The Long Island Speech

Trump Incites Racism, Calls on Pigs Nationwide to Assault the Oppressed

July 31, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Protesters in Long Island: “Trump and Pence Regime Must Go.”

Over 300 protesters came out to confront and denounce Trump, especially his demonization and vicious attacks on immigrants, when he spoke on Long Island, July 28. Dozens of organizations, mainly Long Island-based immigrants’ rights, LGBTQ rights, unions and others mobilized for this. Refuse Fascism mobilized people from NYC to make the trip and to join in and bring the urgency of mobilizing to actually drive out the Trump/Pence regime strongly into the protest.

Photos: Revolution/revcom.us

"Yes there's a conspiracy... to get the cops off."

Clip from Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About, a film of a talk by Bob Avakian given in 2003 in the United States.

MS-13: Made in, and by, America

The origin of MS-13—La Mara Salvatrucha, or simply La Mara—is rooted in the horrific crimes U.S. imperialism carried out against the people of Central America in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A U.S.-backed military coup in 1979 in El Salvador gave rise to a decade-long civil war, led by the FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front), against U.S. domination. Especially under the regime of Ronald Reagan, this struggle for liberation was met by massive terror and violence by the Salvadoran military and death squads led by Roberto D’Abuisson—who got his training at the U.S. School of the Americas.

The Salvadoran death squads and the military were responsible for the deaths of over 75,000 people, including the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the 1981 massacre of 900 people at El Mozote, and other atrocities. This U.S.-backed violence and terror against the people, along with the conditions of poverty and desperation created by U.S. domination, forced a quarter of the entire population to flee El Salvador to neighboring countries. At least 500,000 Salvadorans made the dangerous journey across Mexico and into the U.S. as undocumented refugees. They went to major cities, from Chicago to New York and San Francisco, but especially Los Angeles.

Large numbers of Salvadoran youths wound up in the poor, rough neighborhoods around MacArthur Park near downtown LA. This is where MS-13 was born. These young people were thrown into schools where they barely spoke the language and where they were greatly outnumbered by Chicanos—Mexican Americans—and other immigrants, especially from Mexico. A professor of Chicano and Latino studies at Cal State Long Beach, an expert on gangs, explained that Salvadoran youths “formed a group because they were being ostracized by the predominantly Chicano community. They were marginalized, and they formed MS to protect themselves.” One explanation of the name Mara Salvatrucha is that it comes from words for “gang,” “Salvador,” and “street smarts.”

Surrounded by LA’s widespread gang culture, challenged by and going up against gangs of Mexican youths, many Salvadoran youths were drawn into the gang mentality, marking and fighting over “territory.” These conflicts led to killings of rivals and retaliation, in a spiraling cycle.

A former MS-13 member said that many Salvadoran youths arrived in the U.S. having witnessed an incredible level of violent atrocities carried out by the U.S.-trained and -led death squads. These killers would dismember people to create “shock and awe.” The former MS-13 member described one instance when a death squad decapitated a woman, put her head in the stomach, and put the body on a stick for people to witness for days. He summed up: “So if the government is already teaching these kids how to act, how do you suppose we’re going to act?”

In time MS-13 grew in numbers and became more violent. In the 1990s, the U.S. began rounding up and deporting large numbers of MS-13 members to El Salvador—back into the conditions of desperation many of them had fled. They brought with them the gang experience and culture from their lives in the U.S. and established MS-13 there. They recruited and threatened local gangs of youths to join, and grew to unleash crime and gang violence in El Salvador, spreading across the region. Now they have a presence in cities all over the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and throughout Central America. It’s estimated that there are 10,000 members of MS-13 in the U.S. and 60,000 in other countries.

On July 28, Donald Trump journeyed to Ronkonkoma in Suffolk County, New York, a county with a large Latino population, both immigrant and U.S.-born. There is a long history of Latinos there being subjected to a reign of terror from white racists: pelted with objects thrown from cars, run off the road when on bikes, beaten with baseball bats, faced with arson attacks and even murder, to the point where many parents have refused to let their children play outside.

But Donald Trump did not go to talk about that. No, he went to talk to an audience consisting of pigs, pigs, and more pigs (sorry, we meant to say “sheriffs, local cops, and state troopers”) from around the New York/New Jersey area. Trump came to stir up racist fear and hatred of Latinos, using lurid descriptions of a few horrible crimes attributed to the MS-13 gang (which has perhaps 10,000 members in the U.S., mainly among Salvadoran immigrants) in order to label tens of millions of people as “animals” who should be hunted down and jailed or deported.

This is no exaggeration: After reveling in gruesome descriptions of alleged MS-13 crimes, Trump makes clear that his target is not the tiny percentage of immigrants in gangs, but the entire Latino population, asking: “What happened to the old days where people came into this country, they worked and they worked and they worked, and they had families, and they paid taxes ...? We don’t see that.” In other words, past immigrants—white, European immigrants—were good, they came to work and raise families, but these Latinos are here (in Trump’s words) to transform our “peaceful parks and beautiful, quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields.”

