The recently concluded Republi-fascist “convention” in Dallas was the starting gun preparing Trump’s base of MAGA fascists for the elections scheduled for November and beyond. It was intended to consolidate and train a hard-core force to spread fascist fervor and resolve throughout the country, and support the slaughter of people throughout the world by U.S. bombs. And not take “no” for an answer. 

In “normal” times, both Republican and Democratic party conventions are held once every four years, when presidential elections approach. But we’re not in normal times. And this convention was different. There is no presidential election scheduled, but Trump told the crowd to “pretend” he’s on the ballot, and vote for his fellow fascists who are. He led the assembled horde in a pledge of personal loyalty to him. The pledge expressed willingness to “cheat like hell” to make sure MAGA fascists win the elections scheduled for November.

A “Mega-church/Third Reich Hybrid”

In these times, as Revolution wrote in February, the MAGA fascists “… deeply and fanatically believe that only they are the legitimate rulers of this system and they are actively working to rig and steal the next election—without violence if they can, but through violence if they must.” The convention was accurately described as being more like “a mega church/Third Reich hybrid” than a convention in a comment on the Dallas Morning News’s Instagram account. This convention was aimed at steeling the hard-core MAGA base, especially Christian fascists, for turmoil ahead. 

The fascists who congealed in Dallas were a grotesque, hate-filled mob of deranged social media “influencers,” patriarchal Biblical literalists, gym-bros, tradwives, science deniers, immigrant haters, straight-up racists, gay bashers, and similar ghouls, along with some leading orchestrators of MAGA fascism like Ted Cruz, JD Vance, and Mike Johnson. 

But they all had two key things in common: they are all about supporting Trump to the hilt, and they all hate the same people Trump hates.

The convention rallied the mob around a number of themes, from economic (including Trump’s pledge to give every adult American $5,000 if the Republicans win the midterms), to border security and immigration, to healthcare and foreign policy. A major thrust was ideological and political—becoming warriors against the “communists,” for the nuclear family, and for the United State to be a white, Christian country. Here we focus on the fascist anti-Muslim attacks that are part of a broader leap in assaults on Muslims.

A “Holy War”—Mounting Threats on the Home Front

Hatred and persecution of Muslims have always been core elements of the MAGA movement; millions of Christian fascists are the heart of Trump’s “base.” They see Muslims and Islam as a mortal threat to the cohesion of the U.S. and to Christianity itself. They seek to mount a “holy war” to drive Muslims out of the U.S., and to destroy Islam globally.

One week into his first term as president in 2016, Trump issued an executive order called the “Muslim ban.” It barred people from seven predominately Muslim countries from entering the U.S. After thousands protested at airports across the country, and two court rulings against the ban, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Trump’s Muslim ban.

Nine years later, Trump issued new orders outright banning or severely restricting immigration from 19 countries, many of them mainly Muslim but including countries like Haiti and Cuba. In the interim, about 13 U.S. states dominated by MAGA fascists passed laws to restrict Islam and Muslim people. 31 others have similar measures pending, and MAGA fascists everywhere relentlessly demonize, threaten, and lie about Muslims. Disgusting slander and vilification of prominent Islamic politicians like Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Party candidate for the U.S. Senate from Michigan, and Ilhan Omar, a congresswoman from Minnesota, are common. Bo French, the Republi-fascist candidate for a statewide office now notorious for his racist comments on the student crowd at a University of Texas football game, swore that he “won’t rest until every Muslim is gone.”

Fascist assaults on Islam have been particularly intense in Texas, Florida, and other states led by Christian fascists. Texas has revamped and “Christianized” its curriculum for students. The Ten Commandments now are posted in every classroom, and study of the Protestant Bible is mandatory. Students are instructed that early Islamic history consisted of “brutal military campaigns against Christian and Jewish tribes…,” and that “’radical Islam’ [not particular terrorist groups like al-Qaeda] motivated the 9/11 attacks.” 

Texas’s school voucher program arbitrarily excluded more than 20 Islamic schools that met all the state criteria. Texas governor Greg Abbott has declared the Council on American-Islamic Relations (a civil rights advocacy group) to be a “terrorist” and “transnational criminal” organization. He made a big show of signing a law banning the establishment of “Sharia Compounds” in Texas. (Sharia compounds are Muslim-only communities which exist only in the fevered delusions of Abbott and his fellow fascists.)

