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DESCRIPTION:On The Anniversary Of the Jan 6 Insurrection,  Workers Must Call For A 
 United Front To Fight Fascism\n\nSF Rally On January 6, 2021 12:00 PM  SF 
 Federal Building 90 7th St. SF \n\nThe victory of Biden and the Democrats 
 did not stop the rise of fascism.\n \nThe economic conditions of poverty, 
 collapse of the health system and the pandemic are conditions that expose 
 the failure of capitalism,\n \nThe growing class hatred by the working 
 class has led to a growing strike wave of workers at Columbia University,  
 Volvo, Kellogg, the UMWA Warrior Met miners, Kaiser IUOE engineers against 
 the union busting.\n \nThe call by the Vermont AFL-CIO before the election 
 to warn about the threat of a attempted coup and insurrection was true then 
 and is even more true today. Their call for a general strike was a correct 
 answer to any coup and insurrection.\n \nThe unions, workers and workers 
 organizations must work now to organize and form national and international 
 united front movements against fascism.\n \nWe call for preparation today 
 with education on the rise of fascism and self defense organizations to 
 prepare for another fascist coup.\n \nFascists. have also used the pandemic 
 to organize and also have joined in physically attacking unions in Italy 
 and Australia. The same dangers are growing in the US.\n \nThe rise in 
 racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic and attack on 
 immigrants is part of the rise of the fascist movement in the US and 
 internationally.\n \nThe threats of war with China, Russia and war 
 mongering and sanctions  is part and parcel of the dangers of world war,\n 
 \nThe use of a general strike and other mass working class action is 
 necessary and if a coup takes place workers and workers organizations must 
 be prepared to defend democratic and working class rights with the power of 
 the organized working class and the oppressed.\n \nWe cannot depend on the 
 Democrats, the military and the state apparatus to defend democratic 
 rights.\n \nThe time is now to prepare for the upcoming battles with either 
 the working class or the fascists in charge of the US.\nWe cannot allow and 
 afford a coup or take-over of power by a fascist movement.\n\nEndorsed by 
 United Front Committee For A Labor Party, Class Conscious, Liaison 
 Committee for the Fourth International and its national groups: Consistent 
 Democrats (Great Britain) Liga Comunista (Brazil) Tendencia Militant 
 Bolchevique (Argentine) Socialist Workers League (United States)\n\nWe call 
 on other organizations that are concerned about the growth of fascism and 
 the need for a united front of workers, unions and working class 
 organizations to join this and organize similar actions in all cities in 
 the US.\n\nhttps://www.facebook.com/masslaborpartyusa\n\nAdditional 
 info:\n\nMillions of Angry, Armed Americans Stand Ready to Seize Power If 
 Trump Loses in 
 2024\n\nhttps://www.newsweek.com/2021/12/31/millions-angry-armed-americans-stand-ready-seize-power-if-trump-loses-2024-1660953.html\n\nMike 
 "Wompus" Nieznany is a 73-year-old Vietnam veteran who walks with a cane 
 from the combat wounds he received during his service. That disability 
 doesn't keep Nieznany from making a living selling custom motorcycle 
 luggage racks from his home in Gainesville, Georgia. Neither will it slow 
 him down when it's time to visit Washington, D.C.—heavily armed and ready 
 to do his part in overthrowing the U.S. government.\nMillions of fellow 
 would-be insurrectionists will be there, too, Nieznany says, "a ticking 
 time-bomb" targeting the Capitol. "There are lots of fully armed people 
 wondering what's happening to this country," he says. "Are we going to let 
 Biden keep destroying it? Or do we need to get rid of him? We're only going 
 to take so much before we fight back." The 2024 election, he adds, may well 
 be the trigger.\nNieznany is no loner. His political comments on the 
 social-media site Quora received 44,000 views in the first two weeks of 
 November and more than 4 million overall. He is one of many rank-and-file 
 Republicans who own guns and in recent months have talked openly of the 
 need to take down—by force if necessary—a federal government they see 
 as illegitimate, overreaching and corrosive to American freedom.\nThe 
 phenomenon goes well beyond the growth of militias, which have been a 
 feature of American life at least since the Ku Klux Klan rose to power 
 after the Civil War. Groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, which 
 took part in the January 6th riot at the Capitol and may have played 
 organizational roles, have grown in membership. Law enforcement has long 
 tracked and often infiltrated these groups. What Nieznany represents is 
 something else entirely: a much larger and more diffuse movement of 
 more-or-less ordinary people, stoked by misinformation, knitted together by 
 social media and well-armed. In 2020, 17 million Americans bought 40 
 million guns and in 2021 were on track to add another 20 million. If 
 historical trends hold, the buyers will be overwhelmingly white, Republican 
 and southern or rural.\nAmerica's massive and mostly Republican gun-rights 
 movement dovetails with a growing belief among many Republicans that the 
 federal government is an illegitimate tyranny that must be overthrown by 
 any means necessary. That combustible formula raises the threat of armed, 
 large-scale attacks around the 2024 presidential election—attacks that 
 could make the January 6 insurrection look like a toothless stunt by 
 comparison. "The idea that people would take up arms against an American 
 election has gone from completely farfetched to something we have to start 
 planning for and preparing for," says University of California, Los Angeles 
 law professor Adam Winkler, an expert on gun policy and constitutional 
 law.\nGET THE BEST OF NEWSWEEK VIA EMAIL\nFE Civil War BANNER\nWest Ohio 
 Minutemen, an armed militia, stand guard near Public Square during the 
 second day of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, 
 on July 19, 2016.\nMARCUS YAM/LOS ANGELES TIMES/GETTY\nBoth Democrats and 
 Republicans are rapidly losing faith in the integrity of U.S. elections. 
