What Would Flip the Switch?

For US-Americans to Get Serious About Removing a Fascist Regime from Power

What would it take for tens of millions of US-Americans to take to the streets on a regular basis, rising in a sustained mass movement to cancel business as usual pending the removal of a virulent fascist regime atop the most lethal superpower in world history, before it’s too late?[1]

Genocidal Racism and Concentration Camps

Would that regime sweeping up tens of thousands of US-Americans’ brown-skinned neighbors into a giant expanding network of concentration camps do the trick?

Would the regime’s masked “immigration enforcement” gendarmes disappearing masses of supposedly “illegal” workers, neighbors, parents, loved ones, caretakers, friends, students, children, and siblings across state and even national lines help?

What if heavily armed regime thugs terrorized whole US neighborhoods and towns?

What if these thugs and their commanders targeted their victims on the basis of skin color and ethnicity?

What if dozens died in the regime’s camps because the fascist regime denied proper care to its captives?

What if the regime sent people it kidnapped to torture camps in distant and lawless nations to which they had no historical connection (e.g., sending a Honduran asylum seeker from a US camp to a Rwandan camp)?

What if the regime’s head of state was a racist ogre who returned to power after a presidential campaign in which he echoed Adolph Hitler by saying that nonwhite immigrants were “poisoning our blood”?

What if this president called Somali Americans and a Somali American US Representative “garbage”?

What if he repeatedly referred to female reporters, politicians, and public figures he disliked as “bitches” and “pigs” (and other insulting terms)?

What if this brute habitually called Black elected officials “low IQ individuals”?

What if that president put up a social media post portraying the United States’ first Black president and first Black First Lady as apes?

What if the racist head of the US state further channeled Hitler by calling for more blue-eyed Scandinavian immigrants and granting asylum to white beneficiaries of South African apartheid – this while closing the nation to people from nonwhite nations and stripping temporary protected status from millions of nonwhite immigrants?

What if the regime’s Pentagon chief was a demented Christian white nationalist “crusader” who removed women and people of color from high military posts and renamed military bases after Confederate (Slave Power) military leaders?

What if that Pentagon secretary promoted within the military the arch-reactionary ideas of his pastor, an evangelical fascist on record with the claim that Black chattel slavery marked the high point in the history of US race relations?

Steps Towards Fascist Dictatorship

What if the regime attacked long-time norms and institutions of decency, civility, legality, free speech, and reasoned deliberation, moving rapidly to replace “democracy” and rule of law with the unvarnished rule of irrational and violent men?

What if it was determined to turn back the clock on decades of social justice, civil liberties, civil rights, and environmental victory, working relentlessly to remake US government and society on fascist – white supremacist, militantly patriarchal, xenophobic, and arch-authoritarian – lines?

What if that regime’s first action in the White House was to pardon 1600 putschists convicted for trying to cancel a previous presidential election in a physical attack on the US Capitol, an attack its cult leader had sparked and wanted armed with military assault weapons?

What if that president commuted the long prison sentences handed down to the nation’s top two fascist paramilitary leaders for their roles in the attempted putsch?

What if his second major action was to issue an executive order purporting to cancel the US Constitutional right of birthright citizenship – to rewrite the Constitution by presidential fiat?

What if this president sent out US military forces to occupy US cities on false pretexts?

What if this president behaved in accord with the belief that he is the law and the government?

What if he regularly depicted himself as a divinely ordained savior?

What if the regime’s nativist gendarmes murdered two immigrant rights protesters in a US city?

What if its Justice Department then blocked efforts to investigate these murders?

What if this president responded to a national day of protest of his authoritarianism by putting up a post portraying him flying a bomber that dumped liquid shit on citizens in the streets?

What if he told dozens if not hundreds of lies every week?

What if the regime’s president openly pined to become a strongman for life, half-“joking” about staying in power beyond the US Constitution’s two-term limit for presidents

What if he ordered a military parade in honor of his birthday and the placement of giant banners depicting his face on federal buildings?

What if that president “won” a second term thanks to stepped up racist vote suppression?

