When Trump brays about using the military to “stop crime” and impose “law and order”—when he restores Confederate monuments and tributes to Confederate “heroes,” while forcibly removing references to slavery from institutions around the country—this is a clear indication of the deep hatred he feels toward the masses of Black people and a clear statement of what he intends to do to those masses of Black people: to intensify the murderous repression to which they are already subjected.—Bob Avakian, social media message @BobAvakianOfficial REVOLUTION #139: “Yet More Genocidal Racism From Donald Trump”
And the viciousness just keeps on coming. Four snapshots of the past week:
One: Supreme Court Prepares Further Attacks on Black People’s Voting Rights
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard a challenge to the Voting Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act was paid for with blood—literally. During a voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama in 1965, racists killed three people who supported the campaign—Jimmie Lee Jackson, a teenager murdered by a cop for attempting to defend his mother from a beating; Reverend James Reeb, a white minister from Boston beaten to death by a white mob; and Viola Lee Liuzzo, a white mother of four murdered by Klansmen (including an FBI informant) for driving activists between Selma and other cities.
In fact, scores of people throughout the South who were doing nothing more “criminal” than fighting for the rights of Black people were killed by police, Klan or white mobs, with barely any prosecutions. Thousands more were jailed or beaten. The 1965 Voting Rights Act forbade many of the practices through which white people maintained a lock on representation. Over the past decade, the Supreme Court has been stripping this law of any power. The tenor of last week's hearing led most observers to believe that the Court was preparing to take out one of the last remaining pieces of the Act—one which essentially forbade gerrymandering1 the voting districts to ensure dominance of one party. In a map published in the New York Times, the results of what this would look like were stark: manipulating districts to ensure that there would be no district in Louisiana—and several other states in the southeast—in which Black people are a majority.
Two: Vice-Dragon Vance Repeats Threats Against Cities
On NBC’s Meet the Press on October 12, Vice President JD Vance said Trump is “looking at all of his options” to deploy National Guard troops in Democratic-led cities, including invoking the Insurrection Act. He noted that while Trump “has not felt like he needed to” invoke the Insurrection Act “right now,” he also hasn’t ruled out doing so. The Insurrection Act allows the president 14 days to deploy troops before seeking congressional authorization. There is little doubt that the ICE raid on an apartment building on the South Side of Chicago several weeks ago, in which immigrants and Black people were zip-tied and dragged into the street after midnight, would be just a hint of what they have in mind. Only now, rather than ICE, this kind of thing would be carried out by U.S. troops.
Three: Republican Racist Youth Barf Up Racist Rot, and Vice-Dragon Vance Defends Them
On Tuesday, Politico published a bombshell article about leaked messages exposing racist chats involving the leaders of Young Republican organizations from around the country, which featured jokes about gas chambers, slavery, and rape, along with messages like “I love Hitler.” In response, Vice President JD Vance dismissed concerns about the chats, claiming that “kids do stupid things, especially young boys.” These “young boys” were people ranging in age from 24 to 35 and included people grown enough to be working inside government or party politics, with one currently serving as a state senator. They were aware enough that one of them, who was recently made chair of the New York State Young Republicans, said in the chat, “If we ever had a leak of this chat, we would be cooked fr fr ["for real for real”].” After the scandal became too exposing, some of them were forced to resign.
Four: Recasting the Refugee System—“Non-white People Need Not Apply”
Finally, the New York Times published an article on Wednesday titled “Trump Considers Overhaul of Refugee System That Would Favor White People.”
The article reported how “The proposals, some of which already have gone into effect, would transform a decades-old program aimed at helping the world’s most desperate people into one that conforms to Mr. Trump’s vision of immigration—which is to help mostly white people who say they are being persecuted while keeping the vast majority of other people out.” The article reports that among those who would be considered as refugees might be citizens of Germany supposedly being persecuted for neo-Nazi views.
Refugees from Haiti, which has been dominated and pillaged by the U.S. and France for 200 years, were recently demonized and deported en masse from the U.S. Meanwhile, Trump MAGA fascism promotes the lie that white South Africans are "victims" of "racist oppression" and offered some of them asylum in the U.S.
To be clear: the oppression of Black people is rooted deep in this system, and nothing short of revolution—aimed at bringing in a new system, as envisioned by Bob Avakian (BA) in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America—can actually enable people to dig up the roots of it and end it. (See also Bob Avakian’s article “Racial Oppression Can Be Ended—But Not Under This System”)
At the same time, as BA has recently stated:
If this fascist regime is allowed to remain in power, everything that decent people have felt they could rely on to seek justice will be brutally shut down...every uplifting moral value will be reviled and repressed...every sphere of society will be remade, in terrible ways, in line with the male supremacist, anti-LGBT, white supremacist and anti-immigrant cruelty and the anti-scientific, health and climate destroying madness of the Trump fascist regime and the bloodthirsty ravings and depraved violence of fanatics heading “the department of war,” with the deranged maniac Trump having his finger on the nuclear button.
Every vision, and every active striving, for a better, more just world, for a future worth living in, will be violently suppressed and effectively foreclosed, at least for the foreseeable future.
This is not hyperbole—it is the bitter reality that is being rapidly enforced.
But here is another profound reality: The massive mobilization called for by Refuse Fascism, and open to all, represents the real possibility—the ONLY real possibility—of actually driving out this fascist regime, and putting an end to the endless horrors it is determined to perpetrate. (From social media message @BobAvakianOfficial REVOLUTION #133: "Yes, this Trump/MAGA fascism really is that bad. And, if it is not driven from power soon, it will get far worse.")