 Democrats worry that voter suppression and election interference from 
 Republican state officials will deny millions of Americans their say at the 
 polling booths. A PBS NewsHour/ NPR/ Marist poll in early November reported 
 that 55 percent of Democrats saw voter suppression as the biggest threat to 
 U.S. elections. Republicans claim, contrary to the evidence, that Democrats 
 have already manipulated vote counts through fraud to steal a presidential 
 election. An October CNN poll found that more than three-quarters of 
 Republicans falsely believe Joe Biden's 2020 election win was 
 fraudulent.\nAccording to the Constitution, Congress and the Supreme Court 
 are supposed to settle those sorts of dueling claims. Given the growing 
 intensity and polarization of political life, would either side accept a 
 decision that handed a contested 2024 election result to the other?\nSuch a 
 decision would more likely bring tens of millions of protesters and 
 counter-protesters into the streets, especially around the U.S. Capitol and 
 possibly many state capitols, plunging the country into chaos. Although 
 many Democrats might be inclined to demonstrate, a larger percentage of 
 Republican protesters would almost certainly be carrying guns. If the 
 Supreme Court ruling, expected in mid-2022, on New York State Rifle & 
 Pistol Association v. Bruen establishes an unrestricted right to carry a 
 gun anywhere in the country, bringing firearms to the Capitol in 
 Washington, D.C. could be perfectly legal. Says Winkler: "The Supreme Court 
 may be close to issuing the ruling that leads to the overthrow of the U.S. 
 government."\nIf armed violence erupts the 2024 elections, quelling it 
 could fall to the U.S. military, which may be reluctant to take arms 
 against U.S. citizens. In that case, the fate of the nation might well be 
 decided by a simple fact: a big subset of one of the two parties has for 
 years been systemically arming itself for this very reason.\n"I hope it's 
 just too crazy to happen here," says Erica De Bruin, an assistant professor 
 of government at Hamilton College, who studies coups around the world. "But 
 it's now in the realm of the plausible."\nEnemy at the Gates\nMany 
 Republicans are increasingly coming to see themselves less as citizens 
 represented by the federal government, and more as tyrannized victims of 
 that government. More than three-quarters of Republicans reported "low 
 trust" in the federal government in a Grinnell College national poll in 
 October; only a minority of Democrats agreed. From this point of view, 
 peaceful elections will not save the day. More than two out of three 
 Republicans think democracy is under attack, according to the Grinnell 
 poll, which echoes the results of a CNN poll in September. Half as many 
 Democrats say the same.\nMainstream news publications are filled with howls 
 of protest over political outrages by Republican leaders, who are 
 reflecting the beliefs of the party mainstream. But the small newspapers in 
 the rural, red-state areas that are the core of the Republican party's rank 
 and file are giving voice to a simpler picture: Politics are dead; it's 
 time to fight. "Wake up America!" reads a September opinion piece 
 excoriating Democrats in The Gaston Gazette, based in Gastonia, N.C. "The 
 enemy is at our gates, God willing it is not too late to turn back the 
 rushing tide of this dark regime." The piece goes on to quote Thomas 
 Paine's exhortation to colonists to take up arms against the British. "We 
 are in a civil war," a letter published in September in The New Mexico Sun 
 likewise warns Republicans, "between the traditional Americans and those 
 who want to impose socialism in this country and thus obtain complete 
 government control of its citizens."\nEvidence that a significant portion 
 of Republicans are increasingly likely to resort to violence against the 
 government and political opponents is growing. More than 100 violent 
 threats, many of them death threats, were leveled at poll workers and 
 election officials in battleground states in 2020, according to an 
 investigation by Reuters published in September—all those threat-makers 
 whom Reuters could contact identified as Trump supporters. In October 2020, 
 13 men were charged with plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen 
 Whitmer, a Democrat; all of them were aligned with the political right. 
 Nearly a third of Republicans agree that "true American patriots may have 
 to resort to violence in order to save our country," according to a 
 September poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, a 
 non-partisan group. That's three times as many as the number of Democrats 
 who felt the same way.\nGuns are becoming an essential part of the 
 equation. "Americans are increasingly wielding guns in public spaces, 
 roused by persons they politically oppose or public decisions with which 
 they disagree," concludes an August article in the Northwestern University 
 Law Review. Guns were plentiful when hundreds of anti-COVID-precaution 
 protestors gathered at the Michigan State Capitol in May 2020. Some of the 
 armed protesters tried to enter the Capitol chamber.\nThose who carry arms 
 to a political protest may in theory have peaceful intentions, but there's 
 plenty of reason to think otherwise. An October study from Everytown for 
 Gun Safety and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) 
 looked at 560 protests involving armed participants over an 18-month period 
 through mid-2021, and found that a sixth of them turned violent, and some 
 involved fatalities.\nOne indication of how far Republicans may be willing 
 to go in violently opposing the government is their sanguine reaction to 
 the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Republicans by and large 
 see no problem with a mob of hundreds swarming and forcing their way into 
 the seat of American government. Half of Republicans said that the mob was 
 "defending freedom," according to a CBS/YouGov poll taken just after the 
 insurrection. Today two-thirds of Republicans have come to deny that it was 
 an attack at all, according to an October survey by Quinnipiac University. 
