Occlumency and American Fascism

Tips for Mental Health in the Trumpocene

In J.K. Rowling’s fifth book in her Hogwarts series, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” Harry is required by Professor Dumbledore to take a series of lessons focused on the skills of “Occlumency” from Professor Snape in his dungeon office. According to the Harry Potter Fandom wiki:

Occlumency was the magical practice of protecting one’s mind from external manipulation or penetration, including Legilimency. It was considered an ancient and obscure branch of magic, and had existed since medieval times. It could prevent a Legilimens from accessing one’s thoughts and feelings, or influencing them. A wizard or witch who practised [sic] this art was known as an Occlumens.

In this article, I’m going to argue that to maintain our own mental health and wellness in “the Trumpocene era,” we need to each develop and practice Occlumency. This is a specific way we need to cultivate “digital defense against the dark arts” skills. We must not permit our news feeds to overwhelm us, leading us into despair and hopelessness.

Occlumency and American Fascism (CC BY 4.0) by Wesley Fryer

The risk of hopelessness and helplessness is real, and it’s part of the playbook of fascism. Authoritarians and fascists often seek to overwhelm citizens with rapid-fire actions, events, and distractions which transgress norms and boundaries. Critical and less sycophantic news sources and journalists are demonized as “the enemy” and unpatriotic. It feels impossible to keep up, and overwhelming if we try to. Rage bait, AI slop, and emotionally manipulative content is everywhere. We need to find ways to reclaim our news feeds from Big Tech oligarchs, including vibe coding our media feeds. But we also need the skills of Occlumency.

Vibe Code Your Media Feed (CC BY 4.0) by Wesley Fryer

Today in the United States of America, in late May 2026, we are no longer living in a functioning democratic republic. Our news feeds are ablaze with signs of failing democratic institutions and rising authoritarianism. THE GAME IS NOT OVER, we still have many tools and strategies that we can and should employ to resist this push into oligarchy and fascism, but the hour is late. Professor Timothy Snyder’s April 30th Zoom conversation with Indivisible Charlotte highlighted many of the ways Donald Trump is exercising power as a king rather than an elected chief executive bound by Constitutional limits. These include:*

1. Government by impulse, not structure. Trump treats freedom as “whatever I feel like doing right now,” taking the idea of negative freedom to its extreme end. This is freedom stripped of any positive project, where the leader’s personal whims override structures meant to help everyone.

2. Oligarchic rule framed as liberation. Figures like Elon Musk saying “let’s destroy the government” get treated as a debatable proposition in America, when in fact people cannot be free without the government doing the right things for them. Snyder identifies this oligarchic capture as a defining feature of where negative freedom thinking leads.

3. “Superpower suicide.” The administration is doing things incompatible with the US remaining a meaningful actor in the world, including fighting a war for no good reason, losing it, and then covering it with genocidal rhetoric. Snyder calls this an unusual combination, especially for a country that regards itself as a superpower.

4. The “politics of eternity.” Rather than building a future, the administration anchors politics in an imagined innocent past where “we” were victimized by outsiders. This traps citizens in a cycle of grievance and removes any sense of forward motion, which Snyder compares to an anchor that keeps the boat from moving.

5. Denying people a future as a governing strategy. Futurelessness itself is a way of ruling, because if people cannot imagine collective or individual futures, they accept the status quo of oligarchs controlling the government. Attacks on universities, defunding, censoring, debarring professors, and burdening students with debt all serve this strategy.

6. Gutting the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court’s recent decision largely gutting Section 2 is designed to enable voter suppression reminiscent of the 1950s, and reflects what Snyder calls a “malicious/naive” reading of American racial history by the Court.

7. The three classic authoritarian electoral stunts. Snyder identifies three plays authoritarians use when they cannot win legitimately: claiming to be God, fighting a war, and fake or real terrorism. He notes Trump has already attempted the first two, and he expects a terrorism stunt before November (citing Orban’s fake pipeline-bombing plot in Hungary as a recent template).

