Defeating Trump's Fascism Is Going to Take You and Me—All of Us
We have now crossed the border to authoritarian rule in the United States. But the fight is not over.
“The border between democracy and authoritarianism is the least protected border in the world.”
Ivan Krastev, Bulgarian chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, dropped that assessment on Jon Stewart’s weekly blog last week.
Four days later, that stark reality took a quantum leap with the brutal murder of registered nurse Alex Pretti by a member of President Donald Trump’s paramilitary army in Minneapolis. Pretti is not the first killing by an agent of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) or CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) in recent weeks.
Renee Nicole Good was maliciously shot through a car window by an ICE agent earlier in Minneapolis. Keith Porter was shot and killed while celebrating on New Year’s Eve by an off-duty ICE agent in a Los Angeles suburb. At least six others have died in ICE detention facilities, including Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, who was strangled in what an El Paso autopsy has ruled a homicide.
Yet the Twin City murders of Good followed so soon by Pretti, two white US citizen observers who were appalled by the violent ICE invasion of their city, has transformed the dialogue on whether our country has crossed the road to authoritarian rule.
Neither could be easily demonized by the administration despite desperate attempts by HHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Vice President JD Vance, Press Secretary Karoline Leavett and other administration attack dogs to label them as “domestic terrorists” and justify their murders.
The violence has escalated as Trump, Miller, Vance, and Noem seek to secure and expand their power through what they believe will intimidate and force consent for their authoritarian rule. But they are also afraid of the growing popular resistance.
The usually compliant major media rapidly rejected the administration's lies and cover-up efforts. Almost immediately, the media rejected the excuse that Pretti was planning a “massacre” of ICE agents with a firearm he had a legal permit to carry under Minnesota law. That was especially hypocritical considering the administration’s regular celebration of those on the far right who bring lethal weapons to protests from Kyle Rittenhouse to militia seeking to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to the January 6, 2021 insurrectionists pardoned by Trump.
“Videos Contradict Federal Accounts of Federal Shooting,” blared a New York Times headline, as the Times had pioneered video documentation exposing the lies on Good’s murder. The footage, the Times wrote, shows Pretti “stepping between a woman and an agent pepper spraying her. Other agents then pepper spray Mr. Pretti who is holding a phone in one hand and nothing in the other. His concealed weapon is found and only after he is restrained on the sidewalk …and taken from him before the agents opened fire.” He was killed with 10 shots then, and the agents blocked a physician who saw the shooting from providing medical aid.
The Washington Post presented the clearest video evidence in a report labeled “Federal agent secured gun from Minn. man before fatal shooting, videos show.” Even the Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal called the shooting “the worst … to date in what is becoming a moral and political debacle for the Trump Presidency.” A Journal editorial dismissed administration “spin” saying it “simply isn’t believable.”
Few missed that the Pretti shooting occurred just a hours after tens of thousands of Minnesota residents marched through the streets of Minneapolis in minus 10 degree weather in a general strike and economic boycott to send a message of overwhelming public opposition to Trump’s Minneapolis invasion.
“I do believe that the real problem is that the border between democracy and authoritarianism is the least protected border in the world,” Ivan Krastev, also a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, said, prompting Stewart to proclaim, “you can't just drop that in the middle of a podcast and expect me not to stand up and applaud. Say that again.”
State sponsored violence is the clearest signpost of a regime that has embraced autocratic rule, whether the dictatorship is appointed following an election, as in the case of Hitler or Suharto, marched on the capital by his paramilitary troops like Mussolini, imposed by a military coup like Pinochet and the Argentine “dirty war” generals, or through a bloody civil war like Franco.
ICE and CPB agents most resemble Hitler’s SA Brown Shirts, his paramilitary troops who engaged in violent assaults on political opponents even before Hitler was appointed chancellor by fading democratic Weimar Republic leaders. Two months before Hitler was anointed, a document was leaked in one Nazi sympathetic state that ordered “all orders of the SA or other paramilitary force were to be obeyed under pain of death,” as Benjamin Carter Hett points out in The Death of Democracy.
