Counterpunch, September 18, 2020
“There Has to be Retribution”
It’s getting even more insane than usual to pretend that Donald Trump and his backers aren’t fascist and otherwise existential menaces well beyond the usual right-wing and neoliberal norm.
In applauding the extra-judicial paramilitary execution of the anti-fascist Michael Forest Reinoehl outside Olympia, Washington two weeks ago, Trump told Fatherland (FOX) News’ neo-Nazi host Jeanine Pirro last Saturday that “there has to be retribution.”
The self-described Chosen One told Frau Pirro that “I put out, ‘When are you going to go get him?’ And the U.S. Marshals went in to get him. This guy was a violent criminal, and the U.S. Marshals killed him. And I’ll tell you something—that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution.”
Spoken like the Philippines strongman and death squad leader Rodrigo Duterte, one of the many blood-soaked authoritarian heads of state Trump seeks to emulate.
No arrest, trial, jury, or judge – just “retribution” in the streets. Revenge.
The rule of force over the rule of law.
An eye for an eye.
As the Washington Post reported, a witness to the execution testified that “Reinoehl was clutching a cellphone and eating a gummy worm as he walked to his car… That’s when officers opened fire without first announcing themselves or trying to arrest him.”
What was Reinoehl’s crime, for which lethal “retribution” was required according to Trump? Defending a Black and himself by shooting the fascist streetfighter Aaron “Jay” Danielson, an armed member of the far-right fascist group Patriot Prayer, which spent Danielson’s last day violently attacking civil and human rights protesters in Portland, Oregon.
Trump tweeted “Rest in peace, Jay,” re-tweeting a white supremacist who described Danielson as a “good American that loved his country and backed the blue.”
The Color of Retribution
Does Trump think that killer white cops like Michael Slager (the murderer of Walter Scott), Jason Van Dyke (the murderer of Laquan McDonald), Brett Hankison (the lead detective in the police murder of Breonna Taylor), and Derek Chauvin (the direct murderer of George Floyd) should be summarily terminated in the streets, without trial or even arrest? Is proportionate extra-judicial “retribution” required in those cases, in Trump’s view?
Does Trump believe that the white Kenosha, Wisconsin police officer Rusten Shesky needs to be shot seven times in the back and paralyzed since that’s what Sheskey did to the young Black man Jacob Blake three weeks ago?
The answer to all three questions is of course no.
For Trump and his ilk, white cops are part of the virtuous and superior “Us” called “law and order” for and by white people. Laquan McDonald (Van Dyke’s victim), George Floyd (Chauvin’s victim), Jacob Blake (Shesky’s victim) and the countless other nonwhite others killed and maimed by the vast American racist police state are part of an evil and inferior “Them” that needs to die off and be warehoused in prisons as far as Trump and his backers are concerned.
And notice who Trump thinks needed to be avenged with the execution of Reinoehl: an armed, extra-legal fascist streetfighter – Aaron “Jay” Danielson, a right white-nationalist Christian fascist thug who was terrorizing civil and human rights activists in Portland.
That’s who Trump thinks needed to be avenged by a death squad.
Surprised? Why? Trump claimed that there was some “fine people” among the neo-Nazis and other white supremacists who marched through the University of Virginia campus chanting “Blood and Soil, Jews will not replace us” in August of 2017. Trump approvingly re-tweeted a video of pro-Trump senior citizens chanting “White Power.” Trump welcomes support from the insane fascist cult QAnon, which calls for the murder of liberals and leftists it bizarrely accuses of eating children. Trump defends the teen fascist militia member Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder of two anti-racist protesters, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, in the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin on August 25th.
For Trump, millions taking peacefully to the streets, in response to racist police violence are “left wing terrorists” but white far-right actual terrorists like Kyle Rittenhouse and Patriot Prayer are “great Americans.”
So are armed white militia members who occupy state capitals with assault weapons to protest public health measures required by the deadly pandemic that Trump has fanned across the nation.
What Kind of Retribution for Murdering Tens of Thousands?
Another indication of the special, beyond the norm menace posed by Trump came last week with the longtime establishment journalist Bob Woodward’s revelation and tape showing that Trump knew full well how deadly COVID-19 was back in January of this year. Thousands upon thousands of Americans have died needlessly because Trump spent February, March, and April telling Americans that the virus was no severe threat and refusing to advance remotely adequate measures to combat the worst pandemic in a century.
