The events of the past week show a society tearing apart at the seams. This is focused around the violent and utterly lawless repression being carried out by the Trump fascist regime in Minneapolis-St. Paul… and the heroic resistance against it.

Thousands and thousands of decent people are standing up against the murderous fascist shock troops of ICE; tens of thousands more are organizing in neighborhood networks to sound the alarm and to enable their immigrants neighbors to survive. Prominent artists, influencers, and athletes have boldly stood in support of the people and the protestors against the fascist Trump (for example: here, here, here, and here). And especially important: youth are joining the battle, with high schoolers all over the country going into the streets on Friday and Saturday. You could see this—and the receptivity of these youth to the message of revolution—in this clip from Los Angeles. 

Despite the fantasies of some liberals, the fascists are NOT backing down. For them this is, in the words of the fascist strategist Steve Bannon, an “inflection point”—a time when you come up against resistance and hit back all the harder. The Nazi-promoting Tucker Carlson decried “a kind of insurrection against federal authority,” and Trump's advisor and fascist architect Stephen Miller accused the right-wing Democratic senator from Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar, of “fanning the flames of insurrection for the singular purpose of stopping the deportations of illegals who have flooded the country.” What they are talking about when they say “insurrection” are people nonviolently though often militantly demonstrating, filming arrests and carrying out mutual aid (getting people food, medical care, etc.). And why they are exaggerating this into “insurrection” is in order to violently crush this.

Liberal Mayor Jacob Frey: “You Don’t Even Want to Think About It”

Liberals have divided up. Some, like the Democratic congressional leaders Schumer and Jeffreys, were still trying to cut deals with the fascists—and getting taken every time. But some individual Democrats were trying to sound an alarm. The Democratic governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, talked about this being a “Fort Sumter-like” moment in America. (Fort Sumter was the opening battle of the U.S. Civil War!)

In that same vein, Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis was quite frank about what he feared. This passage from a current New York Times interview gives a flavor of the views of many within the liberal section of the ruling class:

Interviewer: [A] judge has said that ICE has violated nearly 100 court orders since its crackdown began in Minneapolis, which makes me wonder if you think you can enforce any agreement with Homan and the federal government? 

Mayor Frey: That’s the most dangerous question that anybody can ask because we are in a world of hurt that goes way beyond any individual safety if we are talking about a federal government completely ignoring court orders. This is a foundational principle of our Republic. The battlefield that we fight on as municipalities and cities around the country isn’t one of warfare. It’s one of the law. The battlefield that we are going to win on is the law, and a precondition of that necessary fight is that once the law has been determined and a court order comes down, it’s going to be followed.…

Interviewer: What are the options if they don’t do that? 

Frey: The options you don’t even want to think about. I mean, I see where you’re leading me. This is the concern, and I don’t even want to think about what it means if court orders themselves are literally disregarded. [Underscoring added.]

“You don’t even want to think about what it means” is most assuredly NOT the way to deal with an onrushing disaster!! Unfortunately, all too many otherwise decent people adopt the same fundamentally irresponsible—and frankly immoral—mindset.

Fantasies of Trump Backing Off

Early in the week, Trump replaced the Border Patrol commander who was leading operations in Minnesota, Greg Bovino, with the supposedly more “reasonable” border czar, Tom Homan. Attorney General Pam Bondi offered a so-called compromise to Walz. Oh, and Trump’s “poll numbers” went down.

All this caused delirious joy in some quarters. Well, let’s look into it. The “more reasonable” Homan is a longtime virulent anti-immigrant fascist. Homan oversaw the 2017 program of ripping thousands of immigrant children from the arms of their parents at the border. (1,360 of these children have never been reunited with their parents!!) The supposedly gentler Homan floated that maybe there could be a deal if Frey and Walz allowed ICE into the prisons, jails and reformatories to search for immigrants. 

