So I made a somewhat ill-advised flippant comment about Iain Duncan Smith’s latest commentary on the Article 50 court case on Twitter this morning and it’s made me think.

Make him take the Life in the UK test! https://t.co/YMM2TmFeBr

— Milena (@elmyra) December 7, 2016

(IDS’s piece is linked from one of the embedded tweets in there, but don’t click, it’s Daily Mail.)

My tweet, as well as most other commentary I have seen on this article frames IDS’s comments about the courts and their relationship with the legislative and executive arms of the state as ignorance. Didn’t he learn in school about separation of powers? Well, of course he did. And as a former cabinet minister whose department got taken to court repeatedly for the harmful, discriminatory, and unlawful nature of his policies, he has intimate personal experience with separation of powers, and how in a democracy the judiciary is the people’s last line of defense from a malicious executive. As does Duncan Smith’s boss Theresa May.

IDS’s comments are not born of ignorance or misunderstanding. They are a deliberate attempt to undermine the judiciary, one that is fully sanctioned by this government. This has, of course, been going on for some time. The way it has previously manifested is through Brexit. “We don’t want European judges to tell us what to do! They might safeguard some immigrant scum’s human rights!” But as Brexit is becoming a reality, the government, helped along by the fascist gutter press, is seizing the opportunity to further undermine British courts too. The Supreme Court has been labelled undemocratic because unelected (a feature of the system), biased (untrue), and – worst of all apparently – dull (a court is not reality television). IDS’s comments are simply the sequel to the Daily Mail declaring the High Court “enemies of the people”. Except now it’s not just the fascist gutter press spouting, well, fascism, it’s a sitting government MP and former cabinet minister.

So let’s be clear: seeking to deliberately undermine the judiciary in order to increase the power of the executive is a feature of fascism. Let’s not minimise this as ignorance, dismiss it with jokes, or hope it will go away. We must call it by its name, and we must resist it and fight it. We must treat it as the clear threat to democratic institutions that it is.

So if liberals don’t have the tools to fight fascism, and fascism is here, what do we do? The below is hardly a comprehensive action plan – for a start we have no idea how exactly the next stage of this will shape up. We will need a hell of a lot more than this, and there are certainly other legitimate priority calls you can make. But I think these are things we all can do, right now, that may have an impact.

1. We need to realise the scale and scope of what’s going on. Charlie Stross outlines this here. There are a couple of things in there I could quibble with and a couple of things I think he’s missing but I’m not an expert on them either. Take this as a rough guide to how big and nasty this thing is. This fight is global. (Which is part of the reason I’m sitting here in the UK telling Americans what to do.)

2. I know I pointed you to Masha Gessen’s article and said institutions won’t help you. Past a certain point this is true, and we’re very close to that point in both the US and the UK. Other countries may still have a chance to stop the neoliberal erosion of democratic institutions, checks and balances, and individuals’ rights vis-a-vis the state that paved the way for what we’re seeing now.

For the US, I think there’s a couple of Hail Mary things that need to be prioritised. The one you have more control over is state legislatures. The Democrats must under no circumstances lose one because at that point the constitution is toast. I think it’s vital that some effort goes into this. The one you have less control over – but is definitely worth protesting, calling your representatives, etc. – is who Trump is going to put on the Supreme Court.

For the UK, our government has just passed the most extreme piece of surveillance legislation in a democracy ever. The companion piece to this, which would pave the way for censorship, is going through Parliament right now. It looks, for all intents and purposes, like a measure to protect children from online porn, hidden in the new Digital Economy Bill. In practice, it enables ISP blocking of websites hosting perfectly legal content. Today it’s porn. Tomorrow, it’s this blog. The day after, it’s Liberty and Amnesty International. We need to stop this.

Elsewhere, fight for the independence of the judiciary; resist legislation which enables surveillance and censorship (while being aware of how power operates in both these areas and especially on issues of free speech); if you have elections coming up, get involved, campaign, vote, make sure we don’t get more Trumps out there. The ones I can see coming in the near future are the Austrian and French presidential elections, and the German parliamentary elections. (My view is extremely Eurocentric and thus flawed. There will be others, equally important, around the world.) Do not let Marine Le Pen win. Do not let Norbert Hofer win. Find a way to stop the AfD from gaining ground. Germany and France in particular must not be allowed to fall, because if they do, the European Union does. And while the EU has many flaws, in the face of global fascism we’re better off with it than without it.

