The Fascist Assault

In a campaign stop (in other words, a fascist rally) in Michigan on October 17, Donald Trump led his crowd in chants of “Lock Her Up”—directed at the Democratic governor of the state, Gretchen Whitmer.

This was outrageous in itself—and one of the repeated threats Trump and other fascists at the top have made against anyone opposing them, including current and former Democratic Party government officials. But this is in the wake of the October 8 arrest of 13 men on federal or state charges in connection with an alleged plot to kidnap Whitmer—a frequent target of attacks by Trump—to take her to Wisconsin, put her on “trial” for “treason,” and worse.

According to the authorities, and as reported by the press, the plot drew together members of the Wolverine Watchmen, a relatively new group within the large Michigan militia scene¹ and at least some others associated with the Boogaloo Boys, a national movement. As it stands, these are allegations by law enforcement agencies—the FBI in particular, with state law enforcement—and some corroborating evidence such as tape recordings and videos have been produced, and the alleged plot and thinking behind it are consistent with the outlook of the fascist movement.

In this context, two things stand out.

First, Trump has been consciously creating an atmosphere that encourages violence against his “enemies,” and defending fascist groups that carry it out.² In this case, the plotters were reportedly motivated by anger about the public health measures (like having to wear masks, closing gyms, etc.) put into effect by Governor Whitmer to combat the COVID-19 epidemic, which they denounce as “tyranny.” This is right in line with Trump’s demand to “Re-open America,” and his virulent denunciations of state and city leaders who resist this.

On April 15, thousands of people held a “re-open Michigan” protest at the Capitol in Lansing, including armed members of Michigan Militia, Proud Boys, and other fascists with Confederate flags, Trump flags, signs calling the governor a “Nazi,” and someone with a Barbie Doll effigy of Whitmer and a noose.  

On April 30, hundreds of protesters, many heavily armed, stormed the Capitol building, screaming at reporters, intimidating legislators, and carrying signs like “Tyrants Get the Rope.” On May 14, they were back again, with guns. The organizers’ Facebook page was deleted because of death threats against the governor. The legislature cut short its session. At least two of the alleged plotters were filmed at this action.

Trump publicly encouraged these fascist lynch mobs. After the first protest, he tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” After the second, he tweeted, “These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely!”

Whitmer herself noted Trump was “creating a very dangerous situation. Each time he has tweeted about me, each time that he has said ‘liberate Michigan’ and said I should negotiate with the very people who are arrested because they’re ‘good people,’ that incites more domestic terror.”

Armed militia occupying the Michigan State Capitol demanding an end to “stay at home” orders intended to slow the spread of Covid-19.

Second, Trump has now stepped up his attacks on Whitmer. Only hours after the announcement of the arrest of the alleged plotters, Trump tweeted that she was doing a “terrible job” and demanded: “open up your state, open up your schools, and open up your churches!”—embracing the “grievances” of the alleged plotters, giving them and others a “thumbs up.” And the “Lock Her Up” chants Trump led at a Michigan rally on October 17 is not far from the goal of the alleged plotters to put Whitmer on trial for “treason.”

Michigan’s top Republi-fascists have followed Trump’s lead in attacking Whitmer, including one legislator who angrily defended the alleged plotters. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel pointed out these militias are being openly encouraged by elements of law enforcement—particularly county sheriffs, one of whom is on record suggesting that this was not a “kidnapping” plot but a legitimate “citizens’ arrest”!

This Is NOT Just Trump “Not Wanting to Offend Potential Voters”!

These attacks on Whitmer and others are unprecedented in modern times in the history of the U.S.—calls by a sitting president to criminally indict and jail his political opposition, including his opponent, Joe Biden, in the upcoming race! 

These attacks matter, greatly! As Bob Avakian wrote in his historic August 1 statement, fascism, and what we confront with this fascist Trump-Pence regime, is “not just a matter of horrific policies but of a qualitatively different form of rule, based on brutal repression and violation of what are supposed to be the most basic rights.” Along with going after the masses of people opposed to the fascist regime and its policies, imposing fascist rule requires viciously targeting, and attempting to silence and suppress their opponents within the capitalist-imperialist ruling class, those who would pose an obstacle to their fascist program and rule. This includes leading Democrats.

