The Department of War Wants to Bring Troops to Oakland.

This Is Fascism.

Names matter. They do more than describe. They assign intent. When a lover becomes a fiancée the world changes. When the Department of Defense is recast as the Department of War the country changes. That is not a semantic quibble. It is a declaration of appetite. The White House signed an order to relabel the Defense Department with the word war in its title. That word does what words do: it primes people to accept violence as policy and citizens as battlegrounds.

Now add the threats to park soldiers on American streets. Talk of deploying National Guard and federal troops to cities like Oakland is not macho posturing or campaign theater. It is a roadmap for domestic occupation. Oakland city leaders are already bracing for the possibility that troops could be sent their way. That is not hypothetical. That is real planning in response to real threats from the White House.

There is no polite or academic way to say this. The military is built to win wars, not to protect civil liberties. Soldiers are trained to subdue and to dominate. That training is the opposite of de-escalation and community preservation. Deploying troops into neighborhoods is not about safety. It is about control. Experts and criminal justice groups warn that sending armed forces into cities will not make people safer and will instead inflame tensions and erode constitutional protections.

Do not let anyone gaslight you into thinking this is limited to optics. Look at what the administration is doing to immigration enforcement at the same time. ICE is running raids that have been described as military style. These are not polite door knocks. These operations look and behave like paramilitary incursions in civilian communities.

And who is ICE trying to staff these operations with? The agency is aggressively recruiting local cops and deputies with bonuses, six figure promises, and flashy national ads. They are offering huge incentives to pull officers out of local policing into an agency whose mission is mass detention and deportation. Entry level deportation officer roles are being advertised with big signing bonuses and low formal barriers to entry. The result will not be more professional immigration enforcement. The result will be more people who know how to arrest someone but have no training in immigration law, community safety, civil rights, or humane crisis response. That is deliberate. That is reckless.

This is how fascism looks in practice. Not the movie version with black shirts and goose steps but the bureaucratic version where legal frameworks are bent until they mean nothing and ordinary language is weaponized. Look at the pattern and it is chilling. Mussolini took emergency powers and militarized civic life by stealth and spectacle until democracy dissolved. Pinochet turned the army inward and delivered disappearances and brutality as policy. In this country Herbert Hoover sent the army against World War I veterans who were asking for the pay they had been promised. These are not obscure comparisons. They are warnings carved into history for when leaders choose force over governance.

If you think those are big words for small problems, ask yourself what a government shutdown now means in this context. A shutdown creates noise, confusion, and rationed attention. It pulls public scrutiny away from policy shifts and gives cover to dramatic and dangerous moves. While mouths are busy blaming each other about paychecks and furloughs other things happen that have a permanent effect on civil life. A shutdown is not merely an economic problem. It can be a smokescreen. The timing of this political chaos with the rebranding of the Pentagon, the threats to deploy troops, the expansion of paramilitary ICE tactics, and the wholesale poaching of local cops into federal enforcement roles smells of deliberate distraction.

Think about what this means on the ground. Troops or militarized federal agents in an American city do not behave like community police. Their presence rewires the relationship between citizens and state. People start to move differently. Children learn fear. Protest gets framed as insurrection. Journalists get arrested. Lawyers get sued out of town. The erosion is stepwise and then irreversible. That is not alarmism. It is a basic reading of how power works when you hand arms to governance and then call opponents enemies.

And there is the uglier calculation at work here. The administration cannot build legitimacy so it builds spectacle. It cannot solve problems so it creates enemies. It cannot govern without war, so it renames its governing institutions to match the fantasy. It cannot recruit enough trained, professional immigration enforcers for a humane system so it raids local police rosters with cash and names and then pushes them into roles they are not trained to do. That is not competence. It is desperation fed by cruelty.

I see it happening but I am not immune to any of this. I am losing sleep. I am furious. I am terrified. I imagine tanks on Telegraph Avenue. I imagine armed agents at Lake Merritt. I imagine checkpoints replacing civic conversation. I imagine neighbors being rounded up because the paperwork or the color of their skin or the rumor of dissent made them troublesome. This is a state that views its citizens as objects to be controlled rather than people to be served. I feel powerless because these moves are both legalistic and theatrical. They are designed to feel inevitable and therefore unchallengeable. That is how tyranny wins consent.

Wake up. Read the fine print. Follow the budget fights the way you follow the front page. Phone your representatives. Show up for city meetings. Support civil liberties groups that will litigate these moves in court. Support journalists who will name what is being done. Protect the vulnerable neighbors who will be first in the crosshairs. Complain loudly even when it feels like yelling into the void because silence is how this becomes a routine.

This is not hyperbole. This is a civic emergency. When leaders rebrand defense as war, when they threaten to drop soldiers into American neighborhoods, when they turn immigration enforcement into paramilitary raids and recruit cops into deportation squads, when they time these things amid political chaos and a government shutdown, they are not merely testing boundaries. They are burning them down.

If you are not angry yet, you should be. If you are not ready to act, start now. Because once the uniforms are in place, undoing what has been done will be a fight the next generation will have to bleed for.