3. I can’t emphasise this enough: do not normalise this. Do not let others normalise this. It’s going to make for some very uncomfortable conversations with friends and family, and I think we’re all going to lose long-lasting friendships over this, but we have got talk to people, we have got to keep naming the problem for what it is: fascism, white supremacy. Hold people to account, do not let them weasel out, do not let them tell you that “it won’t be that bad”. It already is.

4. We need to start systematically dismantling the myths of our countries that have allowed us to get to this point. In the US, that’s the American Dream, the Protestant work ethic, and the discursive coupling of “America” and “freedom”, both historically and now. Let me go into that last one in detail. It is the most white supremacist of ideas, and it is baked into the consciousness of (white) America and the world. The idea that America is synonymous with freedom crumbles at the slightest challenge even if we centre whiteness. From the House Un-American Activities Committee to Freedom Fries, these are not things a “free country” does. The minute you decentre whiteness, it becomes absurd. It’s a country built on genocide and slavery that needs to reckon with its past. But that idea of the “land of the free” (and see Colin Kaepernick on that one!) is built into the very language even “progressives” use. From Star Trek’s “space – the final frontier” to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the frontier those “aspirational” words refer to is the frontier of genocide. Genocide so normalised that organisations campaigning for human rights see no problem naming themselves after it. America is not free. Has never been free. If we do not succeed in dismantling the myth of American freedom, will never be free. Cat Valente wrote something similar here from an actual American’s perspective.

In France, it’s laïcité, among other things, which is enabling brutal Islamophobia. In Britain it’s the idea of Rule Britannia, the cheerful waving of Union Jacks every summer at the Proms, poppies, and the failure to reckon with a history of brutal colonialism and Empire, the refusal to admit that slavery is as inextricably woven into British history as it is into American history. In Austria it’s the notion that you don’t talk about politics, and the idea that once there was an Austrian empire upon which the sun never set, and the handwaving of what happened between then and now and Austria’s role in it. In Germany, it’s the false sense of security that surely we have reckoned with our past and nothing like this could ever happen here again.

Look at yourself, at your country, at what you were taught in school. Find the most cherished idea about your country, the thing you think of as part of your nation’s essence. Unpack it, take it apart, and you will see that it has been corrupted, that it serves as a tool of oppression. Question it, dismantle it, destroy it, start again.

5. On a more practical level, start sorting out an anti-surveillance infrastructure that works for you. I know it’s neither cheap nor easy and so many privacy tools are a pain to use, but trust me, the surveillance capabilities of the state are something the Trump administration, the May government, and other incarnations of global fascism are going to make extensive use of. Here’s a starting point on that front.

6. If you are a member of a marginalised group start organising, finding community, working out what other people are doing to keep themselves safe. If you are in a position to help the marginalised with time, skills, or money, listen to what they need and give it to them to the best of your ability. Do not dismiss their concerns, do not silence them.

It’s becoming increasingly unwieldy for me to keep track of good analyses of and calls to action with regards to the epic clusterfuck that is the rise of global fascism we seem to be experiencing. So here’s my masterlist of stuff I have found useful, thought-provoking, and terrifying over the last week and a half. I’ll probably keep updating it for a little while. A large chunk of the below come with content notes for discussions of racism, misogyny, queerphobia, violence.

The comprehensive exit poll data. (The Education by Race line speaks volumes.)

A very early Twitter thread by @yeloson on how profoundly some of our lives may change as a result of this. [discussion of cancer and death]

Let we forget, within hours of polls closing, this is what it felt like to be a Muslim woman in America.

Thread on the radicalisation of white men in online spaces by @SiyandaWrites. (The threading on this is somewhat messy and some of the responses are violent.)

Thread on what the left needs to do to create a powerful vision and message by Sunny Singh.

The Mary Sue’s Internet Privacy 101.

And the EFF’s Surveillance Self Defense.

A reminder from @ab_silvera that there are more victims of US policy outside the US. (Follow-up tweets.)

Charlie Stross’s initial analysis of Trump’s election. This man is scarily accurate in his analyses, to the point where’s written himself out of job.

The tactics we’re seeing global fascism use emerged during the break-up of Yugoslavia by @JasminMuj.

@flexlibris on operational security and securing your comms.

The feminist classroom as a safe space post Brexit and Trump by @alisonphipps.

Sunny Singh again on how neoliberalism has improved the lives of many around the world, at the same time as being exploitative. There are no easy answers here.

One for Americans, on how your political systems works and what the best ways are of influencing it.

@HarryGiles on how bad things are.