 "There's been little accountability for that insurrection," says UCLA's 
 Winkler. "The right-wing rhetoric has only grown worse since then."\nMost 
 Republican leaders are circumspect when it comes to supporting violence 
 against the government, but not all. Former Milwaukee County Sheriff David 
 Clarke, a controversial character who remains popular among many 
 Republicans, reportedly told an enthusiastic gathering of Trump supporters 
 in October that if and when a "serious" insurrection springs up, "there's 
 very little you're going to be able to do about it."\nEx-Army Generals Fear 
 Insurrection or 'Civil War' in 2024READ MORE Ex-Army Generals Fear 
 Insurrection or 'Civil War' in 2024\nGeorgia Representative Marjorie Taylor 
 Greene, another prominent Republican popular with the rank and file, opined 
 that the January 6 insurrectionists were simply doing what the Declaration 
 of Independence tells true patriots to do, in that they were trying to 
 "overthrow tyrants." The real threat to democracy, she added, are Black 
 Lives Matter protesters and Democratic "Marxist-communist" agents. Greene 
 and Representative Madison Cawthorn, a Republican from North Carolina, have 
 referred to some of the insurrectionists as "political prisoners."\nTrump 
 himself, of course, has nurtured a constant undercurrent of violence among 
 his supporters from the beginning of his first presidential campaign. In 
 2016 he publicly stated he could shoot someone in the street without losing 
 any of his political support, and he went on to encourage attendees at his 
 rallies to assault protesters and journalists. When demonstrators at a 
 rally in Miami were being dragged away, Trump warned that next time "I'll 
 be a little more violent." At a 2016 rally in Las Vegas, he openly 
 complained to the crowd that security wasn't being rough enough on a 
 protester they were removing. "I'd like to punch him in the face, I'll tell 
 you," he said.\nToday Trump openly declares the January 6 rioters to be 
 "great people." In October, he suggested that Republicans might not want to 
 bother to vote in the 2022 or 2024 elections because of their concerns over 
 fraud in the 2020 election. At the same time, he declared that he would 
 achieve an "even more glorious victory in November of 2024." The notion 
 that Republicans could turn their backs on voting booths while sweeping 
 Trump to glory only makes sense if Trump envisions a path to taking power 
 that doesn't require votes.\nRepublicans approve of that sort of talk. The 
 October Quinnipiac poll found that while 94 percent of Democrats insist 
 Trump is undermining democracy, 85 percent of Republicans say he's 
 protecting it.\nWhere the Guns Are\nIn his acclaimed history of the early 
 days of the American Revolution, "The British Are Coming," author Rick 
 Atkinson explains one major reason why America became the first British 
 colony to succeed in winning freedom, where others had failed. "Unlike the 
 Irish and other subjugated peoples," he writes, "the Americans were heavily 
 armed." Muskets, he points out, were "as common as kettles" among the 
 colonists, and American riflemen were among the world's finest marksmen. 
 That possession of and skill with guns, combined with the colonists' deep 
 passion for ridding themselves of what they saw as government tyranny, 
 would help carry the day against otherwise long odds.\nFE Civil War 02\nOn 
 display at a gun shop in Wendell, N.C., an AR-15 assault rifle manufactured 
 by Core15 Rifle Systems.\nCHUCK LIDDY/GETTY\nToday the many Republicans who 
 have convinced themselves that they, too, must cast off a tyrannical 
 government have plenty of guns. Americans own about 400 million guns, 
 according to the Switzerland-based Graduate Institute of International and 
 Development Studies in Geneva. (The U.S. government doesn't track gun 
 ownership.) The vast majority of those guns belong to Republicans. Gallup 
 found that half of all Republicans own guns, nearly three times the rate of 
 gun ownership as among Democrats. Gun owners are overwhelmingly male and 
 white and are more likely to live in the rural south than anywhere else. 