Eight months later, America is home to just less than a twentieth of the world’s population but a quarter of its COVID-19 deaths. The president continues to fan the pandemic, holding indoor rallies without requiring masks as the nation’s coronavirus death count nears 200,000 with a projected 400,000 fatalities by next January. Trump still refuses to provide an appropriate testing regime to control spread. He is pushing for the reckless and premature opening of schools and businesses. The body count would be much smaller but for Trump’s public denial, deception, and anti-public health obstruction.
We have just learned that one of Trump’s top medical advisers is a quack right-wing radiologist (Scott Atlas) who is urging the White House to follow a “herd immunity” strategy that would mean letting the novel coronavirus spread through most of the population.
A darkly humorous mock campaign billboard tells unpleasant truth:
COVID-19 ENDORSES DONALD J. TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT!
+ Provided a ‘Sanctuary Country’ for COVID-19
+ Created new ‘hotspots’ by encouraging large gatherings
+ Helped Covid19 population grow by limiting testing and calling it a hoax
KEEP COVID-19 GREAT!
Black humor aside, what kind of retribution is required for this mass-murderous conduct? What payback does he think he should face for murdering tens of thousands of Americans? Will he volunteer to lay down for a lethal injection at one of the federal execution sites that he and his pudgy Darth Vader Bill Barr have put back in busines by quietly restoring the federal death penalty?
“Almost Criminal”
The American body count on the day that “we must never forget” – September 11, 2001 – was 2,605. Are we really supposed to forget that the subhuman sociopath Donald Trump has killed nearly 30,000 Americans per month with his grotesque anti-science pandemo-fascism?
The pathetic corporate clown Joe “You Know the Thing” Biden calls this “almost criminal.”
“Almost criminal”? Almost? Seriously? Biden is an almost perfect example of why Sheldon Wolin labelled the Democratic Party “the Inauthentic Opposition.”
Killing Off Useless Eaters
Imagine Trump being cried. A prosecutor seeking the death penalty (quite appropriately and mercifully in this case) would need to establish motive. Why did the Trump White House hide and indeed badly twist the truth on the lethality of COVID-19? Why has he continued to fuel the pandemic and oppose serious efforts to control it?
Trump’s openly idiotic claim that he benevolently wished to avoid traumatizing the populace last February should not be taken seriously.
Imagine Texas’s governor refusing to tell his state’s residents that a Level 5 hurricane was approaching Galveston and Houston as “not to panic people.”
Imagine the governors of California, Washington, and Oregon telling people who reside in raging wildfire zones to stay right they were so as “not to unduly alarm them.”
The malignant narcissist Trump’s likely real motives have been anything but compassionate. He, his top political adviser, the demented white nationalist Stephen Miller, and many others atop his team are genocidal racists and Social Darwinists who believe that the “weakest” in society need to die off to make for a better nation and species. That’s no small part of what the “herd immunity” strategy is about.
People of color have been disproportionately killed by the pandemic. Trump and Miller et al. like that. They consider nonwhites to be inferior, weak, and socially and economically useless.
The virus has especially targeted people with pre-existing co-morbidities, including old age. Trump and Miller et al. like that. They don’t think government and society should have to pay for sick and old people to keep living as “useless eaters” after they’ve ceased to provide labor power to be exploited by the investor class.
This sick contempt for those he and other Social Darwinists consider surplus people is part of why Trump is willing to kill off some in his own base — older whites he encourages to go without masks and social distancing at Trump rallies and in daily life.
At an indoor rally in which white Trumpenvolk were packed in rightly without masks, Trump told an interviewer that he wasn’t comfortable with how close she was standing to him. He’s concerned for his own health but perfectly content to accelerate the spread of the virus even among his own backers (he might want to encourage his rally attendees to do early voting, getting their ballots in before they have to be intubated).
Social Darwinian contempt for the old and infirm is no small part of why the Trump administration has gone to court to strip Americans of their right not to be denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions.
COVID Electoralism/Anti-Electoralism
Another and more outwardly benign motive behind Trump’s literally pathological, openly pathogenic COVID-19 policy has been more rationally electoral. Trump was worried last winter and spring that a serious public health response to the deadly virus would damage his re-election chances by halting economic growth and thereby undermining his false claim to have brought about a great jobs boom. At the same time, we know from a July Vanity Fair investigation that the orange fascist’s insipid, arch-criminal son-in-law Jared Kushner squashed plans for a nationally coordinated COVID-19-testing plan in April of this year after determining that the virus was mainly going to hit blue, Democratic parts of the nation. Kushner’s team determined “that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically.” The Trump administration was content to let the pandemic rage since it was killing people mainly in states where most voters are aligned with the Democratic Party.
