Hastening and Awaiting

A Response to Important Questions and Comments from Folks Who Watched the Latest Refuse Fascism Zoom on the Outcome and Aftermath of the Election

In what follows below I respond to questions and comments that were sent to Refuse Fascism (RF) during RF’s second public Zoom on the 2024 presidential election, this one held three days after Donald Trump’s victory (listen to selected parts of that Zoom discussion here).

The Zoom was hosted by RF podcast host Samantha Goldman and featured yours truly and Andy Zee, a co-host of the Revcoms’ weekly Revolution Nothing Less Show (the RNL Show).

Many questions sent in prior to and during the Zoom did not get spoken to directly during the discussion. They raise issues of broad relevance and importance.

What follows the questions (in italics) below are my own personal responses to these further questions and comments. I do not claim here to be speaking for RF or the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (the Revcoms) or any other group.  

I was very impressed and inspired by the thoughtfulness and engagement evident in these questions and comments.  

My responses reflect my initial thoughts on matters that we all need to be wrangling over together.  They were written before the orange-brushed beast Trump further demonstrated his commitment to the full fascisation of the so-called United States with the following sadistic Cabinet picks: a white supremacist and male chauvinist FOX News hack (Pete Hegseth) to head the US Department of Defense; the Hindu nationalist and onetime religious cultist Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence; the accused pedophile and fascist provocateur Matt Gaetz as Attorney General; the anti-science/anti-vax lunatic Robert F Kennedy, Jr. as the head of Health and Human Services.

My responses were written also before it was reported that the Brute-Elect is: taking bids for the private construction of mass detention camps outside major US cities; pressuring the majority Republi-fascist US Senate to surrender its constitutional confirmation power over Cabinet appointments; calling for a special “Warrior Board” that will permit him to fire “woke” (LOL) military generals he doesn’t like.

I know: holy F’ng shit! Who needs dystopian political science fiction when we’ve got this fascist nightmare unfolding here in non-fiction real time Amerika, right?

I strongly encourage Paul Street Report readers, viewers, and listeners to regularly follow the Refuse Fascism podcast and the RNL Show as resources for continued analysis and discussion as we struggle to see and fight our way out of the fascist mess now upon us.

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So here I go…. In what follows, I put the Zoom viewers’ questions and comment in italics and put my initials (“PLS” for Paul Louis Street) prior to my answers/responses…

We hear from many people that he isn't REALLY a fascist and we aren't in fascism "because we can still protest", or that the US has always been fascist so all presidents are just the same (all fascists). Can you speak to this confusion and distortion of what fascism really is and of why Trump IS one?...? what can we learn, if anything? - Merelle

PLS: Well, how much longer we will enjoy the formal right to protest is a darkly fasci[st]nating question. Trump wanted to use the 1807 Insurrection Act to bloodily repress the George Floyd Rebellion. He sent federal paramilitary units to attack protesters in Portland and Seattle in 2020. After a presidency in which he praised white supremacists, helped spread a pandemic that he thought was especially killing his political enemies, and told border patrol agents he’d pardon them if they shot asylum-seekers (just to mention three among the many fascist things he said and did during his first time in the White House) he attempted a coup that included a violent assault on the US Capitol and 2020 and early 2021.

In his 2024 campaign Trump promised to declare the Insurrection Act on the day of his inauguration to quell protests.  He said he wants to be “a dictator for a day” – right, just one day. He said he wants to “clear the Marxist vermin out of the country.”  He talked about deporting Marxists, “even ones who were born here.” He said the number one threat to America is “the enemy within,” which he calls “the radical Left.”  He said police should be given “one really rough hour” to “end inner city crime” – a call for extrajudicial executions in Black and Latino neighborhoods. He is planning a giant program of racist mass deportation. He (who has done so much to poison the blood of the country) says brown-skinned immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the country.”

I could go on and on. Trump and his party check off all the boxes. With all due respect for the long proto-fascist racist terror of the Jim Crow South and the nation’s fall into something very much like fascism during and after World War I (as shown in Adam Hochschild’s remarkable book American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis), this fascism atop one of the nation’s two major capitalist parties and the nation’s government (and at least half of the nation’s states) marks a radical and reactionary departure in US political and presidential history. The Democrats are a terrible capitalist-imperialist party implicated in one horrific policy and crime after another, of course, but they have not sought to overthrow previously normative bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy, such as they are in the United States itself. The dismal Dems cling to bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy, American style, such as it is, with all the terrible flaws that any decent Marxist or progressive ought to be able to describe. To say that the two dominant parties are fascist and that all US presidents have been fascist is off base. And anyone still questioning the notion that the openly Hitler-channeling fascist Trump is a fascist has their head up their ass probably beyond realistic chance of extraction. 

