Make No Mistake: "This is What Fascism Looks Like"

Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University anti-genocide activist recently kidnapped in a Trump fascist raid, separated from his family, and transported from New York City to a concentration camp in the onetime slave state of Louisiana

“This Authoritarian Dictatorship is Fascist”

As a lady wearing a Refuse Fascism cap to the big International Women’s Day rally in Chicago told ABC 7 Chicago News last Saturday, “this is what fascism looks like. People please get off the couch and do something.” After detailing the multiple threats the Trump regime poses to women’s health, Heather Costello, a physician and Refuse Fascism speaker at the rally spelled it out in 90 seconds:

“Our very lives are on the line. Make no mistake: this authoritarian dictatorship is fascist. This is not hyperbole. This is real. This is happening now. So what do we do? We cant wait for midterm elections. We can’t wait ‘til 2028. People will die while others sit back in denial or fear or ignorance. Change happens…. when we refuse fascism (mass cheering and applause). Rights have to be fought for, they are not freely given. Our rights are being taken away faster than [under] 1930s Germany’s Nazis. We are running out of time. So what do we do? We refuse fascism, we fight back (mass cheering and applause). I am pleading with you: keep protesting…Complacency kills just like fascism kills (mass cheering and applause). When people come out into the streets, it helps others who may not be strong enough or brave enough to do it and we become empowered through our numbers. …If we do not fight back now, our right now protest will be taken away. ..Say it with me: refuse fascism now! (chant taken up by crowd)”

Right on.

Trump’s Agenda is Enforced with Death Threats

Not long after the impressive IWD rallies within and beyond Chicago, I heard a former Republican congressman on cable news explain that one of the big reasons many Republicans in Congress don’t raise objections to the most extreme Trump actions is that they face serious death threats from Trumpist terrorists. It is understood in the Republican caucus that any deviation from the orange-sprayed Dear Leader puts them and their families at grave risk.

Think about that.

Nobody paying attention to recent political history should find this surprising: Trump might well have been convicted in the US Senate for his January 6 crimes but for some Republicans’ fears of violence. The Senate confirmed the open Christian fascist Pete “Pig of Death” Hegseth to head Trump47’s Department of Defense under what the FBI called “credible death threats” from Trump’s armed backers.

Bear in mind that last July the majority Christian Fascist Supreme Court ruled that Trump is immune from prosecution for any he crime he commits in connection with his presidential duties, including even ordering the assassination of his political enemies.

Hegseth’s Neo-Nazi Press Secretary

Also after the IWD rallies, I learned that Hegseth’s Deputy Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson, the daughter of Trump advisor and “conservative” commentator Steve Cortes, has a history of antisemitic and pro-Nazi posts. Her posts include a celebratory commemoration of the 1915 racist lynching of the Jewish American Leo Frank. Wilson has promoted fascist Great Replacement Theory- the conspiratorial notion that a left and globalist “deep state” cabal is working to replace virtuous and hard-working white people with criminal and lazy nonwhite immigrants. Frau Wilson has also backed Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD party, and opined that transgendered people shouldn’t be allowed to buy guns. As The Jewish Chronicle reports, Wilson’s posts in support of the AfD “included using the phrase ‘Ausländer Raus,’ part of the longer slogan ‘Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer Raus’ Translating to ‘Germany for the Germans, foreigners out,’ the chant has been adopted by the AfD’s young supporters, but has its roots in the German neo-Nazi movement and was used by European skinheads in the 1990s…”

File this too under “What Fascism Looks Like.”

A Chilling Fascist Escalation

On International Women’s Day itself, Mahmoud Khalil, a leading Palestinian activist at Columbia University and a permanent US resident with a green card was swept up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) gendarmes. The ICE pigs claimed to be acting on a State Department order to revoke his green card. In a brazen act of family separation, Khalil was whisked away from his eight-months pregnant wife (herself a US citizen) at his Columbia-owned apartment.

According to The New York Times yesterday, “[Khalil’s attorney] said she was not sure of Mr. Khalil’s ‘precise whereabouts,’ and that he may have been transferred as far away as Louisiana. Mr. Khalil’s wife, an American citizen who is eight months pregnant, tried to visit him at a detention center in New Jersey but was told he was not being held there…”

NBC News reports today that the US Department of Homeland Security website “says…Khalil is now incarcerated at an immigration detention facility in Jena, Louisiana.” Further:

“The New York Civil Liberties Union said Khalil's detainment was an ‘extreme attack on his First Amendment rights….Ripping a student from their home, challenging their immigration status, and detaining them solely based on political viewpoint will chill student speech and advocacy across campus. Political speech should never be a basis for punishment, or lead to deportation."

The imperialist kidnapping and transport of Mahmoud Khalil comes in the wake of the fascist leader Donald Trump’s recent pledge to imprison and deport foreign students and “agitators” who dare to raise their voice against the US-Israel genocide in Gaza. It marks a grave escalation of fascist terror.

In related fascist news, Mein Trumpf has withdrawn $400 million of federal funding from Columbia University on the absurd claims that the school has become a “hotbed of antisemitism” and that this “antisemitism” has led it to excessively tolerate student protest of “Israel” (that is, of US-Israel genocide in Gaza). In reality, Columbia has responded to anti-genocide protests with draconian repression that ought to please the wannabe fascist strongman for life in the White House.

