It’s dawned on me that we are well into the Fast Fashion era of Fascism, and there is no putting the genie back in the bottle.
While I tend to keep straight up politics out of my writing here, I did go on about ABC’s cowardly pulling of Jimmy Kimmel off the air just because a Trump administration official glared at them on a podcast.
This is not a USPOL issue. It doesn't matter if you even knew who Kimmel was. That repulsive Human Cheeto's first campaign and administration were trendsetters for populist assholes everywhere.
I assure you would-be autocrats are taking notes about what works now, and if people push back.
— Ricardo J. Méndez (@ricardo.bsky.social) September 19, 2025 at 8:26 AM
I’ve seen the current US Government derisively referred to as “the Temu administration”, but it’s about more than being ruled by cheap knock-offs, and in fact much closer to Zara: autocrats get to learn from each other in real time, and quickly make adjustments to sell policies to their local regime.
Erdogan mimicked Trump’s approach in Turkey. Trump’s first administration followed Orbán’s media playbook. Orbán in turn praised Trump. And Trump has made comments about a third administration, following in Bukele’s steps scrapping his own term limits.
A few years ago, I wrote when talking about The Global Latin America:
everything will be up in the air, only the nimble will survive.
This combination of always-on instantaneous connectivity and immediate, real-time feedback may end up being an outside context problem for democratic institutions.
If we are optimistic, we’d say that democratically-minded representatives take time to listen to their constituents, and there are legal lines they won’t cross; if we are not, we simply admit that the feedback cycles are too long, and they are not likely to see an impact on themselves until years later, when they may not get re-elected.
On the other hand, fascists don’t care who they have to learn from, what they break, or who do they have to bend, as long as they get their way.
And I am not sure if any politician or corporate that isn’t an avowed fascist has realized that either they are immediately in the anti-fascist business, or they are roadkill.