Refuse Fascism has a good definition of fascism on its Website:

“Fascism is not just a gross combination of horrific reactionary policies. It is a qualitative change in how society is governed. Fascism foments and relies on xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny, and the aggressive re-institution of oppressive “traditional values.” Fascist mobs and threats of violence are unleashed to build the movement and consolidate power. What is crucial to understand is that once in power fascism essentially eliminates traditional democratic rights. ..Fascism has direction and momentum. Dissent is piece by piece criminalized. The truth is bludgeoned. Group after group is demonized and targeted along a trajectory that leads to real horrors.”

The Republifascists check all these and other definitional boxes for fascism. It can happen here.  It is happening here.

The denial narrative has had plenty of ridiculous purveyors in the liberal and left so- called intelligentsia.  I wrote a whole book chapter, really a whole book about and against this nonsense. See This Happened Here with particular reference to chapters 2 (“The Fascist Wolf Defined and Foretold’), 3 (“A Fascist in the White House, 2017-2021”) and 4 (“The Anatomy of Fascism Denial”). I’ve been taking on the deniers over the last four years on CounterPunch and on The Paul Street Report.

Trump checked off the boxes in 2015-16 (RF was formed right after his first election!) and he has only become even more virulently fascist over his and Biden’s presidencies

PPL don't get what RF (& theRevComs) were trying coalesce in 2016. Could you address this & reiterate what we were hoping to do then. What it could have looked like. How could have qualitatively changed terrain. Had an EFFECT on fascist growth. - Patricia, CA

PLS: I take it “PPL” (all power to the PPL!) is not a party name and is short for “people.”  I was not in RF in 2016 but my understanding is that the RF goal all through the first fascist Trump presidency was the removal of the Trump-Pence regime through mass popular action making it clear that daily US life would cease to function “normally” as long as the nation was headed by a team of fascist pigs. If millions had mobilized around “Trump-Pence Out Now” (a key RF slogan), we would not have had to rely on the “bourgeois electoral bullshit” (Avakian’s “BEB”) to block a second successive Trump administration.

It would have looked like a revolution.  It would have set whole new people’s power terms for US political life. It would have called into question the despicable and outmoded nature of a social and political order that permitted a fascist to become president.  It would raised the possibility of a real revolution bringing into being a new way of life and organizing society from top to bottom, from superstructure down to base and back up again.

How do we reconcile ourselves to living in a now openly fascist nation?- KE, MA 

PLS: We don’t. There is no such thing as a legitimate fascist government, period.  Bear in mind that the new fascist government will make great efforts to portray itself as being in line with longstanding “democracy” and rule of law even as it attacks and undermines both. The Third Reich tried to wrap itself in legalistic and parliamentary forms even as it installed a genocidal dictatorship.  

Middle aged female disabled and scared at 42. I need more to do to fight the ongoing fascism, present into the future. Eugenics continues to thrive and the thought of RFK having ANY decision making in healthcare is utterly terrifying. - Lindsay, PA

PLS:  Scary indeed, and enraging.  Putting the deranged anti-vax/anti-science lunatic RFK Jr in charge of any significant aspect of national health care policy would be truly beyond the pale. It is unacceptable. Any president who does such a thing should be brought down in mass protests.  

It is apparent that we need an action plan for the next four to six years. Any thoughts on how we resist? - Edward, MO

PLS: I’m not going to pretend to have a 4-6 year action plan six days after the election. How about the first three months or half year of the Trump administration? Clearly there needs to be a campaign to mobilize people to physically as well as legally and procedurally protect immigrants against mass deportation.  The mainstream civil and immigrant rights groups are going to pressure legislators not to fund the round up and will take the deportation campaign to court(s). Okay, but it is not too soon to organize more direct and militant blocking action and to reach out to National Guard and other military personnel about their moral duty not to carry out this draconian program. Military rank and file and officer corps must be told why they should REFUSE to: round up people on the basis of their skin color, language, ethnicity, and nationality; attack people for protesting and resisting this and other fascist programs; staff detention/concentration camps; break up immigrant families; perform other duties in service to the white nationalist project including entering US cities to “end inner-city crime” — a technically illegal mission under the Posse Comitatus Act (though Trump would have to and could well use the Insurrection Act to counter that).        

