Over the past several weeks the fascists who govern Texas have launched a blitzkrieg of hateful, dangerous measures.

• On January 20, Governor Greg Abbott announced his plan for a “parental bill of rights.” It would amend the Texas Constitution, enable parents to screen curriculum materials in public schools, and ban “pornographic” materials. “Teachers found violating the policy would forfeit their public credentials and state licensing, lose their retirement, and be placed on a ‘do not hire’ list by the Texas Education Agency.” Soon after Abbott’s announcement a married heterosexual couple in the town of McKinney went to a school board meeting and demanded the removal of 282 books from the school’s library. The books were drawn from a list of 850 books compiled by a Christian fascist legislator last year, which includes titles such as What Is the Black Lives Matter Movement and Jane Against the World: Roe v. Wade and the Fight for Reproductive Rights.
• On February 17, with this year’s March primary elections approaching, Lina Hidalgo, the top official in Harris County (Houston) reported that “41% (of early ballot applications)—were “flagged for rejection for any reason,” up from 6.6% in 2018. This is a direct—and initial—manifestation of a law the Texas legislature passed last year, which contains some of the most severe voting restrictions in the country, and is aimed at preventing many Black and Latina/o people from voting. The law “specifically targets voting initiatives used by diverse, Democratic Harris County, the state’s most populous.”
• On February 18, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a leading Christian fascist, announced that he intends to introduce legislation to “abolish tenure for professors at Texas’ public universities,” by ending it for new hires and forcing tenure reviews for current employees every year instead of every six years. (Tenure is a long-established system at colleges and universities aimed at preventing professors from being fired for publications, research, or teaching considered controversial.) Patrick tweeted, “I will not stand by and let looney Marxist UT (University of Texas-Austin) professors poison the minds of young students with Critical Race Theory. We banned it in publicly funded K-12 and we will ban it in publicly funded higher ed. That’s why we created the Liberty Institute at UT.” Patrick, some UT leaders, and wealthy donors created the “Liberty Institute” last year to promote “the study and teaching of individual liberty, limited government, private enterprise and free markets” in a city and campus known as oases of oppositional politics and culture in a state dominated by Christian fascists.

• On February 22, Abbott told state health agencies that some medical treatments provided to transgender adolescents should be considered “child abuse” under existing state law. This came days after Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a statement stating that treating transgender teens with puberty-suppressing drugs and hormones should be investigated, and, “There is no doubt that these procedures are ‘abuse’ under Texas law, and thus must be halted.” Within the medical profession there is ongoing debate about what forms of treatment and care are best for trans adolescents, but it is generally considered a legitimate form of treatment. The measures proposed by Abbott and Paxton have absolutely nothing to do with legitimate medicine, science, or any care or concern for the trans kids but are part of a Christian-fascist agenda and ideology that demonizes and would eventually criminalize LGBTQ sexuality, people and choices. In an immediate sense, it could—and will—open the way to intrusive state investigation of trans kids (or kids thought to be trans) and their parents and could include taking kids away from their parents and putting them in foster homes, as a form of threat, intimidation and repression. It is also, as an article in Slate pointed out, a “step toward vigilante enforcement. Under state law, he (Abbott) pointed out, anyone with knowledge of child abuse must report it to the state.”
• On February 23, Abbott vehemently defended police who brutalized Black Lives Matter demonstrators, and said he may pardon any pigs convicted of attacking them. In May 2020, Austin police repeatedly attacked the thousands of people who took to the streets protesting the murders by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Michael Ramos in Austin. On February 22, the District Attorney for Travis County announced that 19 of these pigs are facing charges of aggravated assault for their role in using “deadly weapons to injure 11 demonstrators and threatening them with serious bodily injury.” Nine of them are accused of shooting lead-pellet bags at the same woman. The next day, Abbott threatened: “Those officers should be praised for their efforts, not prosecuted. Time will tell whether the accusations against the courageous Austin police officers is a political sham. Time will also tell whether I, as Governor, must take action to exonerate any police officer unjustly prosecuted.”

The list above doesn’t even include two cornerstones of the fascization of Texas: SB8, the measure outlawing virtually all abortion within the state, and enforced by vigilantes; and “Operation Lone Star,” which deploys about 10,000 members of the Texas National Guard and Texas State Guard to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border in defiance of federal and Constitutional law—Abbott boasted about “Lone Star,” “We have a new program contrary to the Biden plan to catch & release. The Texas plan is to catch & to jail.”

The Fascization of Texas—Yet to Be Determined

Abbott, Patrick and Company are moving rapidly and aggressively to lock in place all-around Christian Fascist domination of the state, beat down any form of opposition and challenge to their rule, and mobilize mobs of fascists to be vigilant in enforcing it, including in hunting out, silencing, and persecuting their opponents.

They are fighting to establish a place where police can kill and brutalize with impunity, and protesters are persecuted; where discussion of the U.S.’s history of oppression of Black people is outlawed; where women are regarded as incubators and they and anyone who assists them in an abortion is punished; where trans youth are tormented, and people who try to help them are criminalized; where immigrants are rounded up, locked up, and charged with crimes just for existing.

They are very far along in establishing that place. And if you think the Christian fascists in this country intend to stop in Texas, you’re wrong.

Many newspaper and TV reports have argued that with election primaries approaching, the Republi-fascists in Texas are trying to prove to their deranged “base” which of them has the most “conservative” (meaning, fascist) bona fides. This completely misses the point. These people—all the fascist leaders and their followers—are moving, hard and fast—to put in place the framework of a form of rule different than what has existed up to now, an overtly fascist form of rule, and consolidate as much of that as they can, even as they move to extend it nationwide. The Democrats—like their national counterparts and leadership—are refusing to call this for what it is, outright fascism, and continue to treat it as legitimate, and they will fail miserably in their attempts at "unity" and "healing."

Opposition and protest have met each one of these measures. But it has been way too small and scattered. Far too many people are retreating into self, staring in disbelief at what is happening under their noses, tending their own gardens while the world around us is in flames. Whatever anyone’s intentions, all these forms of not facing up to reality serve to advance the rapidly developing fascist project.

The entire ensemble of encroaching fascism needs to be fought, and the terms of these battles needs to be reset. The fascist juggernaut must be met with massive, growing opposition, all of society needs to be repolarized through determined struggle, and the revolutionary forces need to work for that repolarization as part of ending the entire capitalist-imperialist system that spawns these fascists and all the shit they are putting in place.

This is possible.

As Bob Avakian powerfully wrote in SOMETHING TERRIBLE, OR SOMETHING TRULY EMANCIPATING, Profound Crisis, Deepening Divisions, The Looming Possibility Of Civil War—And The Revolution That Is Urgently Needed, A Necessary Foundation, A Basic Roadmap For This Revolution

And as “the normal way” society has been ruled is failing to hold things together—and society is increasingly being ripped apart—this can shake people’s belief that “the way things have always been” is the only way things can be. It can make people more open to questioning—in a real sense it can force people to question—the way things have been, and whether they have to stay that way. And this is all the more likely to happen if the revolutionary forces are out among the people shining a light on the deeper reality of what is happening, and why, and bringing out that there IS an alternative to living this way.