OMNI
PROTO-FASCISM USA ANTHOLOGY #1
February 3, 2026
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, Ecology, and a Constitutional Republic
What’s at Stake: “We inhabit a historical moment that resurrects, with chilling
familiarity, the state terrorism once made visible under Hitler, Franco,
Mussolini, Pinochet, and other dictators who transformed cruelty into a
governing philosophy. Central to such regimes lies a single, devastating truth:
the law collapses the moment violence becomes its substitute. In this descent,
due process evaporates, political opponents are rebranded as “terrorists,” and
violence becomes the organizing principle
of power. Independent media are smeared or silenced, universities are targeted
for their critical capacities, and the spectacle of brown-shirted,
goose-stepping thugs hunting down racialized others slips back into public view
as a normalized, even celebrated, form of civic life.” Henry Giroux.
CONTENTS
Proto-Fascism USA
Resistance
Global Fascism
TEXTS
A woman holds a white handkerchief as people carry a banner
with pictures of missing people, victims of Argentina's last dictatorship,
during a demonstration to mark the 49th anniversary of the 1976 military coup,
at Plaza de Mayo square in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on March 24, 2025.Matias
Baglietto / NurPhoto via Getty Images
I lived in Argentina in
the mid-1980s, just after the fall of the brutal military dictatorship that
ruled from 1976 to 1983. The country was taking its first, shaky steps back
toward democracy. It was a time of great hope, but also of grave uncertainty —
because while the generals were gone, the political culture that enabled them
remained.
Like most of the nation,
I was captivated by the pioneering trials of the military generals that
promised to restore justice. But watching the trials, reading the commentary,
and witnessing the national response, it became increasingly clear that after a
dictatorship collapses, its shadow lingers. Institutions that propped it up may
be quick to pivot but slow to reform. And a political culture conditioned to
authoritarian rule does not easily snap back.
I see that same danger
now in the United States. Let’s be
clear: Fascism isn’t some distant or hypothetical threat — it is already
here. . . . .
“Trump's Playbook Comes from the Argentine Junta.” Medium · George
Dillard.
Argentina did face this dark period head-on,
interviewing many of the survivors of government violence and publishing the
harrowing Nunca Mas ( ...Read more
Is
The US Turning Into A Christofascist State? By Chris Hedges, The Real
News. PopularResistance.org (10-29-23). Jeff Sharlet has spent two decades
covering the intersection of extreme Christian nationalism and the far-right.
In his new book, Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, he gives
snapshots of a country rapidly devolving into a Christian fascism state.
He captures the rage, the despair, the dislocation, the alienation, the
aesthetic of violence, and the magical thinking that are the
foundations of all fascist movements—forces that are now coalescing around the
Trump-led Republican Party. The bizarre conspiracy theories and buffoonish
quality of many who lead and embrace this movement, such as Republican
Rep... -more-
CHAUNCEY DEVEGA. “Day
two of Donald Trump's dictatorship.” salon. JULY 2, 2024. Plotting out the demise of the American presidency. [A comprehensive essay every adherent of the
idea of democracy should read. D]
You will obey!
This is the mission statement for authoritarians and autocrats
such as aspiring dictator Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. Donald Trump and
his agents’ and allies’ revolutionary plans to end American democracy are not
secret: they have been publicly announced and are detailed in the Heritage
Foundation’s Project 2025, on Trump’s own campaign website as
Agenda 47,
and throughout the right-wing “news” media disinformation echo chamber. And
now blessed by the highest court in the
land.
These enemies of American democracy would not
be so bold if they were not reasonably certain of
their success.
In series of recent interviews, MSNBC host
and author Rachel Maddow has been trying to warn the American people
about the existential danger to their freedom, lives, and safety from Donald
Trump, the MAGA movement, and larger neofascist project. As Maddow told CNN’s Oliver Darcey, Trump's threats are no
joke:
I'm worried about the country broadly if we
put someone in power who is openly avowing that he plans to build camps to hold
millions of people, and to 'root out' what he's described in subhuman terms as
his 'enemy from within. Again, history is helpful here. He's not joking when he
says this stuff, and we've seen what happens when people take power proclaiming
that kind of agenda. I think there's a little bit of head-in-the-sand
complacency that Trump only intends to go after individual people he has already
singled out. Do you really think he plans to stop at well-known liberals?