Obviously 2016 was the start. In  2020 they armed up and in 2024 they took over  Do we simply leave ? -Barbara, NY.

PLS:  I think slavery and genocide during the British colonial North America era and the early US republic and Antebellum era were “the start.” As the Revcoms like to say, “one, to, three, four, slavery, genocide, and war; five, six, seven,  eight, American was never great!”  All the overlapping racist/white-supremacist, sexist/patriarchal, nativist/immigrant-bashing and fascist shit concentrated in this election and the Trump agenda is “as American as cherry pie.” I document this at length in the sixth chapter, titled “America Was Never Great: On ‘the Soul of This Nation’,’” in my 2021 book This Happened Here; Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America.

The  GOP started leaning hard towards Christian fascism during the 1990s (as Bob Avakian noted) and began to take serious shape as a contemporary (“neoliberal era”) fascist party in response to the (ironically conservative) Barack Obama presidency with the Tea Party and then the birther and Trump phenomena (the presence of a Black man in the White House drove Republi-fascists over the edge).

On taking off…I don’t think leaving the country makes the situation better – indeed, it probably makes things worse for the rest of us left behind when decent people flee. People certainly have and should have the right to leave the USA, of course, and if things get bad enough doing so may be an act of survival. At this point, however, exiting is self-evidently a morally dubious choice of flight over fight. It helps make the US more “red” (the ironic coloring of Republi-fascism).  At the same time, expatriation is not viable for most people. It is quite an elaborate process and an expensive endeavor. And  I wonder if it is realistic to think one can really escape the mess US-led capitalism and imperialism have made of this world.  Finally, for what it’s worth, the far right has been armed up for decades.  

What types of protests and resistance movements are expected to counteract America’s fascist future in the upcoming Trumpian 2025-- era? - Ann, MN

PLS: Well, as Mao said, Marxists are not fortune tellers. It looks to me like the moral, legal, political, and physical fight against the coming mass deportation crusade is going to be a big Resistance test. (Some of us participated in efforts to protect immigrants from raids in 2017-2019.) What the first big test will be is not clear to me yet. The fascist deportation campaign will take some time to set up.  Its going to cost many billions of dollars that Congress must approve and it will involve massive governmental coordination and “manpower.”  Other flash points may come first: mass firings of federal employees, the closing of a key government agency or key government agencies, a major drilling approval, an outrageous military action, an insane Cabinet confirmation (or two or three or more). There will be many potential flash points – just pick from the long list of Trump agenda items. 

I think this time we’ll need to be strongly determined to (a) form and maintain disciplined organization(s) across and between “single-issue” protests\/resistance; (b) pay increased attention to protest safety and self-defense; (c) frame what we are fighting about in national (not just local) and broad anti-fascist terms and in relation to the whole damn system that has given rise to this lethal fascist takeover.  I can’t emphasize enough the importance of reaching out to decent people in the military, who should refuse to enforce plans to turn this country into a Christian white nationalist/neofascist dictatorship. 

what do we do in the coming weeks and months before he gets inaugurated? Hope, OH

PLS: For me it starts with political, moral, and intellectual struggle.  We need to communicate with each other and our broader circles and the public at large about the real nature of the objective situation without fueling flight, freeze, and the wrong kinds of fight.  To be perfectly honest, many if not most of the decent and non-fascist people in this country –  maybe I should say, following Avakian (see below), the people who inhabit the better of the two US-American countries today (fascist America and non-fascist America) — have their heads up their asses right now. Some have given up and are moving into a a kind of internal exile – purely private and personal space. Some are pretending it’s not that bad, finding ways to minimize the horror. Some are dreaming that we can get out of this mess with a changed Democratic Party and yet more voting, voting, voting (we can’t). Some are actually hoping that hapless Joe Biden and the military are going to block Trump’s re-ascendancy. A few are fantasizing about violent revenge. Many are just turning away in disgust and throwing up their hands.

