"Come and Take It"

An Update on Amerikaner Border Fascism and the Eagle Pass Throwdown

Racist border nativism has been central to the Trumpist-fascist project from the start. Donald “Take Back Your Country” Trump announced his 2016 presidential bid by charging Mexico with sending people bringing drugs, criminals and rapists. He promised to build a “Great Wall” on the nation's southern border and vowed to cancel then US president Barack Obama’s  (stalled) executive order that would have protected millions of so-called illegal immigrants from deportation.

Trump as president told US Border Patrol agents he’d pardon them if they shot asylum-seekers.  He said he wanted his border wall electrified.  He told one of his hate rallies that he loved thinking about the image of immigrant families being chased from the border by “big snarling German Shepherds.”  He complained about migrants coming from “shit hole countries” in the Caribbean (Black Haiti) and (Black) Africa, asking why the US couldn’t get more immigrants from white and Nordic Norway.

Now he has gone full Hitler, saying that non-white immigrants “poison the blood of our country.” 

It’s not just about Trump, of course. Not by a longshot.  State-level Republi-Nazis have made ugly border racism a core part of their deep investment in the Amerikaner-Trumpist project. They are merging the right’s overlapping obsessions with national boundaries and racial purity with the longstanding white-supremacist legacy of “states’ rights” to challenge the power of the US national government.

The leading battleground for this white nationalist border fascism right now is Eagle Pass, Texas, a border town where a migrant and her two children recently drowned in the Rio Grande after Texas National Guard troops refused US Border Patrol access to assist the family.  

For many months now. the Republi-fascist Texas governor Greg Abbott has ordered his Texas Military Department (the TMD, comprised of the Texas Army National Guard, the Texas Air National Guard, and the Texas State Guard) to usurp the federal government’s long established superior authority on national border matters by constructing state-specific migration barriers – troops, razor wire, shipping containers, and floating buoys – along and in the Rio Grande.

In recent weeks Herr Abbott has commanded the TMD to deny US Border Patrol agents access to a key section of the southern border along Eagle Pass. The federal agents want to take down razor wire that maims migrants and to assist migrants in distress.

Abbott is doing this in open defiance of a January 22 US Supreme Court order ruling that permits the federal government to enter the TMD-siezed area. In an act of 21^st Century state Nullification, Abbott has refused to honor the judgement of the nation’s highest court.

Abbott’s TMD has chosen the Eagle Pass showdown as a moment to post to its X account a photo showing “the Gonzales flag” flying above its headquarters in Austin. The flag reads “Come and Take It” beneath the image of a cannon.  It is a popular symbol of the 1835 “Texas Revolution” against Mexico.

The slogan “Come and Take It” was used by Confederate Civil War general JB Hood in 1864, by US gun rights activists since the 1990s, and by the fascistic rock buffoon Ted Nugent in 2021. The US fascist Senator Ted Cruz (Rf-TX)and Abbot’s Republi-Nazi state attorney general Ken Paxton have taken up the slogan in support of Abbott.

This is no small matter. “The constitutional law is quite clear,” writes University of Texas law professor Steven Vladeck in The New York Times:

“The federal government gets to set nationwide immigration policies and choose how to enforce them. And although states are free to assist in federal enforcement (or to decline to assist, in the case of so-called sanctuary cities), there is no serious argument that states have the authority to impede or supplant federal enforcement efforts. Federal supremacy is hard-wired into the Constitution, regardless of how vigorously we might oppose the policy choices that particular federal officials — or even the sitting president — make. Although the antebellum era witnessed an array of arguments from states for why they could resist federal statutes to which they objected, none of those arguments survived the Civil War.”

So what? Abbott doesn’t care. Neither do twenty-five other Red State/Republi-fascist governors, who have signed a letter backing Abbott’s “hold the line” insolence.

Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump says “Abbott must be given full support to repel the invasion.”

Florida’s neoNazi governor Ron DeSantis has just announced that he will  send 1000 gendarmes including Florida National Guard members, Florida Highway Patrol officers, and paramilitary thugs from  his own personal taxpayer-funded brown shirt militia unit the Florida State Guard to Texas to bolster Abbott’s proto-secessionist Nullification move against the US government.  “The goal is to help Texas fortify this border, help them strengthen the barricades, help them add barriers, help them add the wire that they need to so that we can stop this invasion once and for all,” DeSantis says, adding that “the states have to band together.”

I am writing this essay in Iowa, whose demented DeSantist governor Kim Reynolds has previously sent Iowa National Guard troops to terrorize migrants along the Mexico-Texas/-US border. Yesterday, Frau Reynolds and fellow Republifascist governors from Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee and Utah joined Abbott in Eagle Pass to defend the use of child-maiming razor wire and the drowning of brown-skinned families in the Rio Grande.  Most of these governors are commiting their own states’ resources to assisting Texas’s war on immigrants.

Maybe they should form a Nativist Nullification Confederacy.  Abbott has justified his defiance of the White House and Supreme Court by claiming that “the federal government has broken its [alleged] compact between the United States and the States.” That is the same legal argument that the Confederacy’s president Jefferson Davis made for southern secession in 1861.

