Letter from Texas:

Fascists Intensify Defiance of Biden Administration, Consolidation of Repressive Measures

Updated June 25, 2021 | revcom.us

 

Dear Revolution:

A series of dangerous, outright fascist laws are being passed and pushed through legislative bodies in states across the country, especially in the South and the Mountain West. In Texas and many other states dominated and directed by fascists, governing bodies all but openly express contempt for federal law and authority as long as Biden is president and the Democrats dominate the presidency and the U.S. Congress, and call for defying them.

For example, at least a dozen states are developing laws that would nullify federal firearms restrictions in their states, and some would make it a crime for local police to enforce federal gun laws.¹ In Missouri the governor recently signed a bill dubbed the “Second Amendment Preservation Act” at a gun store called Frontier Justice. The law declares that federal laws and regulations that "infringe on the people's right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the Second Amendment ...must be invalid in this state."²

In the first few days of last week alone, Greg Abbott, the Republican/Christian fascist governor of Texas, announced the following moves: allocating $250 million as a “down payment” on a “Texas border wall” and launching a drive to “crowd source”³  the rest of the funding⁴; signed a “trigger bill” to completely ban abortion⁵  in the state, in anticipation of that the Supreme Court could rule at some point to overturn Roe v Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion throughout the country (this is in addition to the law Abbott recently signed outlawing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, which will de facto (in fact) end nearly all abortions in Texas on September 1; announced that “critical race theory” will be targeted in an upcoming “special session” of the state legislature since the measures recently taken to promote “patriotic education” were “strong… but more must be done” to ensure that “generations to come understand Texas values.”⁶ This special session of the state legislature called by Abbott will also address a voting law aimed at suppressing the Black and Latino voters, which the Democrats successfully blocked recently. The Democratic Party response to all of these has been to make thus far ineffectual appeals for help from the federal government.

These moves should not be understood as a series of unrelated measures in far-flung locales, with little consequences for or impact on developments nationally. They should be looked at in the context of what is said in A Declaration, A Call to Get Organized Now FOR A REAL REVOLUTION:

This system is in real trouble, caught up in crisis and conflicts for which it has no easy or lasting solutions. Throughout this country the workings of this system have given rise to deep divisions which cannot be resolved under this system. Society is being ripped apart. Those who rule are locked in a bitter fight among themselves, and they cannot hold things together in the way they have in the past.

Demented Distortions of Reality

In the NEW YEAR’S STATEMENT BY BOB AVAKIAN: A New Year, The Urgent Need For A Radically New World—For The Emancipation Of All Humanity, Bob Avakian (BA) wrote that:

The reality has to be confronted that, as expressed through the election, nearly half this country has passionately, aggressively and belligerently embraced what is represented by “Trumpism.” The unavoidable truth is that this country, the much-proclaimed “Shining City on a Hill,” is full of fascists!—in the government at all levels and in large parts of the society as a whole. And a defining characteristic of these fascists is their fanatical allegiance to demented distortions of reality, which is extremely difficult (and in many cases impossible) to penetrate with reason and fact, because these distortions serve to reinforce their sense of threatened entitlement and render long-standing prejudices and hatreds even more virulent.

A central, cohering expression of what BA is talking about here is the rejection by tens of millions of people of the reality of Trump’s electoral loss in November. A CNN poll from May 2021 indicated that 70% of Republicans didn’t accept the legitimacy of Biden’s electoral victory.⁷ A seemingly endless (and utterly fraudulent) fascist “audit” of the presidential vote in Arizona has garnered Trump’s enthusiastic support, and Arizona has become the destination for a sort of pilgrimage for Republicans from across the country who seek to replicate that process in their own states.⁸ A fuller analysis of the nature and significance of the Arizona audit is not in the scope of this letter. But, along with seeking to discredit Biden’s electoral win in Arizona, it is establishing a method for fascists throughout the country to dispute and reject any and all elections won by their opponents.

Crowd-Sourcing Fascism

This distortion of reality also further enflames an already seething fascist social base around issues they associate with “federal interference.” State governments across the country have taken hateful measures aimed against trans students⁹; 561 bills to restrict abortion, including 165 abortion bans, have been introduced in 47 states in the first four months of the year, and 83 of those restrictions, including 10 bans, have been enacted¹⁰; by the middle of May, 389 bills with provisions restricting the vote have been introduced in 48 states, and 22 have already been passed.¹¹ As the Brennan Center for Justice wrote, the attacks on the vote come from “the racist voter fraud allegations behind the Big Lie” that the presidential election of 2020 was stolen from Trump.¹²

An ominous feature of many of these measures is that they are designed to mobilize fascist mobs for their enforcement. When Texas’s anti-abortion law goes into effect on September 1, any U.S. citizen, whether they reside in Texas or elsewhere, will be authorized to sue any doctor in Texas they believe to be in violation of the law. They could also sue anyone who "knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion, including paying for or reimbursing the costs of an abortion through insurance or otherwise."¹³ Similarly, Abbott’s so-called “Texas border wall” aims to be built through “crowd sourcing” an infusion of money and land provided by private citizens.

