CounterPunch, 4.10.2023

“Fascists, Fascists!”: Racial and Political Eliminationism in Tennessee

Even as the Republi-fascist Party regularly and absurdly excoriates the Democrats as “socialist” and “Marxists” (supposedly terrible things to be), Democrats can hardly ever bring themselves to reasonably call the Republican Party fascist. Sometimes, however, young folks say out loud the fascist nature of the “Republican” beast without any prompting required from older politicos and intellectuals.  The Friday after Donald “Make America Great Again” Trump was elected in 2016, for example, more than a hundred mostly youthful people in Iowa City marched out to occupy Interstate-80 chanting “No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA!”  The chant did not emerge from me or any other “radical leftist” joining the procession. It arose from gay, female, transgender, immigrant, and nonwhite high school students marching because they had been catching Hell from white fellow schoolmates who had been telling them for months that “we’re going to take care of you when Trump gets in.”

Last week, as the vicious Christian white nationalists in charge of the Tennessee House of Representatives prepared to expel two young Black state legislators for breaking “decorum” rules by joining protests for gun reform in the wake of a Nashville school shooting, young people in the gallery above the legislative chamber started chanting “fascists, fascists!”  And why not?  The Tennessee Republicans’ move to cancel democratically elected Black legislators, cancelling the votes of those representatives’ predominantly Black constituents in Memphis and Nashville, was chillingly racist and richly authoritarian. It was a brazen act of racial and political eliminationism.  

If it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck….

Don’t Pardon Greg Abbott’s Fascism

Speaking of which, remember when then US president Trump decided to go on the very last night of the 2020 presidential campaign to Kenosha, Wisconsin, the town where the teen fascist Kyle Rittenhouse had killed two Black Lives Matter protesters with an AR-15 in August of 2020? One year later, Trump invited the freshly and absurdly exonerated Rittenhouse for a sit down at Mar-a-Lago, proclaiming the adolescent slayer “ a nice young man” who shouldn’t have had to go through a trial for, you know… using an illegally owned assault weapon to kill two people at a march against racist police brutality.

Check this out a year and a half after Rittenhouse walked. We learned yesterday that Texas’ Republi-fascist governor Greg Abbott intends to pardon a fascist killer named Daniel Perry within days of Perry’s jury conviction for having shot to death a BLM protester in Austin, Texas in July of 2020. As the Austin-American Statesman reports:

“Perry, an Army sergeant, was working as an Uber driver in Austin on the night of July 25, 2020, when he ran a red light at the intersection of Fourth Street and Congress Avenue and drove into a Black Lives Matter march before stopping….Prosecutors [successfully] contended that Perry instigated what happened. They highlighted a series of social media posts and Facebook messages in which Perry made statements that they said indicated his state of mind, such as he might ‘kill a few people on my way to work. They are rioting outside my apartment complex.’ A friend responded, ‘Can you legally do so?’ Perry replied, ‘If they attack me or try to pull me out of my car then yes.’ …A jury Friday unanimously convicted Perry.  State District Judge Clifford Brown is set to sentence him to prison in the coming days. He faces up to life in prison…David Wahlberg, a former Travis County criminal court judge, said he cannot think of another example in the state’s history when a governor sought a pardon before a verdict was formally appealed. ‘I think it’s outrageously presumptuous for someone to make a judgment about the verdict of 12 unanimous jurors without actually hearing the evidence in person,’ Wahlberg said” (emphasis added)

The Austin-American Statesman elaborates:

“Less than 24 hours after a jury in Austin found Daniel Perry guilty of shooting to death a protester, Gov. Greg Abbott announced on social media Saturday that he would pardon the convicted killer as soon as a request ‘hits my desk.’  The unprecedented effort, which Abbott announced to his 1 million followers on Twitter, came as Abbott faced growing calls from national conservative figures such as Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Kyle Rittenhouse, who was acquitted in the shooting deaths of two Wisconsin protesters in 2020, to act to urgently undo the conviction” (emphasis added).

How despicable. It’s not just the pardon itself.  It’s the advance promise of a pardon before the killer’s lawyers even appealed – a pledge to pardon as soon as possible without even reviewing the evidence.

(Abbott’s purported legal basis for pardoning Perry is Texas’ NRA-sponsored “Stand Your Ground” bill, which permits the no-retreat use of deadly force if one is attacked.  The killer claimed that his victim raised a weapon at him before he shot but the obvious fact presented by numerous eyewitnesses is that Perry totally instigated the confrontation. That’s not “standing your ground.”)

How F’ing fascist is that?

Again, if it walks like a fascist duck and sounds like a fascist duck…

Another Outrage in Texas

Fascism? The 21st Century Amerikaner version it comes with a strong Christian flavor and a pungent scent of vicious misogyny. Matthew Kacsmaryk, a handpicked far-right Christian and Trump-appointed federal judge in Amarillo, Texas picked Good Friday to issue his long-awaited ruling banning the safe and effective abortion pill mifepristone nationwide. Mifepristone is the main medication used in at least half of the nation’s abortions. Like the Supreme Court’s openly medieval Dobbs v. Jackson ruling ending women’s constitutional right to an abortion last summer, Kacsmaryk’s decision defies majority US public opposition to the re-imposition of the de facto female enslavement of forced motherhood.

