You Keep Using That Word: Fascism, Language Theft & The Fight for Meaning

“See? You’re Silencing Me! That’s Fascism!” 

You’ve heard it before. A Republican congressperson votes to ban abortion, defund public schools, and criminalize queer existence, but the moment someone disagrees with them? “Help! I’m being silenced! This is fascism!” 

Words like freedom, tyranny, and fascism get tossed around like confetti, emptied of meaning and repackaged to serve the very systems those words were invented to fight. When fascists call themselves freedom fighters, and billionaires claim to be victims of oppression, the goal isn’t accuracy. The goal is confusion—confusion protects power. 

Let's pull back the curtain and break down what fascism actually is, how right-wing figures co-opt the language of resistance, and show you how to reclaim language as a tool for liberation, not a weapon of control.

Fascism starts with slogans. If we want to fight it, we have to start by refusing to speak its language.

What Fascism Actually Is 

Let’s get one thing clear: Fascism isn’t just someone being strict, loud, or conservative. It’s not a mask mandate. It’s not cancel culture. It’s not your niece using they/them pronouns. Fascism is a specific political structure—a form of ultranationalist, authoritarian rule that fuses state power, corporate interests, militarized masculinity, and cultural purification into a single, violent system of control. 

It doesn’t care about truth. It doesn’t allow dissent. It’s obsessed with strength, order, and obedience, and it always imagines a mythical past that needs to be “restored.” 

Core Traits of Fascism: 

As laid out by political theorists, historians, and survivors: 

• Cult of the leader – charismatic figure who “alone can fix it” 
• Militarism and violence – force as virtue; peace as weakness 
• Propaganda and censorship – truth is what the regime says it is 
• Scapegoating – an enemy within to blame and punish 
• Disdain for human rights – rights are conditional, not inherent 
• Corporate-state fusion – private power aligned with government control
• Obsession with decline – belief in a “great” nation being corrupted 
• Suppression of unions, press and intellectuals – dissent is betrayal

We’ve seen this before: 

• Mussolini’s Italy 
• Hitler’s Germany 
• Franco’s Spain 
• Pinochet’s Chile 
• Orbán’s Hungary 
• Modi’s India 

And now we’re watching parralells in the United States: 

• A twice-impeached demagogue calling for mass deportations, purges of federal workers, and the attacks on his enemies 
• A party criminalizing protest, targeting trans existence, rewriting history books, and building loyalty economies through propaganda outlets 
• A base radicalized into seeing diversity as decay, democracy as weakness, and cruelty as strength 

This is not metaphor or exaggeration. It is fascism with American branding and billionaire sponsorship. 

When Fascists Pretend to Be Rebels 

Fascism always needs an enemy

Not just because it’s convenient, but because without one it collapses. At its core, fascism is less a political ideology and more an identity cult. It survives by manufacturing a sense of existential threat and then offering a unifying, purifying force to fight back against it.

That’s why Umberto Eco, in his famous essay Ur-Fascism, listed an “obsession with a plot” as one of fascism’s defining traits. There always has to be a them—a corrupting force to blame, fear, and ultimately, destroy. 

Sound familiar? 

• “They’re coming across our borders!” 
• “They’re taking your jobs!” 
• “They’re indoctrinating your kids!” 
• “They want to destroy America!” 

This isn’t an accident. It’s called accusation in a mirror—accuse your enemy of the exact things you’re planning to do. 

• Nazi Germany: “The Jews are trying to destroy Germany.” 
• Rwanda: “The Tutsis are planning genocide against Hutus.” 
• MAGA republicans: “The left is trying to silence you, control you, and dismantle your freedoms.” 

It’s not that the GOP don't know what fascism is. It’s that they want you to stop knowing—to stay confused.

Why Our Words Are Co-Opted 

If fascism is so powerful, why bother pretending to be the victim? Because that’s how it gets in the door. Authoritarian movements don’t usually start by declaring “We’re the bad guys!” They start by claiming they’re under attack—by immigrants, trans people, teachers, socialists, Muslims, or whoever they’ve chosen to scapegoat this cycle. 

It’s a trick, but a highly effective one: Power that wants to dominate must first disguise itself as power that’s under siege. 

This is why Republican leaders constantly claim they’re being “silenced,” “censored,” “discriminated against,” or “targeted” even as they pass laws to ban books, control schools, and criminalize healthcare. It’s how white supremacy adapts to a post-civil rights world. It’s the logic of the abusive partner: “You’re making me hurt you. I’m the victim here.”  It's classic DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.

MAGA republicans can’t say the quiet part out loud anymore, so instead, they flip the script:

• Affirmative action becomes “reverse racism.” 
• Anti-police violence protests become “riots.” 
• Queer inclusion becomes “indoctrination.” 
• Diversity programs become “fascist oppression.” 

This is why the GOP doesn’t try to redefine fascism. They just use it so often it stops meaning anything. If everything is fascism, nothing is. 