What if he continued to obsessively repeat the massively dis-proven and Hitlerian lie that a previous presidential election was stolen from him?

What if the regime repeatedly defied judicial orders?

What if the regime further mocked the principle of constitutional “checks and balances” by turning the US legislative branch into its supine handmaid?

What if it attacked the nation’s top universities, media firms, and law firms, insisting that these institutions exhibit cringing obedience to its Dear Leader?

What if it repeatedly declared fake states of emergency to justify its authoritarian measures?

What if it encouraged far-right violence against its perceived political enemies while labeling those who questioned its actions “domestic terrorists,” “Radical Left lunatics,” and “enemies of the people”?

What if it drafted draconian plans to crush and cripple dissent, identifying any criticism of dominant US social hierarchies and ideologies as criminal and treasonous?

What if the regime’s top political advisor boasted that sheer force rightly trumps the “niceties” of national and international law?

What if this advisor channeled the language and spirit of Adolph Hitler’s master propagandist Joseph Goebbels by saying this at an assassinated fascist youth leader’s memorial:

“We are the storm. Our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion. The light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello… Our ancestors built the cities… the art and architecture… the industry. To the enemy, I say this: You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can create nothing… You have no idea the dragon you have awakened”?

What if the regime’s head of state and war chief ordered more than 800 top military officers from across the US Empire into a military auditorium to tell them that the nation’s top adversary was “the enemy within,” meaning the president’s political enemies, and that the Pentagon should use cities as “training grounds” for foreign wars?

What if the regime conducted a “retribution” campaign of vengeful political prosecution, weaponizing its Justice Department to punish the president’s perceived critics and enemies?

What if the regime campaigned for and aligned with neo-fascist parties in Europe – a grotesque insult to the 260,000 US troops (including my mother’s beloved older brother Connie Freed) who died fighting the Nazi Third Reich and its allies?

What if the regime and its party undertook a many-sided attack on the integrity and possibly even the occurrence or acceptance of the 2026 US mid-term elections, an attack including the sparking of a massive state-level campaign to gerrymander majority Black and Democratic Congressional districts out of existence? What if this neo-Jim Crow attack was green-lighted by a fascist Supreme Court that the president and his cult party created during a previous administration and that subsequently enabled the president’ return to power in defiance of the US Constitution’s 14^th Amendment – this while also granting him lifetime immunity from prosecution for any crimes he commits in connection with his “official presidential duties”?

What if the president expressed hostility to the occurrence of future election and made clear his refusal to accept election outcomes he doesn’t like?

What if the regime obstructed the release of criminal investigation files demonstrating its head of state’s long close friendship with an epic sex-trafficker and sexual abuser of girls and likely containing evidence that the president himself is a pedophile?

Fascist Imperialism

What if the regime carried out a monumentally illegal and immoral campaign of extrajudicial executions in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, a campaign that killed hundreds of Latin Americans without offering evidence for the claim that its victims were “enemy combatants” transporting illegal drugs to the US?

What if the regime defended its criminal “double tap” slaughter of incapacitated victims of a first strike, clinging for life to the wreckage of their boat?

What if the regime doubled down on this Western-hemispheric “gunboat diplomacy” by kidnapping and jailing Venezuela’s elected head of state, killing dozens of Cubans and Venezuelans in the process?

What if the regime followed this crime by ordering Venezuela to hand over control of its petroleum industry to criminally eco-exterminist US oil companies?

What if it imposed an embargo on the export of Venezuelan oil to Cuba, leading to the death of Cuban hospital patients?

What if the regime’s head of state repeatedly threatened to “take Cuba” and “do whatever I want with it”?

What if the regime joined with its genocidal client state Israel to launch a monumentally criminal, unprovoked war of imperial aggression against Iran, murdering thousands of that nation’s civilians, including hundreds of children?

What if the regime’s leader sickened the world and revealed its genocidal nature by repeatedly threatening to wipe out the whole civilization of Iran, sending it “back to the Stone Ages where it belongs” if Iran’s government did not accede to his wishes?

What if the regime openly backed Israel’s Judeo-fascist wars of genocidal annihilation in Gaza, Lebanon, and the Palestinian West Bank?

