The Iron Heel: A Report from Fascist Iowa

Reflections on the Crackdown at the University

Iowa’s fascist governor Kim Reynolds after signing the state’s draconian and racist Back the Blue law in June of 2021.

Dear readers: again, I am writing with a certain rush, trying to keep up with current events….it’s hard to keep up. I haven’t had time today to see what the IDF is doing in Rafah.

I need to qualify my response to a reader named Kread, who wrote the following to me last week:

“I used to think you were a bit over the top on the 'we already have a fascist USA' front, until I watched 7 different news takes on the campus protests and the congressional responses highlighted. Six of the 7 networks completely ignored the issue of Palestinian slaughter, USA complicity, etc. and focused on successful police action. Only Aljazeera spoke to students about the issues and covered the brown-shirt attack by goons at UCLA. Police stood aside and let the thugs go after students with bats and bear spray. 1933 Germany scenario.”

Bearing in mind my sense that Kread is correct about both the awfulness of the media coverage and the classically fascist nature of the UCLA incident (with the cops standing by while Ziofascist thugs attacked left anti-genocide protesters), here was my initial response to Kread:

“I have not argued and do not argue that ‘we already have a fascist USA.’ I say we have a fascist movement, a Republifascist party, a Weimar like Dem party, though I guess here I said Vichy (dark laughter) and a fascist leader named Trump. I say it can happen here. If may be happening here. We are about to find out. And we may look back and realize the cancer had in fact irreversibly spread before 2024-26.”

The qualification to my response is this: we do already have fascist states in the United States, places where the cancer has spread not only in movement and ideological form but in the form of actual state policy.

States like Iowa.

I am proud to have recently spoken before and lent support to the student anti-genocide movement in Iowa City, home of the University of Iowa. But the movement has been badly constricted by the fascist nature of the state in which it has occurred.

Where, you ask is the student encampment at UI? It was torn down yesterday morning, before it could even get established, by the University of Iowa police and the Iowa State Patrol yesterday. According to a leading local activist, “Law enforcement learned [about the attempted encampment] the same morning and showed up with numerous police agencies, including U Iowa police, Johnson County Sheriffs, Iowa State Patrol, and undercover agents.”  

It was a multi-agency police state attack on free speech and public assembly.

In a perceptive statement after the assault, The student Instagram page uiowa.action.for.palestine reported that:

“Less than half an hour after beginning setup, approximately 9 cops showed up along with Assistant Vice President and Director of Public ‘Safety’ Mark Bullock. As far as can be told, everyone made it out safely. The University of Iowa Police Department is infamous for its tracking and surveillance, which will come as no surprise to many of us. Fascist and authoritarian governments rely on tracking our every move- and many of the surveillance technologies they rely on to do so are a product of Israeli technology that has been tried and tested on occupied Palestinians.”

Why, you might ask, did the students honor an order to disperse and not face arrest when the gendarmes came to dismantle the site? Two reasons. First, nine of the anti-genocide movement’s leading participants had already been arrested for locking themselves to the university’s football stadium while university president Barbara Wilson held a holiday party there (as Palestinian children were buried in the rubble created by US-made bombs) last December. The nine activists were engaged in civil disobedience and demanding that the university’s disinvest from companies doing business with the mass-murderous, racist, occupation and apartheid state of Israel.  A plea deal subsequently worked up for these students included the promise of severe penalties if they got arrested again within six months. 

Second, the Republi-fascist Iowa state government headed by the deranged DeSantian Republi-Nazi Kim Reynolds in Des Moines responded to the 2020 George Floyd Rebellion by passing a draconian 2021 “Back the Blue” bill (BTBB) that increased the penalty for engaging in an “unlawful assembly” from a simple misdemeanor to an aggravated misdemeanor, which could result in two years in prison. The bill also raised the penalty for engaging in a “riot” from an aggravated misdemeanor to a class “D” felony, which could result in up to five years in prison. The bill defines “riot” and “unlawful assembly” in very broad and vague terms.

As a result, staying on the super-peaceful camp site, absurdly declared illegal, would have opened the students up to charges carrying serious jail time.

Never mind that Iowa Republicans’ hero and 2024 presidential candidate Donald “Retributtion” Trump wanted fascist paramilitaries to be allowed to carry AR-15s up the US Capitol to help his mob of neo-Confederate putschists overthrow previously normative bourgeois electoral democracy and rule of law on January 6, 2021.  (Their orange-hued Dear Leader will win this state by a wide margin next November.

But I digress.

Why haven’t Iowa students done what their counterparts in Chicago and elsewhere have done by taking to the streets and circling up for rallies in key intersections?  Why haven’t they followed the model of a 2016 Trump election protest and the George Floyd Rebellion by heading a couple miles north to shut down traffic on “the Main Street of America,” Interstate-80? 

Because the fascist BTBB made it a “serious misdemeanor” for a protest to obstruct any street, sidewalk, highway, or other public way.

And especially because the same draconian bill offered immunity from civil liability to drivers who plow into protesters and thereby injure or even kill protesters with their vehicles. The immunity applies even if the murderous driver is shown to have been negligent or grossly negligent.

How F’ng Fascist (if I might link two dreaded “F-words”) is that provision of the BTBB? It’s a green light to run over protesters! 

Beyond these extreme punishments for a broad range of conduct, the BTBB “stripped away local discretion by preventing law enforcement or local government from deciding, based on circumstances, not to enforce a provision of state, local, or municipal law. A local government found in violation will be denied state funds for the following fiscal year. In other words, the bill effectively defunds both law enforcement and municipal operations for exercising discretion they have always had.”