Trump’s “Solution”—Unleash the Cops to Be as Brutal as They Wanna Be—the Law, the Constitution, and Civil Rights Be Damned!

Having painted a picture of the whole U.S. overrun by violent immigrant criminals, Trump called for a nationwide offensive of police brutality and terror against Latinos (and Black people as well) aimed at “liberating our towns” “one by one.” And this offensive, Trump made clear, should be unconstrained by any concerns about the rights of people suspected or accused of crimes, or by laws, courts, or anything else. Trump promised the cops repeatedly: “We have your backs 100 percent.”

Remember when Baltimore cops threw Freddie Gray, handcuffed, into a police van and gave him a “rough ride” around the city, snapping his spine? Trump does too; he told the cops, “When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon—you just see them thrown in, rough—I said, please don’t be too nice.”

Remember when Ferguson, Missouri, cops killed Michael Brown, and then suppressed peaceful protests with armored vehicles, automatic weapons, and clouds of tear gas, night after night? Well, Trump does, too, and he reminded the cops, “When you wanted to take over and you used military equipment—and they were saying you couldn’t do it—you know what I said? That was my first day: You can do it. (Laughter.) ... And I tell you what—it’s being put to good use.”

But Trump isn’t just revisiting the “greatest hits” of past police atrocities. According to Trump, any constraint on the police by the laws, courts, or politicians has to be thrown aside. Trump claims that existing U.S. laws are “made to protect the criminal” and are “stacked against” the police. Trump complained that sometimes cops and immigration agents have to go through judges instead of just doing what they want. He railed against sanctuary cities as if their purpose was to protect murderers, rather than ordinary people trying to provide for their families. He complained about “pathetic” mayors who mildly constrain the police.

This whole picture of cops being “handcuffed” is America upside down! This is a country with more than two million incarcerated people, very few of whom even had a trial.¹ It is a country in which cops killed roughly 10,000 civilians since 2005, yet only 83 cops were ever charged, and only 30 convicted. It is a country where millions of Black and Latino people have been searched by police without probable cause, and hundreds of thousands of youths labeled “gang members” because of how they dress or who they hang out with.

But Trump is aiming for all-out fascist terror against the oppressed. After describing MS-13 members as sadistic killers, Trump said U.S. enforcers were “rougher,” that MS-13 is “nothing compared to our guys.... And that’s what you need.”

Chicago in Trump's Crosshairs

Then Trump took another leap, turning his attention to Chicago, the city with the second-highest Black population in the U.S., and infamous both for its murderous, lying cops and for the plague of violence among oppressed youths. From his inauguration, Trump has put Chicago in the crosshairs of his regime, threatening to send in the feds to fix gun violence, which he and others blame on Black people. In June, the regime sent 20 additional agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) into Chicago—an advance guard for a reign of terror on top of centuries of savage oppression of Black people. And in the Long Island speech, Trump revealed that his target is not just immigrants or even Latinos—his aim is to violently reassert American white supremacy, everywhere and with a vengeance.

Highlighting this objective, Trump talked about a Chicago cop who supposedly told him that “if you gave me the authority,” the problem of gang violence there could be straightened out “in a couple of days.... We know all the bad ones. We know them all.”

Taken together with everything else Trump said in this speech, this evokes the unleashing of cops—without judicial oversight, warrants, probable cause, or evidence—to kick down the doors of hundreds or thousands of Black and Latino people in Chicago that the cops consider to be “bad guys.” Jailing some, deporting others, spreading terror everywhere, with no questions asked and no resistance tolerated. It raises the specter of the early stages of Gestapo terror in Nazi Germany, an opening wave of racially guided terror that, if not met with massive resistance (and not just from the section of people targeted!), will grow, and spread to other sections of people. And this lawless army of enforcers, increasingly pledged to personal loyalty to Trump himself, could just as easily be turned on white or middle class opponents of fascism, and on Trump’s opponents within the ruling class. In other words, this is a key element of the fascist drive to clear away all obstacles to their complete lockdown of society.

In short, Trump’s speech was a call for fascist policing of the oppressed and others—which was warmly welcomed by the cops in the room, who at the end broke into the bitterly appropriate chant, “USA, USA, USA.” Trump’s vision is indeed well-grounded in the whole white supremacist history and current oppressive relations of the USA. But Trump is preparing to take that longstanding nightmare to a dramatically higher level. This reality must be confronted, condemned, and defeated, as an integral part of driving this regime from power.

1. According to Michelle Alexander, a noted expert on the criminal justice system, writing in the New York Times: "More than 90 percent of criminal cases are never tried before a jury. Most people charged with crimes forfeit their constitutional rights and plead guilty.

“'The truth is that government officials have deliberately engineered the system to assure that the jury trial system established by the Constitution is seldom used,' said Timothy Lynch, director of the criminal justice project at the libertarian Cato Institute. In other words: the system is rigged." For more on this see Alexander's book: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. [back]

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