The American War on Free Speech and Public Assembly

A Bipartisan Campaign

“Take Matters in Your Own Hands”

Every day it seems brings new evidence for the obviously accurate thesis that the Republican Party has crossed into fascist space — something I have been documenting for many years with no love for the dismal, militantly capitalist-imperialist, fascism-complicit and neoliberal Democrats, who have their own authoritarianism problem now on display in relation to protests for Palestine.

A recent piece in the Republi-fascist jigsaw puzzle comes courtesy of the white nationalist election denier and arch-Trumpist US Senator Tom Cotton (Rf-AR). This is what MAGA Tom (“Wishing for the Days of”) Cotton (Slavery) wrote on X after after hundreds of activists , demanding an end to the genocidal US-Israel crucifixion of Gaza, blocked traffic in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Philadelphia, and and other major U.S. cities: “I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands. It's time to put an end to this nonsense.”

Read that again. Yes, he absurdly called opposition to the mass murder and starvation of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians “pro-Hamas” and he sickeningly called efforts to stop genocidal ethnic cleansing “nonsense.”

But that’s not the main thing to notice here. The key thing is how he wants his fellow fascists “to put an end” to protests. As everyone who read his post knew and knows, “take matters into your own hands” means drive into and over protesters.

“Take matters into your own hands,” like the self-proclaimed neo-Nazi James Fields, currently serving a life term in federal prison for murdering Heather Heyer and injuring 35 other people by driving his car into a crowd of civil rights protesters during the fascist Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August of 2017 — the sick gathering where white supremacists chanted “Jews Will Not Replace Us!,” the event about which the Hitler fan and future and predicted putschist Trump said there were “good people on both sides.”

At least 14 and likely more civil rights and social justice protesters were killed — most by vigilantes, some by police and one by a National Guard unit — during the George Floyd Rebellion. Two of the victims, Robert Forbes and Summer Taylor, died after being rammed by automobiles. (Please see my September 11, 2020 CounterPunch essay “Fourteen Martyrs in the Struggle Against Racist Terro and Trumpism-Fascism”).

“Any Other Means”

Senator Cotton, it is worth recalling, is the Republi-Nazi Senator who published a New York Times Op Ed titled “Send in the Troops" in June of 2020. He called in that commentary for “an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter” the George Floyd protests. Cotton brandished the slaveowners’ Insurrection Act, which he called “a venerable law, nearly as old as our republic itself,” and which he said “authorize[d]” his orange-tinted Dear Leader “to employ the military ‘or any other means’ in ‘cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws."'

How curious and fascist it was to call a protests against racist police brutality “an insurrection.” The chilling phrase “any other means” does not appear in the text of the law (see https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/subtitle-A/part-I/chapter-13). Cotton was likely thinking of the act’s reference to “state militias” (forerunners of today’s state National Guard units), which were in place mainly prevent and punish slave uprisings across the South at the time of the original legislation.

We know who Trump included in his notion of “any other means”: fascist thugs like the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, and the Oath Keepers, all of whom participated in the actual insurrection attempt of January 6, 2021.

The Proud Boys, who Trump told (in a nationally televised presidential debate) in October of 2020 to “stand back and stand by,” would twice gather to terrorize Washington DC after Biden’s election. At the first one of the Proud Boys’ post-election hate rallies in Washington in November of 2020, Trump offered encouragement with a thumb-up and okay signal limousine drive-by past cheering fascist masses in Freedom Plaza.

At the second fascist rally in December, Trump's helicopter flew low over the National Mall, eliciting cheers from Proud Boys wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the slogans “6MWE,” “Camp Auschwitz,” and “Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong.” The first slogan is an acronym for “Six Million Jews (Killed in the Nazi Holocaust) Wasn’t Enough.” The last one refers to the US-backed Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who overthrew the democratically elected government of the socialist president Salvadore Allende on September 11, 1973 (Latin America’s 9-11) and murdered many thousands of Chilean workers, intellectuals, and activists. Proud Boys tore up Black Lives Matters flags and banners, leaving little doubt about their determination to physically crush the struggle for Black civil rights and racial equality

If Trump had had his way, these paramilitary fascists would have been permitted to bring AR-15s and other military assault weapons to the Capitol. “I don’t f---ing care that they have weapons,” Trump screamed while telling his aides to take down magnetometers (metal detectors) near the White House before he made his infamous “fight or you won’t have a country” speech. “They’re not here to hurt me, take the f---ing mags away,” Trump said.