Maddow continued:
It also seems pretty clear that some people in
politics might think they'll be on the safe side — that they might even benefit
from it — if they side with Trump. Ask Mike Pence about how that
works out in the end. When Trump invokes the Insurrection Act to deploy the
U.S. military against civilians on his first day in office, do you think he
then rescinds the order on day two? For that matter, what convinces you that
these massive camps he's planning are only for migrants? So, yes, I'm worried
about me — but only as much as I'm worried about all of us.
Donald Trump wants more political
violence — the Supreme Court just handed MAGA one excuse
Rachel Maddow is correct. History has repeatedly shown
that authoritarian and fascist movements almost always expand the groups of
people they target as the enemy or some type of Other. Eventually, these
movements target their own supporters in a cycle of escalating violence and
suffering, as they finally, as seen in Nazi Germany, consume themselves in
destruction. Ultimately, almost all Americans are imperiled by Trumpism and
American neofascism.
One of the great failures of the mainstream news media in the
Age of Trump (and especially its
hope-peddlers, institutionalists, and professional centrists) is treating
aspiring dictator Donald Trump and the right-wing’s plan(s) to end multiracial
pluralistic democracy as a hypothetical or something imagined and fantastical
instead of as a real and present and growing danger.
In their new essay at Slate, Norm Ornstein and Dahlia Lithwick write with uncommon clarity and force about
how the news media and the country’s political class have mostly failed
in their responsibilities to warn the American people about the imminent
dangers and reality of Trumpism and American neofascism:
Americans have a normalcy bias. It
leads them to believe anyone who tells them that everything is awesome and that
a system is “holding” — even as that system is hanging together by way of
dental floss…..And many journalists have a normalcy bias so acute they wouldn’t
know how to cover an authoritarian takeover if it meant that one of the two
presidential candidates threatened jail for his political opponents—even as he
continues to refer to these journalists as “the enemy of the people.” (My
emphasis added) It also means that they tend to cover “Trump convicted on 34
felony counts” in terms of “how much would this story make us deviate from
covering a normal election?” It turns out that we’re normalizing the abnormal,
covering the election as a horse race between democracy and illiberalism
without mentioning illiberalism or considering the stakes and the consequences,
and repeatedly applying a false equivalence to Trump and Biden…. The signals
are flashing red that our fundamental system is in danger. “The system is
holding” is not a plan for a knowable future. It never was.
What are the specifics of Project 2025, Agenda 47,
and the larger right-wing plot to end American democracy? These plans include
removing any checks and balances on Dictator Trump and his regime by
purging any members of the bureaucracy who are deemed to be disloyal, i.e. they place the
Constitution and the rule of law above personal fealty to Trump and the MAGA
movement. The Department of Justice will also be politicized and used to attack
the enemies of the Trump regime. . . .
Subscribe today to support Salon's progressive journalism
The Republican Party will basically be made into the
country’s official national party. Voting for the Democrats or other political
parties that are deemed to be a threat to the MAGA movement will be made
prohibitively difficult through voter intimidation, nullification and
purges. White Christianity will be made into America’s official state
religion. The civil rights of Black and brown people, the LGBTQ community, and
women will be severely curtailed. Women will have their reproductive rights and
freedoms taken away. There will be mass deportations and concentration camps
targeting non-white migrants and refugees. Homeless people and other
“undesirables” will also be imprisoned in these camps. As promised, Trump and
his forces will target the human “vermin” who are polluting the “blood” of the
nation, including but not be limited to non-whites, Muslims, Jews, and disabled
people.
