Welcome to Quantum Fascism: American Authoritarianism Under Donald Trump

I first started noodling on this post in February. The official White House X account had just posted a 41-second video titled, “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” Remember it? In the interminable dog years of Trump’s muzzle-velocity presidency, it genuinely feels like a lifetime ago.

In the clip, shackled immigrants are escorted onto a plane, the sounds of jet engines humming in the background. The post quickly went viral; ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) videos are typically considered calming and indefinably pleasurable, and the video paired that experience with the forced removal of human beings, framing the whole thing as frivolous entertainment—though it was anything but.

The cruelty and fear tactics have only intensified in the intervening months. We see it in the disappearing of individuals with no due process, starting with voices calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza (notably Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Öztürk, along with many others); then the revoking international student visas under similiar auspices; and the brutalization of thousands of both American citizens and immigrants—the latter of whom have been sent to horrific detention centers ranging from Florida’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ to Ecuador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT—a megajail which has been called a gulag—unconscionable in its own right but worse so because many of these people were following the prescribed legal pathway to secure American citizenship.

These efforts have been colored by what we might charitably call incompetence, such as the high-profile deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia “because of an administrative error”—but the following attempt to brand him as a criminal and re-deport him tells us that even this “incompetence” is being weaponized as part of an explicit, intentional bid to simply terrorize immigrants.

Though the DOGE frenzy has died down, this “agency” also embodied this spirit: first in its trollish name, then with Elon Musk’s “smash it with a hammer” approach to government “efficiency” (which was anything but efficient, and is now believed to have caused over 600,000 deaths worldwide, including over 400,000 children—and furthermore is projected to cause as many as 14 million deaths through it’s cuts to USAID alone).

Most recently, we see it in the rebranding of the Department of Defense to the Department of War, under whose banner Pete Hegseth and Trump have occupied American cities that they call “enemies,” and branded essentially anyone who disagrees with their policies as terrorists.

All of this