It’s also why their rhetoric is so emotionally effective because it leverages victimhood as a brand. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, how much power you hold, or how many levers of government you control. If you can make your base believe they’re under attack, then every act of domination can be framed as “self-defense.” 

Language as a Weapon, Not a Tool 

When most people use language, they’re trying to communicate something real. Describe a situation. Make sense of their experience. Ask a question. Tell the truth. 

In fascist rhetoric, language is performative, and rather than using words to illuminate, it uses words to indoctrinate, dominate, and mislead. It’s not about what’s true, it’s about what’s effective. 

You see this all the time in GOP messaging: 

• “Censorship” = being disagreed with publicly 
• “Freedom” = I can oppress others without consequences 
• “Grooming” = a queer person exists near children
• “Patriotism” = unquestioning loyalty to the state 

And beneath all of it? A deeply embedded schema they rarely question because they’ve been trained not to. Many Republicans are raised in religious authoritarian households—places where questioning authority is framed as rebellion, obedience is morality, and language is used to define the limits of acceptable thought. Indoctrination didn’t start in Congress. It started in Sunday School. 

If you were taught that “freedom” means submission to divine law, then it’s easy to believe that protest is violence and control is compassion. It’s no coincidence that Republican rhetoric feels a lot like a church sermon:

• Good vs. Evil 
• Heaven vs. Hell 
• The Chosen vs. The Condemned 

It’s easier to accuse than to think

Stuck in that black and white, simplistic worldview, complexity becomes heresy. So, when someone says “Black lives matter,” or “trans people deserve safety,” or “capitalism is the problem,” it’s easier to yell "that’s fascism!” than to investigate power, and it’s much easier to weaponize language than to wield it with care.

Why Fascist Movements Can't Survive Real Memory

Fascist movements rely on amnesia, distortion, and spectacle. Because the moment people start remembering how power actually works, the whole illusion begins to unravel. That’s why the GOP’s language game is so aggressive. They don’t want you to think. They want you to react. They don’t want you to analyze power. They want you to misidentify it. Their goal is to make you forget who holds the gun by screaming that someone else is pointing it at you. 

What fascism tries to obscure: 

• It is top-down, not grassroots. 
• Censorship comes from the state, not someone disagreeing with you online. 
• Corporations fund both parties, but only one is trying to criminalize dissent while feeding culture war outrage to billion-dollar donors. 
• Naming social privilege isn’t persecution, and someone else getting rights doesn’t mean yours are being taken away. 

Fear is a hell of a drug and our neoliberal legislators—republican and democratic—have been selling it nonstop since 9/11, rebranding it every few years as “patriotism.”

Language is power. If we forget what words actually mean, they can mean anything, and that's how fascism becomes an author of reality. It doesn’t need truth. It just needs a crowd that’s too afraid, too confused, or too exhausted to question the story being told.

Resistance Requires Precision 

If fascism thrives in confusion, then clarity is the key to resistance, and resistance is about more than action. It's about definition.  

We don’t beat authoritarianism by yelling louder—we beat it by making meaning sharper. Resistance must include reclaiming the words distorted by fascist leaders to restore truths they’ve buried. We must refuse to speak in the vocabulary of our oppressors. 

We must reclaim our language: 

• “Fascism” is not “someone was mean to me on the internet.” It’s a system of authoritarian nationalism designed to crush dissent and enforce obedience through state violence and manufactured loyalty. 
• “Censorship” is not “someone disagreed with me.” It’s the suppression of information by those in power. 
• “Freedom” is not “I can do whatever I want to others.” It’s the collective ability to live safely, truthfully, and without domination. 

And that clarity matters because fascists want your words before they want your rights. They want to rewrite meaning so they can rewrite reality.

So what do we do? 

• We get precise and strategic. 
• We get unshakeable in our definitions, our values, and our vocabulary. 
• We teach our communities what fascism actually is. 
• We build political literacy, not just protest slogans. 
• We remind people that power is not a feeling—it’s a structure. 

Call to Action: Refuse the Script 

You don’t need to shout louder or win debates with your uncle or in-laws. You don’t need to reclaim every thread, comment section or conversation. You just need to refuse the fascist script. You know the one. That says, “you’re the real fascist.” That says oppression is patriotism and cruelty is strength. That blames the powerless while praising the powerful, and replacing language with slogans, politics with performance.

Tear it up. 

Refuse the false binaries. Refuse the lazy outrage bait. Refuse to speak in the language of domination and instead: 

• Teach the truth even when it’s messy. 
• Define fascism before they do. 
• Help others see how power actually works—who has it, who doesn’t, and who’s trying to steal more. 
• Build resistance rooted not in purity or panic, but in clarity, solidarity, and strategy. 

When we build resistance movements rooted in clarity and reclamation—not just reaction—we get to write our own stories. We choose our own adventure. This is about so much more than just politics. It’s about meaning and what's at stake. About who gets to define reality and who gets erased by it.