As we wrote last week, with the firing of the Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., and other top military officers, the future of the U.S. armed forces, and the future that the fascists are preparing for, came into sharp focus. As that article pointed out: “the armed forces of this system have carried out towering crimes in defending the core interests of capitalism-imperialism. But the intent in these moves by Trump should be clear: the transformation of the armed forces into a qualitatively more white supremacist, misogynist, anti-gay, unhindered, and—above all—loyal-to-Trump force.”

Trump, his defense secretary Pete Hegseth, and other fascists are definitely not finished with their moves to “whiten and masculinize” the U.S. military. Here are two examples.

Ouster of Black Head of Virginia Military Institute

On February 28, the board of the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) announced they would not renew the contract of the school’s superintendent, Major General Cedric Wins, who is Black. Founded in 1839, VMI is the oldest public sector military college in the U.S. and one of the largest producers of officers for the U.S. military. Wins is the first Black superintendent of VMI. 

Wins took over at VMI in 2021 shortly after a major scandal broke into the open about how Black cadets at the school were victims of ugly, pervasive racism. After an incident in which a Black VMI cadet was threatened with lynching by a white sophomore, the state of Virginia ordered an investigation. Five of the 12 Black cadets interviewed in the investigation said that the period of "hazing" for new students promotes “racial intolerance and/or discrimination.” This period is called the “rat line” and involved physical and mental torture for new students, including things like waterboarding. But the investigation did not recommend any actual changes.

In fact, the school has long had an open affinity for the Confederacy—the losing side of the slave owners in the U.S. Civil War. It was not until 2020 that VMI was forced to put a stop to an annual “reenactment” of a Civil War battle in which the school’s cadets played the part of Confederate soldiers. 

One of Gen. Wins’s actions after he took over as superintendent was to remove the statue of a Confederate general, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, which had been at a prominent place on the campus. Wins also initiated measures promoting diversity. In response, according to the New York Times, “an alumni group known as Spirit of V.M.I. campaigned to end what it called a ‘woke’ assault on the college.” When the white supremacists and fascists attack DEI (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”) and what they call “woke,” what they most often mean is that any and all attempts to reform the blatant discrimination, segregation, exclusion and erasure of Black and other oppressed people must be done away with—and the overt racism that characterized all aspects of life in the U.S. until just 75 years ago restored.

And now, with Trump/MAGA in the White House, Wins has been forced out. 

Firing of the Military Lawyers—and Greasing the Skids for Open Violations of Rule of Law

As we reported last week, the firing of the top lawyers in the Army, Navy and Air Force means that they can “now bring in people who would be more lenient on war crimes.” Even as many war crimes by the U.S. military routinely go unpunished, even the tiny percentage of perpetrators that do receive any punishment is too much for the MAGA fascists.

Actually, the dangerous impact of the firing of these military lawyers—called judge advocate generals, or JAGs—goes beyond the possibility of even more war crimes being carried out by U.S. troops. In a significant opinion piece in the New York Times, Frank Kendall, secretary of the Air Force under Biden, wrote that JAGs are supposed to have “independent legal authority to tell any military commander or political appointee that an order from the president or the secretary of defense is unlawful, cannot be given and should not be obeyed.” 

In other words, if Trump were, for example, to order troops to shoot at protestors in the street (as he wanted to during his first term), the previous JAGs may have been a potential impediment by telling commanders that the order went against the Constitution and should not be obeyed. Now, with the axing of the JAGs along with the Chief of Staff and other top military officials, Trump and Hegseth have removed that impediment and can replace them with those who will faithfully obey orders even if blatantly illegal. Hegseth said outright that the ousted JAGs represented “roadblocks”—when asked what he meant, he replied, “It’s roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.”

In his Times piece, Kendall gets further into the significance of the move by Trump and Hegseth to replace the JAGs: “One has to ask why JAG leadership was singled out for replacement. This is part of a much larger pattern of disrespect, even disdain, for the rule of law…. Our country is in uncharted territory. We have an administration that is waging war against the rule of law. The evidence is everywhere. We don’t yet know how far it will go as it seeks to control, reinterpret, rewrite, ignore or defy legal constraints, including the Constitution itself. The replacement of the military JAG leadership is one skirmish in that war….”

It is a big deal that a former secretary of the Air Force is sounding the alarm in this way, and while he is speaking from the perspective of maintaining and upholding this system, the alarm should be heard and heeded.

Time Is NOW for Those Who Oppose This to Act

The revolutionary leader Bob Avakian wrote an important statement this week, Trump’s fascist rule, like Hitler’s before him, is a regime of horrors—and is completely illegitimate.

This statement ends with this call:

Before Trump’s fascist rule can become fully consolidated and carry out even far worse horrors than what it is already perpetrating, it must be defeated through powerful mass mobilization—overcoming all “divide and conquer” schemes, uniting all who can be united, from many different viewpoints and perspectives, in actively opposing, defying and resisting this fascism, in continually growing numbers—moving to quickly involve millions, determined to create such a profound political crisis that Trump cannot govern the country and continue to implement his fascist program, with all its terrible consequences.