 Those demographics mesh neatly with the hard-core segment of the Republican 
 party.\nGun sales have spiked wildly in the past two years. About 17 
 million people, or more than six percent of the population, bought 40 
 million guns in 2020 alone, according to research from Harvard and 
 Northeastern Universities. Sales for 2021 are on track to add another 20 
 million to the total, according to gun-industry research firm Small Arms 
 Analytics & Forecasting.\nWhile there's data to suggest Democrats are 
 stepping up their modest share of the gun-buying, recent history suggests 
 that the great majority of these guns are going to Republicans. According 
 to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey, Republicans and Republican-leaning 
 independents were more than twice as likely to own a gun as their 
 Democratic counterparts.\nFormer Iowa Representative Steve King, long known 
 as someone unafraid to say out loud what many other Republicans are 
 thinking, is confident that his party is better armed. "Folks keep talking 
 about another civil war," he posted to Facebook in 2019. "One side has 
 about 8 trillion bullets... Wonder who would win?"\nEcstatic Donald Trump 
 Fans Retweeted His Call for "Wild" ProtestsREAD MORE Ecstatic Donald Trump 
 Fans Retweeted His Call for "Wild" Protests\nThe impulse for violent 
 insurrection among Republicans is getting some of its energy from the 
 mostly Republican gun-rights movement, and vice-versa. That's a relatively 
 new phenomenon. The right to own guns was long a passionate cause of 
 conservatives, without ever posing much apparent threat to democracy. But 
 that's changing fast.\nIn 2000, 60 percent of gun owners cited hunting as 
 the reason they bought guns, according to a Gallup poll. Many of the rest 
 listed "sport," which generally means target shooting. But by 2016, 63 
 percent were saying they bought guns for self-defense. That shift was 
 brought on by growing paranoia about street crime and mob violence, a fear 
 constantly pumped up on Fox and other right-wing media, which have long 
 been conjuring up the notion that urban gangs and other trouble-makers are 
 increasingly running rampant through suburbs and beyond.\nOver the past 
 four years those fears have been blurring into anti-government, pro-Trump, 
 and in some cases white-supremacist movements. "We've seen the flourishing 
 of a different view of gun rights, one that focuses on the necessity of 
 owning guns in order to fight a tyrannical government," says Winkler. "The 
 promotion of that idea has made it all the more likely that some people 
 will come to see the government as a tyrannical one that needs to be 
 overthrown." The resulting gun-rights-driven, anti-deep-state radicalism 
 echoes throughout Republican-heavy social media and other communications 
 channels.\n\n\nThe full text of the Vermont General Strike Authorization 
 Resolution adopted on November 21, 2020:\n\nVermont AFL-CIO Resolution: 
 Protect Democracy \nNovember 21, 2020\n\nWHEREAS, the Vermont AFL-CIO and 
 our affiliates are committed to the defense of democratic rights and the 
 institutions of democracy, regardless of the party affiliations of those in 
 power; \n\nWHEREAS, the Vermont AFL-CIO recognizes that democracy in the 
 United States is hobbled by the archaic structure of the Electoral College 
 and entrenchment of the two-party system; \n\nWHEREAS, President Donald 
 Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have refused to acknowledge the results 
 of the election in multiple key states and continue to mount frivolous 
 lawsuits and various political interventions in a baseless attempt to 
 overturn the November 3rd results;\n\nWHEREAS, President Trump has refused, 
 on multiple occasions, to denounce the activities of white supremacist 
 militias and organizations that have stated desires to overthrow American 
 democracy and instead has conveyed support for their actions; \n\nWHEREAS, 
 the Trump administration and Republican allies have conducted a concerted 
 campaign to obstruct, sabotage, and reject a fair and complete count of 
 presidential ballots by creating barriers to voting, targeted at people of 
 color, immigrants, women, and young people. These tactics include 
 intimidation of BIPOC voters at polling places and requirements to have two 
 people sign a ballot that hurt women voters, as well as dismantling key 
 infrastructure such as the U.S. Postal Service; \n\nWHEREAS, the 
 Constitution requires voting results and Electoral College tallies to be 
 completed and submitted to Congress by the first Monday after the second 
 Wednesday in December, and the new 2021 Congress to validate the results, 
 and voters should be determining the results, not courts; \n\nWHEREAS, 
 Trump has denied science, resulting in more than 250,000 Americans dying 
 from COVID-19, and millions more facing deep economic pain due to ongoing 
 impact from the virus, and can do irreparable harm during a lame-duck 
 session; \n\nWHEREAS, the extreme risk currently posed to the historic 
 institutions of democracy in our nation may require more widespread and 
 vigorous resistance than at any time in recent history; \n\nWHEREAS, the 
 labor movement and trade unions have played a proud and vital role in 
 protecting democracy and opposing authoritarianism in many nations 
 throughout the world; \n\nWHEREAS, the most powerful tool of the labor 
 movement in our history has been the power of the general strike; 
 \n\nTHEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Vermont AFL-CIO is empowered by the 
 delegates at the 2020 state convention to call for a general strike of all 
 working people in our state in the event that Donald Trump refuses to 
 concede the office of President of the United States. \n\nBE IT FURTHER 
 RESOLVED that the Vermont AFL-CIO will work with allies in the antiracist, 
 environmental justice, feminist, LGBTQ+, immigrant rights, and disability 
 rights movements to protect our democracy, the Constitution, the law, and 
 our nation’s democratic traditions; \n\nBE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the 
 Vermont AFL-CIO will call on city and county governments to pledge to 
 protect protesters defending democracy, and commit to not using police 
