More Things NOT to Say Regarding the Potential Fascist Takeover of the USA

And Link to Refuse Fascism Zoom TONIGHT

What TO Say and Do

First things first. Please sign up to hear my Refuse Fascism colleagues and I make the case via Zoom tonight for major RF protests this coming Monday, February 17, 2025:

Here’s the Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_95M5RZOMTq-rjhWxSobJLA#/registration

Join this Zoom and you will hear a lot about WHAT TO SAY about the threat of fascist consolidation in the USA and what to do about it!

More on What NOT to say

Okay, at the risk of sounding of “negative,” I am this morning adding seven more things to my list of what NOT TO SAY right now.

Previous entries: 1-13 here; 14-17 here; 18-24 here; 25-30 here; 31-38 here.

#39. “The Trumpists are anti-government.”

It is standard to hear and see MAGA fascism described as “anti-government” in mainstream discourse. Incorrect: MAGA fascism seeks to takeover and makeover government and society on Christian white nationalist and neofascist terms. It hates and attacks all aspects of government that it sees as liberal, “woke,” “leftist,” and “Marxist,” etc. but it is quite determined to use big government power to repress and oppress the people at home and abroad. It hates and attacks “the left hand of the state,” any aspect of government won by past social movements for decency and democracy. It loves and inflates the “right hand of the state,” the parts of government that punish its opponents, roll back civil rights and democracy, militarize society, protect and impose traditional social hiearchy and values, and distribute wealth and power upward. Fascists are not libertarians.

#40. “Calm down: the different factions of the Trump movement will tear each other up before too long, once the current ‘MAGA feeding frenzy’ is over.”

Yes Trumpism-fascism contains some competing factions: the more globalist tech oligarchic tendency around the noxious Elon Musk; the fiercely nativist white nationalists around Steve “Musk is Evil” Bannon and the pure racist Stephen “Camp of the Saints” Miller; the more traditional and top-down “managerial-fascist” policy wonks around Project 25; the evangelicals; the more libertarian New Agey goofballs who champion he antivax lunatic Robert F Kennedy, Jr.; the malignant and mercurial narcissist and megalomaniac Trump himself and those most directly in his immediate political cult circle and command; Trump’s somewhat diverse voting base, some of which marked ballots for Trump with little idea of the full fascist and oligarchic agenda. But counting on Trumpism-fascism to collapse of its own accord because it contains different and potentially conflicting tendencies is foolish. The binding through thick-and-thin power of Amerikaner neofascism under the cult of the potent hate-monger Trump should not be underestimated. Without serious, sustained, righteous and courageous opposition from below and across society, it will march forward to full consolidation, drawing strength as much as —- if not more than — weakness from its diversity. People in the MAGA movement who Trump or his successor Vance find too problematic will be defeated and expelled.

#41. “Calm down: Trump is a lame duck. US presidents only get two terms.”

Please: Trump will almost certainly try to abrogate the two-term rule if he hasn’t died been forced out of office by a mass rebellion before 2028-29.

#42. “Calm down: Trump is really old and may die in office.”

Please. He’s got top drawer socialized health care (what saved his life during the Covid-19 pandemic he helped fan in 2020) at the Walter Reed military hospital to keep him hating and golfing for at least for more years. If he dies in office, a new unifying fascist cult will rapidly form around the equally malignant Republi-Nazi sociopath JD “Haitians are Eating the Pets in Springfield” Vance.

#43. “Calm Down: the Courts Will Save Us.”

Hold on. Yes, federal justices have so far put holds on key parts of the early Trump policy Blitzkrieg: As the New York Times reports in a recent article titled “Why Federal Courts May Be the Last Bulwark Against Trump”:

“The legal pushback has already yielded quick — if potentially fleeting — results. Judicial orders in nine federal court cases will, for a time, partially bind the administration’s hands on its goals. Those include ending automatic citizenship for babies born to undocumented immigrants on U.S. soil; transferring transgender female inmates to male-only prisons; potentially exposing the identities of F.B.I. personnel who investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol; coaxing federal workers to accept “deferred resignation” under a tight deadline; and freezing as much as $3 trillion in domestic spending. On Friday [February 7^th] afternoon, Judge Carl Nichols, a district judge nominated by Mr. Trump. said he would issue a temporary restraining order halting the administrative leave of 2,200 employees at the U.S. Agency for International Development and the looming withdrawal of nearly all of the agency’s workers from overseas.”