The United States military will be ordered to occupy
Democrat-led cities and other “blue” parts of the country to combat
"crime." There will be a national “patriotic” education program where
dissent and intellectual freedom and otherwise challenging
“conservative”/neo-fascist orthodoxy and dogma will not be allowed. High-quality public education will be
ended and replaced with indoctrination programs to create compliant subjects who lack the intellectual training to be
critical thinkers and responsible citizens in a real democracy. Universities
and colleges will be targeted with censorship, lawsuits and other efforts to
defund and close them down – as well as to threaten and intimidate faculty and
administrators – if they do not sufficiently support the Trump regime and the
larger right-wing reactionary and revolutionary project.
Freedom of the press and freedom of speech will be severely
limited. President Biden and other leading Democrats, Republicans deemed to be
disloyal, and any other individuals and groups who are targeted as the enemy
will face the possibility of being put in prison for “treason” and then being
executed. Donald Trump and his propagandists and other agents and allies have
repeatedly made such explicit threats and promises of “revenge” and
“retribution”. As part of that project, Trump will pardon the January 6 terrorists
(a group he describes as “soldiers” and “heroes”) and other violent right-wing
extremists who will then become his personal brownshirts.
Donald Trump will personally exercise control
over the United States economy by making himself the de facto head of the Federal Reserve board. Trump, like other
autocrats and authoritarians, will use federal tax policy and other laws to
reward his business allies. In turn, these business interests will give Trump
and his family and other designated recipients vast sums of money. Trump’s first
term in office was but a preview of the vast corruption that will take place
when/if he takes power in 2025. To that point, at a fundraising event, the former
president recently told fossil fuel industry executives to give him one billion
dollars. In
return, they will be permitted to pollute and ruin the world.
There are prominent voices among the news media and political
class (and general public) who will push back that this is all “hysterical”,
“doomsaying”, and that “the institutions” and “the rule of law” will stop
aspiring dictator Donald Trump and Project 2025 and his Agenda 47 and the other
plans to end the country’s democracy. Plus, Trump could not implement his
desire to become a dictator during his first regime because he is “stupid” and
“disorganized” and his Jan. 6 coup failed, and he is now a convicted felon
which all means that the “guardrails held”. And of course, there is this
talking point: the American people are basically good! Donald Trump is a bad
man! The American people will get it right because they always do in the end!
Such responses and denials are so much hopium happy pill
balderdash and immature thinking that are at odds with reality as it actually
exists.
The following new interview in Rolling Stone with
Trump MAGA operatives should sober up such voices – it will not.
“OF COURSE WE aren’t fu**ing bluffing.” That’s
the message one close Trump adviser and former administration official — who
requested anonymity to speak candidly — wants to get across to the press and
public, when asked about Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign vows of “retribution,”
unprecedented force, and militaristic action.
Indeed, this sentiment is shared widely among
the upper echelon of Trumpland and the MAGAfied Republican Party, with various
officials and conservatives with a direct line to the former president
insisting that so-called “moderates” or alleged “establishment” types will be
tamed or purged, if Trump retakes power next year.
Rolling Stone spoke with a dozen sources who
are playing roles in Trump’s “government-in-waiting” or are in regular contact
with the ex-president, including GOP lawmakers, Trump advisers, MAGA policy
wonks, conservative attorneys, and former and current Trump aides. They
universally stress that the former (and perhaps future) U.S. president and top
allies are serious about following through on his extreme campaign pledges.
These promises run the gamut from siccing active duty military units on not
just American cities but also Mexican territory, all the way to prosecuting and
potentially imprisoning Trump foes.
Rolling Stone continues, "Yes, we do really want to burn it all down,”
says another Republican close to Trump, referring to the so-called GOP
“establishment” remnants who may wish to shackle Trump’s hard-right impulses.
When asked about potential court challenges in a Trump second term, this source
simply replies: 'Who cares?”'
Are you afraid? You should be.
Where is the massive public resistance to aspiring Dictator
Donald Trump and the other neofascist forces and enemies of American democracy
and freedom? As compared to how Europeans are responding to ascendant
neofascism in their own respective countries, the mobilization (or lack
thereof) by the American people can reasonably be described as pitiful. On
this William Bunch writes at the Philadelphia Inquirer:
With far-right populist movements and
strongman leaders on the rise across the globe in 2024, France’s marchers
aren’t unique in fighting back. Earlier this year in Germany, large crowds took
to the streets to voice their opposition to their country’s up-and-coming
ultraright movement, Alternative for Germany (AfD). For many critics in
Germany, AfD — with 16% of the vote in recent elections for the European
Parliament — carries dangerous echoes of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party, which
plunged their country into World War II and executed the Holocaust against
Jews.