When the Florida State Board of Education was poised to adopt rules limiting what and how teachers can teach civics and history classes, fascist governor Ron DeSantis said, “We’re passing a rule this coming month that says for the 180,000 teachers, you cannot indoctrinate students with stuff that’s not based on our new standards. But you have to police them on a daily basis.” And he said, “If we have to play whack-a-mole across this state, stopping this Critical Race Theory, we will do it.”¹⁴

Urgently Needed: Repolarization for Revolution

In light of these intensifying moves by fascist forces, the following from Bob Avakian’s New Year’s Statement is very important:

As I pointed out in the 2017 talk The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go:

There is a direct line from the Confederacy to the fascists of today, and a direct connection between their white supremacy, their open disgust and hatred for LGBT people as well as women, their willful rejection of science and the scientific method, their raw “America First” jingoism and trumpeting of “the superiority of western civilization” and their bellicose wielding of military power, including their expressed willingness and blatant threats to use nuclear weapons, to destroy countries.

At the same time, the divide, and the clash, between the past and the future goes deeper than demographic changes and the prospect of a majority non-white U.S. population. The forces fighting for the past are aiming to reverse, with a vengeance, even the modest concessions that have been made to the fight against social injustice and institutionalized inequality and oppression, and to enforce a form of capitalist dictatorship that is overt and unrestrained by the Constitution and the rule of law (or which turns the Constitution and the rule of law into merely instruments of fascist tyranny and atrocity).

People across this country need to stop sleep-walking through the fascist horrors that are metastasizing in this country. It is a real possibility that by September 1, a little over two months from now, abortion will no longer be legally available in Texas, the second most populous state in the country. It is possible that as schools open this fall in states across the country, teachers will be afraid to teach history lessons that include discussions of the horrors of slavery, because mobs of racists claim their children are being “indoctrinated in liberalism” and taught “souped-up Marxism.”

This entire situation urgently needs transformation. As A Declaration, A Call to Get Organized Now FOR A REAL REVOLUTION states:

This situation needs to be radically changed, to where there are masses of people prepared to defeat these fascists and to do so as part of getting rid of this whole system, which has bred these fascists, along with all the other horrors it continually perpetrates.

What we need is “repolarization for revolution”—making real revolution an active and increasingly powerful force of first thousands, and then millions, of people organized to work for and win more and more people to this revolution— radically changing the “terrain” on which the revolution will be fought.

 

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1. GOP State Lawmakers Seek to Nullify Federal Gun Limits, Associated Press, March 5, 2021  [back]

2. Missouri Has Declared Federal Gun Laws Invalid. Can it Do That? National Public Radio, June 17, 2021  [back]

3. Gov. Greg Abbott Says He’ll Use Crowd Sourcing for Funding His Plan to Build a Border Wall, Texas Tribune, June 15, 2021 [back]

4. Governor Greg Abbott Announces Texas is Providing $250 Million “Down Payment” for Border Wall, Texas Tribune, June 16, 2021 [back]

5. Governor Abbott Signs Bill That Would Outlaw Abortions if Roe v. Wade is Overturned, KPRC Click 2 Houston, June 16, 2021 [back]

6. To understand what these “Texas values” are really about, see “A challenge from the Revcoms: Take the ‘REAL Texas Values’ Quiz” at revcom.us. [back]

7. Even Now, Most GOP Voters Still Reject Legitimacy of Biden’s Win, MSNBC News, June 21, 2021 [back]

8. The Controversial Arizona Election Review Is Drawing Republicans From Across the U.S., NPR, June 19, 2021 [back]

9. Republi-Fascists Push Wave of Hateful Anti-Trans Laws, revcom.us, April 12, 2021 [back]

10. 2021 Is on Track to Become the Most Devastating Anti-Abortion State Legislative Session in Decades, The Guttmacher Institute, April 30 2021 [back]

11. State Voting Bills Tracker, the Brennan Center for Justice, May 28, 2021 [back]

12. Voting Laws Roundup: May 2021, Brennan Center for Justice, May 28, 2021 [back]

13. Texas’s Fetal Heartbeat Bill Has Many Private Attorneys General, but Lacks a Public Attorney General, Reason, May 20, 2021 [back]

14. DeSantis Blasts Critical Race Theory, Endorses Rule Changes for History, WFSU News, May 22, 2021 [back]