All of this and more has to be take on and struggled against in a “comradely” way. Without sacrificing commitment to core principles and truth, we should try not to be unduly combative in difficult conversations (because it’s not about our egos, it’s about trying to defeat this nightmare and make a better world).

Determine your best information sources. Hold speak outs and town halls and Zooms. Do not give up. Bob Avakian’s social media outposts are extremely useful both in terms of understanding the always changing/in-motion objective situation and in terms of maintaining “Hope for Humanity on a Scientific Basis” (the title of an important 2019  Avakian essay).

I admit I had hoped Harris would win. But this country is huge enough for racist sexist folks who don’t care if a rapist, lying criminal runs a country. What has happened to the moral compass of most Americans has shattered me the most.  - Habra, CA

PLS: There’s tons of lethally revanchist and dangerous people in the US.  It’s like Avakian says: “America your shining City on a Hill is chock full of fascists!” Trump’s vote total was 29% of the adult US population – less than a third and just over a fourth of the country. About 20% of the country truly wants a Christian fascist dictatorship. That is sadly more than enough to make it happen if an equivalent or larger group doesn’t rise up against fascism.  There’s the active proponents of fascism and there’s the giant mass of obedient “good Germans,” I mean “good Americans,” who let the Hitlers and Trumps of the world have their way. How many people possess the “moral compass” and willpower to refuse “good American” conduct and to join a serious antifascist movement – one that gets to the root of the problem as well as its horrible surface manifestation – is what we’ll have to find out.  It’s up to us to make that number as big as possible. One in five Americans joining would be more than enough to bring the system to its knees.

K Harris got a round of applause from her Democratic Party supporters when she called on people to look forward to the "peaceful transition of power" to Donald Trump and fascists." Please discuss this stand-in light of the deep divide between ruling class parties - Stan, MA

PLS: Yes. Let me quote the visual artist Dread Scott: “President Biden has vowed to ensure ‘a peaceful and orderly transition’ to the Trump regime.  Harris has called Trump a fascist. The fact that the head of the Democrats, and the current President of the United States, is encouraging a peaceful and orderly transition to fascism tells you everything you need to know about the Democrats and why it is dangerous to rely on them.”

All this Dem talk of being morally superior because they honor a nonviolent transition is darkly ironic.  Their party and president granted “ironclad” imperial backing to a literal genocide in Gaza while helping spark and conducting an imperial proxy war that has killed and maimed untold hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians! The next president they are so proud of handing off power to “peacefully” is an open Hitler-channeling agent of fascist eliminationism.  How pathetic.

One scenario Avakian and Revcoms imagined weeks ago involved the Dems totally capitulating to Donald “They’re Eating the Dogs and Cats” Trump. Trump winning as decisively as he did is helping make abject “cover my ass” surrender look attractive to many establishment Dems.  But the story of ruling class division (or lack thereof) has yet to be fully told. The shock and awe of the Trump triumph is still very much in force and will be for a while. Beneath that, there are still splits within the ruling class over various policies and issues foreign (NATO, Ukraine, and Russia and trade wars with China, for example) and domestic. The days of a unified and largely East Coast based US imperial ruling class “power elite” are long gone, of course (that goes back to the Reagan years). And the nation remains fundamentally divided, harshly polarized between Red and Blue, socially (and even to some extent geographically with a strong emphasis on rural vs metropolitan and coasts vs interior). We see the “so-called United States” living almost as two countries in one nation.  Avakian puts it well in his 102nd social media post this year:

“This election brings out sharply that there really are ‘two countries’ within this country. This, in a real sense, is an extension of a fundamental division that has existed since the beginning of the so-called ‘United States’ of America, with its foundation in slavery and genocide—a division which has never really been resolved throughout the history of this country—not through the Civil War in the 1860s, and not through changes that were brought about through the 1960s and in the years following…there is a direct line from the pro-slavery Confederacy, at the time of the Civil War, to the fascism of today, with its determination to make America once again openly, aggressively white supremacist, male supremacist, and anti-LGBT people. This division into ‘two countries’ can find no good resolution under this system. The election of an outright fascist, Donald Trump, as the head of this system is a powerful demonstration of this.”

This underlying concrete reality – two very different nations within one country – is not going away.