What if the regime’s head of state told The New York Times that “I don’t need international law” and that the only relevant and legitimate restraint on his conduct was “my own morality, my own mind”?

What if he called for the prosecution of six Congresspersons for “treason” for posting a video in which they informed military personnel of their right and duty to refuse to carry out illegal orders?

What if the regime tried to rename the Department of Defense as the “Department of War,” insanely claiming that the original name was a product of leftist “woke” culture?

What if the regime’s Pentagon chief expressed contempt for long established rules of international law and military engagement, upholding a “warrior ethos” that trumped “tepid legality” with “maximum lethality”?

What if the regime rejected weapons controls and provocatively ordered the resumption of nuclear weapons testing while pursuing and encouraging chaotic military nationalism across a world chock full of thermonuclear arms and menaced by ever more advanced and dangerously automated systems for delivering those weapons?

Attacking Science, Public Health and the Climate

What if the regime carried out a massive and sustained attack on US environmental regulations, climate science, medical research, and higher education?

What if it attacked US renewable energy production on a planet that is nearing irreversible climate catastrophe caused by the excessive extraction and burning of fossil fuels?

What if it slashed funds for federal emergency management and relief in a time of ever more extreme weather driven by the climate crisis it denied and fueled?

What it if attacked basic public health measures and agencies, including cancer research and vaccine readiness in a world full of pandemic menaces and other grave epidemiological and medical threats?

What if the regime pushed tens of millions of US-Americans off health insurance to spite a previous president it hated because of the color of his skin and his party identification?

What if it removed millions of US-Americans from food assistance eligibility because it sees the poor as lazy and inferior “useless eaters,” disposable and surplus people unworthy of existence?

What if its president told an audience of his wealthy backers that the federal government can’t afford to pay for Social Security and Medicare because it needs to fund war?

What if the regime killed hundreds of thousands of people abroad by slashing global health funding at the behest of a fascist Afrikaner tech multi-billionaire?

Mental and Moral Unfitness Indicating the Urgent Need for Removal

What if more than 40 elite medical and psychiatric experts sent to Congress a detailed letter presenting evidence that the debilitated mental and moral health of the regime’s leader “present[s] a clear and present danger to our country and to the world” – a letter that ended by saying that the US president was “mentally unfit to be the President of the United States and that steps to remove him from office must be taken with the greatest urgency”?

What if the regime’s reigning wannabe dictator-for-life combined fascism with an epic, unprecedented level of corruption, “monetizing” the US presidency to garner $10 billion in profits from foreign payments, corrupt oligarchs, digital assets and cryptocurrency holdings?

Every Day of Business as Usual Normalizes This Fascist Insanity: A Call Conscience

As I’m sure every reader who has gotten this far knows, there’s nothing hypothetical about all the “what if” statements written above. All of this and much more terrible to contemplate and experience has happened under the Trump47 regime, providing the basis for following eloquent 87-word reflection from the organization Refuse Fascism:

“The streets of this country have been too damn silent as the world continues to be held hostage by this demented fascist tyrant and his regime of dark ages, genocidal-racist, women-hating, immigrant bashing, science-denying, and climate destroying FASCISTS. Every single day of business-as-usual normalizes fascism, allows further horror to be perpetrated, and degrades the decent people who are opposed to this. It is long past time this country be brought to halt through a mass nonviolent outpouring of millions demanding THE TRUMP FASCIST REGIME MUST GO NOW!”

None of the maddening Blitzkrieg of Trump47 outrages listed above (and that’s a short list) have yet done the trick to elicit what is righteously and correctly called for in those 87 words

Could anything flip the switch and bring about a proper response – a “mass nonviolent outpouring of millions” demanding that the regime “go now”?