These unprecedented attacks therefore represent a serious escalation towards consolidating fascist rule in the U.S., and towards openly terrorizing the opposition, legally or extralegally. They further pave the way to implementing an even more brutal dictatorship over the oppressed masses, including sweeping and violent political repression, open white supremacy, ethnic cleansing, and misogynistic and patriarchal oppression of women. These have to be opposed as part of the struggle to oust this regime from power through mass, sustained, nonviolent protests, like those called by Refuse Fascism. Yet another reason this nightmare must end!

1. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who carried out the 1992 bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building that killed 168 people, also came out of this scene.  [back]

2. Trump praised white supremacists in Oregon who descended on Portland to attack anti-racism protesters; he falsely claimed that a militia thug who killed two protesters and seriously wounded a third in Kenosha was acting in “self-defense”; during the first debate with Biden, he refused to denounce white supremacists and instead told the Proud Boys, “Stand back and stand by.”  [back]

Hundreds of people wait in line for early voting on October 12, 2020, in Marietta, Georgia. Voters have waited six hours or more. Photo: AP

Letter from a reader

Revcom has written, “Trump is already stealing the election, he has a plan in place to use key institutions, including the Supreme Court, and violent thugs, in and out of uniform, to keep his regime in power.”

The presidential election is November 3. But stealing the election, and suppressing the vote, are well underway by fascist Republicans. These crimes are happening in and through repressive measures taken by state and local officials, upheld by federal appeals courts, and through other measures of disenfranchisement, especially of Black and other oppressed people.

More than 400 lawsuits and court cases involving the vote are “in the mix” around the country. Mainly they involve various ways the Republicans are moving to suppress the vote, especially of Black and other oppressed people, and countersuits by Democrats and voting rights advocates. One of the effects of these “dueling lawsuits” that ping-pong back and forth is that they create confusion over who can vote, where, when, and how, which itself both is a form of suppression and lays the groundwork for contesting the legitimacy of the vote after November 3.

Among the recent court rulings and other actions which are having an immediate impact on limiting voter turnout, including early voting and vote by mail during the pandemic:

• Texas governor Greg Abbott, a Christian fascist and staunch Trump/Pence ally, had ruled that only one drop-off ballot box per county was permissible. Drop-off boxes are particularly important during the pandemic and vital in enabling many people to vote, especially in the sprawl of Harris County (Houston and some surrounding areas) with its huge concentration of Black, Chicano, and other oppressed people, and the vast spaces of overwhelmingly Latinx west Texas and south Texas, where public transportation is virtually nonexistent. Abbott was sued, and a lower court ruled that one box per county would restrict the ability of people to vote, especially the elderly and disabled. This week an appeals court upheld Abbott’s decision. What will happen to ballots already cast through other boxes is not clear.
• In Wisconsin, an appeals court blocked an extension for counting absentee ballots sought by Democrats. The court ruled that ballots must be delivered to election clerks by 8 pm on Election Day to be counted. The state expects two million people to vote absentee in November. In April, during Wisconsin’s presidential primary, long lines, fewer polling places, and a shortage of poll workers resulted in thousands of ballots being mailed after the election, and arriving days late. In Milwaukee, which has the largest population of Black people in the state, the number of polling centers dropped from 180 to five in April.

Other measures to suppress the vote include:

• Drastically slashing the number of polling stations, especially in areas of the oppressed. In Georgia, people in a largely Black Atlanta suburb waited up to five hours during the June primary, and many of them were still unable to vote since the polls closed before they reached the end of the line. A 2013 Supreme Court decision removed federal oversight of elections in states that had a history of voter suppression. After this ruling the Republican leadership of Georgia, one of those states, immediately cut polling stations by 10 percent, even though the state’s population has grown significantly in the past decade. Now, the nine counties that make up Metro Atlanta, where 80 percent of new voters are “nonwhite,” have almost half the state’s voters but only 38 percent of the polling places.
• In Florida this week, the Division of Elections director told all county officials to “push former felons from voter rolls if they have outstanding court debts.” People in Florida, a key “battleground state,” voted in 2018 to amend the state constitution so that people could vote, but the Republic-fascists who dominate the state have been trying to overcome that by insisting that all fines must be paid before people can vote. Matt Goetz, a rabidly fascist Florida congressman, as much as openly admitted that the measure is intended to prevent many Black people from voting when he snarled the lie that money raised to enable people to pay their fines is “specifically targeting African-Americans because they believe in Florida, African-Americans will vote 90-95 percent for Joe Biden.” And now, in a move taken from the Jim Crow segregationist playbook, the state is moving to “purge” the polls in a move that will disproportionately impact Black people.