What does this mean for international relations? Bea, OH

PLS: Hard for me to say. Heightened chaos, for starters. The genocidal fascist Israeli butcher Bibi Netanyahu and his frothing right-wing Zionist backers are delighted. They are looking forward to the end of any statements of outward ambivalence on the part of the White House when it comes to backing the genocidal ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people in Gaza and (increasingly) the West Bank. Trump will perhaps undertake a direct conflict with Iran, helping set the Middle East further aflame.

Ukraine will have to surrender territory and pledge never to join NATO (this is actually a positive development). EU nations will increase their military budgets out of (much exaggerated) fear that Russia will be emboldened to move on other European states.

Trump’s victory certainly helps embolden fascist parties and movements around the world.

Trump’s shutting down of the horrific proxy war in Ukraine will not mean that he is standing down from US imperialism.  It will mean that he wants to focus US aggression more completely on China – the real world systemic rival to US hegemony. China could I suppose be sparked to ratchet up pressure on, even militarily attack Taiwan in response to Trump’s promised extreme tariffs and it’s not clear that Trump will defend Taiwan without some major transactional concessions from the vulnerable island nation. (I just read one “expert” who claimed that “he could use Taiwan as a bargaining chip in his trade war with China.”) Trump may order a military incursion into Mexico in the name of a war on the drug cartels and immigrant “invasion.” He might be tempted to invade Cuba and end the “Marxist” regime there once and for all.

It’s hard to know what this maniac will do on the global stage: he is notoriously mercurial. If he is intent on enlisting the US military in combating/repressing/crushing his homeland “enemies within” – raiding immigrant communities and occupying inner cities, running detention camps, securing the border, rousting up political enemies and the like – that may restrict his ability to project force abroad, something that may enter into rival state calculations.   

What to do in the face of attacks on resistance forces? - Bea, OH

Safety is key. It takes many forms on the streets, online, in professions and workplaces, etc. I won’t pretend to be an expert on this. We have a right to armed self-defense and must be prepared to protect ourselves and each other in all necessary ways. As long as it exists, the Second Amendment should not be seen as the exclusive property of the right. Given the gross imbalance of physical force, however, we will need to reach out to those in the armed forces who (a) can be convinced not to shoot down protesters and (b) can be persuaded to side with the people against fascism.

Do we need another uprising just like what happened in summer of 2020 to prevent or drive out the Trump-Vance regime?

PLS : Yes and no. On the yes side, the George Floyd Rebellion was massive and morally righteous.  We will want big George Floyd-like numbers and spread across the whole country fueled by a Floyd Rebellion-like passion for social justice and revulsion against racist tyranny. On the no side, the next uprising needs to be bigger (actually) and focused not just on one or two immediate issues like (  e.g. racist police brutality or immigrant rights) but on bringing down a whole national government captured by fascists and confronting the system that brought that government into being. That feels more like a revolution than a rebellion. The George Floyd “uprising” was a largely spontaneous mass rebellion sparked and fueled by two remarkable developments: (i) the viral videotape of a racist cop outrageously committing the prolonged fatal asphyxiation of a Black man in Minneapolis and (ii) the remarkable “free time” for mass action produced by the Covid-19 pandemic’s removal of millions of people from work and school.  It was not really a full-on uprising – at least not one with radical political goals.  Far too few of the participants connected the protests to RF’s righteous call for “Trump-Pence Out Now!” The rebellion was fading even before the deranged teen fascist, Trump fan, and militia member (Kyle Rittenhouse) murdered two people with an illegally owned AR-15 at a Black Lives rally in Kenosha, Wisconsin in August of 2020. And by the time that killer Kyle did his deed with the approval of his Dear Leader (who went to Kenosha to honor fascist murder on the very last night of the 2020 campaign), the movement-killing quicksand of the quadrennial US capitalist electoral extravaganza was taking over the national political spotlight, with the dismal electoralist  Democrats pretending to be champions of anti-racism. (There was an Indian Sumner protest moment in September after Kentucky’s racist attorney general refused to indict Brianna Taylor’s killers but the “uprising” was largely spent by then).  The rebellion lacked coherent radical leadership and organization and serious and radical goals beyond things like prosecuting killer cops, “de-funding the police,” and advocating “community control” of the police. It was far too caught up in identity politics, localism, and silly slogans like “this is what democracy looks like,” "speak truth to power,” and “the people united will never be defeated.” The people will continue to be defeated unless and until they rise up and take power from a capitalist ruling class and system that has hatched and empowered fascism. There will still be police under revolutionary socialism - police with a very different mission and role.