Red State Cancel Culture

In the wake of the George Floyd uprising, red states passed fascist bills granting immunity to drivers whose vehicles strike and injure protesters in public streets. These bills are just one especially murderous part of a broader and lethal Republi-fascist and red state attack on the right of public assembly, an assault just upheld by the Christian Fascist US Supreme Court in a decision that rejected precedent and degraded the First Amendment by leaving intact three southern state bills that make individual protest organizers financially liable for any harm that anyone might experience in a mass protest. The US Protest Law Tracker Website reports that 45 US states have since January of 2017 have considered 289 bills restricting the right to public assembly, enacting 42 such bills to date. As the International Center for Non Profit Law notes:

“Since January 2017, the U.S. has seen a wave of bills introduced by state and federal lawmakers that would limit the right to protest. These anti-protest bills are often introduced in response to prominent protest movements, including movements for racial justice, campaigns against new oil and gas pipelines, demonstrations on college campuses, and protests supporting better working conditions for teachers. Anti-protest bills undermine our First Amendment right to freedom of assembly. While lawmakers often claim that the bills are needed to prevent violence, the overwhelming majority of protests in the U.S. are nonviolent, and states already have laws prohibiting property destruction and violent conduct. Instead of refining or better targeting existing law to address legitimate needs, lawmakers have proposed bills that can restrict and deter peaceful and constitutionally protected protest.”

Heil Kyle, Currently Touring American Campuses

On August 25 of 2020, Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, were murdered by the white teen fascist Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin. A big Trump and police fan, Rittenhouse answered the call of a local fascist militia, the “Kenosha Guard,” in response to protests and riots sparked by white Kenosha policeman Rusten Shesky’s savage attempted murder of the young Black man Jacob Blake.

With the chilling approval and support of militarized Kenosha County police, Rittenhouse patrolled Kenosha’s riot zone with a military assault weapon that he was too young to legally own. Rittenhouse shot his first victim, Rosenbaum, five times.

When protesters tried to disarm the active shooter, knocking him to the ground, the teen fascist turned and murdered Huber, a skateboarder, in an assault widely viewed on cell phone video.

After committing his second homicide of the night, Rittenhouse walked freely past Kenosha County military police with his arms in the air while protesters futilely told the gendarmes that the fascist adolescent had just shot two people.

The police who let Rittenhouse go unmolested and leave town were commanded by David Beth, a moronic and fascist county sheriff who said the following in response to the arrest of Black shoplifting suspects in 2018:

“I’m to the point where I think society has to come to a threshold where there are some people that aren’t worth saving. We need to build warehouses to put these people into it and lock them away for the rest of their lives…. Let’s put them in jail. Let’s stop them from, truly, at least some of these males, going out and getting 10 other women pregnant and having small children. Let’s put them away. At some point, we have to stop being politically correct… These people have to be warehoused, no recreational time in jails. We put them away for the rest of their lives so the rest of us can be better.”

This was a statement of flat-out fascist eliminationism, an epitome of what the brilliant left social critic Henry Giroux calls the “neoliberal fascist politics of disposability.”

After he was belatedly apprehended and charged with murder, Rittenhouse was defended by no less of a fascist than his very own beloved U.S. president, Donald “White Power” Trump. Rittenhouse was proclaimed a hero by the nation’s alt-right and much of its mainstream (Republican) right-wing, including Fatherland (FOX) News anchor Tucker Carlson. Nazi cultist Anne Coulter tweeted that she wanted Rittenhouse as her next president. Amerikaner Trumpenvolk streamed contributions to the white-nationalist teenybopper’s legal fascist defense fund.

Tellingly enough and full of grave implications for what was to come, Trump made a special point of visiting Kenosha on the very last night of the 2020 presidential campaign.

The fascist murderer Rittenhouse was subsequently found not guilty of murder in a deeply flawed trial overseen by a transparently asinine and right-wing judge.

Rittenhouse has since been feted by neo-fascists like Charlie Kirk and brought as a guest of honor to — where else? — Mar a Lago, home of Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump himself, the malignant Nazi who will quite possibly take up residence in the White House for a second time on January 20, 2025 (thanks in no small part to the capitalist-imperialist dismalness of the Neoliberal Dems).