Five months later, we can be sure that Trump and his team are looking at COVID-19 as an electoral (well, anti-electoral) opportunity – as an opportunity to claim victory in an election they would likely lose (even to a pathetic right-wing challenger like Joe “You Know the Thing” Biden) under normal voting circumstances during a major recession and a massive presidential public health fiasco that makes Katrina look like a hiccup by comparison.
There are numerous and interrelated aspects of the Trump and GOP strategy to mess with the 2020 election: efforts to sabotage the mail delivery in an election that will depend on mail-in ballots thanks to the pandemic that Trump has fanned; the deployment of armed right-wing “poll watchers” to intimidate minority and other Biden voters; the usual racist and partisan voter suppression in battleground states; the likely false claim to have to fostered a fully tested and safe coronavirus vaccine; the coming release of a transparently political Justice Department report (the “Durham Report”) claiming that Obama officials criminally instigated the RussiaGate inquiry; the encouragement of terrorist street actions and intimidation by white “tough guys” (bikers, militia members, cops, and soldiers) before, during, and after the election; the false claim to have overseen a dramatic economic recovery; the nutty but core fascist claim that the country is menaced by Marxists and “radical Left terrorism” (funded by wealthy and mysterious elites); the insane depiction of the Wall Street- and Pentagon-captive Democrats as a “trojan horse for socialism;” and more.
Along the way, the party of Herr Trump (“COVID-45”) has the openly anti-democratic and right-/Red State-tilting Electoral College working in its favor (thanks, holy Founders). Trump’s personal Attorney General William Barr will mount an effective and prolonged court challenge to any election count that doesn’t go Dear Leader’s way.
The MAGA party of white nationalism will win if the presidential contest is thrown into the House of Representatives (as in the 1876 Tilden-Hayes fiasco, whose House settlement put the final nail in the coffin of Reconstruction and opened the door for the proto-fascist Jim Crow era across the U.S. South) ) after December 8th. That’s because the House’s verdict is pathetically but constitutionally based on which party controls the most House delegations by state, not which party has the most individual House representatives (another reason to say “thanks, holy Founders”).
COVID-19 has certainly been integrated into Trump’s plan to “win” the election by any and all means “necessary,” legal and extra-legal. It is childish to think otherwise.
In a likely and widely dreaded scenario, Trump wins the Election Night contest on the nation’s major network and cable news television screens because his voters are more likely (at his encouragement) to spurn fears of COVID-19 and vote in person (after they cast their last ballot for Trump, the president is happy for them to die off) instead of by mail. Then Trump reiterates his reckless but put purposeful claim that the mail-in ballots required by the pandemic he criminally fanned are invalid and fraudulent. He activates his in-place paramilitary “Operation Legend” agents and his bigger shock-troop army both within and beyond formal police and military to crush protest with extreme prejudice. The white cops, many of them avid FOX News viewers and Trump fans, will comply with their fascist leader’s orders in a heartbeat.
(Perhaps someday in the future, we will learn from a former MSNBC intelligence expert reporting from an undisclosed location in Canada that Trump and his crew saw the coronavirus as a way to cripple the 2020 election early on. I just found this typically insane, paranoid-style Trump tweet from last June 22nd: “RIGGED 2O2O ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!”)
“We’ll Put ‘Em Down Quickly, in Minutes”
The mainstreamed far right wing is now actively threatening martial law in such a scenario. Listen to this menacing exchange between Frau Pirro and her master last Saturday night:
Frau Pirro [a look of fear and alarm on her face as she pants before grotesque cult leader]: What are you gonna do…say…there are threats [Pirro reaches for papers]…they say they’re going to threaten riots if they lose on election night….What are you gonna do?
Trump: We’ll put’em down very quickly if they do that. We have the right to do that. We have the power to do that if we want. Look, it’s called Insurrection, we should send in and, we do it very easy, it’s very easy…if we had to we’d put it down in minutes, within minutes.