How can we resist if protest is outlawed? – Robert

PLS: We can’t honor the outlawing of protest. We disobey.  Outlawing protest must fuel protest on a greater scale.

In 2020, 74,223,975 voted for Trump.  In 2024, 73,663,351 voted for Trump. Those numbers are according to Wikipedia. So, we didn't have more for Trump this time.  But, we had way fewer votes for Harris than we did for Biden.  So, to me the question is why aren't enough people willing to show up and vote against Trump?  How do we make people be aware of that danger? Adrianna

PLS: I’d be careful with “we.” The Democrats are a dismal, dollar-drenched, and demobilizing “Weimar” (see below) capitalist party of “inauthentic opposition” that will and indeed can never properly fight fascism and can never take on the dialectically interwoven oppression systems – capitalist anarchy and class rule, white supremacy, patriarchy, nationalism,  nativism, and imperialism – that provide the fertile soil within which the political pathology of fascism arises. Millions of people who hate the Republifascists also understandably dislike the Democratic Party, a nauseating capitalist-imperialist political organization whose leaders have despicably given “ironclad” support to the burning, bombing, burial, sickening, and starving of innocent children in  Gaza. 

“Weimar” refers to the liberal bourgeois-democratic/capitalist political regime that appeased and gave rise to Hitler’s Third Reich in the early 1930s.  

What can I do in a red state to stand up for human rights? I have been looking for organizations to be a part of and organize with and it seems like things are very quiet right now. Adrianna

PLS: Yes, things are much tougher in red states. You must be more careful, courageous, and creative in Republi-fascist jurisdictions, where the good old boys in the pickup trucks are right next door and the governors and legislatures are fully on board with the Trumpist project. (I have chilling stories about the differences between red Iowa and blue Chicago/Illinois when it comes to trying to protest the genocide in Gaza.) But how much do we really want to distinguish between blue and red states? The fascists are taking over the whole country.  They are going to send federal gendarmes into big Blue state cities to round up immigrants and perhaps to “fight crime in the inner city.” They are going to go for a national abortion ban.  They are going to unleash more fossil fuel drilling and fracking to burn down the whole planet. I could go on.  So while I think it is important to speak out and rise up in “red” (try brown for the shirt color of Hitler’s early paramilitaries) states, I’d also encourage you to back anti-fascist and revolutionary movements on a national basis.    

The 74 million are not all fascists. So why did non-fascists vote for Trump? – Adrianna

PLS:  Well, different things: standard longstanding Republican racism, nativism, and sexism (all of which obviously predated and fed into the Republican Party’s fascist takeover during the Obama years); inflation, a global capitalist phenomenon in the wake of Covid-19 and the Ukraine war (and here I dissent from those who think it’s a matter of ideological principle to deny that the high price of basic necessities had anything to do with why many working and middle class people voted for Trump — of course it was a factor); “populist” resentment of snotty professional class liberals; sheer stupidity (some voters make their ballot “choices” on the basis of truly ridiculous things like the shape of a candidate’s face and “who I’d like to have a beer with”); a naïve belief that Trump’s fascist promises are just campaign rhetoric he won’t act on; Trumpenleft cynicism…those are my top candidates. 

But let’s not give “non-fascist Trump voters” guilt-free space to escape accountability. Nobody has any respectable or defensible excuse in 2024 for not knowing that the orange-brushed beast Trump is a lethal Hitler-channeling menace to humanity and other living things!

How can I start conversations with my Trump-supporting family and neighbors to open their minds to new information? -Adrianna

PLS: I’m not sure. Maybe one way is to try to appeal to their purported “populism” by telling them about the venal and oligarchic “gangster capitalism” that is part of Trump’s fascist project – about how he will benefit hiself and the already super-rich while fueling inflation with wild tariffs and attacking Medicare and Social Security. I’m not sure how many fascist/FOX News minds can be changed, however, and I think a bigger problem than the 29% who voted for the malignant orange fascist sack of shit is the many decent people in the 71% who need to get up off their butts and fight this fascist nightmare and the system that gave rise to it. (And here I do not mean fighting with the BEB and Democrats as your “weapons,” which is like hoping for nice music from a broken violin.)

