In a special session on Thursday, May 7, the Tennessee state House of Representatives voted to eliminate Memphis' only majority Black congressional district. During the session, protesters filled the crowded chamber, shouting and using loud horns. Justin Jones, who represents Nashville, burned a Confederate flag in the rotunda of the State Capitol while protesters marched through with lynching ropes in their hands, wearing the white hoods of the Klu Klux Klan with signs that Tennessee was "Lynching the Black Vote." 

In a heavy scene, the brother of Democratic Representative Justin Pearson was arrested by State Troopers during the legislative session. Pearson's seat in Memphis is one that was being dismantled by this racist vote. As his brother was being arrested, he got up in these white pigs' faces calling them "boy" and demanding, "what the fuck do you think you're doing, you stupid motherfucker."

This followed a speech Pearson gave to the legislature, which said in part:

These maps are racist tools of white supremacy, at the behest of the most powerful white supremacist in the United States of America, Donald J. Trump.... What you are doing is eviscerating the only Black congressional district in our state of Tennessee. We need to realize that the callous decision that you all are basing your decisions alters a voting Rights act that was paid in blood. It was not just a parchment of paper, it was paid in blood of the Edmund Pettis Bridge; paid in blood by Medgar Evers, paid in blood by Fannie Lou Hamer, paid in blood year after year, time after time, with assassinations, and lynching after lynching.... what is happening here is immoral and wrong. But we are still here. This nation and state has legalized the worst things in history, including our enslavement, and we are still here...

Two things need to be said about this:

First, much more of this is needed! This kind of defiance matters and needs to spread! And Justin Pearson himself should be defended in the face of fascist attack.

Second, as powerful as Pearson's statement is—bringing alive the blood-soaked white supremacist history of this country—he still underestimates the genocidal extremes this fascist regime is willing to go to. Beyond that, his statements overall channeled people back into the electoral confines which are a) never the way real change is brought about, and b) a meaningless trap in the face of this fascism.

Let's break this down further:

This kind of triumphalism that "we are still here," or, as Pearson said in an interview later that day, that "it's impossible to stop Memphis," is a dangerous underestimation of Trump's genocidal program and how far things have already gotten.

As the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian wrote in Trump's first term, "Donald Trump is a genocidal racist. Donald Trump hates Black people and everybody who is not a 'white, English-speaking, Christian American.' If he could, he would kill off a whole lot of them, and put many of the rest in jail for life, or drive them out of the country."

Just in the last two years, Trump and his fascist regime have gutted affirmative action—300,000 Black women are no longer in the workforce—tried to erase the viciously racist history of this country from education, monuments, parks, and more. Beyond that, Trump routinely spouts and spreads truly poisonous racist shit—for instance, his social media video portraying Obama as a monkey. This open white supremacy is a cornerstone of their larger fascist agenda that includes the open patriarchal oppression of women and LGBT people, mass deportation and ethnic cleansing of immigrants, anti-science lunacy, etc. The point is not that this regime is all powerful, but the only way we can fight it is by confronting the full extreme danger and calling on millions to act outside the confines of the elections, even as people's right to vote should be vigorously defended.

In an important social media message from last May, Bob Avakian broke down why "Democratic Party politicians may contribute to the crucial struggle against Trump/MAGA fascism—but the Democratic Party will not, and cannot, lead this struggle where it needs to go."

Eliminating the underlying causes of this fascism is impossible within the confines of this system, and the Democratic Party’s highest priority is maintaining and enforcing this system. The heads of the Democratic Party will always seek to keep the struggle against this fascist regime within terms and limits that do not threaten the stability of this system. But, even short of a revolution to abolish this system overall, the necessary struggle to defeat and remove this fascist regime requires non-violent but determined and sustained struggle, of millions of people, to bring the functioning of this system, under the rule of the fascists, to a halt—to make the country “ungovernable” by this fascist regime—so that different factors and forces come together, as a big powerful broom sweeping this fascist regime from power.