The United States is currently reaching political extremes that feel completely outstanding — ICE tearing through our immigrant communities, the destruction of international relationships, the rollback of centuries of federal protections, an exponentially devastating support of Israel’s genocide, and so much more. On top of it all, the climate crisis is showing its face more clearly than ever before, with each extreme weather event worse than the last. The label “end times” is thrown around across the country and the world, ushering in a collective despair and hopelessness.
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor isolate three material developments that propel this end-of-times apocalyptic appeal: the climate crisis, COVID, and artificial intelligence. These three circumstances feel particularly unprecedented, and their impacts have been steadily intensifying. “End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism — a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy,” Klein writes[1]. Since April of 2025, when Taylor and Klein’s article was published, the United States has spiraled farther down the barrel into Trump’s authoritarian agenda.
These developments are arguably unparalleled historically, and therefore our responses must reflect the severity of the moment. On college campuses across the United States, they are. As a university student myself, I have both witnessed and participated in the full-throttle organizing efforts that persist on hundreds of campuses, despite ever-changing political circumstances.
Encampments, sit-ins, and rallies calling for institutional divestment and a liberated Palestine are leading the way towards a continually shifting cultural push for an America that resists Israel’s genocidal campaign. University students continue to organize and resist in the face of direct attacks from the Trump administration. All this to say: today’s dangerous reality is being taken seriously by many, and should be taken seriously by more.
However, I don’t believe that this “unprecedented times” narrative will be what fuels young people to continue resisting. We know the pressure upon us to create a better world; we know how scary it is. But what we forget, and what must be remembered, is the thread of resistance that ties us to generations of young people before us. The “Hey! Actually, people have been doing this for longer than we are aware of,” narrative has a far more powerful appeal than insistence on the singularity of our lives and experiences. If this is the end times, or even if it isn’t, community and connection are what will cultivate resilience, not isolation.
Investment into community and connection means building a longer dinner table and a door that props open instead of individualistic, nuclear family-focused protection and “apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety,” as described by Klein and Taylor. This horizontal connection builds communities that can be mobilized. But we must be careful not to isolate ourselves from history as well. Community investment means finding safety in the resistors before us, and rooting ourselves into an extension of their fight. A vertical connection with the past will help us understand our history and our next steps. Our resistance is not historically isolated.
Loss of collective memory is a deeper issue than just graduational turnover, and in our case, it was exacerbated by the pandemic. On my campus, many collective spaces that served as hubs for radical imagination and organizing have shifted and shrunk. Collaborative special interest housing, for example, has diminished in its campus cultural importance. A lot of the student body’s collective memory was lost; now we are left to reimagine our campus’s future without the base of imagination and work that existed before.
The Power of Archival Resource
Strong movements sit atop years of both related and unrelated organizing, understood by Sarah Schulman as the “politics of repetition[2],” that endures until a response is evoked and the cycle of resistance continues. Curious about the resistance that has created change on my own university’s campus, I arrived in my spring semester of sophomore year eager to understand the anti-South African apartheid student movement through the eyes of students in the 1960s-1980s.
It seemed like a natural choice, given the parallels in space occupation between their movement and the student encampments erected in 2023 and 2024 in support of Palestine. I found myself boxes deep in the Archival Research Center almost every morning, sifting through folders of administrative memos, news coverage transcriptions, film photo negatives, student paper articles, and scraps of recorded memories. Along with total divestment from South Africa, the clearly outlined demands that the established student Committee for South African Divestment asked for were as follows:
- The university should take a clear stance against institutional racism on campus and against apartheid in South Africa
- Total divestment; more financial aid for minority and low-income student
- Another full-time minority recruiter
- A freshman orientation workshop on race awareness
They shared that the only demand they were willing to discuss was specific figures for financial aid. After a decade of consistent resistance — although often waxing and waning — to apartheid, the university divested from all investments tied to South African Apartheid on February 26th, 1989. This extended fight and success was mirrored across numerous college campuses in the United States.
Two primary occupations of space propelled the resistance forward. The first was a three-day sit-in, occupying the primary administrative building and the oldest building on campus. For decades, this building has been the target of many student demonstrations, as it holds great significance in physically housing the administrative decision-making process. “This building is their main administrative building. It is completely shut down. This university cannot run without this building,” stated one news reporter during the sit-in[3].
The second occupation of space was a shanty town built by students on the academic quad. Shanty towns were highly visible, makeshift dwellings that were intended to draw attention to the living conditions of Black South Africans under the apartheid regime. They were built to highlight the inconsistency between U.S. university students’ lives and the realities of Black South Africans across the world, ultimately becoming a symbol of solidarity across campus resistance movements.
Using Archives in Present-Day College Campus Organizing
Through this archival dive, it became increasingly obvious that the key to believing in the futures of our communities is access and investment into understanding their histories. On college campuses and across youth movements, the issue of shortening collective memory is heightened. There is a natural turnover that comes with campus organizing — every spring, large swaths of deeply important and experienced organizers graduate and take their knowledge of the landscape with them. Reinventing the wheel becomes a frequent practice if its blueprint is not explicitly outlined by its previous inventors.
Loss of collective memory is a deeper issue than just graduational turnover, and in our case, it was exacerbated by the pandemic. On my campus, many collective spaces that served as hubs for radical imagination and organizing have shifted and shrunk. Collaborative special interest housing, for example, has diminished in its campus cultural importance. A lot of the student body’s collective memory was lost; now we are left to reimagine our campus’ future without the base of imagination and work that existed before.
Further, it’s important to recognize the institutional priorities that aren’t supported by an extended collective memory. Universities and institutions may not prioritize or want a memory that extends past our current moment, particularly when the movements are pushing for institutional change. A living, breathing resistance that learns from itself is dangerous for the business-as-usual nucleus of a university administration.
Therefore, it is our job as young people and organizers to build the bridges of connection across graduations and generations. I believe that accessible archives are a strong place to start. There are stacks of institutional and student body histories housed in the basement of almost every campus — and they are underutilized. The anti-apartheid movement is one of hundreds that I can learn from and implement into present-day organizing.
I feel, for lack of a better term, utterly precedented. Further than just institutional records, community resistance archives such as Brooklyn’s Interference Archive and the Lesbian Herstory Archives provide open, accessible, individual narratives that build a collective reality. There are histories around us that will remind us of our predecessors, if we choose to look for them.
Young people certainly have a tall task in front of them, but it doesn’t need to be Sisyphean. Let us resist the appeal of apocalyptic, end-time fascism by building roots wide across communities and deep into our shared history. Let us be informed by those who came before us. I urge you: look, connect, and resist falsified historical isolation.
Image Credit: Ernest Cole, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Notes:
[1] Klein, Naomi, and Astra Taylor. “The Rise of End Times Fascism.” The Guardian, 13 Apr. 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/13/end-times-fascism-far-right-trump-musk.
[2] Sculman, Sarah. “How to Survive the End of the World: the Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity.” https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/lg48y2tyxjgctw67z2bki/HTS_-The-Fantasy-and-Necessity-of-Solidarity-with-Sarah-Schulman.pdf?rlkey=xyzxy3aw28zfvw2ef2lvwzn8n&e=1&dl=0.
[3] UA029.001.002.00003, Divestment — sit-in, 1985, Box: 2 — Onsite. Student Body Collection, UA029. Tufts Archival Research Center. https://archives.tufts.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/74619.
