Fascism and the English Language

Telling the Truth about Attacks on Immigrants

“What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them.”

—George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

Earlier in 2025, we released “Fascism and the English Language” to help advocates for justice, equality, and freedom speak plainly about the MAGA regime’s ongoing assault on our lives and our loved ones. As we wrote at the time, these relentless attacks are designed to make us feel unmoored, struggling to articulate what is happening. We must heed Orwell’s warning that “political speech and writing are largely a defense of the indefensible,” and speak truth not merely to power but to each other.

In the months since we released the piece, Trump and MAGA have escalated the pace and scope of their power grab—with particular cruelty inflicted on a long-favored target: immigrants. We must take care not to obscure MAGA’s crimes by referring to raids, abductions, and travel bans as “immigration policy.” “Immigration” is the movement of people into a country for purposes of residency. While the above actions do concern immigrants, they are not about immigration but rather the dehumanization, imprisonment, and harassment of human beings based on what they look like and where they come from.

MAGA relies upon deliberately constructed, repeated refrains to lend normalcy, legitimacy, and even righteousness to their actions. When we sanitize their actions or echo their refrains, for example, calling the Florida facility “Alligator Alcatraz,” we aid their cause. This is a concentration camp. It’s not merely accuracy at stake; naming this facility a “concentration camp” contextualizes this horrific new assault within a well-known fascist playbook. It decimates the anesthetizing fiction that “it could not happen here,” which impedes our ability to bring a wide array of actors into withdrawing consent for what is, in fact, happening.

Policy for how to approach the border and rules around newcomers are areas of real debate in a democratic society; concentration camps are not. We must choose words that make clear to our audiences exactly what is at stake, exposing the motivations of the MAGA regime and generating the will to be in continuous opposition to it.

We need people to understand the severity of the moment and accomplish this most effectively by stating what this new regime IS as opposed to what it isn’t.