This provision amounted to the fascist state government of Iowa ordering “liberal” (Democratic) Iowa City, Des Moines, Fairfield, Sioux City,  and Davenport city officials to enforce the draconian anti-protest laws all the time.

As if all this wasn’t bad enough, Frau Reynold’s BTBB granted “qualified immunity” to protect officers against lawsuits in cases where they are accused of abusing their authority.

The BTBB also – and this is the racist kicker, I hope you are sitting down when you read this – made it a “serious misdemeanor” not to stop for an unmarked law enforcement vehicle driven by a plain-clothes law enforcement officer. I call this the Night Rider provision: “Those in the communities of color, women, and others driving at night would have to pull over for anyone with red or red/blue flashing lights, no matter how unsafe it may be. The penalty for failing to do so could be up to a year in jail.” 

In other words, if some Oath Keeper, Three Percenter,  Proud Boy or other local Iowa neo-Klan fascist paramilitary gets one of his cop buddies or collaborators to give him some surplus flashing blue or red lights and rides up on you in their AR-15-carrying Ford F-150 truck, you need to pull over and explain why you have a Black Lives Matter sticker on the back of your Toyota.

It’s a nice match for the state’s fascist 2022 anti-“Critical Race Theory” bill, which makes it a crime for Iowa teachers from K to PhD to tell the truth about the central roles of white supremacist racism and sexism in the American historical experience past and present.  The legislation says nothing about or against the teaching of Fascist Replacement Theory (FRT), the noxious white supremacist narrative that a radical left globalist conspiracy is trying to replace supposed superior and virtuous Caucasian American volks with purportedly inferior and criminal non-white immigrants.  

The BTBB is also nicely aligned with SF2430, a nativist, white nationalist bill that Republi-Nazi Frau Reynolds recently signed. This sinister fascist (SF indeed) legislation, claims the right to supersede federal authority on immigration matters by making it a crime for a person to reside in Iowa if they were previously removed from the U.S. or have outstanding deportation orders. The Department of Justice has recently told Reynolds that it will sue the state of Iowa if it tries to enforce this measure.

The child labor enthusiast and Republi-fascist dry-drunk Reynolds is chomping at the bit to help Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump enlist the National Guard undertake his promised national round up and interior “heartland” internment of brown-skinned immigrants. She’d love nothing more than to host racist and poltiical concentration camps in the state of Iowa. She looks forward to asking the insurrectionist Donald “Vermin” Trump to send the US military to quell protests under ther guise of the Insurrection Act the next time a massive wave of Black Lives protest washes into Iowa — or gets sparked by another racist police incident in Iowa.

Speaking of superseding supposed (LOL) “radical left” federal authority, der verabscheuungswürdige Gouverneur[1] Reynolds has sent Iowa National Guard troops and even Iowa State Patrol officers to assist the giant fascist state of Texas in its ongoing military nullification of US Border Patrol authority on the southern US border.  

Commander Kim has told pro-Palestine/anti-genocide protesters that Big Brother/Sister will be watching them very carefully, ready to pounce if things get “out of hand.”  And lo and behold, she had enough State Patrol agents free from nativist/nullificationist/Confederate duty in Texas to sweep in on the University of Iowa encampment yesterday.

This is some sick fascist shit and it’s going on in many other “red” states, which really ought to be called brown states (as in brownshirts.)

Reynolds continues to advocate for making Iowa a forced motherhood abortion elimination state, a goal that has been stymied by the Iowa Supreme Court.

Of course, as Kread would be right to (perhaps) point out, we have urban police states with strong fascist tendencies all across urban blue America. Look at what big city cops have been doing to protesters and encampments on campuses and in the streets across Democratic-run big city  urban America – in LA, Chicago, and New York City, etc.

The fascist Reynolds regime in Des Moines is about more than fascism alone.  It’s also about savagely unequal, corrupt, and eco-cidal  neoliberal capitalism, seen in the state government’s strong voucher-funding commitment to the destruction of public schools, its opposition to any and all serious environmental regulation, Reynolds’ campaign to abolish the income tax, and more.

There’s no contradiction between this neoliberal agenda and the fascist agenda.  Fascism is not remotely anti-capitalist; its “populist” pretense is disingenuous. It is the continuation of the underlying class dictatorship of capital without the (dispensable) fig leaf of previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law.

What goes on in “the states” is no small matter.  States rights, a longstanding battle cry of white supremacists since the long slave and Jim Crow era, is a big part of how and why masses of Americans live under policy regimes that are extremely far to the revanchist right of majority national public opinion in the US.

“The people, united, will never be defeated,” is a nice sounding chant but it’s not really true.  The people will continue to be defeated unless and until they rise up to end that class dictatorship by seizing and transforming state power, replacing the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with a dictatorship of the proletariat that is designed  and advanced in such a way as to put humanity on the path to the ending of all exploitation and oppression.

A final word. Make no mistake, the white supremacist, patriarchal, and palingenetic ultra-nationalist Republifascist Party of Trump has every intention of trying to make the whole fucking country Iowa/fascist. The pathetic behavior of big blue city mayors and university presidents and the bloodsoaked Zionist warmonger Joe Biden and others high in the Democratic Party in reponse to the righterous anti-genocide uprising of pro-Palestinian students suggests clearly that the dismal neoliberal Dems are ready to move from being the Weimar party to the Vichy party once they give the White House and the US Senate back to Amerikaner Party of Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump.

Endnote

1. German for “the loathsome governror“