Beyond Just "Our Community"

The Trump Fascist Regime Must Fall

By numerous reports and all indications, the Trump fascist regime will be sending National Guard troops to criminally occupy the city of Chicago under the guise of fighting crime in September of 2025. Here is a statement on and against this threat from the former leading Communist Party member and current Freedom Road Socialist activist Frank Chapman — a legendary presence on the Chicago Left:

“The Trump train coming to town and we need to stop it in its tracks. The President’s threats to bring federal troops to Chicago are a clear, blatant attack on the Black community and the immigrant community. That’s what this is aimed at, repressing Black communities under the guise of fighting crime and repressing immigrant communities by implementing mass deportations and violating the right to due process of law.

This is far deeper than any constitutional crisis that we’ve ever had in this country since the Civil War. Not only should we take it seriously, and we do take it seriously, but we are calling on all the people, including their political representatives, to resist to the fullest extent of the law and through whatever means of resistance we can muster to stop Trump in his tracks and keep this military occupation of our community from happening.

Trump is violating the law. He has no legal, constitutional right to do what he’s doing. Neither the mayor or the governor of this state have called on him to deploy federal troops. This is an illegal military occupation of our community, and we have an inalienable democratic right to resist it.”

This is in many ways a good statement.

Frank Chapman is right about the racism and nativism of Trump’s attack on Chicago.

Frank Chapman is correct that Trump is attacking due process.

Mr. Chapman is correct that Trump lacks a legal and constitutional basis for militarily occupying Chicago.

Chapman is right to suggest that America is now in its biggest constitutional crisis since the Civil War.

He’s right to say that Trump’s threats have nothing to do with fighting crime, that Chicagoans from top to bottom should resist occupation and that they have the right to resist it.

But this statement falls down in three ways.

One, it is over-focused on just one community, albeit a very important one — Chicago.

Two, it fails to properly identify the Trump regime and the menace it poses to Chicago and indeed to every US city and town as fascist.

Third, it mistakenly if indirectly refers to the dismal, dollar-drenched capitalist Democrats as the political representatives of the people of Chicago.

I put the following up as a comment below Chapman’s online post about defending Chicago against Trump likely and indeed imminent occupation:

‘Yes to resistance in Chicago, of course, but please broaden the geographic lens beyond just "our community" and join Refuse Fascism in calling for a movement of many millions to bring about the FALL OF THE TRUMP FASCIST REGIME. Let's free all of the USA and the world of this many-sided existential menace, for starters. Now, in the streets and public squares, above all this fall in Washington DC, through a sustained mass popular uprising, not on the bourgeois electoral timetable and under the dead wings of the dismal Weimar Dems.’

As Refuse Fascism points out in its call for a truly mass mobilization — the biggest demonstrations in American history — in Washington DC this coming November:

"The Trump Fascist Regime is illegitimate. What it is demanding we become is unconscionable. At every level of society, in every institution, tens of millions of us know this in our bones. If we dare, we can defeat a horror that threatens humanity’s very survival. If we fail to even try, future generations — if they exist — will never forgive us.”