“While the junta’s national project had several ideological pillars—neoliberalism, social conservatism, and Pinochet’s authority – violence fueled it and made it possible,” writes Ruth Ben-Ghiat in Strongmen.
Social media posts from the White House and several executive departments have begun borrowing Nazi slogans and translating them to justify the ICE campaign. “One People, One Realm, One Leader,” posted the US Department of Labor this month, echoing the Nazi slogan "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer." Just days after assuming office, Hitler declared “There can be only one victor: either Marxism or the German Volk,” notes Peter Fritzsche in Hitler’s First Hundred Days.
On Ezra Klein’s podcast, Atlantic journalist Caitlin Dickerson describes how after passage of Trump’s massive bill to extend the tax breaks to the super rich and nearly doubling the number of agents for the anti-immigrant campaign, there was a rush to fill the new ICE spots with “lots of people, it seems, within this new workforce who have absolutely no experience, who are learning how to enforce the law, how to carry a weapon, how to interact with the public, just starting from square one right now.”
“But we're also seeing a lot of explicit references to white nationalist ideas and the kind of dog whistles that we've all become used to when Trump is president. The fact is that if you're a member of the Proud Boys or you're a follower of QAnon, you recognize these exact phrases that are being used as a kind of call to action and to apply for a job as an ICE agent.”
They’ve all received a message, Dickerson continues, from anti-immigrant campaign leader Stephen Miller, who said on TV: “To all ICE officers, you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties, and anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you, is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one, no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties. And the Department of Justice has made clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction, into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against ICE officers, then they will face justice.”
“Obstruction” to Miller and company has become a license to threaten, assault, and arrest anyone bearing witness—especially filming—ICE violence and brutality. Legal citizens have been dumped far away from where they were picked up, even in unsafe conditions. Agents are now also using technology to identify observers for economic retaliation, an escalation of the goal of intimidation and seeking to silence observation and dissent.
Miller, Dickerson emphasized, “is just underscoring that argument that you're not going to get in trouble for being too aggressive. And in fact, the only thing you will get in trouble for is not being aggressive enough.”
The violence has escalated as Trump, Miller, Vance, and Noem seek to secure and expand their power through what they believe will intimidate and force consent for their authoritarian rule. But they are also afraid of the growing popular resistance symbolized by the massive march in Minneapolis in horrific freezing conditions, and the solidarity protests from coast to coast in red states and blue.
In Jacobin, Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of Twin Cities Sunrise Movement, described the increasingly effective fightback campaign in her state. Their tactics have focused on targeting corporations like Hilton, and Home Depot to stop collaborating with ICE, and have been especially successful in tormenting ICE agents in hotels at all hours with noise intended to drive out the agents and create conditions where “ICE agents won’t want to stay there, and hotels won’t want to house them.”
“I think about it as leverage and power looking everywhere ordinary people have leverage and seeing where we can pull those levers. Under a functioning democracy, you play the game of public opinion," said Shiney-Ajay. "If you convince the majority, then you can get legislation or win an election. But what we’re living under right now is not a democracy.”
“A lot of establishment advocacy groups seem to be hoping we’ll show America that Trump is really bad, then in the midterms we’ll take back power… I don’t think that’s accurate,” Shiney-Ajay says. “Just look at what Trump is doing now and how similar it is to how authoritarians in other countries have grabbed power.”
“You have to look at what ways ordinary people are directly upholding a regime’s ability to logistically function, and switch from purely persuasion campaigns to the logic of non-cooperation. It’s like building a muscle of solidarity across race, across class. It’s something the Left talks about a lot, but I’ve never experienced it like this. And it’s truly ordinary people—it’s not majority organizers or activists. It’s people who’ve never organized a day in their lives but know something wrong is happening and want to do something.”
We all need to do something. That includes non-cooperation, continuing to bear witness; recording the abuses; pressuring media to report and expose the ICE lawlessness; organizing national economic boycotts and general strikes; mobilizing to win elections, and more. No one leader or political party will save us from fascism. We have to do it ourselves.