The promise to put down mass protests “within minutes” is a pledge to murder Americans exercising their rights to public assembly and free speech. First you call protests “riots,” then you can shoot.
The fascist lunatic Roger Stone is now publicly calling for Trump to declare martial law. This is not something to be laughed off. Kooky as he is, Stone talks to the QAnon fan Trump regularly. He has certainly been whispering “Nixon, law and order, riots, and 1968” into Trump’s ear ever since the George Floyd rebellion arose.
Last Sunday, Michael Caputo, Trump’s far-right Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, warned of a left-wing “insurrection” after Trump “wins” a second term. That is another call for the violent suppression of protests of the election theft that Trump is preparing.
“Trump Isn’t Actually Running for Re-Election”
Commenting on Caputo’s wild claim, the New York Times opinion writer Jamelle Bouie made an observation two days ago that may be obvious but is nonetheless remarkable to read on the editorial page of the nation’s official newspaper of record:
“Ordinarily, in a presidential election year, the main story of American politics is the election — its twists and turns, its ups and downs. This year, that story is hard to convey. Part of the reason for this is that the race itself is unremarkable, despite everything else that’s happening around it. Biden is ahead, most voters have made up their minds, and Trump has a narrow path to reelection, with few opportunities to recover lost ground….The larger, more important factor is that Trump isn’t actually running for reelection — or at least, not running in the traditional manner. He has a campaign, yes, but it is not a campaign to win votes or persuade the public outside of a few, select slivers of the electorate. Instead, it’s a campaign to hold on to power by any means necessary, using every tool available to him as president of the United States. Caputo, in that sense, is only taking cues from his boss…Of course, Trump would like to obtain a proper victory. But it’s clear he’s not counting on it. That is why the most visible aspect of Trump’s campaign for continued power is his attack on the election itself. If he doesn’t win, he says again and again, then the outcome isn’t legitimate.” (“Trump’s Perverse Campaign Strategy,” New York Times, 16 September, 2020, A22, emphasis added).
Liberals fantasize about the top U.S. generals stepping in to make sure that the mail-ballots are counted and that Trump leaves office if they show that Trump has lost. That is magical thinking. The nation’s top military commander has said that the Pentagon will stay out of the election for as long as the administration is holding up the final tally in the courts and Congress. With William Von Barr leading the legal way, staving off his overdue fatal heart attack just long enough to keep his beloved Antichrist in power, the White House will have little to fear from the Pentagon. The only people the military will intervene against are those protesting the theft of the election.
“Sedition”: William von Barr, Fascist Prosecutor
In the meantime, von Barr is trying to advance full on politicized white nationalist MAGA control over federal line prosecutors and pushing for the federal prosecution of “violent” Black Lives Matter and anti-fascist activists for – no joke – “sedition.”. A sedition charge is extremely uncommon and is filed against people who “conspire to overthrow the government or to levy war against the country.” Charging protesters with sedition negates constitutional protections to free speech and public assembly. Barr has also floated the idea charging the mayor of Seattle with some federal violation because he didn’t like her response to protests.
“Remember,” a knowledgeable journalist writes me, “there’s also a special prosecutor appointed by Barr working on potential charges against former FBI/Justice Dept. types like Brennan and Comey. Republicans in Senate just issued subpoenas to those guys. Trump didn’t like the way they handled the Russia deal. We’ve heard talk of arresting and locking up democrats. The Evil Buddha is talking about it all the time. Whether he does so is unknown, but it certainly serves to fire up the QAnon support. Oh and don’t forget Hunter Biden. There’s a cell waiting for him if The Thing gets reelected, and apparently The Thing in the WH likes to imply that ‘Sleepy Joe’ has a thing for kids. Might be something there, too.”
“If this administration gets a second term, the Justice Dept. could go after anyone vaguely in the opposition.”
As the West Burns: “Trees Just Explode”
Another indication of just how truly and existentially horrific Trump is – far beyond the right-wing and neoliberal ruling class norm – has come with his predictably insane response to the historic West Coast wildfires that have killed dozens, forced tens of thousands to evacuate, and subjected millions to the deadliest air quality on the planet. The ever more apocalyptic wildfires, droughts, and storms that plague the United States and the world are a predictable and indeed predicted reflection of the human- and largely fossil fuel-driven problem of climate change.