 action or curfews to curtail these activities, and to use all available 
 resources to stand up against any effort by the Trump administration to 
 steal the presidential election. \n\nBE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the 
 Vermont AFL-CIO commits itself to the long-term goal of winning genuine 
 democracy through the abolition of the Electoral College and two-party 
 system, through the collective action of our affiliates and allied 
 organizations.\n\n*Adopted by the seated Delegates at the November 21, 2020 
 Vermont AFL-CIO Convention\n\n***\nClick on the below link to which the 
 film of the full Vermont General Strike discussion, debate, and 
 authorization vote: 
 https://www.facebook.com/1912800402275545/videos/3127791327447958\n\nAmerica 
 is now in fascism’s legal 
 phase\nhttps://www.yahoo.com/news/america-now-fascism-legal-phase-100024511.html\nAmerica 
 is now in fascism’s legal phase\n“Let us be reminded that before there 
 is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a 
 third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, 
 then another, then another.”\nSo began Toni Morrison’s 1995 address to 
 Howard University, entitled Racism and Fascism, which delineated 10 
 step-by-step procedures to carry a society from first to 
 last.\nMorrison’s interest was not in fascist demagogues or fascist 
 regimes. It was rather in “forces interested in fascist solutions to 
 national problems”. The procedures she described were methods to 
 normalize such solutions, to “construct an internal enemy”, isolate, 
 demonize and criminalize it and sympathizers to its ideology and their 
 allies, and, using the media, provide the illusion of power and influence 
 to one’s supporters.\nMorrison saw, in the history of US racism, fascist 
 practices – ones that could enable a fascist social and political 
 movement in the United States.\nWriting in the era of the 
 “super-predator” myth (a Newsweek headline the next year read, 
 “Superpredators: Should we cage the new breed of vicious kids?”), 
 Morrison unflinchingly read fascism into the practices of US racism. 
 Twenty-five years later, those “forces interested in fascist solutions to 
 national problems” are closer than ever to winning a multi-decade 
 national fight.\nThe contemporary American fascist movement is led by 
 oligarchical interests for whom the public good is an impediment, such as 
 those in the hydrocarbon business, as well as a social, political, and 
 religious movement with roots in the Confederacy. As in all fascist 
 movements, these forces have found a popular leader unconstrained by the 
 rules of democracy, this time in the figure of Donald Trump.\nMy father, 
 raised in Berlin under the Nazis, saw in European fascism a course that any 
 country could take. He knew that US democracy was not exceptional in its 
 capacity to resist the forces that shattered his family and devastated his 
 youth. My mother, a court stenographer in US criminal courts for 44 years, 
 saw in the anti-Black racism of the American legal system parallels to the 
 vicious antisemitism she experienced in her youth in Poland, attitudes 
 which enabled eastern European complicity with fascism. And my grandmother, 
 Ilse Stanley, wrote a memoir, published in 1957, of her experiences in 
 1930s Berlin, later appearing on the US television show This is Your Life 
 to discuss it. It is a memoir of the normalization years of German fascism, 
 well before world war and genocide. In it, she recounts experiences with 
 Nazi officers who assured her that in nazism’s vilification of Jews, they 
 certainly did not mean her.\nPhilosophers have always been at the forefront 
 in the analysis of fascist ideology and movements. In keeping with a 
 tradition that includes the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, 
 I have been writing for a decade on the way politicians and movement 
 leaders employ propaganda, centrally including fascist propaganda, to win 
 elections and gain power.\nOften, those who employ fascist tactics do so 
 cynically – they do not really believe the enemies they target are so 
 malign, or so powerful, as their rhetoric suggests. Nevertheless, there 
 comes a tipping point, where rhetoric becomes policy. Donald Trump and the 
 party that is now in thrall to him have long been exploiting fascist 
 propaganda. They are now inscribing it into fascist policy.\nFascist 
 propaganda takes place in the US in already fertile ground – decades of 
 racial strife has led to the United States having by far the highest 
 incarceration rate in the world. A police militarized to address the wounds 
 of racial inequities by violence, and a recent history of unsuccessful 
 imperial wars have made us susceptible to a narrative of national 
 humiliation by enemies both internal and external. As WEB Du Bois showed in 
 his 1935 masterwork Black Reconstruction, there is a long history of 
 business elites backing racism and fascism out of self-interest, to divide 
 the working class and thereby destroy the labor movement.\nThe novel 
 development is that a ruthless would-be autocrat has marshalled these 
 fascist forces and shaped them into a cult, with him as its leader. We are 
 now well into the repercussions of this latter process – where fascist 
 lies, for example, the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, 
 have begun to restructure institutions, notably electoral infrastructure 
 and law. As this process unfolds, slowly and deliberately, the media’s 
 normalization of these processes evokes Morrison’s tenth and final step: 
 “Maintain, at all costs, silence.”\nConstructing an enemy\nTo 
 understand contemporary US fascism, it is useful to consider parallels to 
 20th century history, both where they succeed and where they fail.\nHitler 
 was a genocidal antisemite. Though fascism involves disregard for human 
 life, not all fascists are genocidal. Even Nazi Germany turned to genocide 
 only relatively late in the regime’s rule. And not all fascists are 
 antisemitic. There were Italian Jewish fascists. Referring to the 
 successful assimilation of Jews into all phases of Weimar era German life, 
 my father warned me, “if they had chosen someone else, some of us would 
