The Re-Launch of the Fascism Watch Newsletter on Medium
The stakes of the 2024 election merit a rejuvenated project
Fascism Watch is back and bigger than before
In the summer of 2022, my first official edition of “Fascism Watch” was published in Politically Speaking. Although it was a topic I frequently addressed throughout my writing career on Medium, I wanted to create a newsletter that specifically drew attention to America’s rising fascist movement. I discovered a passion for this topic during my time in graduate school, where I studied public opinion and propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933–1945.
I was intensely interested in how an event as horrific as the Holocaust could not only be perpetrated on a massive scale by seemingly ordinary people but also how so many people in the German public came to excuse, justify, or passively accept these evils. What were the insidious forces shaping public opinion? Did propaganda have as large of a role as we thought?
I began conducting and writing my research in the summer of 2020, in the throes of a gruesome election year in which then-President Donald Trump was serving his final term. I often found myself incredulous or shell-shocked by some of the historical parallels of the present day when researching Germany’s…