Trump may soon do the same thing to at least nine other academics institutions that have engaged in the repression of anti-genocide protesters over the last year and a half: Harvard University, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, Northwestern University, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Southern California.

As Columbia University president Katrina Armstrong fails to understand, no amount of knee-bending subservience to Trump’s campaign against pro-Palestine protesters will spare American academia from fascist repression. Trump, his vice president JD “Professors are the Enemy” Vance, and his Amerikaner allies and operatives across the Republi-fascist policy and political universe have determined against all evidence that the United States’ capitalist and imperialist colleges and universities are bastions of supposedly awful “radical Left” and “anti-American” Marxism and communism. (“If only that were true,” say I – an actual radical left Marxist and communist with a doctorate who has published seven academic books and whose politics disqualify him from teaching beyond adjunct assignments if even that anymore in so-called higher education!) This is entrenched neo-McCarthyite Red Scare Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, and Turning Point doctrine reflecting the longstanding simultaneously anti-intellectual, anti-truth, anti-science, and anti-Marxist obscenity and obsessions of fascist thought and politics.

The outrageous action against Kahlil and his family is being protested in New York City’s Federal Plaza right now. Columbia University and Barnard professors are holding a press conference on the matter in two and half hours (5pm).

I’m Done Debating Fascism-Denying and Fascism-Minimizing Curmudgeons Online

On a less urgent note, I’ve decided to suspend online “debate” with left-identified white male curmudgeons who deny or minimize the core fascist essence of what the Trump regime is all about. Bob Avakian’s accurate comment on America’s top messianic-militarists, Christian fascists, and warmongers back in the days of Bush43 and Dick Cheney is triply apropos when it comes to Trump’s “oligarchs” and “authoritarians” and much of his base today: “Conservative my ass. These people are Nazis!” At a certain point, there’s no point in piling yet more evidence on top of the case for what ought to be obvious to any purposed leftist with a modicum of historical and political knowledge by March of 2025.

Why can’t these curmudgeons tell what time it is? While I never reduce political (or other) viewpoints to race and/or gender (or class or generation or nationality, etc.), I also think it is far from mere coincidence that the people who engage me to deny or minimize the fascism of Trump and Trumpism are almost always older, white, and male. It’s not a stretch to suspect that many of them are too uncritically entrenched in whiteness and patriarchy to grasp the full spectrum awfulness of Trumpism-fascism, which is rooted in savage white supremacism and gender oppression (along with strong and overlapping doses of xenophobic nationalism and Christian fundamentalism wrapped in political violence). Their insufficiently checked white maleness predisposes these curmudgeons towards a kind of “progressivism” that tends strongly towards an economistic and often trade-union-ish class reductionism that fails to take racism, patriarchy, LGBT-bashing, nativism, and bellicose nationalism with the seriousness they deserve. Some of them seem to believe incorrectly that taking racism, sexism, and fascism seriously would compromise their leftism and purported “working-class populism.” Since racial and gender oppression are core components of contemporary fascism — as well as the capitalist (“billionaire”) class rule the curmudgeons claim to oppose — they can’t quite understand the hour.

In its least toxic form this curmudgeonly leftish fascism denial/minimization aligns with the Democratic Party electoral sheepdog (and faux-Independent) Bernie Sanders’ campaign against the “billionaire class” and its “oligarchy,” which Bernie sometimes like to call “authoritarianism.” I think anti-fascists can work to some degree with curmudgeons in this camp because we have a common enemy — Trump and his party and movement — and because Trumpism is in fact and of course oligarchic and authoritarian. I say, “to some degree” because these “progressive” curmudgeons’ blind spots on race and gender (and also on LGBT issues and other matters) predisposes them towards an undue accommodation of fascists – a mistaken defense of Nazi Amerikaners that commonly reflects a stupid habit of excusing and rationalizing Trumpism-fascism as a reflection of supposed working class economic anxiety and “duping.”

In its worst form, the curmudgeons I hear from are full on pink-brown Trumpenleftists, damn near neo-Strasserites who often seem to have a thing for Vladimir Putin. I share no common enemy with these poor bastards; they have gone over to the wrong side of decent humanity. They are with and for the enemy. They have signed up with fascism.

To the progressive curmudgeons, I say this: please reconsider your class reductionism and your dysfunctional attachment to the nation’s lethal and right-tilted electoral politics. Stop making excuses for Trumpist-fascists in 2025. Please extract yourself from the quicksand of the US bourgeois electoral bullshit, the “BEB” that Avakian has been warning us about for years. Close your ears to the deadly siren songs of candidates; turn away from their savagely time-staggered biennial and quadrennial electoral extravaganzas. Don’t let Bernie and/orAOC and/or whatever other “progressive Democrat” strikes your fancy keep Judas Goating you up the gang planks to the electoral killing floor.

Enough with all that lamed bullshit! Join diverse humanity in a mass movement beneath and beyond the masters’ election cycle to prevent the consolidation of what Bernie constantly calls oligarchy and sometimes calls authoritarianism – what Refuse Fascism (2016 to present) and a rising tide of the populace know to be fascism.

Like Dr. Costello and her audience said in Chicago two days ago, refuse fascism now!

To the Trumpenleft curmudgeons, my message is this: you might as well be full-on fascists yourselves. I think some of you already are.

Things are moving very quickly. If you see a mistake mention it in comments or email me.