The first part of this story should sound
familiar to U.S. voters. Donald Trump’s Republican Party is running in November
on a mass deportation proposal that would round up a million or more immigrants
in the dead of night and ship them to large, sweltering detention camps on the
southern border. Trump’s anti-immigrant plan — a first cousin to the extreme
nativism of France’s RN or Germany’s AfD — is just one chapter in a 900-page
blueprint for an American dictatorship called Project 2025 that would guide a
second Trump administration.
So ... where are the protesters? . . . .
Read more: Dr. Phil's staged interview with
Donald Trump is a sign of the grim political theater to come. "An expectation of
redemption": Trump is fueling MAGA's revenge fantasy. Trump is conditioning MAGA for the
next stage.
Chauncey DeVega is a senior politics writer
for Salon. His essays can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com. He also hosts a weekly
podcast, The Chauncey DeVega Show. Chauncey can be followed
on Twitter and Facebook.
MORE
FROM CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
Related Topics ------------------------------------------
Agenda 47 Commentary Democracy Crisis Donald Trump Election Fascism President Biden Project 2025 Rachel Maddow Stochastic Terrorism Related:
How endless war has
reshaped America by ANDREA MAZZARINO -
TOMDISPATCH.COM
Trump
taints Memorial Day by BRIAN KAREM
Bragg
establishes a crucial pattern CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
Farewell to THE
PUBLIC EYE
I continue to prepare to unpack and pack to move from my
home. Today I opened a box of my cache
of the no longer published journal dedicated to exposing US right wing
government repression: The Public Eye.
A sad loss. Many of our
barriers against fascism have already collapsed (Z Magazine!) One might say, of course or Trump couldn’t
have won twice. Adolescents go viral
over a bird’s poop, but not enough citizens saw the urgent importance of early
resistance to the growing proto-fascism emerging full-bloom in Donald Trump’s
Republican party to keep The Public Eye alive. Here's a sampling of titles 2007-12. 2007:
“The Libertarian Theocrats: R.J. Rushdoony, Pres. Bush, and the GOP. “ “Legacies
of Lynching: An Interview with On the Courthouse Lawn author Sherrilyn
Ifill.” “Secrecy, an Ally of an Imperial
Presidency,” “Government Secrecy: Decisions without Democracy” by People for
the American Way. Farewell The Public
Eye, we need you today more than ever, resistance is harder without
you.
RESISTANCE
But other Watchers are stepping up.
Henry Giroux. “Echoes
of Hitler and Pinochet: How Trump’s Policies Resurrect State Terror by Henry A. Giroux, December 4, 2025, Z Net. https://znetwork.org/author/henrya-henrya/ Also pub. in LA Progressive. [This article has appeared in several
venues. I read it in VFP’s Peace and
Planet News (Winter 2026) under the title of “Echoes of Hitler and
Pinochet.” Giroux has published over 40
widely admired books. D]
America’s fascist
dress rehearsal including torture, dehumanization, and the collapse of
democratic norms are no longer theoretical—they’re preparing for the opening
act.
We inhabit a
historical moment that resurrects, with chilling familiarity, the state
terrorism once made visible under Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, Pinochet, and
other dictators who transformed cruelty into a governing philosophy. Central to
such regimes lies a single, devastating truth: the law collapses the moment
violence becomes its substitute. In this descent, due process evaporates,
political opponents are rebranded as “terrorists,” and violence becomes
the organizing principle of power. Independent media
are smeared or silenced, universities are targeted for their critical
capacities, and the spectacle of brown-shirted, goose-stepping thugs hunting
down racialized others slips back into public view as a normalized, even
celebrated, form of civic life.