 have been among the very best Nazis.” We American Jews feel firmly at 
 home. Now, where the fascist movement’s internal enemies are leftists and 
 movements for Black racial equality, there certainly could be fascist 
 American Jews.\nGermany’s National Socialist party did not take over a 
 mainstream party. It started as a small, radical, far-right anti-democratic 
 party, which faced different pressures as it strove to achieve greater 
 electoral success.\nDespite its radical start, the Nazi party dramatically 
 increased its popularity over many years in part by strategically masking 
 its explicit antisemitic agenda to attract moderate voters, who could 
 convince themselves that the racism at the core of Nazi ideology was 
 something the party had outgrown. It represented itself as the antidote to 
 communism, using a history of political violence in the Weimar Republic, 
 including street clashes between communists and the far right, to warn of a 
 threat of violent communist revolution. It attracted support from business 
 elites by promising to smash labor unions. The Nazis portrayed socialists, 
 Marxists, liberals, labor unions, the cultural world and the media as 
 representatives of, or sympathizers with, this revolution. Once in power, 
 they bore down on this message.\nIn his 1935 speech, Communism with its 
 Mask Off, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels described Bolshevism 
 carrying “on a campaign, directed by the Jews, with the international 
 underworld, against culture as such”. By contrast, “National Socialism 
 sees in all these things – in [private] property, in personal values and 
 in nation and race and the principles of idealism – these forces which 
 carry on every human civilization and fundamentally determine its 
 worth.”\nThe Nazis recognized that the language of family, faith, 
 morality and homeland could be used to justify especially brutal violence 
 against an enemy represented as being opposed to all these things. The 
 central message of Nazi politics was to demonize a set of constructed 
 enemies, an unholy alliance of communists and Jews, and ultimately to 
 justify their criminalization.\nTrump supporters constructed a gallows near 
 the Capitol in the hours before the 6 January riot.Photograph: Andrew 
 Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images\nContrary to popular belief, the Nazi 
 government of the 1930s was not genocidal, nor were its notorious 
 concentration camps packed with Jewish prisoners, at least until the 
 November pogrom of 1938. The main targets of the regime’s concentration 
 camps were, initially, communists and socialists. The Nazi regime urged 
 vigilante violence against its other targets, such as Jews, separating 
 themselves from this violence by obscuring the role of agents of the state. 
 During this time, it was possible for many non-Jewish Germans to deceive 
 themselves about the brutal nature of the regime, to tell themselves that 
 its harsh means were necessary to protect the German nation from the 
 insidious threat of communism.\nViolent militias occupied an ambiguous role 
 between state and non-state actors. The SS began as violent Nazi 
 supporters, before becoming an independent arm of the government. The 
 message of violent law and order created a culture that influenced all the 
 Nazi state’s institutions. As Yale historian Timothy Snyder writes in On 
 Tyranny, “for violence to transform not just the atmosphere but also the 
 system, the emotions of rallies and the ideology of exclusion have to be 
 incorporated into the training of armed guards.”\nIn the US, the training 
 of police as “warriors”, together with the unofficial replacement of 
 the American flag by the thin blue line flag, auger poorly about the 
 democratic commitments of this institution.\nA thin blue line carried at a 
 Blue Lives Matter rally in Kenosha, Wisconsin, 30 August 2020. Photograph: 
 Morry Gash/AP\nFor a far-right party to become viable in a democracy, it 
 must present a face it can defend as moderate, and cultivate an ambiguous 
 relationship to the extreme views and statements of its most explicit 
 members. It must maintain a pretense of the rule of law, characteristically 
 by projecting its own violations of it on to its opponents.\nIn the case of 
 the takeover of the mainstream rightwing party by a far-right 
 anti-democratic movement, the pretense must be stronger. The movement must 
 contend with members of that party who are faithful to procedural elements 
 of democracy, such as the principle of one voter one vote, or that the 
 loser of a fair election give up power – in the United States today, 
 figures such as Adam Kinzinger and Elizabeth Cheney. A fascist social and 
 political party faces pressure both to mask its connection to and to 
 cultivate violent racist supporters, as well as its inherently 
 anti-democratic agenda.\nArmed members of the New England Minutemen militia 
 group at an anti-mask and anti-vaccine ‘world wide rally for freedom’ 
 in Concord, New Hampshire, 15 May 2021. Photograph: Joseph 
 Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images\nIn the face of the attack on the US capital on 6 
 January, even the most resolute skeptic must admit that Republican 
 politicians have been at least attempting to cultivate a mass of violent 
 vigilantes to support their causes. Kyle Rittenhouse is becoming a hero to 
 Republicans after showing up in Kenosha, WI as an armed vigilante citizen, 
 and killing two men. Perhaps there are not enough potential Kyle 
 Rittenhouses in the US to justify fear of massive armed vigilante militias 
 enforcing a 2024 election result demanded by Donald Trump. But denying that 
 Trump’s party is trying to create such a movement is, at this point, 
 deliberate deception.\nBlack rebellion, white backlash\nStreet violence 
 proved invaluable to the National Socialists in their path to power. The 
 Nazis instigated and exacerbated violence in the streets, then demonized 
 their opponents as enemies of the German people who must be dealt with 
 harshly. Trump’s rise followed Black protest, at times violent, of police 
 brutality in Ferguson and Baltimore. More recently, the murder of George 