Meanwhile, in the frozen streets of Minneapolis, ICE raids continue with all their brutality, and new “theaters” (to use Homan’s military term for ICE targets) were opened up. More than 200 people were arrested in Maine this week. ICE broke its record for most raids in a single day (on January 28) in Los Angeles—nearly 50 raids. And this week there are rumors of an offensive against Haitian immigrants, who until very recently had “temporary protected status” due to the impossibly violent repressive and chaotic conditions in their imperialism-ravaged homeland. 

And this is something to crow about, as if “we’re winning”? Sorry, but no.

As for Bondi’s compromise, this was an offer to stop the ICE offensive in Minnesota if Walz turned over the state voter rolls, if he gave Bondi the list of all recipients of SNAP benefits and Medicaid, and if he ended sanctuary laws. In other words, Walz had to both fully cooperate in the ethnic cleansing and forced exile of Minnesota immigrants AND allow Trump to tamper with Minnesota voting rolls. 

As for “the polls,” Trump has already shown you he could give a f*ck about actual election results. In case you didn’t get this message from January 6, 2021, just this past week Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was sent to Atlanta to once again try to make a case that Trump actually won Georgia and with it the 2020 election. Ask yourself why the person in charge of the CIA has been sent to Georgia to look into voting, and none of the answers you come up with will be any good!

And oh yeah, by Friday the supposedly chastened Trump was again back to defaming Alex Pretti.

The fantasies of Trump fascism self-destructing are deadly. And here we urge every reader to listen to—and to spread—this clip from Bob Avakian drawing from some very relevant history during Hitler’s time to answer a similar claim during Trump’s first term. 

WHY Is This Nightmare Happening?!?

This is not some bad dream we’re all gonna wake up from. This fascism has grown out of the economic and political system that dominates and shapes this society—the system of capitalism-imperialism, which is in an extremely serious and deeply-seated crisis. The old way of containing the deep contradictions within this system through a mixture of extending minor privileges and concessions, backed up by open violent repression when necessary, all within a framework of a society built on virulent white supremacy, suffocating patriarchal oppression of women and LGBT people, wars of aggression and occupation, hatred of “foreigners” and extreme ignorance—this way of maintaining the social order has broken down in the face of big economic and social changes. All this against the backdrop where those who rule this system face significant economic problems and an increasingly serious political, economic, and military rivalry with China—rivalry which could explode into all-out nuclear holocaust. Hanging over all of that is the on-rushing climate catastrophe, which capitalism has proven itself incapable of solving. For a deeper explanation of why we are facing this fascism, go here and here.

In response to that crisis, this system has given birth to an even more monstrous form of rule. One section of the ruling class has decided that the only solution is an openly repressive, lawless and violent fascist regime. The other section still clings to the “old ways” that enabled this country to “rise” to number one exploiter, oppressor and purveyor of violence in the world. That old form of rule—bourgeois (or capitalist) democracy—enabled the ruling class to settle their conflicts with each other without it spilling into open violence.

But capitalism-imperialism has always been a disaster for literally billions around the planet and for tens of millions within the U.S. And let’s be clear: the imperialists have never hesitated to go beyond the law to repress those they deem as immediate threats to their rule. But this was done within certain limits—with certain limited rights and rule of law—to preserve their “legitimacy” in the eyes of those they ruled. 

The fascists see those limits—as they apply to those who oppose the system AND as they apply to their opponents within the ruling class—as obstacles that have to be swept away. They are convinced that desperate and extreme measures, including against their rivals in the ruling class, are needed to more strongly exert U.S. domination of a rapidly changing world. The deep roots and driving dynamics of this conflict mean that this fascism is not going to just “go away”—as Trump’s “comeback” since 2021 has so amply illustrated.