Kacsmaryk is longtime women-, gay-, and trans-hating judge for whom Christian fascists went “shopping” last year. His order is based on thoroughly false, anti-scientific allegations about mifepristone’s safety and defies the six-year statute of limitations on challenges to FDA decisions. It ignores the anti-abortion plaintiffs’ lack of standing and brazenly rejects established medical-scientific opinion on mifepristone’s safety.  It advances theocratic “fetal personhood” doctrine that could be taken as precedent for a national abortion ban, which is what the Christian fascists have been seeking all along. It is an assault not only on abortion but on the regulatory state more broadly, setting a chilling precedent: one far-right jurist in a single-judge federal district court bizarrely empowered to determine what drugs and medical procedures can be used and prescribed.[1]

While Kacsmaryk presides in Texas, where two women are being sued – under Texas and Abbott’s “vigilante abortion ban” (S.B.8) – for helping another woman end an unwanted pregnancy, his ruling applies nationwide.  It will very likely be backed on appeal by the far-right Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and/or via “shadow-docket” by the High Handmaid (Supreme) Court that Trump and former US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell crafted between 2017 and 2020.

The fascist women-hating dystopia portrayed in Margaret Atwood’s novel A Handmaid’s Tale is coming into formation before our very eyes in the USA.

Attacking women’s freedom is the leading spear in a man-sided assault on what’s left of previously normative bourgeois democracy and diverse civic decency in the USA. The fetal fascists slaughtering women’s reproductive rights coast to coast are pretty much the same vicious people who are enacting numerous other parts of the Republi-fascist agenda with special intensity at the state level:

* enacting fascist laws against the accurate teaching of past and present US history with racism, sexism, genocide, homophobia, imperialism and nativism properly included.

* fascistically banning books that challenge white Christian racist, sexist, and anti-gay norms and practices.

* pandemo-fascistically undermining public protections against current and future pandemics.

* fueling the nation’s insane fascist gun violence epidemic (see below) by blocking and rolling back firearms controls.

* denying  basic human and civil rights to gay and transgender people – with a massive state-level assault on LGBT rights currently underway across the country.

* suppressing the voting rights of racial minorities and others likely to oppose the Christian white nationalist agenda.

* attacking public schools and slashing social  services and environmental regulations.

* outlawing liberal, progressive, and left protest.

*strengthening and expanding the nation’s giant racist police and prison state.

Why the Republi-fascists Love the Gun Status Quo 

Amerikaner fascism comes also with a strong whiff of gunpowder. The carnage promoted by the neofascist NRA, which has created a nation with 125 firearms for every 100 people (the next closest ratio in the world is found on the Falkland Islands at 63 per 100 people), is relentless.  Easter Sunday brought 90 shootings resulting in 40 fatalities, including one mass shooting in Orlando, Florida.

The day after brought a mass shooting killing at least four people in downtown Louisville,  Kentucky. It was the 150th mass shooting in the USA so far this year – well more than one a day.

Everyone knows by now that there will be no serious gun control passed in the wake of the latest bloodshed, the most recent corpses in Nashville, Orlando, Louisville, and …the list goes on and on and on. The Republi-fascist right’s Minority Rule power is too embedded at the national and state levels for “common sense gun reform measures” to get through.

Let’s acknowledge something unpleasant about why the Republi-fascists oppose gun control. Let’s just say what we know or ought to know[2] out loud: the nation’s rightmost major party is now a socially, racially, and politically eliminationist and neofascist formation that embraces the rule of men over the rule of law.  It channels and contains definite white-supremacist genocidal tendencies and sensibilities. As such, it leaders are happy about the fact that its adherents possess a wildly disproportionate share of the insane number of firearms and especially of the military style weaponry that is out and about in the US-American Armed Madhouse. It is pleased with the private arms status quo as it applauds demented politicos including a putschist ex-president who fascistically and absurdly call their corporate Democratic opponents “radical Left animals” and who speak in open terms about bloody “retribution”[3] and “Civil War.”

Notes

1. Expect a similar ruling on the secondary abortion drug misoprostol in coming months along with cases or a case brought to Kacsmaryk (or some other compliant far-right Trump-appointed federal judge) with the goal of prohibiting contraception.  Christian fascist opposition to birth control is proof positive that the religious right’s real agenda is not “saving the babies” but rather keeping women as pregnant and powerless – put back “in their place” – as possible.

2.  I know there’s a bunch of predominantly older white, left-identified males who still, even now, get their undies in a bunch at the mention of the F-word – fascism – in relation to contemporary US politics and society and the Republican Party.  How pathetic. Thankfully, this strange, largely online cadre of bitter old white men is less and less vocal these days.  There are good reasons for that: just look where we are now in the USA. The always ridiculous and idiotic charge that serious radical anti-fascists like me (of all people) have been engaged in Democrat-friendly “wolf-crying” and mere bourgeois identity politics looks stupider and stupider by the day. It’s long past STFU (for all) time for these preposterous and contemptible and  predominantly (by no mere accident) Caucasian codgers of the Trumpenleft – and all the Substack writers  who play to their asinine pink-brown, neo-Strasserite buffoonery.

3. Five weeks ago, the biggest asshole in human history, Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors Cuz the Guys with the AR-15 Don’t Want to Hurt Me” Trump, told his frothing, gunned-up Christian white nationalist backers in right-wing Waco, Texas “I am your warrior, I am your justice…For those  who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution.”  Trump ginned up his more fundamentalist fans with Armageddon-like imagery by telling them that the 2024 presidential election will be “The Final Battle.” He subsequently responded to the coming first Trump indictments issued  by a grand jury in Manhattan by calling for mass street actions that reminded many of his infamous “get wild” tweet before the January 6 Capitol Riot.  He put up a “Truth Social” post showing himself holding a baseball bat aimed at the distinguished Black Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg’s head.  He warned that an indictment of him would bring “death and destruction” to the nation.  Trump called Bragg “a danger to our Country,” a “racist,” and a “Soros-backed animal” who is “doing the work of Anarchists and the Devil.”