Shut down ICE, No Military Occupation, Shut Down The Whole Trump Fascist Regime...Trump Must Go—NOW!

These important new slogans just went up on the RefuseFascism.org website, along with an important call to action. We want to speak here to how we revcoms see some of the importance of these new slogans and the important actions that Refuse Fascism has called for on July 26-28, and protests in unity with the National Call for “Good Trouble” on July 17.

The outrages and the horrors of just the past week paint the picture of a society very close to the essential consolidation of fascist rule. 

Last Monday, over 100 armed soldiers and federal agents—some on horseback—took over a Los Angeles city park in a way that provoked LA Mayor Karen Bass to say that this is the kind of scene that happens before a coup. A few days later, hundreds of people came out to defend farmworkers in an ICE raid in nearby Ventura County. (See Ground Zero Los Angeles: City Erupts in Fascist Repression and Courageous Resistance.) Meanwhile in Florida, reports of terrifyingly inhumane conditions began to leak out of ICE’s “Alligator Alcatraz” prison. Trump himself threatened to revoke the citizenship of the New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and to deport him. Trump then said that he himself would take over New York City and Washington, DC.

And this is just some of it. The week before, the Supreme Court continued to hand Trump more and more power. It sharply restricted the lower courts' ability to stay any “executive order” signed by Trump as unconstitutional for the country as a whole—no matter how blatantly unconstitutional it might actually be. This had been customary right up until then, and this Supreme Court ruling now puts Trump in a category “above the law.” This move, among others, provoked Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to say later that she stays up at night worrying about what will happen to “our democracy.”

The raw truth is this: We face a fascist regime which is very far along in the process of consolidating its rule. And this regime is accelerating the implementation of its horrific program. This fascism must be defeated—NOW. It must be removed from power through a process that relies fundamentally on massive, growing mobilization of people who refuse to accept a fascist America and act, nonviolently but urgently and relentlessly, in accordance with that understanding and that determination.

We face an emergency situation. The rapidly accelerating times demand that all those who oppose this fascism change how we are thinking and how we are acting—NOW. We need to reach out to others, to work and plan together to rapidly take concrete steps toward creating the situation described above. 

This resistance must be built so that people see it as explicitly linked to and pointing the way towards bringing about the level of massive noncompliance and nonviolent resistance necessary to bring the machinery of the fascist regime to a halt until the regime is removed from power. In other words, the demand “The Trump Fascist Regime Must Go—NOW!” must become a concrete, immediate mission.

Los Angeles as the Epicenter of the Quake

Los Angeles is in some key ways an epicenter of this struggle right now. There is a fighting spirit and growing organization, and there is also a section of the rulers that feels compelled to oppose what the fascists are doing.

This is not accidental. The Trump regime has put its focus on LA—with military occupation, with thousands arrested, and with masked fascist goons popping up everywhere every day to mount terrorizing raids. Mass networks of rapid response have risen in opposition, with people getting texts or other messages and showing up to defend those under attack. This has been extremely important, but it needs to grow, it needs to become societal, and it needs to be linked to the overall recognition that we face a full-court fascist press, which requires thousands and millions of us acting together to defeat this fascism. 

Learning from what’s happened in Los Angeles, and building it to another level all over the country, we need a tone and a practice everywhere of growing networks in workplaces, neighborhoods, schools, shopping districts, etc. where people are getting experience in standing together and working together, yes in emergencies… but day after day as well. Even something as simple as everyone coming out of their house at a specific time to bang pots and pans in protest can get people used to acting together and can spread a spirit and an organized practice of “we’re not going along with this shit.” These actions—building a spirit of collective noncompliance and increasingly sustained communal action, with growing complexity and determination—are crucially necessary to the kind of massive, nonviolent, relentless struggle needed to actually defeat this fascist regime.

In summing all this up, it’s essential to return to, and important to be guided by, something Bob Avakian said in his social media message Revolution #125, “Not the courts, and not the Democratic Party: Decent people, mobilizing massively and relentlessly, are the force that must be relied on to defeat Trump/MAGA fascism”:

Ongoing protests, and powerful mobilizations all over the country, have been very important, and they show the potential for what must be done. But all this must make a leap, soon, to become a massive popular uprising, determined to actually defeat this fascist regime, uniting around the urgent demand: The Trump Fascist Regime Must Go—NOW!

This means “no business as usual.” It means protest and resistance building day after day: non-violent but sustained and relentless—responding to repression by the fascist regime with even greater outpourings of resistance—uniting all who can be united, in continually growing numbers, motivated by the necessary sense of urgency, aiming to create a profound political crisis and major shifts and “realignments” throughout society, including in the dominant institutions of power, so that this illegitimate fascist regime cannot function, and is actually removed.