Policies soaked in
blood are repackaged as entertainment, folded into a culture industry that
echoes the aestheticized fascism of Leni
Riefenstahl, spectacles designed
to numb, seduce, and train the public in the pleasures of violence. The
brutality unleashed by the Trump administration against critics, immigrants,
cities, political enemies, and so-called terrorists is more than an echo of
fascism’s mobilizing passions; it is a signal of what is to
come. Its endpoint can be found in the concentration camps and gulags of the
20th century. And the road to the camps always begins the same way: with the
brutalization of the innocent in modern-day torture chambers.
This is the central
lesson of the illegal abduction and exile of Venezuelans to one of the most
notorious prisons in El Salvador—a maximum-security torture chamber run
by Nayib
Bukele. It is a canary in
the coal mine, a rehearsal for the next stage of violence that will be
unleashed on Americans. More than 200 Venezuelan migrants were seized and sent
to a notorious maximum-security torture dungeon in El Salvador run by Nayib Bukele, a ruthless dictator, punished not for crimes, but for the ink on their skin. Their tattoos were read as threats, their bodies as evidence.
Later, they were deported to Venezuela as part of a large-scale prisoner
exchange among the United States, Venezuela, and El Salvador, an arrangement
that saw ten Americans held in Venezuela freed in return for the Venezuelan
deportees.
As reported in The New York Times, many of the men testified that while imprisoned “they were
shackled, beaten, shot with rubber bullets and tear gassed until they passed
out. They said they were punished in a dark room called the island, where they
were trampled, kicked and forced to kneel for hours. One man said officers
thrust his head into a tank of water to simulate drowning. Another said he was
forced to perform oral sex on guards wearing hoods.” What emerges here is not
simply a catalogue of human-rights abuses, nor merely the grotesque suspension
of due process; it is the language of barbarism made policy, brutality elevated
to the level of governance. These acts, carried out under the pretext of
fighting terrorism, reveal themselves for what they are: the state-sanctioned
machinery of a racialized war, a campaign of terror unleashed by the Trump
regime against immigrants. Such violence does more than break bodies, it shreds
the very fabric of a democratic society–teaching a lesson no nation should ever
teach: that some lives can be debased with impunity.
The dreams of
annihilation extend from the genocidal slaughter of indigenous populations to its updated colonial and
racialized version in American slavery, Hitler’s dreams of racial purity, and
Trump and Miller’s embrace of the delusions of white
nationalism and white
supremacy are back. The Mein Kampf dream-world of masters and servants
no longer parade as a fixed repository of history; they have become the present
modeled after history.
We live in a world in
which stupidity and cowardice no longer hide in the shadows, it now thrives in
a culture of massive inequality, precarity, racism, misogyny, and moral collapse. The vans of death are
designed not just for immigrants, trans people, and Black and brown people,
they are eager to come for anyone who does not surrender to fascist cult led by
Trump and his barbaric ilk. The horror inflicted on more than 200 Venezuelans
in Bukele’s torture chamber was not an endpoint but a prelude, an experiment in
something far more expansive and deadly.
History offers echoes
and warnings, and writers who lived through earlier dictatorships remind us of
their enduring lessons. Ariel Dorfman,
writing about the barbarous Pinochet regime, reminds us that the lessons of
history matter as both a form of moral witnessing and a source of collective
resistance. He makes clear with a sense of urgency that “that ordinary men and
women can find at the most dire and dangerous moments in their lives, the
courage and wisdom to resist injustice, so that the crimes of their day—and,
alas, of ours—need not be endlessly repeated tomorrow.” We can only hope that
in such dark times his words represent more than a warning but also a call to
action.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the
generosity of its readers.
Progressive Hub (October 21, 2025).
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‘Textbook
Authoritarianism’: Trump Aims IRS Criminal Division At Left-Leaning Groups,
Donors |
“Fascism Knocks.” 
OR Books 1-31-26
FASCISM, AMERICAN STYLE
Artwork from
THE YOUNG PERSON'S ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO AMERICAN FASCISM
SUE COE and STEPHEN F. EISENMAN
Artwork from
MUSEUM OF DEGENERATES: PORTRAITS OF THE AMERICAN GROTESQUE by
ELI VALLEY
“The Angriest Political Cartoonist in America,” —New York Magazine
FROM THE FLAG TO THE CROSS: Fascism
American Style by
ZACHARY SKLAR and MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH.