Systematically Attacking the Right to Vote

The group Take Back the Court maintains an “Anti-Democracy Scorecard” which tracks “every election-related vote made by federal judges in 2020 and reports whether “judges voted in favor of litigants seeking freedom to vote, ballot access, or lowered signature requirements.” As of October 11, it reported that Republican-appointed judges had made “anti-democracy” rulings in 80 percent of their cases; Trump-appointed judges in 86 percent.

Since the Trump/Pence regime came to power it has prioritized stacking the courts with like-minded fascists. In particular, they have loaded the federal appeals courts—which are a crucial link in deciding cases before they reach the Supreme Court, and shaping those that do—at a “record setting pace.” They’ve appointed fascists with “rock-solid conservative” (i.e., fascist, and often Christian fascist) credentials on issues such as gay marriage, abortion, and voting restrictions to these appeals courts, as well as to the Supreme Court.

In early October, a South Carolina case involving the number of signatures required on absentee ballots went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which voted to uphold a restriction on voting by mail pushed by Republicans. And now the fascist regime is moving quickly to lock in place a solid majority of Christian fascists on the Supreme Court.

Republicans claim all their measures to suppress voting are because they want to eliminate “voter fraud.” In fact, voter fraud is virtually nonexistent. The reality is that fascist Republicans have for years been moving systematically to enact laws that make voting more difficult for Black and other oppressed people, and to pack the courts with fascist clones who uphold these measures.

Sources

A Conservative Agenda Unleashed on the Federal Courts, New York Times, March 24, 2020.

Anti-democracy scorecard, Take Back the Courts

U.S. Appeals Court Sides With Texas On One-Per-County Ballot Drop-Off, National Public Radio, October 13, 2020.

Court blocks extension of Wisconsin absentee ballot deadline, Associated Press, October 8 2020.

Milwaukeeans brave wait times as long as 2 1/2 hours, top election official says, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, April 7, 2020.

Why Do Nonwhite Georgia Voters Have To Wait In Line For Hours? Too Few Polling Places, National Public Radio, October 17, 2020.

Florida acts to remove felons from voter rolls as election looms, Politico, 10/15/20.

U.S. Supreme Court allows South Carolina vote-by-mail restriction, Reuters, 10/5/20.

Loving County, 81% white
Harris County, 29% white

Republi-fascists in Texas & nationwide are waging a relentless voter suppression campaign and building an "army" of "poll watchers" to intimidate voters.

Vote! But voting is not enough. We need to mobilize! Join: @RefuseFascism pic.twitter.com/3vZEcXEyXG

— The Revcoms (@therevcoms) October 16, 2020

People gathered around as a horse drawn carriage carried the body of George Floyd to his burial on June 9, 2020, in Pearland, Texas. Photo: AP

Usually, traffic control is the biggest security issue at someone’s burial. But when the body of George Floyd was brought to Pearland, Texas, for his burial, the nondescript Houston suburb was occupied by a small army of enforcers.

Documents released to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) show that, unbeknown to Floyd’s family and thousands of mourners, a “massive presence and militarized police response” swarmed into Pearland under the direction of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The force was spearheaded by the deployment of 66 agents, including six sniper units on rooftops, from the Border Patrol’s BORTAC unit, a paramilitary force that the Trump/Pence regime has drawn on to brutally suppress protests in Portland, Oregon. The Houston Chronicle reported that 800 National Guard troops were “available on standby,” and that Pearland Police “called in 475 officers from local, state, and federal agencies.” DHS drones and planes operated by the FBI circled over George Floyd’s burial.

More than 700 people had been arrested in Houston righteously protesting the murder of George Floyd and other Black people, and angry protests also erupted in several smaller towns in the area, places where such things had never happened before. But during the days of viewing George Floyd’s body, and at his funeral and burial, the mood among people who came to be part of the historic event was solemn, mournful, and respectful of the Floyd family. None of this mattered to the force directed by the DHS—according to the ACLU report it was specifically authorized to use “deadly force anytime under Ch 9 Texas Penal Code if people went beyond throwing full water bottles or bricks.”