Even now, as yet another climate-fueled hurricane bears down on the Gulf Coast, and the worst heat and drought-driven woodlands fire wave on record burns down much of the Great Pacific West, the orange-tinted lunatic had the eco-fascist and Bolsonarian gall to persist in denying the impact of climate change when he traveled to California on Monday. Even now, with carbon at more than 415 parts per million, the Siberian forests on fire, and global permafrost in meltdown and humanity poised to eliminate itself by melting Antarctica in the next two or three decades, Trump sits in the world’s most powerful office denying something masses of grade-schoolers readily comprehend – that the excessive extraction and burning of fossil fuels is wrecking livable ecology.
The Greenhouse Effect is not that difficult to grasp. But this actually happened as the Orange Beast made a rare West Coast swing to take in the soul-crushing wildfire damage (which Trump likely found sadistically entertaining) in California, Oregon and Washington:
“In California, the president questioned climate change, and blamed the fires on poor forest management even though many forests in California are federally managed…California National Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot disagreed that the rapidly spreading wildfires could entirely be blamed on forest management. He told Mr. Trump, ‘We want to work with you to really recognize the changing climate, and what it means to our forests.’ Crowfoot warned, ‘If we ignore that science, and sort of put our head in the sand, and think it’s all about vegetation management, we’re not going to succeed together protecting Californians.’
The president claimed the climate would ‘start getting cooler. Just you watch.’
‘I wish science agreed with you,’ Crowfoot replied.
‘I don’t think science knows,’ the president responded.
Mr. Trump said exploding trees, caused by dryness and poor management, are the cause of the fires.
‘When trees fall down after a short period of time, about 18 months, they become very dry,’ the president said. ‘They become really like a matchstick … you know, there’s no more water pouring through and they become very, very — they just explode. They can explode.’”
The Greenhouse Gas Chamber
Don’t agree with me and others that Trump is a fascist? You’re badly wrong on that but okay, let’s all at least agree with Noam Chomsky (who has strangely claimed that Trump has no ideology) that Trump is “the most dangerous criminal in the history of the human race.” As Chomsky noted last early February:
“Hitler had been perhaps the leading candidate for this honor. His goal was to rid the German-run world of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other ‘deviants,’ along with tens of millions of Slav ‘Untermenschen.’ But Hitler was not dedicated with fervor to destroying the prospects of organized human life on Earth in the not-distant future (along with millions of other species). Trump is. And those who think he doesn’t know what he’s doing haven’t been looking closely. …Every day brings new forebodings. We have just learned, for example, that the gigantic Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica has been eroding from warm water below… The chief scientist involved in the study [showing this] warns that this may signal “an unstoppable retreat that has huge implications for global sea-level rise.”
That’s today. Tomorrow will be something worse. What’s causing the warmer water? No secret. This is only one of the likely irreversible tipping points that may be reached if ‘the Chosen One,’ as he modestly describes himself, is granted another four years to carry out his project of global destruction.…Trump’s war on organized life on Earth is only the barest beginning.…On the side, he has been casually proceeding to dismantle the last vestiges of the arms control regime that has provided some limited degree of security from terminal nuclear war, eliciting cheers from the military industry.” (emphasis added).
As I’ve been saying for years, the U.S.-led carbon-capitalist project (well underway with presidential leadership under Barack Obama and Bill Clinton as well as Ronald Reagan, the two George Bushes, and Donald Trump ) is to turn the entire planet into a Greenhouse Gas Chamber. But here now is a president who takes the petro-capitalist madness to the point of banning federal agencies from using the phrase climate change, tearing up and abrogating every environmental regulation he can, and calling renewable energy un-American.
The ultimate target for Trump’s retribution is humanity itself. This fascist Antichrist is literally trying to wipe the species out. If he can’t kill us off with pandemics and environmental ruin, he might get us with nuclear war, which Trump has all-too quietly advanced behind the headlines over the last three plus years. When Trump told California officials that “the climate will get colder soon, just you watch,” my mind went straight to Nuclear Winter and Trump’s recent statement that his administration and the Pentagon have been developing awesome new nuclear weapons capabilities that blow our minds if we knew about them. That’s the kind of language that can set off a terminal nuclear arms race.
Voting is Insufficient
What is to be done the horrors of Trump and the truly hideous, apocalyptic specter of a second Trump term? Democrats seem to have nothing really to offer beyond the pathetically inadequate admonition to vote for the cognitively challenged corporate clown and corrupt, lying neoliberal warmonger Joe Biden. “The best way to protest,” Obama likes to say, “is to vote.” Obviously, though, the Trump forces are badly undermining the already severely limited power of the electoral franchise.