With contributions by JIM LAFFERTY, CHRIS
HEDGES, RICHARD WOLFF, DIANNE FEELEY, HENRY GIROUX, BILL MULLEN, MARGARET
KIMBERLEY, and KSHAMA SAWANT
ABOLISH ICE by NATASCHA ELENA UHLMANN..
“A concise, impassioned call to dismantle
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency at the heart of the U.S.
government's punitive immigration system."
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“The right-wing playbook exposed - but you
can stop them.” October, 2024. Dick – A guide to tyranny: Step 1 → Eviscerate the Voting Rights Act, 4
Steps to Tyranny Step 2 → Limit who has access to the ballot
box, state by state. Step 3 → Implement an authoritarian
platform like Project 2025. James (Dick), our democracy is under attack,
and it all starts with undermining our right to vote. As we approach the general election,
voter suppression tactics – like limiting ballot access and racially
gerrymandering districts to exclude people of color – have already unfolded
and are only intensifying. The ACLU is fighting to safeguard every
American's fundamental right to vote, but Congress has a job to do, too. James (Dick), this is where you come
in. We know Congress won't act without serious pressure from
constituents. Your support is urgently needed to pass the John
Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (VRAA). The VRAA will restore and
fortify the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which the hostile Supreme Court
majority undermined, ensuring equal access to the ballot box for all. Fighting for our future together, The ACLU Team |
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The other day I read an article about how Peter Thiel has been going around giving
strange speeches in which he speculates about who the Antichrist might be and
what signs we should look for to spot him if he shows up, and all I could
think of was that I Think You Should Leave skit where Tim Robinson is dressed in a hot
dog costume next to a hot dog car that had just crashed through someone’s
wall saying “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this!” It’s like the Pope going around telling
everyone he’s looking for the head of the Catholic Church.
Peter Thiel is one of the creepiest people
alive. A notoriously nasty and vindictive billionaire, Thiel is a leading architect of the modern imperial surveillance
state. His CIA-backed company Palantir has intimate ties to both the US intelligence cartel and to Israel, playing a crucial role in both the US empire’s sprawling surveillance network and Israeli atrocities against Palestinians. The Trump
administration has alarmed even the mildest empire critics with its efforts to bring the nation much further under Palantir’s
information monitoring umbrella. There was a very informative moment last year when Thiel was asked by Piers Morgan whether he agreed with the large
sector of the public who viewed the shooter of United Healthcare CEO Brian
Thompson as a hero. Thiel paused for a long time, and then
stuttered for a long time, and then eventually got out the words, “It’s, I don’t know what, what to say? I, I think I still
think you have, you should try to make an argument. And I, I think this is,
this is you should, you know, there may be things wrong with our health care
system, but you have, you have to make an argument, and you have to try to
find a way to convince people and and change, change it by by that, and this
is, you know, this is not going to work.” They know. The plutocrats are acutely aware
that we can get rid of them whenever we want and end the system which
empowers them. They think about it a whole lot more than most of us do. It’s
never too far from their thoughts. They know there are a lot more of us than
there are of them, and that their abuse ends whenever we decide we’ve had
enough. Oil on canvas. Caitlin’s Newsletter is a
reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work,
consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. All works co-authored with my husband Tim
Foley. |
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Fascism Needs Financing
John Miller. “How the Rich Got Richer.” Dollars & Sense. August
14, 2025.
As more and more pass-through business income goes to the
super-rich, the income share of the top 1% doubles.
“Why I Joined the DSA” by Lindsey Boylan. The Indypendent. August
12, 2025.
Not only is everything about DSA so unlike my experience
working for Cuomo, it is so disparate from my experience of being abandoned by
my own party, the Democratic Party of New York.