The Trumpist-fascist Rittenhouse is currently touring campuses, eliciting mild protests at four different universities in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio.

Fascism Denial as “an Act of Complicity”

Perhaps he can speak at Wesleyan College, where he can be introduced by the liberal historian and minor league fascism-denier Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, who could explain that fears of an American fascism are overblown and needlessly alarmist.

Better, I think, for Wesleyan to invite Giroux, whose recent book Fascism on Trial , co-authored with the prolific political scientist Anthony DiMaggio (author of Rising Fascism in America) calls out the Steinmetz-Jenkins crowd as collaborators in the fascisation of 21st Century America. “The refusal by an array of politicians, scholars, and the mainstream media to acknowledge the scale of the fascist threat bearing down on American society,” Giroux and DiMaggio write, “is more than an act of refusal — it is an act of complicity…We believe that one cannot be silent in the face of such a dire threat” (Giroux and DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial, p. 3).

(For me the jury is out on how much of the academic fascism-denial — to which I dedicated an entire chapter in my 2021 book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America — is about conscious refusal and how much of it is about professional over-specialization and sheer stubborn stupidity, two interrelated syndromes that are rife in the ivory tower.)

Not so Liberal or Higher Ed in Not so Left California

But things are dodgy and authoritarian also on the not so left side of the binary US party spectrum. In other news from so-called higher education, the University of Southern California, in the nation’s bluest state, has cancelled a valedictorian address by the brilliant young biomedical engineering student Asna Tabassum. The reason given? Her opposition to the Judeo-fascist genocide that has been underway for half a year with massive US imperial support (funding, equipping, and diplomatic protection) in Gaza raises “safety concerns.”

Also in “left” California, at the “radical” University of California Berkeley, the liberal “free speech champion” and Dean of the UC-Berkeley Law School Erwin Chemerinsky and his wife, the liberal Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk, recently demonstrated their commitment to the First Amendment by physically cancelling female Palestinian American law student Malak Afaneh’s attempt to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people at a law school function held in the backyard of Chemerinsky and Fisk’s sumptuous home. A damning video of the incident shows professor Fisk assaulting Afaneh as the student tried to speak freely against Judeo-fascist Israel and the United States’ criminal war on Gaza.

As a brilliant radical historian writes me, “the Dean and his spouse apparently have a new interpretation of the 1st amendment: ‘My house is my castle and I can suppress speech I do not like even at a law school sponsored event’…a strange position for a constitutional scholar. The student apparently is looking for legal counsel from the National Lawyers Guild, the leftist lawyers who defended those persecuted in the McCarthyite hysteria.”

The Revcoms rightly describe the cancellation of Ms. Tabassum as “only the latest in a massive wave of repression on campus, including the arrest of 20 students at Pomona College in Claremont [also in bright blue California] last week, the firing of college presidents at Harvard [in blue Massachusetts] and Penn [in blue Philadelphia and purple Pennsylvania], the suppression of pro-Palestinian student organizations at Columbia [in bright blue, Trump-loathing New York City], Barnard [in blue New York], and other [bright blue] schools, etc.”

“On campus[es],” the ultimate blue-Democratic space, absurdly considered “under the control of the radical Marxist left” (I wish — I’d have a real job!:) by the Republi-fascists.  

Last night, I watched in horror (though not surprise) as the “liberal,” militantly both-sidesist and pretend above-it-all “P”BS “NewsHour” played along with the absurd, authoritarian, and richly bipartisan imperialist and neo-McCarthyite narrative that US students are engaging in “anti-Semitism” when they speak out against the murder, maiming, displacement, and starvation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

Clearly red state-America and the Reich-most party have no monopoly on the repression of free speech and public assembly in the United States, as numerous pro-Palestine activists arrested and otherwise repressed in blue cities can attest.

The Democratic Party’s imperial alignment with genocidal Israel and the Democrats’ related participation in the grotesque, neo-McCarthyite smearing and repression of pro-Palestine speech and activism on and beyond college campuses in the supposed homeland of democracy is no small part of why the fascist Trump-Rittenhouse party may well take back the White House and perhaps the Senate in 2025, with disastrous consequences for humanity at home and abroad