SPECIFICALLY what do we do? what can I SPECIFICALLY do? right now? today? tomorrow? I understand that the left isn't gonna help and that we need to act but in a very strategic way but HOW do I do that?  Do I organize a local protest? How do I help with a new system? WHAT DO I DO? I AM ANGRY AND I WANT TO ACT! Getting busy doing what? less time for myself to do exactly what?

PLS: I’m all for good action/trouble, but putting out deeply informed and radically truthful analyses of what has happened and why – including the underlying systemic basis – is important and necessary to guide the activism we need. We can’t act properly against this menace and the system that gave rise to it without a proper, dare I say scientific analysis of the objective historical situation – the many forces in motion and play at home and abroad.   How we understand/think about this mess, the very epistemology of the matter, is a big deal because acting on false and outmoded premises (like  “we must get the Dems back in power and get ready for the 2026 and 2028 elections!” or “we need to start burning shit down” or “we need to get back to democratic capitalism” or “things will get better when we organize more unions and the working class rises up one of these days!”) is self-defeating and ineffectual.  So at one level I think it is strategic to get the best analysis out for discussion and orientation. At the activist level, it seems likely that the biggest and most momentous (though perhaps not the first) flash point to organize around and against will be the coming mass deportation program.  The mainstream immigrants rights groups will fight that program on a single-issue civil and human rights basis. We need to broaden the lens and raise popular sights beyond single issues and mere “bourgeois right” (Marx) to frame things in terms of the whole damn fascism-generating system (capitalism-imperialism).   

There are already calls for protests in DC on inauguration (I think from Women's March). Comment? - Jay

PLS: I think the DC protests are scheduled for the day before. It could be a Hell of a day.  Trump has said he wants to declare the (very wide open) 1807 Insurrection  Act to use the military to crush protests on day one of his presidency.  I assume fascist militia sorts (the Proud Boys et al) will be on hand the day before – thugs who may feel they’ve been given a green light to terrorize protesters. This could be a major flash point.

The 2017 Women’s March outings were giant but pretty bourgeois — all about trying to feel good and self-righteous in the wake of Trump’s shocking first victory and “keep  hope alive” for electing dismal Democrats in 2018 and 2020. I recall many signs blaming Trump’s victory on Russia, as if the imperialist Dems had not shown themselves to be thoroughly Weimar under Obama and in the horrific Hillary Clinton campaign.

I think anti-fascists would want to show up with a sharply different message this time, including this from Refuse Fascism’s website: “The Democratic Party and voting will not stop this nightmare… There can be no reconciliation with fascism except on the terms of the fascists. Fascism must be resolutely opposed.”

I agree…people did not go out into the streets this time…. are you saying that the brutality of what’s going to come down is what will get people to resist? How do we move people very quickly? - Bill

PLS: Yes, we don’t have the initial mass protests like in 2016. But after the numbing effect of Trump’s 2024 “mandate” and the shock and overwhelm of yet more Trump insanity (which never really went away during the Biden years) wear off a bit more, the sheer many-sided horror of what these unmitigated malignant fascist assholes are doing to the nation and the world and to life itself may well spark significant outpourings.  Our role will be not only to hasten resistance but also to spread a deep understanding of particular outrages – e.g. the mass deportation campaign – as part of a broader fascist project rooted in a capitalist imperialist system that plagues humanity with what the Revcoms rightly call “the five stops” – five terrible things that cannot be overcome under that system: system: ecocide, white supremacism, patriarchy, imperial war, and nativism/immigrant-bashing.

The Trump transition team is already drafting a raft of Executive Orders to implement the Fascist program. The Democrats are “peacefully transferring power” (Obama statement and Harris concession) The media is downplaying the significance and downplaying the real radicalism of what Trump is doing. The liberal groups are planning for electoral 2026. WHO WILL TELL THE PEOPLE? We must!

We’re in an emergency. The message is for Biden to use his Executive Power to slow down Trump and for the Left to take the streets as a means of educating people. -Bill

PLS: I’m down with most of what is said here but: (a) I lack any hope in Weimar/Vichy/Genocide Joe doing anything to slow down fascism; (b) I’m not sure who or what exactly “the Left” is at this point; (c) the entities I see today that are most capable of properly “telling [educating] the people” about the objective historical situation and what is to be done are RF and the Revcoms. Progressive, liberal, and radical folks need to pay attention and turn to those groups for serious and righteous intellectual/scientific leadership and vision for a way out of this capitalist-imperialist and fascicising mess beneath and atop the world’s most powerful and dangerous country.   

