Through the Static

The Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) recently released world report states 72% of the globe currently lives under an autocracy, where governments are led by one ruler with total power. The U.S. is neck deep in fascism, and something I’ve learned since launching TtS is that Black community leaders and voices are regularly being excluded from the resistance. Let me ask you this: Do you remember the last time Seattle held a Black Lives Matter protest, outside of 2020? I asked several people that question because I was unsure, and they didn’t have an answer either. 

To fight these fascist regimes— to fight America’s fascist empire— we need to grind down to the root causes of these ideologies to understand what our nation has truly and always represented, as history rhymes. I understand the comparison between federal law enforcement officials and Nazis, the Gestapo, and I’ve used those terms to describe their actions, too. But what we need to understand is untaught U.S. history, and that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler modeled his genocide against the Jewish people of Europe after America’s racist and oppressive systems, especially slavery and Jim Crow laws that created racial segregation. 

“The origins of modern-day policing can be traced back to the “Slave Patrol,”” stated the NAACP. “The earliest formal slave patrol was created in the Carolinas in the early 1700s with one mission: to establish a system of terror and squash slave uprisings with the capacity to pursue, apprehend, and return runaway slaves to their owners. Tactics included the use of excessive force to control and produce desired slave behavior.” 

To enforce laws in the 1900s, local governments created police departments, which continue to brutalize and disregard Black people to this day. On December 2, 2025, Seattle Police officers gunned down 29-year-old Christian Hadley Nelson, whose nine-year-old son in Georgia will never see again. Last year, there were reports of numerous hangings of young Black men across the country, with 21-year-old Trey Reed’s being ruled a suicide in Mississippi. Black people have been broadcasting that Black men don’t commit suicide by hanging, and that these were lynchings. 

But we as a whole move on when violence against the Black community is the catalyst for the autocracy we are currently living under, and interconnected to ICE operations, the genocide in Palestine, and the IOF. ICE kidnapping and murdering immigrants— and now U.S. citizens, including Keith Porter, a Black man— resembles what America is at its core: a white nationalist and hateful country. Similarly to enslavers, these mass immigrant prison owners are profiting off suffering and forced labor, and SPD hasn’t been protecting the community from being taken into them.

Several reports state that some Seattle Police officers have engaged in training programs with Israeli forces, bringing brutality tactics carried out on Palestinians back home to disproportionately inflict on the Black community. And during the 2020 BLM uprisings, Palestinians helped educate protesters on how to navigate chemical weapon deployments and stay safe.

All of the atrocities we see being carried out in person and on our screens are connected. And the unfortunate reality is that Black and Indigenous people in the U.S. hold the most knowledge on how to resist systems of oppression stateside, with trauma spanning over generations that have impacted Black people’s genetic makeup. Similarly to other groups, they’re showing up for communities with genuine care and by providing direct mutual aid and resources. The need for these supports and others is ongoing and should be up-scaled to serve more people.

Amplifying Black voices, experiences, and history within the resistance is crucial to taking down the U.S. fascist regime that is tainting all parts of the globe, and that is attacking them directly.