But notice the phrase “potentially fleeting.” The Trump team is throwing up as much insane shit as it can on the wall in a short period, seeing what can stick and counting on ultimate victories at the Supreme Court level. If the high court doesn’t give them enough of what they want, look for neo-Confederate MAGA to try to hold a constitutional convention on some key matters, especially birthright citizenship, which is ensconced in the first section of the US Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment!

The mindset of Trump MAGA command is quite clear: Herr Vance has recently repeated his longstanding authoritarian belief that federal judges don’t have legitimate constitutional or practical political and physical power to block Dear Leader Trump from breaking laws and engaging in unconstitutional actions –- something that raises the specter of Trump plowing ahead in brazen defiance of established law and judicial review even without validation from the Christian Fascist Supreme Court that he and his Republi-fascist allies in the US Senate created during his first presidency. Trump has already brazenly Congressional legislation and a Supreme Court “ordering” Tik Tok out of the US unless it passes ownership to an American firm. He is currently defying key parts of a federal district judge’s ruling against his freeze of funding for Congressionally appropriated programs.

#44. “May all These Trumpists Find Their Luigi.”

I recently saw a semi-prominent and chronically snark-oriented leftish commentator call for six of Elon Musk’s Treasury-raiding teenage minions to “find their own Luigi.” I suppose he thought that was amusing. It’s not. It is a call for extrajudicial executions that would only embolden the fascists and help them rally support for the bloody repression of regime opponents. Calling for assassinations of fascist operatives ala the Red Army Fraction and the SLA is a sign of desperation and defeat. It has nothing to do with building a mass antifascist movement in the streets. It is indeed fundamentally opposed to creating such a movement and a reflection of the absence of such a movement. And it speaks poorly to the moral character of certain anti-fascists, suggesting their readiness to justify terrible means with supposedly noble ends.

#45. “I’m just out here for Gaza”…. “I’m just out here for immigrant rights”….”I’m just out here for trans rights”… “I’m here for abortion rights”….“I’m just out here for a sustainable climate”….”I’m just out here for voting rights”… “I’m just out here for…[fill in the single-issue blank]”

You get the idea. No! As the Revcom Corps for the Emancipation of Humanity said in its call for nationwide protests last February: “This is Fascism…Standing up against individual attacks - against immigrants, trans people, and others — is righteous and necessary but on its own is NOT ENOUGH. THE WHOLE TRUMP/MAGA FASCIST PROGRAM MUST BE DEFEATED BEFORE IT CONSOLIDATES!”

(I recently attended an Iowa City Gaza solidarity event where only one or two of the two participants seemed to know or care that 150 Latina and Latino kids had the previous Monday night taken over Iowa City’s downtown protesting Trump’s fascist mass deportation program! It is long past time for “the left” within and beyond campus town bubbles to stop getting cherry-picked off by focusing on single issues while MAGA Trump forces ram a many-sided and diverse but cohesive, internally consistent FASCIST program down the nation’s throat!)

#46. “Federal Courts May Be the Last Bulwark Against Trump.”

Here I am repeating most of the New York Times headline I quoted under #43. “With a compliant Congress and mostly quiet streets,” the Times report under that headline reads, “the president’s opponents are turning to the judicial branch with a flurry of legal actions. But can the courts keep up?”(emphasis added).

Wow. Has the Times ever heard of “We the People,” the masses in the streets and public squares? A more accurate phrasing might be “the Last Bulwark Against Trump’s MAGA Fascist in the American bourgeois state.”

And it is far, far too early to proclaim the “streets mostly quiet.” we are starting to see very significant protests against MAGA fascism across the country. The Shock and Awe is wearing off.

Are federal courts in fact “the last bulwark against Trump”?

Not at all: we the masses are the real and last bulwark against MAGA fascism!

Refuse Fascism has called for a national day of protest this coming Monday, February 17. Please reach out to others and make preparations to join the real anti-fascist RESISTANCE.

https://refusefascism.org/2025/02/08/monday-february-17-presidents-day-take-to-the-streets/