@pookleblinky‘s thread on how fascism is an exponential process.

Me on the importance of not normalising fascism.

@yeloson again on cyberpunk, racism, humanity and Trump.

Safety pins? Here are some things you can do to actually make people safer, by @siliconphospho.

@alwaystheself on how white supremacy socialises us to dismiss and minimise the terror it inflicts.

@UnburntWitch on the safety pin thing and dealing with constructive criticism in activism.

@scattermoon on the Jo Cox murder and how media has been minimising and dismissing the threat of fascism since before Brexit and Trump.

Masha Gessen’s rules for survival in an autocracy.

The 14 characteristics of fascism.

@aurabogado on Obama’s role in maintaining the good immigrant/bad immigrant dichotomy.

@ChiefElk on tech and social media’s role in enabling fascism.

@DNLee5 on racist selective memories of the Civil Rights Movement.

Flavia Dzodan on white feminism’s inadequacies and our desperate need for intersectional feminism.

@mxbees on privacy tools and digital rights for those who most need them.

We have got to stop devaluing black women’s knowledge.

Me on how liberals without a lived experience of a hostile state do not have the tools to fight fascism.

Roja Bandari on the the normality of living in a religious dictatorship.

Kali Holloway: Stop asking me to empathise with the white working class.

Me on the discursive coupling of “America” and “freedom”.

And among all this, Britain passes the most extreme surveillance law ever in a democracy.

Pookleblinky again, on how fascism quickly accumulates power by putting people through a series of obedience tests.

@mcclure111 on the bullshit that is “post-identity liberalism”.

@jpbrammer on how white working class Americans see themselves.

@AndrayDomise on what we should be calling the people who call themselves the “alt-right” – his recommendation is neo-Nazis.

Sarah Kendzior on how to be a light in dark times. Contains the most chilling paragraph I have read in the last ten days: “Write a list of things you would never do. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will do them.”

Cat Velente on American greatness.

Charlie Stross on the scope of the fight we’re facing.

Laurie Penny on bargaining, normalisation and mental health.

Me again, with an action plan of sorts for starting to fight this thing.

Mikki Kendall on why white working class voters need to be held accountable for voting against their own interests.

A thread live-tweeting FeministaJones’s talk at UPenn.

What the First Amendment Defense Act will mean for queer people in the US.

And a thread on FADA’s impact specifically on trans women. CN transmisogynist violence.

@Asher_Wolf on treating Trump & co. like cranky toddlers.

Hey liberal friends. Yes, you. You who’s been telling people frightened for their lives that “it won’t be that bad”. And you who keeps posting links to obscure constitutional loopholes that might make Bernie president. And you, who told me yesterday with a straight face that May was the British Trump (and I agree that a case can be made here) and then proceeded to talk about how to disentangle our message from that of more left-wing, more diverse campaign groups. We need to have a talk, because I don’t think you have even begun to realise yet how out of your depth you are. You simply don’t have the frame of reference: you have never lived in a state that was openly, actively, viciously hostile to you, there’s nothing in your set of life experiences to date to help you process this. And that is a problem, because your cluelessness and flailing is playing into the hands of fascism and doing damage to the rest of us.

Here are three pieces of reading for you to help you build a frame of reference:

Masha Gessen’s rule for surviving in an autocracy. She speaks from experience, she grew up in Putin’s Russia. Rules 1 and 3 in particular are what liberals seem to be struggling with. 1: Believe the autocrat. When Trump says he will deport 3 million people, don’t even for a second think that he doesn’t mean it, that it was just an election soundbite. Believe him, he will do it. Think about what you can do to resist this, to help those he is targeting. 3: Institutions will not save you. The electoral college is not going to swoop to the rescue. Neither are constitutional loopholes going to make Bernie president. Instead, Trump is going to stack the Supreme Court his way for the foreseeable future, and if the Democrats lose one more state legislature, the Republicans, already falling in line behind Trump like ducklings, are going to eviscerate the constitution. These are the stakes. You need to realise this, and accept it, and work out how you can keep people around you alive.

Here’s pookleblinky’s Twitter thread on how fascism is an exponential process. This, frankly, is a terrifying read. But honestly, I’d rather work on this premise and be wrong than keep going with the “it won’t be that bad” narrative and be wrong about that. Some key points: for most of its gestation time, fascism is basically invisible and seems like a joke; by the time you see the exponential ramp of its growth, it’s ubiquitous and overwhelming; you are always playing catch up – by the time you think of a strategy to deal with it, that strategy is no longer effective; the time window of effectiveness for each new strategy is shorter than the last; last time fascism reared its ugly head, it had horses and telegraphs – now it has instantaneous global communication, nukes, pervasive normalised surveillance, and biometric databases of close to the entire population. I honestly don’t have a good answer for this. I can only reiterate: start working out how you’re going to keep people alive.

