This is the Moment We Were Warned About.

Dear Pride Center Family,

My grandfather taught me how fascism rises. He made me promise to never look away.

I was born into a world built by men who had fought a war to stop fascism.

Cresskill, New Jersey, was a town shaped by the GI Bill, a place where (white) veterans returned from World War II and built a future they believed was safe. The streets were lined with modest postwar homes, filled with families who had seen the worst of humanity and believed their service had secured something lasting. Freedom. Democracy. Stability.

But for all their patriotism, for all their faith in this country, they also lived with ghosts.

These were men who had stormed the beaches of Normandy, who had walked through the ruins of Europe and seen the death camps with their own eyes. They had sworn they would never let it happen again. The lessons of that war weren’t just something we read about in textbooks. They sat at our dinner tables, spoken in voices still heavy with memory.

Fascism, I was told, does not arrive with jackboots and fanfare. It seeps in quietly, convincing good people to look the other way. It twists logic, normalizes cruelty, and turns neighbor against neighbor. It weaponizes fear until ordinary people find themselves complicit in horrors they never thought possible.

And yet, even as my grandfather’s generation swore they would never let it happen again, their own sons were sent to fight and die in Vietnam. Another war justified by the fight against authoritarianism, even as civil rights leaders were being assassinated at home.

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Then Came November 22, 1963

John F. Kennedy was shot in broad daylight, and America watched its innocence bleed out onto the pavement in Dallas.

My grandparents loved JFK—not necessarily the man, but the ideals. The belief that public service was noble. That democracy could be a force for good. That America, for all its flaws, was something worth protecting.

His death changed everything.

It shattered trust. It fueled conspiracies. It made people question who was really in control. And it marked the beginning of an era where hope was met with a bullet—first JFK, then Malcolm X, then Martin Luther King Jr., then Bobby Kennedy. One by one, they were gunned down, and with them, any illusion that this country was immune to the forces of violence and hatred.

The message was clear: step too far out of line, and you will be taken down.

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Then Came the 1980s

The Reagan era. The decade of excess, of trickle-down economics that never quite trickled down.

I was a kid growing up in a deeply Republican household. We were told we had won the Cold War, that America was standing against the “Evil Empire” of the Soviet Union. But at home, an entirely different kind of war was unfolding.

The War on Drugs. The rise of mass incarceration. The crack epidemic ripping through cities while Wall Street boomed.

And AIDS.

We watched as men wasted away, as entire communities were decimated, while our own government refused to even say the word. Reagan let an entire generation of gay men die rather than acknowledge they existed. People begged for help, for research, for action, and the response was silence. Because the people suffering weren’t considered worth saving.

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Then Came the 1990s

We were teenagers when Los Angeles erupted after the Rodney King beating. When we saw police brutality captured on video and still watched the system excuse it.

We were coming of age when the Oklahoma City bombing happened. Not carried out by some foreign enemy, but by a homegrown right-wing extremist radicalized by anti-government, white supremacist rhetoric.

We saw Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell force LGBTQ+ servicemembers into hiding. We saw the Defense of Marriage Act sign into law that our families, our love, were second-class.

And when Columbine happened, when we watched children gunned down in their school, we saw the same politicians who had spent decades fueling fear, who had armed police departments like military units, turn around and say, “Nothing can be done.”

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Then Came the 2000s

We were barely adults when the Twin Towers fell.

We watched as the world changed overnight. As fear became the most powerful currency in America. As we were told, you are either with us or against us.

We saw the Patriot Act strip away civil liberties. We saw mass surveillance become normal. We saw the government detain people without charges, justify torture, and use national security as an excuse for unchecked power.

We saw Hurricane Katrina. An American city underwater, Black families abandoned on rooftops, while the president flew over the devastation and did nothing.

We saw the 2008 financial crisis. Wall Street was bailed out while millions of working people lost everything.

We saw how easy it was for those in power to let people suffer.

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Then Came the 2010s

We saw the murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner.

We saw Black Lives Matter rise, only for the right-wing media to call them terrorists.

We saw white supremacists march in Charlottesville. We saw our own president call them “very fine people.”

We saw children ripped from their parents at the border and put in cages.

We saw January 6. We saw an armed mob attack the Capitol, Confederate flags paraded through its halls. And we saw those responsible walk free while the same government that calls us “extremists” looked the other way.

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Then Came Now.

And now, they are coming for us.

They came for Trans people first—banning healthcare, erasing identities, forcing families to flee their home states in search of safety. They are testing how much cruelty a society will tolerate before it resists.

They are coming for our Latiné and Haitian neighbors—demonizing immigrants, stripping asylum protections, tearing families apart at the border and deporting people to places they barely know.

They are coming for women—rolling back reproductive rights, silencing survivors, punishing those who dare to fight for autonomy over their own bodies.

They are coming for all of us—anyone who does not fit into their narrow vision of who deserves to be free.

This is not a drill.

This is not an isolated event.

This is what happens before everything falls apart.

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This Is the Moment We Were Warned About.

🔔 We sound the alarm in the name of those who fought fascism and those who died at its hands.

🎖️ We sound the alarm for the soldiers who stormed the beaches, the ones who never came home.

🕯️ We sound the alarm for the men lost to AIDS, abandoned by their own country.

✊🏾 We sound the alarm for the students who sat at lunch counters and faced fire hoses.

🎒 We sound the alarm for the children gunned down in their classrooms.

🌍 We sound the alarm for the families torn apart at our borders.

🚨 We sound the alarm because we were taught to sound the alarm. Because we must.

We are out of time for debating whether this is as bad as it feels. It is.

We are out of time for waiting to see if it gets worse. It will.

And we are out of time for hoping someone else will be the one to stop it. We are the ones who stop it.

We sound the alarm loud enough that they cannot ignore it.

Loud enough that no one can say they didn’t hear it.

Loud enough that history will know we refused to standdown.

This is the moment. And we do not sit this one out.

In solidarity,

Brooke Malloy

Executive Director