The remarkable New York Times column quoted at length above concludes with no actionable recommendations, just the following weepy if accurate statement: “In a half-functioning country, all of the president’s rhetoric on this score would be grounds for removal from office. But we don’t live in a half-functioning country — we live in the United States of America.”
Well, gosh, what would Times opinion writer Jamelle Mr. Bouie propose to make the U.S. more “functional”? Of course people should and will try to vote Trump out. In light of the horrors recounted here and so much more – we have recently learned, for example, that Trump’s racist-eugenicist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agency has carried out mass involuntary hysterectomies on Latin American women – one really has to question the sanity and morality of anyone on “the left” who is unwilling to take two paltry minutes to try and vote the satanic monster Trump out of the White House. It is depressing that many progressives and leftists are (in my communications) too stubbornly if understandably embittered and alienated to vote for Trump’s removal even after being shown beyond the shadow of any serious doubt that he poses a grave menace beyond the right wing and neoliberal norm . Acknowledging this does NOT make one an apologist for U.S. neoliberalism and imperialism.
But voting alone is simply NOT enough to remove Trump or prevent something or someone worse from taking power after Trump leaves and the pathetic and decrepit neoliberal warmonger Joe Biden is possibly installed in the White House. Voting is not remotely sufficient for the change we need. Even the vote requires people’s politics beyond voting. A reasonably fair election and presidential succession will not take place without major grassroots mobilization before, during, and after the quadrennial ritual. The notion of waiting until after the election to protest its coming likely theft is suicidal. The day after will be too late.
This is something for which the Democrats are morally and institutionally ill equipped. They won’t and can’t fight the fascist Trump the way he needs to be fought. They have no understanding of the need to struggle beneath and beyond the election itself. They’re simply not up to the battle that needs to be fought.
The best case scenario is for thousands and then millions to take to the streets to force the ruling class to remove the criminal, racist, sexist, and genocidal pandemo-fascist Trump-Barr-Miller-Pence regime now, even before the dreaded Election Night scenario and its horrific aftermath can unfold. This is a mass-murderous regime that openly (for those willing to see and hear) advances ecocide, racist genocide, eugenicist mass sterilization, right-wing terrorism, lawlessness (in the name of “law and order”), election sabotage, epic corruption, nuclear escalation, a relentless Orwellian war on truth, a war on science, and government repression. Why permit it to be in place to steal a second term, a likely death knell for the species? And why let it stay in power to kill God knows how many more Americans and others through January 20, 2021, its official departure date if it can actually be removed through an election?
After removing Trump, the popular movement we desperately need to organize must multiply and deepen to confront the underlying system – the fascism-enabling corporate and imperialist Democratic Party included – that gave rise to Trump and Trumpism in the first place. If Biden and Harris win, this system will vomit up more terrible far-right neofascist presidents is and other office-holders (white nationalist Harvard Law graduate and martial law advocate Tom Cotton in 2024?) unless and until it is overthrown by the people.
I have a dream: a great people’s movement is formed to remove the current fascist (or, if you prefer, “fascist-equivalent” or simply “authoritarian white nationalist”) regime – headed by “the most dangerous criminal in human history” – and then becomes a permanent revolutionary struggle that keeps rolling right past the next party (the Inauthentic Opposition Party of Fake Resistance known as the Democrats) in nominal power (the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire always hold the final ‘deep state’ cards behind the surface of what passes for ‘democratic politics’ in the U.S.) to undertake what the democratic socialist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the real issue to be faced” — “the radical reconstruction of society itself.”
This wild and fantastic dream is likely the only realistic practical change humanity has for enjoying a decent and organized existence in the future.
September 21st
On Monday, September 21st, the national organization Refuse Fascism – the only left organization that seems to understand what time it is right now in the United States – is calling for masses of Americans to assemble and march in commemoration of the 200,000 Americans who have died from the deadly pandemic that Trump let loose upon the land and continues to fan to this very day. The notion of leaving this mass-murderous, genocidal racist white nationalist arch-authoritarian sexist and eco-cidal monster in power even to January 20th of next year is insane. The sick tangerine pandemo-fascist t needs to be forced out now before he kills 200,000 more.