 Floyd and a historic protest movement in the US in the late spring has 
 given fuel to fascist misrepresentation.\nAll of these recent developments 
 take place as only the latest in a long US history of Black rebellion 
 against white supremacist ideology and structures, and a parallel history 
 of white backlash.\nWhite vigilante groups regularly formed in reaction to 
 Black rebellions, to “defend their families and property against Black 
 rebellion”, the historian Elizabeth Hinton writes in her recent history 
 of these rebellions. Hinton shows that police often acted in concert with 
 these groups. For decades, the instigator of these rebellions has typically 
 been an incident or incidents of police violence against members of the 
 community, following a long period of often violent over-policing that 
 exacerbated these communities’ grievances.\nArmed police forced people to 
 lie face down in the street during the Watts riots, Los Angeles, in August 
 1965. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images\nStreet movements in the US 
 have often been accompanied by vigorous campus protests, from the protests 
 against the Vietnam war of the 1960s, to recent campus protests for racial 
 justice that attracted media rebuke (paradoxically, for “chilling free 
 speech”). Politicians in both parties have feasted on these moments, 
 using them to troll for votes. During these episodes of protest and 
 rebellion, US politicians from Barry Goldwateronwards, placing campus 
 protests together with Black rebellion against over-policing, have 
 encouraged harsh law and order policing and crackdowns on leftists. John 
 Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s top advisers, said that Nixon’s campaign and 
 administration “had two enemies: the anti-war left and Black people”, 
 and invented the drug war to target both:\nYou understand what I’m 
 saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war 
 or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana 
 and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could 
 disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, 
 break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening 
 news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we 
 did.\nPoliticians have shown less interest in addressing the underlying 
 conditions that lead to violence in poor Black urban communities – the 
 widespread availability of guns, the massive and persistent racial wealth 
 gap and the effects of violent policing and mass incarceration. And why 
 should they? As long as these underlying conditions persist, politicians of 
 either party can run for office by milking fear and promising a harsh law 
 and order response. Morrison’s 1995 address is a warning that these 
 conditions are ripe for harnessing by a fascist movement, one targeting 
 democracy itself.\nIn its most recent iteration, in the form of the 
 reaction against Black Lives Matter protesters and the demonization of 
 antifa and student activists, a fascist social and political movement has 
 been avidly stoking the flames for mass rightwing political violence, by 
 justifying it against these supposed internal enemies.\nRachel Kleinfield, 
 in an October 2021 article, documents the rise of the legitimation of 
 political violence in the US. According to the article, the “bedrock idea 
 uniting right-wing communities who condone violence is that white Christian 
 men in the United States are under cultural and demographic threat and 
 require defending – and that it is the Republican Party and Donald Trump, 
 in particular, who will safeguard their way of life.”\nThis kind of 
 justification of political violence is classically fascist – a dominant 
 group threatened by the prospect of gender, racial and religious equality 
 turning to a leader who promises a violent response.\nHow to topple a 
 democracy\nWe are now in fascism’s legal phase. According to the 
 International Center for Not for Profit Law, 45 states have considered 230 
 bills criminalizing protest, with the threat of violent leftist and Black 
 rebellion being used to justify them. That this is happening at the same 
 time that multiple electoral bills enabling a Republican state legislature 
 majority to overturn their state’s election have been enacted suggests 
 that the true aim of bills criminalizing protest is to have a response in 
 place to expected protests against the stealing of a future election (as a 
 reminder of fascism’s historical connection to big business, some of 
 these laws criminalize protest near gas and oil lines).\nThe Nazis used 
 Judeo-Bolshevism as their constructed enemy. The fascist movement in the 
 Republican party has turned to critical race theory instead. Fascism feeds 
 off a narrative of supposed national humiliation by internal enemies. 
 Defending a fictional glorious and virtuous national past, and presenting 
 its enemies as deviously maligning the nation to its children, is a classic 
 fascist strategy to stoke fury and resentment. Using the bogeyman of 
 critical race theory, 29 states have introduced bills to restrict teaching 
 about racism and sexism in schools, and 13 states have enacted such 
 bans.\nOpponents of critical race theory protest outside the Loudoun county 
 school board offices, in Ashburn, Virginia, 22 June 2021. Photograph: 
 Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters\nThe key to democracy is an informed electorate. 
 An electorate that knows about persisting racial injustice in the United 
 States along all its dimensions, from the racial wealth gap to the effects 
 of over-policing and over-incarceration, will be unsurprised by mass 
 political rebellion in the face of persistent refusal to face up to these 
 problems. An electorate ignorant of these facts will react not with 
 understanding, but with uncomprehending fear and horror at Black political 
 unrest.\nSometimes, you trace a fascist movement to its genesis in Nazi 
 influence on its leaders, as with India’s RSS. In the United States, the 
 causal relations run the other way around. As James Whitman shows in his 
 2017 book, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of 
 Nazi Race Law, the Jim Crow era in the United States influenced Nazi law. 
