Nationalism, fear, and the dangerous romance with authoritarianism.

There is a new language rising across the globe. It is not written only in policy or legislation but in chants, marches, and whispers sharpened into threats. It is the language of nationalism dressed in urgency, the rhetoric of purity and grievance that seeks to turn entire societies inward against themselves. And if you are paying attention, you already know this script. Because we have seen it before.

In Britain, Steve Bannon told a crowd their country was “on the brink of civil war.” The phrase was less analysis than invocation. Civil war becomes a rallying cry when nationalism needs chaos to thrive.

In Japan, anti-immigrant protests are swelling, borrowing slogans from Elon Musk’s demographic commentary and turning them into weapons against the vulnerable. In Australia, Chinese nationals describe feeling blindsided and unsafe as anti-immigrant marches move from fringe gatherings into the mainstream. In Spain, far-right groups clashed violently with migrants in a small town this summer.

And in the United States, the killing of right-wing figure Charlie Kirk has been seized upon by MAGA voices as proof of a leftist terrorist plot, weaponizing grief before facts are even settled.

Different countries, different details, but the same story. Across continents a pattern is visible: a surge of nationalist ideology fueled by resentment, fear of demographic change, and the promise of restored dominance for a select group. Whether it is White Britons fearing displacement, Japanese nationalists pushing back against immigration, Australians marching against outsiders, or MAGA faithful conjuring fantasies of revenge, the underlying rhythm is the same. The world is turning on its neighbors.

The connective tissue of these uprisings is familiar. First comes scapegoating: immigrants, minorities, and anyone deemed “other” are painted as existential threats. Then come purity myths: the idea that a society once belonged exclusively to one race, faith, or culture and can only be saved by returning to that imagined past. Finally comes grievance politics: the insistence that one’s own majority is now the true victim, stripped of rights by the very presence of others.

The numbers tell their own story. Nationalists rarely represent a majority. In Britain, hardline anti-immigration voices are loud but not dominant. In Japan, protests draw headlines but the country still grapples with labor shortages that make immigration a necessity. In Australia, the marches may be growing but they do not reflect the views of most Australians. In America, MAGA remains a powerful faction, yet polls show a larger population exhausted by extremism.

These movements thrive not because they represent everyone but because they are willing to burn everything down until everyone else looks away.

Globally, minorities are scapegoated despite representing small slices of their host populations. Migrants in Spain. Africans in China. Muslims in Britain. Latinos in the United States. It does not matter the ratio. It never has. Nationalist movements are not about numbers. They are about power.

This is where the danger sharpens. Why would people willingly sacrifice freedoms in exchange for authoritarian control? The answer is simpler than it seems. Authoritarianism offers clarity. It packages uncertainty into digestible enemies. It gives people who feel disoriented by modern life the illusion of control by promising to eliminate complexity.

In this framework, immigration is not about economics or demographics, it is about purity. Protest is not about dissent, it is about treason. Freedom of speech is not about debate, it is about loyalty. Authoritarianism thrives by shrinking the range of what is thinkable and then demanding allegiance to the narrower frame.

It is no coincidence that nationalist movements obsess over thought policing. In classrooms, libraries, and media outlets, the drive is not simply to censor but to control the boundaries of reality. The gaslighting is deliberate. Those who are silenced are called oppressors, while those silencing them cry persecution. In America, Christian nationalists claim their faith is under attack if they are denied the right to deny others theirs. In Japan, anti-immigration voices frame exclusion as protection. In Britain, Bannon’s apocalyptic warnings transform civil discord into a test of loyalty.

Authoritarianism appeals because it pretends to simplify life in a world of unbearable complexity. But simplicity bought with cruelty is not safety. It is surrender.

Here is where the global becomes personal.

The killing of Charlie Kirk is a tragedy. No human being deserves to be murdered in public, broadcast in front of millions, their final moments consumed like spectacle. To pretend otherwise is to surrender our own humanity. Yet what is happening in the aftermath reveals a selective fury, and a kind of fractured morality that runs through far-right politics.

Kirk spent much of his career dismissing the calls for gun reform that followed school shootings, often targeting young people and communities of color for being too emotional or politicized in their grief. After Sandy Hook, after Parkland, after Uvalde, children were buried and parents screamed into microphones, and Kirk’s side of the aisle told them freedom required their sacrifice. He defended guns as essential to liberty while shrugging at the slaughter of the innocent.

Now, with his own death, the script has flipped. The movement that minimized dead children is incandescent with rage for one of its leaders. They are demanding public executions, the very thing Kirk once said children should watch in order to learn the price of crime.

That contradiction should stop us cold. If violence against schoolchildren is acceptable collateral damage for a political agenda, how can the killing of one adult be enough to justify reordering democracy itself?

The answer is that grief here is not about human life. It is about symbolic capital. The death of Charlie Kirk is useful in a way the death of children is not. One can be weaponized. The other demands compassion. And compassion has no place in a movement built on resentment.