8. Foreign war as domestic tool. Snyder argues the Iran war was conceived in part as a stunt to rally people behind the flag and justify using the military at home. The fact that it is not working domestically is exposing the cynical purpose behind it.

9. Christian nationalist mobilization. Trump’s appeals to divine mandate are an effort to “find warriors who will go to war for me even when I lose the elections,” recruiting an extra-electoral base of loyalists who view his authority as transcending democratic outcomes.

10. Politicization of the military. The appointment of Pete Hegseth, “somebody who thinks the enemy is within and would be delighted to use the American armed forces inside America,” telegraphs a clear authoritarian intent. Mass firings of top military leaders fit the pattern of an early-stage purge, even if the current timeline limits how far it can go.

11. Threatened use of ICE for voter intimidation. Snyder anticipates attempts to deploy ICE around ballot boxes despite having no legal authority, as part of a broader strategy to intimidate voters and demonstrate dominance.

12. State media model and corruption cover-up. Trump is trying to build the kind of state media apparatus that Orban and Poland’s PiS used to cover up scandals, while abuse of power and oligarchic corruption are treated as ordinary governance.

13. Subordination to Putin. Snyder says the most reliable way to predict Trump’s foreign policy is to ask what Putin would want, because “Putin’s way of seeing how the world works is how Trump thinks the world should work.” Lifting sanctions on Russia under the pretext of the Iran war is a recent example.

14. Compulsive lying around dramatic events. Whenever something dramatic happens, Trump lies, so the instinct to “rally around the president” in a crisis must be resisted in favor of rallying around the country, local reporters, investigators, and the judicial process.

15. Strategic incompetence masked by media conventions. American journalistic norms of “on the one hand, on the other hand” make it hard to plainly state that Hegseth and Trump are wildly strategically incompetent, which itself helps authoritarian projects by treating them as normal political actors.

I encourage you to watch this full, recorded conversation with Professor Snyder on YouTube or Substack, and also check out Galen Smith’s recent reflection on the presentation.

Whatever apps and websites you use today to read news and opinions, I’ll argue they are not sufficient to provide the mental boundaries and protections we need from the media feeds of authoritarian propaganda specialists. Meme warfare is in full swing. Occlumency is needed.

My iPhone Learning and News Apps (CC BY 4.0) by Wesley Fryer

So what does “Occlumency” look like in our modern Trumpocene era? Here are a few ideas, drawing on the teaching techniques of Professor Snape and lessons of Harry Potter.*

1. Empty the mind before sleep. Snape’s first lesson was to clear emotion from the mind before bed, when Voldemort’s intrusions were strongest. Translation for 2026: no doomscrolling in the last hour before sleep, and no news as the first input of the morning. Authoritarian propaganda works hardest on us when we are tired, anxious, and ungrounded.

2. Learn to recognize when a Legilimens is probing. Harry had to feel the intrusion before he could resist it. We need the same instinct online. That sudden surge of fury, dread, or contempt when an app loads is often the signal that someone is fishing for our attention and our outrage. Naming the feeling out loud (”this post is engineered to enrage me”) weakens its grip. (As I’ve argued elsewhere, using “SIFT” can be a ‘digital defense against the dark arts!)

3. Vibe code our own news feeds. As I argued above, this belongs at the center of any Occlumency toolkit. RSS readers, self-hosted aggregators (like my News with Wes Fryer project at news.wesfryer.com), and a deliberately curated set of newsletter subscriptions put US back in charge of what enters our minds, instead of an oligarch-tuned algorithm choosing for us.

4. Cast a daily Patronus. Remember, the Patronus Charm requires a genuinely happy memory to drive back the Dementors who literally feed on hope. Our equivalent practice is the intentional summoning of joy: a long walk with the dogs, time in the kitchen, a song that means something, a real conversation with someone we love. This is not denial. It is fuel.