 In 2021, legislators in 19 states passed laws making access to the ballot 
 more difficult, some with specific (and clearly intentional) disparate 
 impact on minority communities (as in Texas). By obscuring in our education 
 system facts about this era, one can mask the reemergence of legislation 
 that borrows from its strategies.\nTrump supporters outside the 
 Pennsylvania convention center, where ballots were being counted, 6 
 November 2020. Photograph: Bryan R Smith/AFP/Getty Images\nIndeed, the very 
 tactic of restricting politically vital information to schoolchildren is 
 itself borrowed from the Jim Crow era. Chapter 9 of Carter G Woodson’s 
 1933 book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, is called Political Education 
 Neglected. In it, Woodson describes how history was taught “to enslave 
 the Negroes’ mind”, by whitewashing the brutality of slavery and the 
 actual roots and causes of racial disparities. In Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter 
 G Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, Jarvis Givens documents the 
 strategies Black educators used to convey real history in the constricted 
 environments of Jim Crow schools, strategies that, tragically, will again 
 become necessary for educators to take up again today.\nFascist ideology 
 strictly enforces gender roles and restricts the freedom of women. For 
 fascists, it is part of their commitment to a supposed “natural order” 
 where men are on top. It is also integral to the broader fascist strategy 
 of winning over social conservatives who might otherwise be unhappy with 
 the endemic corruption of fascist rule. Far-right authoritarian leaders 
 across the world, such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor 
 Orbán, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, have targeted “gender ideology”, 
 as nazism targeted feminism. Freedom to choose one’s role in society, 
 when it goes against a supposed “natural order”, is a kind of freedom 
 fascism has always opposed.\nAccording to National Socialist ideology, 
 abortion, at any point in pregnancy, was considered to be murder. Just as 
 it was acceptable to murder disabled people and other groups whose 
 identities were considered dangerous to the health of the “Aryan race”, 
 it was acceptable to perform abortions on members of these groups. In the 
 first six years of Nazi rule, from 1933 to 1939, there was a harsh 
 crackdown on the birth control movement. Led by the Gestapo, there was a 
 punitive campaign against doctors who performed abortions on Aryan women. 
 The recent attack on abortion rights, and the coming attack on birth 
 control, led by a hard-right supreme court, is consistent with the 
 hypothesis that we are, in the United States, facing a real possibility of 
 a fascist future.\nIf you want to topple a democracy, you take over the 
 courts. Donald Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 by 
 almost 3m votes, and yet has appointed one-third of supreme court, three 
 youthful far-right judges who will be spending decades there. The Roberts 
 court has for more than a decade consistently enabled an attack on 
 democracy, by hollowing out the Voting Rights Act over time, unleashing 
 unlimited corporate money into elections, and allowing clearly partisan 
 gerrymanders of elections. There is every reason to believe that the court 
 will allow even the semblance of democracy to crumble, as long as laws are 
 passed by gerrymandered Republican statehouses that make anti-democratic 
 practices, including stealing elections, legal.\nThere has been a growing 
 fascist social and political movement in the United States for decades. 
 Like other fascist movements, it is riddled with internal contradictions, 
 but no less of a threat to democracy. Donald Trump is an aspiring autocrat 
 out solely for his own power and material gain. By giving this movement a 
 classically authoritarian leader, Trump shaped and exacerbated it, and his 
 time in politics has normalized it.\nDonald Trump has shown others what is 
 possible. But the fascist movement he now leads preceded him, and will 
 outlive him. As Toni Morrison warned, it feeds off ideologies with deep 
 roots in American history. It would be a grave error to think it cannot 
 ultimately win.\n\nTRUMKA: HANDS OFF THE VERMONT AFL-CIO - NINE LEFT 
 ORGANIZATIONS FROM AROUND THE WORLD BACK VT 
 AFL-CIO\nhttps://www.facebook.com/vtworkers/\nToday the Vermont AFL-CIO was 
 pleased to receive solidarity from nine working class organizations from 
 around the world in our conflict with Richard Trumka over our commitment to 
 defend democracy both in our Republic and within Organized Labor.  The 
 below open letter is to National AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. The 
 letter demands that he end his politically motivated investigation into the 
 Vermont AFL-CIO for daring to hold a November 2020 vote authorizing our 
 Executive Board to call for a General Strike in the event that Donald Trump 
 carried out a fascist coup against our democracy prior to January 20, 
 2021.\nThe Vermont AFL-CIO stands firmly by our decision to have our 
 members vote to authorize a call for a General Strike if our democracy came 
 into existential crisis. Workers taking collective action to defend and 
 advance our democracy shall ALWAYS be the right thing to do!  \n-Vermont 
 AFL-CIO\n***\n https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2021/12/31/18847015.php
SUMMARY:On Anniversary Of Jan 6 Insurrection, Workers Must Call For United Front Against Fascism
LOCATION:San Francisco Federal Building\n90 7th St.\nSan Francisco
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2021/12/31/18847015.php
DTSTART:20220106T200000Z
DTEND:20220106T210000Z
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