calculated. In authoritarian regimes throughout history, minimizing political violence is the first step to normalizing it. Mocking, denying, and deflecting are tools to desensitize the public. It’s not just indifference. It’s a message: that some people’s lives, and deaths, aren’t worth taking seriously.

We like to believe we’d recognize fascism if it came here. That it would look like jackboots and flags and shouting. But in truth, it looks like a smiling spokesperson saying “nothing to see here.” It looks like masked agents dragging people into unmarked vehicles. It looks like laws that sound too technical to panic over, until they start killing people.

If this sounds familiar, it should. In 1930s Germany, the Nazis didn’t begin with camps. They began with elected officials—arresting, attacking, and killing members of opposition parties. They passed laws that allowed doctors to deny care. They tested the edges of public tolerance, inch by inch, until resistance was no longer possible.

We are not there. But we are not far. And the question isn’t whether history is repeating itself, it’s whether we’re willing to recognize the rhyme.

But here’s the good news: history doesn’t just warn us. It shows us what to do. And this newsletter is all about learning from the past when learning how to fight for our future. We know what resistance looks like. We saw it when thousands of people took to the streets on No Kings Day, marching against rising authoritarianism with paper crowns and handmade signs, reminding the world that democracy doesn’t die in silence, it dies when no one shows up. Your pushing back is working. It’s even made Trump chicken out on his own flagship policies because you’re making them so unpopular!!

So we keep showing up. We remember that fear is how fascism spreads, but solidarity is how it breaks. That the antidote to gaslighting is not proving you're right—it's refusing to go numb.

This isn’t just another news cycle.
It’s a test.
And we are not going to fail it.

If you need a pallet cleanser, please watch our latest episode of Boy Problems featuring the hilarious Hannah Berner because laughing at patriarchy is our love language!