What Bob Avakian said in September of last year remains starkly true:

If this fascist regime is allowed to remain in power, everything that decent people have felt they could rely on to seek justice will be brutally shut down...every uplifting moral value will be reviled and repressed...every sphere of society will be remade, in terrible ways, in line with the male supremacist, anti-LGBT, white supremacist and anti-immigrant cruelty and the anti-scientific, health and climate destroying madness of the Trump fascist regime and the bloodthirsty ravings and depraved violence of fanatics heading “the department of war,” with the deranged maniac Trump having his finger on the nuclear button.

Every vision, and every active striving, for a better, more just world, for a future worth living in, will be violently suppressed and effectively foreclosed, at least for the foreseeable future.

This is not hyperbole—it is the bitter reality that is being rapidly enforced. (from social media message REVOLUTION #133: Yes, this Trump/MAGA fascism really is that bad. And, if it is not driven from power soon, it will get far worse.)

So it is extremely important that the regime not just be temporarily stopped but that it be DRIVEN OUT. ICE is the spearpoint of a much bigger agenda. The fascists see ethnic cleansing and suppression of dissent as a matter of “national survival”—and they are more than willing to crush their Democratic opponents to accomplish it. These fascists are determined not to be backed off what they see as this existential mission.

We Need to Defeat Fascism AND We Need to Go Way Beyond This Rotten System

Even with the crucial importance of defeating this regime, there is something much deeper involved and at stake—the chance for a giant step toward REAL emancipation for humanity—revolution in the U.S. The rulers of this system cannot rule in the old way. And in any case, that "old way" would mean that we are still sitting in a world hurtling headlong to an ecological catastrophe caused by this capitalism-imperialism… that almost any conflict could quickly spiral into a nuclear war over who will control the world—even as that world is incinerated in the course of that war. Simply restoring this system, even with a new face, would allow (and require that) the racist oppression of Black people and other people of color, the patriarchal oppression of women and LGBT people, the backing of genocidal terror on the people of the world, the hatred of immigrants, and the general all-round ignorance and cruelty that poisons this society—all that would be kept basically intact. 

But the breakdown in the old way of ruling that we have described both carries huge danger and at the same time opens up equally huge positive possibility. Bob Avakian explained why all the way back in 2021:

As this situation develops, and the ruling class is more and more unable to rule in the old way, society and daily life for masses of people, from different parts of society, can become increasingly unsettled and chaotic, with frequent “disruptions” of the “normal” way things have been.

And as “the normal way” society has been ruled is failing to hold things together—and society is increasingly being ripped apart—this can shake people’s belief that “the way things have always been” is the only way things can be. It can make people more open to questioning—in a real sense it can force people to question—the way things have been, and whether they have to stay that way. And this is all the more likely to happen if the revolutionary forces are out among the people shining a light on the deeper reality of what is happening, and why, and bringing out that there IS an alternative to living this way (From This Is a Rare Time When Revolution Becomes Possible—Why That Is So, and How to Seize on This Rare Opportunity)

This questioning is happening right now on a broad scale. The homemade sign “Better to bleed in resistance than rot in obedience” at the protest in Los Angeles last Friday is a prime example. It is time now, and urgently so, to answer this challenge and call:

To everyone who can’t stand this world the way it is ... who is sick and tired of so many people being treated as less than human ... who knows that the claim of “liberty and justice for all” is a cruel lie ... who is righteously enraged that injustice and inequality go on, and on, and on, despite false promises and honeyed words from people in power (or those seeking power) ... everyone who agonizes about where things are headed and the fact that to be young now means being denied a decent future, or any future at all ... everyone who has ever dreamed about something much better, or even wondered whether that is possible ... everyone who hungers for a world without oppression, exploitation, poverty, and destruction of the environment ... everyone who has the heart to fight for something that is really worth fighting for: You need to be part of this revolution.

This revolution is not just “a good idea”—it is actually possible. (From A Declaration, a Call to Get Organized Now for a Real Revolution)

Get into Bob Avakian. 

Get with the Revcoms. 

There is a planet to save and a world to win.