There is great historical research on how rural farmers literally circled the wagons to block the sheriff from evictions and confiscation. They put bodies on the line and sabotaged transportation. We need to restore that radical tradition!!!! – Bill

PLS: damn straight.  This has relevance in relation to the promised and coming fascist immigrant round up. And since your brought up past Depression era direct actions, let’s remember what happened in Chicago (and I’m guessing other cities) during the 1930s: the cops would come to throw an evicted family out of their home in the Black ghetto and local residents would say “quick, go get the Reds.” Radicals would arrive to organize a movement to put the family’s belongings back in the apartment. That was the old US communism at its best, I think.

I feel like people were mad and ready to protest after 2016 (and all that was quickly co-opted by the DNC). This time people seem to be super pessimistic, resigned, and exhausted. This country is ready to be radical, but how to get the populace there? What are the ways to get our peers ready to fight? – Max

PLS: Avakian has an excellent phrase for what revolutionaries do in times like these: “hasten and await.” We work to intellectually, morally, and organizationally prepare ourselves and masses of people for coming crises and uprisings — ultimately socialist revolution — rooted in and responding to the unfolding contradictions of the system. We start by struggling to get our epistemological, theoretical, moral, and empirical heads screwed on right about the underlying objective historical-material situation. I don’t think we have to wait long for crises and outrages resulting from the fascists’ determination to move fast on their plan to takeover and makeover American government and society along sharply oppressive Christian white nationalist lines. The fascists see this as their “Shock and Awe” moment to seize and act quickly to jam their horrific agenda down our throats. The numbness will I think wear off and the masses will be aroused to fight. We need to tell them that the future is already radical and the only question is which kind of radical do they want: radically repressive, tyrannical, ecocidal and fascist on the path to Hell on Earth or radically liberating and revolutionary on a path to a world where no part of humanity any longer oppresses and exploits any other part of humanity and where the possibility of fascism is a distant menace for the history books!

How about a plan to educate students and young adults about fascism vs. democracy?  If they are willing to support or just allow fascism how is a revolt going to be successful? – Ken

PLS: It would be good to organize local educational forums (in public libraries?) on “what is fascism, how does it happen, where does it come from?” I would add  “capitalism vs. democracy” and “how capitalism generates fascism” to the list of topics. I also think we should point as many people as possible to the remarkable weekly Refuse Fascism podcast. It is an extraordinary resource. And here I refer not just to the various academic, legal, activist, and journalist experts that the podcast’s brilliant host Samantha Goldman interviews but also to Ms. Goldman’s regular first-rate breakdowns of “this week in fascism.”  Those breakdowns are indispensable.

Facebook: "We need to fight because the election was stolen. And Biden has immunity so he can get rid of Trump...I want to know if he will do it.”

PLS: oh yes, I am seeing this madness on Facebook and Twitter X.  I have on old liberal-left friend who is running with this inverted blue conspiratorialism and fantasizing that Weimar Joe is going to block Trump’s re-ascendancy! Trump and Trumpism have driven some decent people out of their minds and over the edge (she accuses me of wanting “to install a Nazi dictatorship” because I criticized the Democrats for backing genocide in Gaza.)

Why did fascists lose in 2020 and not now? – 

Two answers: (a) Covid-19/Trump’s response to it; (b) the viral public release of the video of the George Floyd lynching leading to the George Floyd Rebellion/Trump’s fascist response to the rebellion.  Without those two “chance” occurrences, Trump would have won the 2020 election and we would have just finished an election in which he tried for a third term.  Accident and contingency are of real, never fully predictable significance in the unfolding of history!

No guardrails for Trump and MAGA should mean none for us.  Just how do we overcome the loss 

PLS: I appreciate the sentiment: we cannot hold back against a fascist state.  However we must be careful not to abandon our own moral guard rails just because the enemy has none.  We cannot fall into “the ends justify the means” thinking, which is a practical political mistake as well as a moral one.  We can’t sustain popular support if we descend into gratuitous violence and revenge. We are not Narodniks and Weathermen. We should keep in mind that the Democrats’ loss is not the same as the people’s loss.  We do not resist in the name of the Weimar Party and the decrepit system of US Minority Rule bourgeois democracy that hatched this fascist nightmare.

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