The Washington Post reports that “a radio interviewer” recently asked Abbott “about the maximum pressure he could [legally] use at the border,” bringing this response from the Texas governor: “The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”

Notice the reason Abbott gives for not killing migrants in cold blood? Not because racist mass murder is wrong but because committing that crime would open Texas up to federal prosecution. How F’ng fascist is that?

The Post failed to name the “radio interviewer” who queried Abbott: the leather-clad Republi-Nazi Dana Loesch, a former editor at Steve Bannon’s white nationalist Breitbart News and a former spokesperson for the fascistic National Rifle Association (NRA).  Loesch once made an NRA commercial that essentially threatened the assassination of liberal politicos and celebrities who criticized the nation’s blood-drenched gun lobby, telling NRA critics that their “time is running out.”

Speaking of fascism, the Post reports that “a  motley crew [has] gather[ed]” in and around Eagle Pass in defense of Abbott’s nativist showdown with Washington:

“militia-style groups invoking 1776 and the Civil War. Christian nationalists praying for the chance to confront evil. Racists stoking fear about the ‘replacement’ of White people. Election deniers, anti-vaccination crusaders, conspiracy theorists….Right-wing extremists…dusting off the blueprint for the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol and using it to rally support for their cause du jour…Monitoring groups warn that Abbott’s posturing, like Trump’s ‘Stop the Steal effort, heightens the risk of political violence as supporters converge on Eagle Pass…Summed up by one observer as ‘slow-motion secession,’ the unrest in Texas is a case study in how once-fringe ideologies have been laundered into mainstream Republican politics… …Abbott’s stand …is communicated in language that glorifies vigilantism and promotes white supremacist talking points, the latest example of the GOP’s hard-right swing in the Trump era… …Abbott and other GOP leaders use the same tropes about migrants as white-power groups and frequently echo the racist ‘great replacement theory,’ which imagines the engineered replacement of White people in western societies. … white supremacists, Proud Boys and other extremist groups are ‘taking advantage of the standoff to push their propaganda and recruit new members.’ Texas Proud Boys factions have shared posts referring to ‘brown immigrant invaders’ and urging followers to ‘grab your guns’… a neo-Nazi network issued a rallying cry ‘asking for White men to join the resistance’ in Texas.”

The streets of Eagle Pass have been turned into a Trumpist movie set, with vendors hawking MAGA hats and Trump flags.

A far-right trucker convoy has descended on the small Texas town to buttress the great white fight to keep desperate and oppressed Latin American people out of “our country.” Never mind that “our” country includes vast swaths of territory – like the whole US Southwest and California – that was literally stolen from Mexico in the name of US Anglo-Saxon “Manifest Destiny” during the one-sided 1840s “Mexican-American War,” which helped precipitate the sectional crisis that produced southern secession and the US Civil War.  

Professor Vladeck claims that “the left” is engaging in “wild hyperbole” by calling the Eagle Pass standoff a constitutional crisis.  “What’s really happening in Texas isn’t a constitutional crisis,” Vladeck argues: “It’s a stress test for a potential constitutional crisis…”

Oh, okay. Wait, really? The US government is now embroiled in a constitutional and physical showdown with the racist head of a state government for the first time since 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower reluctantly deputized the Arkansas National Guard and sent in the US 101 First Airborne to enforce Supreme Court-ordered school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas. 

Abbott is openly, proudly, and physically defying the federal government, including its highest court, on the ground, militarily. He is denying US government forces access to a section of the United States border with heavily armed state troops whose commanders fly a flag daring the federal government to exert its authority – daring the pathetic Weimar warmonger Biden to deputize the Texas National Guard and/or send in US Armed Forces. Abbott is doing this with the support of twenty-five “red [try brown as in brown shirt] state” governors, twelve of whom have traveled to Texas to back his Nullification policy, and one of whom is sending his own personal fascist militia.  

Fascist forces around the country have predictably seized upon Abbott’s neo-Confederate, proto-secessionist stand as a great rallying cry and organizing tool.

That’s one Hell of a “constitutional stress test.”

Don't look for Genocide Joe, a dedicated conciliator of what he once daringly called “something like semi-fascism” (“the MAGA philosophy”), to pass the examination

Meanwhile, the top-dog RepubliNazi himself, Adolf “Vermin” Trump has directed his running dog Christian Fascist US House Speaker Mike Johnson and the post-republican Republican House caucus to nullify any bipartisan “solution” to the border crisis no matter how far right Biden and his appeasement party bend on immigration policy.  The orange-tinted wannabe fascist strongman has ordered that Biden and the Dems must have no parliamentary-legislative achievements on the border issue, on which Trump wants to run again, as in 2016.

Along the way and as usual, nobody “red”  or blue in the mainstream US media and politics culture says one word about the historical-material taproot of the southern border crisis: US-led capitalism-imperialism’s longstanding and ongoing bipartisan ruination of the lives of masses of human beings in Central and South America. Props to Revcoms who went down to Eagle Pass with a banner saying, “We Don’t Have an Immigration Problem, We Have an Imperialism Problem.”  As the revolutionary communists know, both the dismal neoliberal Dems and the revanchist Trump-Republifascists back the capitalist-imperialist order that induces millions around the world to risk life and limb in desperate efforts to escape poverty, oppression, violence, and ecocide in the global South