This is not to deny the real pain of Kirk’s family or his wife’s haunting message in the aftermath. It is to point out that the eagerness with which his death has been transformed into political ammunition tells us something about the environment we are living in.

There are people who seem almost anxious for tragedies to occur if it means they can be turned into proof of their worldview. Every crime, every death, becomes another brick in the edifice of grievance. That is what makes this moment so dangerous.

Because once death becomes currency, once human suffering is only measured by its usefulness to your side, you have already abandoned the very empathy that makes us human. To celebrate death, any death, even the death of an adversary, is to step onto a slope where violence becomes not tragedy but sport. And history tells us where that slope leads.

What ties these stories together is not geography but psychology. Each example reveals how nationalism metastasizes: first through language, then through policy, then through violence. The arc is not new. What is new is how synchronized it feels, as if borders themselves cannot contain the fever.

And here is where it cuts into bone. Because this is not only about rallies and parliaments. It is about families, friendships, and communities forced to face where they stand. We are living in times that compel people to declare allegiance. For some, refusing to join in the dehumanization of others is branded as toxic empathy. For others, recognizing all people as human is considered weakness, even betrayal.

It is heartbreaking to discover that someone you once trusted, a friend or even a relative, does not see the humanity you assumed was self-evident. These revelations do not just fracture relationships, they reveal the deeper fracture running through entire societies.

But here is the truth we cannot ignore. If your ideology requires you to harm, demean, or strip rights from another human being in order to prove its legitimacy, it is not persecution when society refuses you that permission. It is protection. It is survival.

Faith that calls for war, belief that justifies hatred, ideology that glorifies violence—these are not shields of conscience. They are weapons dressed up as virtue. And naming them as such is not intolerance. It is clarity.

Sometimes voices on the far left are guilty of selective outrage too. There are causes they elevate while others, just as deserving, are met with silence. There are times when protest becomes performance, when rhetoric of inclusion masks action that excludes critics. If the demand is for justice, it must extend everywhere. If the principle is dignity, it must apply to all. Failure to hold ourselves accountable is not neutrality. It is part of what enables cruelty.

So how do we defend against these movements without becoming their mirror image? How do we fight for dignity without slipping into the same spiral of dehumanization that fuels nationalist rage?

First, we must refuse to surrender truth. Not the weaponized versions of it, but truth in its raw, inconvenient form. That includes acknowledging our own failures, the ways liberal democracies have ignored inequality, the ways economic pain has been manipulated into resentment. Denying those realities only feeds the narrative of betrayal that nationalists thrive on.

Second, we must reclaim language. Authoritarians win when they redefine words until nothing means what it should. Compassion becomes weakness. Protest becomes terrorism. Equality becomes oppression. We cannot simply react. We must set the terms of the conversation with clarity and courage.

Third, we must widen the lens. These uprisings are not isolated. They are connected across borders, learning from one another, emboldened by each other’s victories. The opposition to them must be just as global. Solidarity is not an abstract slogan. It is a survival strategy.

And finally, we must practice what we defend. It is not enough to oppose cruelty in rhetoric if we reproduce it in our methods. To defend humanity, we must embody it, even when it costs us. Especially when it costs us.

If nationalism continues unchecked, societies will fracture into fortified tribes. Freedoms we take for granted will be bargained away in the name of purity and security. Violence will escalate, and every justification will be framed as self-defense. The neighbors we once greeted will become the enemies we fear.

But this is not inevitable. The same human instinct that can be manipulated into hate can also be cultivated into resilience. The same machinery that spreads propaganda can spread solidarity. The same streets that host marches of exclusion can hold rallies for inclusion. The difference will be whether enough people decide to risk discomfort for the sake of dignity.

The question is not whether authoritarian nationalism will keep rising. It will. The question is whether we will keep turning away until it is too late.

Because at the end of it, history is not made only by leaders or movements. It is made by neighbors. It is made by the quiet decisions to look away or to speak up, to side with cruelty or to side with humanity.

When the world turns on its neighbors, the betrayal is not only of others. It is of ourselves. Because every time we dehumanize another person, we carve away at our own humanity until nothing is left to defend.

The choice before us is not abstract. It is as close as the house next door, the coworker across the table, the relative at dinner. Do we want to live in societies where power comes from our ability to destroy, or do we want to live in societies where power comes from our ability to recognize each other as human?

This moment demands clarity. And the clarity is this: defending humanity is not toxic empathy. It is survival. And survival, if it is to mean anything worth keeping, requires us to choose not to turn on our neighbors but to turn toward them, while we still can.

It is not what we say or think that defines us, but what we do. Jane Austen wrote that two centuries ago. Today it has never been more urgent.

So find your people. Build your community. Nurture them fiercely. Share love in reckless abundance. Take care of one another even when the world tells you to turn away. And know that whatever waits on the other side of this season will not be delivered by luck or by leaders. It will be delivered by us, by neighbors who refused to turn on each other and instead stood together when it mattered most.

I still believe in humanity, and in what becomes possible when we choose unity.

PS. She is watching.