But the attacks have gone nationwide, also. Alabama’s Christian fascist senator, Tommy Tuberville, said in a speech on the Senate floor earlier this year that unless Christian Americans respond to the intrusion of Islam into the U.S., this country will soon be known as the “Caliphate of America,” and Americans will have to “fight in the streets to get the country back.” He said his advice to an Islamic academy that had proposed to relocate in Alabama is that they should be “moving out of Alabama and out of our country.”

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz spoke at the convention on the day the assembled fascists honored Charlie Kirk, the fascist youth leader who was murdered a year earlier. Cruz hypocritically denounced “political violence,” then claimed that Islam produces “murder and oppression.” As Cruz attacked several prominent Muslim Democrats, including Zohran Mamdani, mayor of New York City, and Abdul el-Sayed, someone in the crowd shouted “they should be shot” after each name. Neither Cruz, Trump, the Republican National Committee—nor any leading figure in the Republi-fascist party—has rebuked that call.

A “Holy War”—Rivers of Blood in the Middle East and Asia

For decades Christian fascist leaders have been preaching and lying about the violence they claim is inherent to Islam. An opinion piece in the online Christian journal Good Faith Media reported that Franklin Graham, “one of Trump’s closest religious advisers, has framed our [meaning the U.S.’s] actions in Iran as a crusade … in the medieval manner, in which Christian kings baptized the bloodshed they wrought as a sacred mission.”

It is the U.S. that has caused rivers of blood to flow in the past 25 years. A study done at Brown University concludes that wars beginning with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan killed "An estimated over 940,000 people … by direct post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001-2023. Of these, more than 432,000 were civilians.... An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.” Note that this study concluded three years ago and doesn’t contain information on the tens of thousands killed in Israel's genocidal war against Gaza, which is fully supported by the U.S.  Nor does it count the schoolgirls and thousands of others in Iran killed by U.S. bombs.

People at a recent solemn memorial for the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon read their names aloud. It took about four hours. Reading the names of all the dead in largely Muslim countries in Asia and the Mid-east caused by the U.S. since 9/11 would take about 109 days.

Challenges of a Rapidly Accelerating Situation 

In March this year, as the U.S. and Israel began their war with Iran, John Hagee, a leading Christian fascist, said “God Almighty is brought onto the battlefield and the enemies of Zion and the enemies of the United States can be destroyed before our eyes. Let God arise and let his enemies be scattered.”

The response of the Democratic Party to all this lunacy, hatred, and genocidal violence has been to occasionally, and mildly, chastise the blatantly expressed bigotry of fascist Republicans, and to say they should be elected instead. They organized “massive voter registration drives” in several cities in the wake of the fascist convention. Meanwhile the “decent people”—the kind of people who flooded airports to protest Trump’s first Muslim ban—have not joined in this fight to stand with besieged Muslims.

The situation is rapidly accelerating as the elections scheduled for November approach, and where it will go is uncertain. What is clear is that passivity in the face of this growing danger would be disastrous. Attacks on Muslims are part of a broader effort to lock down and fully consolidate fascist rule in the U.S. and expand U.S. domination worldwide—and they must be opposed.

This has to be taken very seriously. At their convention the MAGA regime fired up its most fanatical followers to carry out and support massive repression in the U.S., and to give full backing to war crimes it commits against those it declares to be its enemies. The dogs are being let off their leashes.

But the underlying tensions and obstacles that are driving this system to such extremes are also bringing forward the possibility of great change, even the possibility of revolutionary change, when sections of those ruling the system split apart and the old norms of how things are ruled no longer hold. As Bob Avakian wrote in “HUMANITY ON THE BRINK: A Forced March Into the Abyss, or Forging a Way Forward Out of the Madness?”:

It is not possible, at this point, to determine which of these scenarios—or perhaps some other situation—might develop. But this orientation is crucial: While the resistance against the fascist regime must continue, the advocates of the new communism, while continuing to be actively involved in this resistance, must be firmly oriented and prepared to carry out ongoing work for revolution—theoretical, political, practical and organizational work—even as this will need to be done under the conditions that will likely be qualitatively more repressive and difficult.