And finally, just in case you’re still not convinced that what we’re dealing with is the real thing, just in case you still think the fact that Trump and his staff don’t know anything about the scope of the Presidency will save you, here are the 14 characteristics of fascism. Trump and those around him exhibit all 14. May… is getting close. Disdain for human rights, obsession with national security, protection of corporate power and suppression of labour power, disdain for intellectuals… If those don’t ring a bell, you have not been paying attention. We also need to acknowledge that liberalism has enabled many of these. Something to think about if we come out the other side of this.

So, liberal friends. You simply do not have the tools to fight this. Hell, most of you still don’t even believe that there’s anything to fight. You’d better start believing it, and fast. By the time it gets so bad you can see it, people and communities more marginalised than you will be wiped out. So. Listen to those people, to those communities. Listen to black and brown women. Listen to Black Lives Matter. Listen to queer people – and to trans women in particular. Listen to migrants, documented or otherwise. Listen to those of us who have lived experience of an actively hostile state. Take your lead from us. And start figuring out how you’re going to keep us alive, because without us you’re lost.

I am, to be perfectly honest, still reeling from the act of violence that was the election of Donald Trump. My thoughts are not particularly coherent. I have retweeted many more coherent, more articulate people over the last few days – take a look if that’s what you’re after. But as I try to piece my life back together, what strikes me is how quickly normalisation has set in. From US domestic as well as foreign commentators urging us to “give Trump a chance”, to world leaders dutifully congratulating him on his election, to the host of (mainly) white men who have told me and others terrified for our futures, for our friends’ lives that “it won’t be that bad”, we’re already moving into “business as usual” mode. Angela Merkel’s language was the strongest possible within the constraints of diplomacy, but in the face of what awaits us it doesn’t feel like anywhere near enough.

Here’s the thing. It absolutely will be that bad, and probably worse. But you (white, straight you) won’t notice. Not at first. Much like what we’re seeing with Brexit, the changes will be small, gradual, seemingly unconnected, and you will find other things to blame for them. Mass exodus of international banks from London? Well good riddance to those bankers, nevermind that the banking sector directly employs 4% of the UK population, with many others’ livelihoods tied to it. Sterling collapses? Damn those markets! Food and consumer goods prices rise by 10-20%? How dare Unilever not give us our daily Marmite for free?! And those are just the things Middle England sees and pays attention to. The sharp rise of violence against anyone who looks or sounds like they might be vaguely foreign, against LGBT people and other vulnerable groups; the complete collapse of any opposition, making the UK a one-party state for the foreseeable future; the steady, unstoppable progress through Parliament of a bill extending and legitimising mass electronic surveillance – those day to day horrors visited upon the already marginalised and the deep structural changes cementing this as the status quo don’t even register on the radar of white, straight Middle England. And this is precisely what awaits America too. (And frankly, America is too big to not have an impact on the rest of us.)

Here’s what the flipside feels like: the not cis, not straight, not really white enough side of this. A lot of us saw at least some of this coming. For us, this is just an escalation of the kind of violence that we’ve been living with for years. When I lost my shit back in 2010 over Gordon Brown grovelling to Bigoted Woman, it wasn’t because she’d called me a “flocking Eastern European”. It was because those words were being normalised and legitimised by the Prime Minister, and no one else seemed to think that there was anything wrong with that. When as a digital rights campaigner I’d been warning people of state surveillance for years, they always looked at me like they thought I should be wearing a tinfoil hat. Then the Snowden revelations broke and, honestly, nothing changed. When I spent the entire summer after the Brexit referendum waking up halfway to a panic attack every single morning, my partner’s father wrote me an email telling me it wasn’t going to be that bad. (Then Amber Rudd said employers should be named and shamed for employing filthy foreigners like me and I got a vaguely apologetic email, which still made light of things.) Resistance is othered. Questioning the status quo, warning of the pitfalls of fascism is ridiculed. Naming our oppression and the violence committed against us on a daily basis is dismissed. “Oh, don’t be hysterical, it won’t be that bad.”