Unrestrained police brutality and murder is at the core of the fascist Trump/Pence regime’s white supremacist program of “making America great.” Under this regime headed by a genocidal racist, the federal government, as well as numerous state governments, has systematically moved to criminalize and suppress protest. It has developed centralized paramilitary forces answerable to and under the control of the fascist regime, and capable of being deployed anywhere in the country.

The fact that they are willing to marshal these squads of hi-tech, hyper-armed robocops at the burial of a man murdered by the police indicates the extreme suppression of righteous protest, and of the masses of Black people, they have prepared. All this repression and brutality must be resisted and opposed by righteous protests, such as those which reverberated across the country this summer. Even more urgently, the fascist regime directing it must be driven from power.

Sources:

Documents Obtained by ACLU Reveal Border Patrol Agents Were Authorized to Use Deadly Force, American Civil Liberties Union, October 1, 2020.

Six sniper teams, hundreds of cops: Documents show major police presence at George Floyd’s burial, Houston Chronicle, October 2, 2020.

Border Patrol Will Deploy Elite Tactical Agents to Sanctuary Cities, New York Times, February 14, 2020.

On October 13, a flight chartered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) left a Texas airport for Douala, capital of the West African nation of Cameroon. According to the website of Voice of America, “state Cameroonian Radio Television ... reported that there were 126 asylum-seekers aboard ... 86 were Cameroonian and the rest were believed to be from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

These people had risked everything to flee persecution, torture, and death in their homelands. A lawyer representing a Cameroonian man who had been in ICE prisons since March 2019 told the San Diego Union-Tribune that he was tortured and threatened with death by authorities in Cameroon, who claimed he was associated with anti-government protests. The lawyer said other men imprisoned in the same cell with him had been taken out and executed, and that he had been “flogged naked.” The lawyer added that if he is sent back to Cameroon,  “He’ll be tortured, and he’ll die, and the court [in the U.S.] could grant his motion (to reopen [his asylum appeal]), but he’ll be dead.”

The asylum seekers had been imprisoned in several detention centers around the country before they were transferred to a center in Alvarado, Texas. Beginning in February, about 40 Cameroonians at an ICE prison in Louisiana organized sporadic protests, including hunger strikes, against their lengthy detention. During their third hunger strike this year, guards attacked the detainees with tear gas and pepper spray. ICE prison guards also swarmed three prisoners, threw them on the ground, and put them in chokeholds.Some were thrown in solitary confinement. Katie Jane Fernelius, a journalist based in New Orleans, reported that one man pleaded to the guards, “We are peaceful demonstrators! We have committed no crime! Someone needs to listen to us!”

In the Louisiana prison, ICE agents tortured inmates to get them to sign their own deportation orders, a lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other organizations alleges. A Cameroonian man testified that “An ICE agent came to see me Sunday, September 27, 2020 to try to get me to sign a deportation document. I said I didn’t want to sign a deportation order. I said I am afraid to go back to my country. He promised me he would torture me. Monday, September 28, 2020, he came again while I was outside to try to force me to sign, I refused to sign. He pressed my neck into the floor. I said, ‘Please, I can’t breathe.’ I lost my blood circulation. Then they took me inside with my hands at my back where there were no cameras.”

Cameroonians and people from the Democratic Republic of Congo have been fleeing persecution, torture and death in their homelands for several years. Here, people from Cameroon wait in Tijuana, Mexico for their names to be called indicating that they have been granted asylum in the U.S. in 2019. (Photo: AP)

The fascist Trump/Pence regime has inflicted unspeakable, Nazi-like horrors on literally millions of immigrants, including asylum seekers. These are crimes against humanity of the highest magnitude. This regime must be driven from power NOW! 

Sources:

Supporters of Cameroonian Asylum-Seekers Decry US Deportation, Voice of America, October 14, 2020.

ICE is using torture against Cameroonian immigrants to coerce deportation, according to new complaint filed by immigrant rights groups, Southern Poverty Law Center, October 7, 2020.

Cameroonian asylum-seekers accuse US of forcing deportation, Associated Press, October 13, 2020.

Cameroonian asylum seekers fear looming deportation flight means certain death, San Diego Union-Tribune, October 13, 2020.

Someone Needs to Listen to Us: Why African Asylum Seekers Went on Hunger Strike, In These Times, October 7, 2020.