Sure. There are several things or combinations of things that could bring that about. I claim no clairvoyance, recognizing that the historical terrain shifts day by day, subject to accident and contingency, but from my current vantage point what seems most likely to spark the real resistance required is the regime’s assault on the mid-term elections. The notion that “we the people” have a substantive, even controlling popular and democratic voice in government conduct and policy through the ballot box, via voting, is a widespread and practically religious belief in US American civic culture. It’s a questionable belief, to say the least, given the remarkable capacity of concentrated wealth and power to shape and control opinion and policy under the US capitalist political and constitutional order, which numerous elite and credible scholars have long and defensibly described as “an oligarchy,” far from anything like a real and functioning “democracy.”[2] That harsh reality is no small part of why a vast swath of the US citizenry doesn’t bother to participate in the nation’s elections.

Still, the regime’s apparent determination to rig, cancel, or refuse to honor the outcomes of the coming midterms could be the final straw for millions of decent Americans who believe or want to believe in the reality of electoral democracy in the Unted States. Given the potent hold of electoralism over the political imagination of a giant swath of the citizenry and Trump’s well understood extreme unpopularity, the current and now gravely escalating assault on US election integrity and viability could – in combination with other Trump and Trumpist outrages – create something along the lines of a popular rebellion. It could spark a mass turn to a different sort of politics beneath and beyond the masters’ savagely time-staggered election cycle. It could help us “free ourselves from the election madness engulfing the entire society, including the left,” to quote the progressive historian Howard Zinn in the spring of 2008. As Zinn’s friend and fellow progressive Noam Chomsky wrote in 2004:

“a huge propaganda campaign is mounted to get people to focus on these personalized quadrennial [and biennial] electoral extravaganzas and to think, ‘That’s politics.’ But it isn’t. It’s only a small part of politics… Forces for change that have come up from the grass roots and shaken the society to its core include the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the women’s movement and others, cultivated by steady, dedicated work at all levels, every day, not just once every four years (emphasis added).”

For the Trump regime and party (including state and local outposts) to savagely assault the national civic religion of electoral democracy in such plain sight as they are doing right now is quite provocative. The highly racialized and hyper-partisan Trump regime’s attack on “free and fair elections” is already well underway. It could help jolt masses towards the “grass roots” politics that Chomsky referenced, though here we should add a critical qualification: what is urgently required now is not “shaking society” to win reforms from the existing government – the outer limit of what Chomsky and Zinn called for in 2004 and 2008 – but removing a regime that poses an existential threat to humanity.

Scenarios aside, the current dire moment calls for everyday US-Americans to take a hard look in the mirror and ask themselves how much longer they can tolerate all this insanity being imposed on humanity in their name. As RF stated it its March 2025 Call to Conscience, Call to Act:

“The hour has come for each of us to ask: If we do not act to stop this, what kind of people will we become? There can be no conciliation or collaboration between the world we want and the country they [the Trump regime and party] want… Waiting for the next elections will be too late. We cannot rely on the Democratic Party’s leadership who complacently rely on the very norms and processes that the Trump regime shreds by the hour. We must organize and struggle as we never have before …Let it not be said that when there was still a chance to stop an unprecedented threat to the future of humanity, we did not rise to meet the challenge of our time. Let us not allow the watching world today to despair of our silence and our failure to act.”

Endnote

+1. I’m not talking about a single day national protest of an aspiring “king” or against “billionaire class oligarchy.” I mean a serious, ongoing movement for US-American regime change from the bottom and up, forcing the hand of the nation’s rulers.

+2. This belief is no small part of why many US-Americans, even some anti-Trump ones, will tell you that the Trump47 presidency is “legitimate” and ought to be permitted to last for a full second term. Wrong! There’s no such thing as a legitimate fascist regime, and this is no less true when a fascist regime comes into power through existing bourgeois-democratic and constitutional institutions (as did Italy’s fascist dictator Mussolini in 1920, Germany’s fascist dictator Hitler in 1933, and the aspiring fascist strongman-for-life “Mein Trumpf” in 2017 and 2025) or through bloody military coups (like Spain’s fascist dictator Franco in 1936-39 and Chile’s US-sponsored fascist dictator Pinochet in 1973). Consistently attack the bourgeois-democratic order that you came up through (and that in fact spawned you) with the goal of creating a new fascist form of governance and you lose all bourgeois-democratic legitimacy. There’s also the technical fact that Trump likely got across the finish line first in 2024 because of racist vote suppression.