They Want You to Feel Alone
One of the most effective tools of authoritarianism is not force.
It’s isolation.
The feeling so many people have described to me this week, the quiet fear, the instinct to pull back, the sense that speaking up might cost too much, that isn’t accidental. It’s the point. Fascism doesn’t just silence people with laws or weapons. It silences them by making dissent feel lonely, dangerous, and futile.
When you feel like you’re the only one unsettled, the only one afraid, the only one questioning what’s happening, you’re far more likely to retreat. And when people retreat individually, power advances collectively.
That’s the design.
Silence becomes the most valuable currency. Not because it signals agreement, but because it clears the path. It allows rhetoric to harden, policies to escalate, and narratives to be rewritten without friction. Over time, what once felt unthinkable becomes routine, not because people changed their values, but because they were separated from one another.
This is how normalization works.
And to be clear: fear is understandable. Many people do not feel safe protesting. Many are weighing real risks to themselves and their families. Acknowledging that reality isn’t weakness, it’s honesty. But we also need to be honest about the tradeoff being imposed on us: the more isolated we become, the easier it is for power to move unchecked.
Authoritarian systems thrive when dissenters believe they are alone.
They thrive when people assume everyone else has already chosen a side.
They thrive when silence is mistaken for consensus.
They thrive when survival instincts are quietly repurposed into compliance.
That doesn’t mean everyone must be loud. It doesn’t mean everyone must march. Visibility is not the only form of resistance, but connection is non-negotiable.
Speaking, even quietly, disrupts the illusion.
Naming what you see interrupts narrative capture.
Finding one another, even in small, imperfect ways, breaks the spell of isolation.
The most dangerous moment isn’t when people are afraid.
It’s when they are afraid and alone.
If you’ve been feeling that weight, please know this: you are not imagining it, and you are not isolated by accident. Others see what you see. Others are wrestling with the same fear, the same hesitation, the same question of what comes next.
Fascism depends on your silence.
Democracy depends on your connection.
This all ends when enough of us say enough, and saying enough doesn’t always begin with a shout. Sometimes it begins with refusing to disappear.
