Let’s be real about what’s happening. The US government is endeavoring to solidify dictatorship rule. It’s moving incredibly fast because the structures needed to pull this off have been getting implemented piecemeal and with purpose since the Reagan Revolution in 1980. So now they are ready to rock and roll.
Dictatorships always rely on a militarized police force to rain hell on a scapegoated minority that are “blamed” as the cause of whatever the authorities decide is going to put fear into their base and use that fear to stoke division and prejudice amongst people.
This militarized police force operates as an arm of a military engagement where no probable cause, due process or any of the civil rights people think protects them from government abuse or persecution exist. Masked, unbadged, heavily armed and using maximum force, soldiers are fast becoming America’s new Community Policing Model. They/we didn’t abolish (or defund) the police, we militarized them. Couple this enforcement with new “black site prisons” being constructed on military bases across the country to incarcerate whoever they choose without due process—is a core facet of any dictatorship, and always has been.
At the same time, in order to ensure that the new “truth” can be spread and never discredited, all dictatorships know it is important to silence institutions that might challenge or fact check the information and documentation it spreads. So universities, public and commercial media, legal entities, and government agencies conducting research and documenting financial trends and data are defunded as public broadcasting and university grants vanish and Trump keeps firing research staff at government agencies and replacing them with sycophants.
With these structures in place the dictatorship can now go about the business of governing: Ensuring that the wealth of the country gets consolidated amongst a select core of institutions and cronies.
The “banana republics” of South and Central America were countries operated as a private enterprise for the exclusive profit of the ruling class. The US is becoming a Banana Republic in 2025. To finance this, all public spending must be directly connected to profits for the ruling class.
Expenditures such as public welfare, education, health care, housing, environment are being and/or have already been eliminated. Since USAID was shut down over 90,000 children have died and frankly the US government doesn’t give a shit. Just like it won’t give a shit about the children and others at home when they eliminate access to Social Security, Medicaid, Housing, Food Stamps, or a livable income. Some of these massive cuts will take effect immediately and some are being rolled out so as to truly hit people after the midterm elections in November of 2026. But they are all coming.
Some $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid means 17 million people will lose access to vital health care, 411,000 people are projected to lose their housing voucher subsidy (500,000 Public Housing Units have already been lost) $230 billion in cuts to Food Stamps, coupled with draconian work requirements in several programs, mean more people will be living with hunger in the richest country in the world.
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This is just a partial list to illustrate the breadth of oppression and brutality. Militarized police and immigration enforcement systems are created to protect dictators from the pain and suffering they cause as they hoard a country’s wealth and resources.
Immigrants, trans community members, unhoused people, disabled people, people of color are the primary targets for oppression, but we are all targets. So is anyone who is poor and all those who are not working to protect or enrich the ruling class of people who believe that they are the rightful benefactors of this country’s wealth. When a country operates as a private enterprise for the exclusive profit of the ruling class violence, fear and oppression are a core function of governing.
In this context, Trump’s July 24 Executive Order on homelessness makes perfect sense. Entitled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” it calls for forced treatment and civil commitment for people with Mental Health Disabilities and, mandates local governments to increase their sweeps and incarceration of unhoused people—or risk losing Federal funding. Round them up, beat them up, lock them up and throw away the key.
We all know who “them” is: It’s us.
True community groups and organizations are faced with the new reality we are living in, and need to figure out what we are going to do to support each other and build stronger and more universal alliances, messaging, and campaigns. We need to do this 1) to survive and 2) to fight the incredible amount of truly dictatorial shit happening to all sorts of communities right now, and surely into the immediate future.
We all know shit has been real bad for a long while already, but it is going to get a whole lot worse and we need each other to survive. It’s not just homeless based groups, all of us need to seriously think about our organizing strategies under the current fascist regime.
As Pete White from LA Community Action Network wrote recently, “We are awake. And let this awakening be the beginning of a new chapter—a chapter where we reclaim the truth, where we demand justice, and where we refuse to allow any person or institution to strip us of our humanity. So, let us stand together, with heads held high and hearts fierce.”
Paul Boden is director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project.