5. Form our own Dumbledore’s Army. When official institutions (the Ministry of Magic, much of the mainstream press, a too-cautious congressional opposition) refuse to name the danger, the answer is not isolation but a small, trusted circle that meets regularly to learn and act. Indivisible chapters, faith communities, and even a handful of friends on a weekly Zoom can become a DA. Join your local chapter of Indivisible and become an active volunteer.

6. Choose our mentors with care. Harry was lucky to have Dumbledore, McGonagall, Lupin, and Sirius. Each of us should pick three to five historians, journalists, and writers we trust to interpret events with integrity (Timothy Snyder, Heather Cox Richardson, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Anne Applebaum, Mike Caulfield on the media literacy side). Read them deeply, rather than skimming a hundred reactive voices.

7. Do not stare into the Mirror of Erised. Dumbledore warned Harry that it does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live. There are two versions of this trap today: doom-scrolling a future catastrophe that has not yet happened, and escaping entirely into nostalgia, fiction, or numbing entertainment. Both pull us out of the present, which is the only place we can actually act.

8. Do the reading like Hermione. She was prepared because she had already done the work. Knowing the history of how authoritarian regimes rise, and how they fall, is itself a defense against panic. Snyder’s “On Tyranny” and “On Freedom,” Applebaum’s “Twilight of Democracy,” Ben-Ghiat’s “Strongmen,” and Stanley’s “How Fascism Works” can serve as important cornerstones of a shared educational foundation we need as pro-democracy citizens and anti-fascists.

9. Accept Phoenix tears when they are offered. Fawkes healed Harry’s wounds in the Chamber of Secrets. Our wounds in the Trumpocene are real, and ignoring them only depletes us. Rest, therapy, prayer, sabbath time away from the feed, and honest conversation are not luxuries. They are operational requirements for sustained resistance.

10. Refuse to obey in advance, even mentally. Snyder’s first lesson in “On Tyranny” applies inside our skulls as well as in the public square. When the regime wants us to feel powerless, to feel that the future is closed, to feel that resistance is naive, that internal capitulation is itself a form of compliance. Holding onto HOPE in the present is a political act.

11. Protect the young minds in our care. Students and children absorb the emotional climate of the adults around them. Modeling steadiness, naming propaganda techniques in age-appropriate ways, and teaching SIFT habits is Occlumency at the curricular and parental level. The next generation of Aurors is sitting in our classrooms and at our dinner tables right now.

12. Stay embodied. Voldemort spent years as a disembodied parasite, and he was utterly miserable for it. Touch grass. Cook. Garden. Hug your dogs. Worship in person. Show up at the next No Kings rally. Protest with a local Indivisible chapter. The body, in community, is where hope actually lives. No algorithm can reach us there.

In the Harry Potter universe, “Aurors” were the dark wizard catchers:

An Auror was a wizard or witch that worked as a highly trained law enforcement official for a wizarding governing body. Auror training was extremely difficult and intensive, so there were few qualified applicants. Aurors of different countries dealt with different high-risk situations that were most prominent to them.

The Aurors were not born ready. They were trained. They studied dark magic so they could recognize it, name it, and counter it. They built their skills in community, year after year, even when the Ministry pretended there was no darkness to fight.

That is exactly our work now. Practicing Occlumency is not retreat from the battle. It IS the battle, fought first inside our own minds so we can show up clear-eyed for everything else. Every grounded morning, every honest conversation, every act of refusing to obey in advance, every hour we spend tending HOPE rather than feeding despair, makes us steadier and stronger for the long fight ahead. The Trumpocene wants us hollowed out, exhausted, and alone.

We will be none of those things.

We will resist.

We will heal.

And we will train ourselves, and the next generation of Aurors sitting in our classrooms and around our dinner tables, to keep the light alive until morning comes.

Training Aurors for Occlumency (CC BY 4.0) by Wesley Fryer

AI Attribution: I used Claude AI to analyze the transcript of the Timothy Snyder video and help me brainstorm ideas for this article. Claude also helped me draft the image prompts which I provided to Gemini for the first and last images.

More ways to connect and learn with me, specific to advocacy for democratic values, are available on wesfryer.com/advocacy.