There comes a point where this all adds up. Where it becomes a crushing weight. Where the thing you’re fighting begins to feel too enormous for you to tackle, because nobody else seems to even think that there’s a thing to fight. I am… closer to that point than I like to admit this publicly.

So here’s the thing. White people. Cis people. Straight people. Non-disabled people. Stop normalising fascism. Stop normalising Trump. Stop normalising Brexit. Stop normalising Marine Le Pen, and Norbert Hofer, and Farage, and the AfD. When those of us with a day-to-day lived experience of violent oppression tell you that that is what is happening, believe us. Listen to us. Don’t tell us it’s not so bad. Don’t question the language we use and dismiss it as hysteria and hyperbole. Work out what it is that you can do to normalise resistance, to protect those less fortunate, more marginalised than you.

Stand in the line of fire.

Nothing else is good enough.

[I posted this on Facebook on November 9th. Including here for the sake of completeness/easy reference.]

I’ll be the first to admit that this comes from a place of mild hypocrisy: I have never voted in an Austrian election. By the time I had the right citizenship and was the right age, I was no longer living in the country, and it seemed like a good idea to leave the voting to those who would actually be affected by it.

But, the world is going to hell in a handbasket and needs must. And thanks to court shenanigans and dodgy glue I have finally got my act together and have registered and received my polling card for the Bundespraesidentenstichwahlwiederholung. (Thanks, Patrick, for the repeated prompting, I really appreciate it!)

Now here’s the thing. Leading up to the first round of this clusterfuck of an election, you couldn’t tell from my Facebook feed that there was an election going on in Austria. Nothing. Political tumbleweed. It’s something that’s always bothered me about the country: the complete and utter apathy when it comes to politics. I can’t say I’ve enjoyed the #Brexit campaign, or the US presidential campaign, but I’d rather have those than the complete silence followed by “oh shit, we accidentally a nazi” that suddenly (and briefly) flooded my Facebook feed the day after the first round. And what’s even scarier is that, with a few small exceptions, we seem to have gone back to that silence leading up to this third attempt at a run-off. But here’s the thing: we didn’t *accidentally* a nazi. Given the regularity this happens with in Austria, we should know better by now (and yes, that includes me). We should not be waiting until the nazi gets 50% of the vote before we wake up and briefly talk about politics before getting distracted by shiny things again.

Granted, the Austrian president doesn’t quite have the same global reach and impact as President Trump will. But large chunks of the world are lurching to the right, becoming increasingly hostile for any and all marginalised groups in society, and one more country in Europe, even a small one, going that way is going to make things significantly worse.

So get your act together and vote. Because if we wake up on the 5th of December with a nazi president and you can’t look me in the eye and say “I did my damnedest to stop this”, then you might as well have voted for him.

So there. Go. Do the thing. I’m fucking done with losing an entire day of productivity to drink the day after elections. I’ve done it twice this year already. Don’t make me do it again.

Honey, I don’t look angry, I am angry. I am mostly angry at the people who duped you and other Brexiters to vote the way you did, like turkeys for Christmas. But I am also angry at you and other Brexiters for continuing to stick to your guns long after every single thing the Brexit campaign said has been exposed as a lie (and they’ve admitted to it), long after that vote wiped out a significant chunk not only of the UK economy, but of the European economy and the world economy, long after it became clear that we are headed for a social, political and economic catastrophe. I am particularly angry at anyone who claims to be left-wing and supported Brexit because there wasn’t a single grain of that argument that was rooted in reality and what was even remotely achievable – and it’s given the Tories a significant boost, and put in power an incredibly dangerous right-wing woman, who will ramp up austerity and the sale of state assets, who will cheerfully take away all of your civil and human rights, and make you thank her for it. I am angry because this vote has given voice and legitimacy to the racism in this country that has been bubbling and building for years now, and all Brexit voters have to say is “we’re not all racists”. I am angry because as an EU immigrant in this country my own future is now incredibly precarious and uncertain. I am angry because both my partner and I work in higher education and academia which is already getting obliterated by Brexit. I am angry because the government this vote helped put in power is going to be even more actively hostile to queer people and women (both of which I am). I am angry because as a result of this vote People. Are going. To die. Brown people, immigrant people, queer people, poor people, disabled people, women. You think the Tories are bad? Try the Tories with no restrictions from pesky human rights and EU regulations. Try the Tories in power for generations because Scotland will leave and they’ve got England stitched up. Oh honey, you have no idea what’s coming to you. But here you are, all worried about how you’re being perceived and whether someone asked you to face the consequences of your own actions.