217: Hot Wet Fascist Summer
The virus of violence spreads
Our bodies break down in this kind of heat and that makes it difficult to function, whether doing farm chores or putting out new issues of the newsletter. Publishing may be sporadic as temperatures and humidity remain high. 🥵
To paraphrase Bill Gibson, the violence is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.
It’s in the armored ICE vans prowling neighborhoods like predator drones. It’s in the thunderous threats that Trump hurls at his enemies—journalists, migrants, judges, or the left. It’s in the unbearable heat that bakes city sidewalks and scorches farm fields. It’s in the overdraft alerts, the unpaid rents, the empty fridges. It’s in the heavy silence of people who know something is wrong but don’t yet know what to do.
We are in the middle of a hot wet fascist summer—a season soaked in sweat, surveillance, sickness, and state-sanctioned cruelty.
And like the temperature, the pressure keeps climbing.
The Fascism of the Everyday
Fascism doesn’t arrive with fanfare and flags. It creeps in like a humidity wave—sticky, smothering, hard to breathe through. ICE raids are accelerating, yet becoming normalized in the news. Children are separated from families. People are disappeared, detained, deported. Many are citizens. Many are workers. All are targets.
And while these actions happen in the name of "security" or "law and order," they serve the same function as every authoritarian playbook: sow fear, fracture solidarity, and normalize brutality.
Meanwhile, Trump is not campaigning. He is commanding. Declaring vengeance. Floating military coups. He promises “mass deportations” on Day One and publicly muses about violence like it's theatre. These aren’t idle threats. They’re invitations.
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Similarly as the political climate shifts toward repression, the actual climate continues its own violent course. June 2025 was the hottest month in recorded history. July is on track to beat it. In some places, the heat index surpassed 50°C. In others, the air was so thick with wildfire smoke that breathing became a health hazard.
Climate collapse isn’t looming. It’s arriving in waves.
Yet amid record heat, border walls are being reinforced—not to keep people safe, but to trap them in—or out. Water access is policed. Climate migrants are criminalized. The cruelty is policy.
And as the air thickens, so does the denial. As if we can air-condition our way through the apocalypse. As if the swimming pool down the block or the podcast in our ears can keep reality at bay.
COVID is still here too. A new generation of variants is sweeping through the population—faster, more infectious, leaving long-term illness and disability in its wake. But just like the heat, the virus is now ambient, normalized, ignored.
There’s no public messaging. No updated guidance. No infrastructure of care.
Which is why the mask is more than protection. It’s a political gesture. A declaration of solidarity.
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Whether at a protest, on a bus, or in a grocery store, wearing a mask is a signal to others: We care about your health. We believe in collective responsibility. Mutual aid is not just food and rent. It’s breathable air. It’s the right to stay healthy in public. It’s the refusal to abandon each other, even when the state already has.
In this landscape of instability, culture becomes both refuge and opiate. Social media platforms drip-feed us dystopias amidst a flood of aspirational escapism. Algorithms distract us with novelty while the world burns in the background.
We joke about civil war while living through low-intensity conflict every day.
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There’s a word for this: thermopolitics. The study of how power operates through temperature—who gets cooled, who gets burned, and who gets left to overheat. In a warming world, air conditioning isn’t just a comfort; it’s a privilege. Heat waves kill, but not equally. The rich retreat into climate-controlled bubbles while the poor, the incarcerated, the unhoused, and the overworked bear the brunt of rising temperatures.
Thermopolitics reveals how climate collapse isn’t just an environmental issue, but a tool of control, stratification, and abandonment. It’s the politics of breathability, survivability, and who is deemed worthy of relief.
There is a growing chorus shouting: this is fascism. This must be stopped. But the urgency hasn’t reached everyone. The momentum hasn’t yet crested. The heat hasn’t yet forced the reckoning.
But it will.
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Authoritarianism thrives in exhaustion. It relies on despair. The challenge is not to predict the spark, but to prepare for it. To build solidarity, not just resistance. To create cool zones, not just for relief, but for radical imagination.
Because the heat is real, and so is the hatred. But so is our capacity to organize, to care, to break the cycle.
And something will break.
Let’s make sure it’s the system—not us.
Our recent salon on the nature of nature was a stimulating and high level conversation that we highly recommend checking out. Our next is scheduled for early August on the power of language. Email metaviews at gmail.com to reserve your spot or get access to our Signal group which gets priority access.