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“Anti-fascist
rallies take the streets away from the racists.” Editor. mronline.org (8-11-24). Counterfire members attended demonstrations
across the country and sent the following reports of the heartening
mobilisations against racism and fascism. |
Originally published: Counterfire on August 8, 2024 by Counterfire Staff (more by Counterfire) | (Posted Aug
10, 2024)
Culture, Inequality, Movements, RaceEurope, GlobalNewswire
Dozens of
counter-protests sprung up across the country in response to widely reported
far-right riots planned for Wednesday night. Across the country, anti-racist
activists vastly outnumbered the far-right, and in many towns and cities, the
far-right failed to turn up at all.
Fear had been building
all day, with police forces reporting over 100 planned far-right riots at
various immigration advice centres, immigration lawyers’ offices and hotels
housing asylum seekers. Towns were boarded up in preparation for disorder and
violence and mosques were implementing extra security, given the Islamophobic
violence seen in the past week.
Instead, towns and
cities were packed with anti-racists, from Walthamstow to Liverpool and
Brighton to Newcastle. The far-right, racist mobs turned out to be a very small
number of individuals in many places and in some places, no one turned up at
all. It represents a huge victory for the anti-racists and while the far-right
threat is not gone by any means, this is a very significant pushback on the
streets. . . .MORE
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RESISTING THE RIGHT:
How to Survive the
Gathering Storm by ROBERT EDWARDS. Foreword by JAMES CARROL.
“Combines the revelations of unfolding tragedy
with the artistry of a story-teller” —Bill Moyers.
“Profoundly
disturbing” —Kai Bird.
Josh Fernandez. The Hands That Crafted the Bomb: The
Making of a Lifelong Antifascist. PM Press, 2024.
Josh Fernandez is a community college
professor in Northern California who finds himself under investigation for
“soliciting students for potentially dangerous activities” after starting an
antifascist club on campus.
As Fernandez spends the year defending his
job, he reflects on a life lived in protest of the status quo, swept up in
chaos and rage, from his childhood in Boston dealing with a mentally ill father
and a new family to a move to Davis, California, where, in the basement shows
of the early ’90s, Nazi boneheads proliferated the music scene, looking for
heads to crack. His crew’s first attempts at an antifascist group fall short
when a member dies in a knife fight.
A born antiauthoritarian, filled with an
untamable rage, Fernandez rails against the system and aggressively chooses the
path of most resistance. This leads to long spates of living in his car, strung
out on drugs, and robbing the whiteboys coming home from the clubs at
night. He eventually realizes that his rage needs an outlet and finds
relief for his existential dread in the form of running. And fighting Nazis.
Fernandez cobbles together a life for himself as a writing professor, a
facilitator of a self-defense collective, a boots-on-the-ground participant in
Antifa work, and a proud father of two children he unapologetically raises to
question authority.
Praise
“Fernandez is scathing on the corporate-minded
liberals who talk about equity and diversity, antiracism and gay rights but
can’t deal with people actually defending themselves or challenging authority.
What he offers instead isn’t heroics or militant slogans or even measured
analysis—it’s the messy story of a ‘fucked up person’ trying
to ‘channel rage into something less destructive,’ a guy who tends to
run face-first into danger but also has the good sense to run away screaming
when confronted with a knife-wielding racist. Fernandez’s account of violence,
trauma, and loneliness is hard to read in places, but there’s an underlying
sweetness here, a hopefulness about flawed people helping each other out, a
sense that if we can get past the lies, we can remake this world together.”
—Matthew N. Lyons, author of Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far
Right’s Challenge to State and Empire
“‘I had a keen sense of right and wrong from
an early age and simply preferred to do the wrong thing’ says Josh Fernandez
who debuts with a force, rigor, and candor that punches you in the gut. As a
trenchant critique of neoliberalism’s facade which pays lip service to
diversity and equity in academia, this memoir fights fire with fire, rage with
rage. Fernandez holds an unflinching mirror to people and institutions who
think good intentions are enough and arms a reader with a language ‘to defend
themselves as the world turns in the last gasp of white supremacy.’ This book
disrupts with the incandescent lyricism of a poet’s eye and unearths beauty in
the darkest moments of solitude, longing, and loss. ‘Some see me as a good
man,’ says Fernandez, ‘so I remind them I am not. Some see me as evil, so I
show them why they are wrong. I am the sum of my life, little hands tinkering
away to make me better, my own hands fixing their work as I go.’ Put simply,
this book is a verb, kindling to burn the house down.”
—Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, author of Children of the Land and Cenzontle
“The Hands That Crafted the Bomb is
nothing less than incendiary, a memoir as timely and vital as it is irreverent,
as gritty, and uncomfortable as it is necessary. Josh Fernandez is punk as
fuck!”
—Jonathan Evison, New York Times best-selling author of All
About Lulu, West of Here, The Revised Fundamentals of
Caregiving, This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!, and Lawn
Boy
“The Hands That Crafted the Bomb really
brought back memories for me, but also hit home the kind of fight we face
today. Today’s neo-fascists are more emboldened but this account from someone
that has been on the frontlines of fighting them for decades is a good roadmap
for those who wish to continue it. It shows the major hazards along the way,
namely the threats to one’s own security in life, but overall shows the
benefits which ultimately what matters. Don’t sleep on this!”
—Daryle Lamont Jenkins, executive director of One People’s Project
MORE BOOKs on Resistance
Sobering
Reality: Trump WAS ELECTED
Joel Westheimer .
“The Hardest Part of Fighting Fascism Comes After the Fascists Have
Fallen.” Truthout (1-31-26).
Having lived in Argentina after dictatorship, I know
restoring democracy requires far more than just deposing fascists.
GLOBAL FASCISM
(7 articles and 2 reviews)
“Until Tomorrow,
Comrades: An Antifascist Novel
in Brilliant English Translation” BYJacques LaPere (December 5, 2023)
What lessons can be drawn from the struggle against fascism in
the previous century? One answer, Jacques LaPere writes, can be found the new
English translation of Portuguese antifascist Manuel Tiago’s Until
Tomorrow, Comrades. | more…
José Luis Granados Ceja, Scheer Post. Popular Resistance.org
(8-11-24). The latest chapter of Israel’s
occupation of Palestine has raged on for nearly the last year, marking a
significant shift in the decades-long clash that has already initiated the
demystification of the mythology behind Israel. Truth continues to be the first
casualty of war in this particular struggle, as it has been massacred, through
the killings of journalists in Gaza and the censorship of dissidents,
throughout the conflict along with the Palestinians themselves.
Unfortunately for Israel, however, the state’s lies and brutality this time are
too severe to escape the eyes of the global stage, and even its own
people. -more-
José Luis Granados Ceja.
“Progressive Leaders Across the Americas Unite
Against Growing Global Fascism.” Truthout. August 12, 2025.
Portside Snapshot (8-18-25).
Mexican Senate President Gerardo Fernández Noroña said the
two defining features of the rising fascist threat in the world were the
suffering inflicted on Palestinians and the abuse of migrants by the U.S.
Dossier
no. 79: “To Confront Rising Neofascism, the Latin American Left Must Rediscover
Itself.” Editor.
mronline.org (8-16-24).
The Tricontinental presents
a broad overview of the Latin American far right’s political, economic, and
cultural programs and how the absence of a real left political project that
secures better living conditions has thrown different fractions of the working
class into the grip of neofascism.
The
Hidden Forces Behind The UK Race Riots
By
Kit Klarenberg, MintPress News. Popular Resisstance.org (8-11-24). Ever since July 29, Britain has been plunged
into crisis, with incendiary far-right riots sending towns and cities across
the country spiraling into states of emergency. Vast mobs of armed, angry
thugs, motivated by racist, Islamophobic animus, have vandalized homes,
property and places of worship, violently clashed with police, and targeted
hotels housing refugees with arson attacks in apparent stabs at mass murder.
Hundreds of arrests have been made, and counter-protesters have taken to the
streets in profusion to counter the upsurge of hatred. -more-
|
“Why Americans
should be worried by the rise in British fascism.” Editor. mronline.org
(8-11-24). The racist pogroms on the streets of Britain
are the result of British support for genocide in Palestine and the
construction of a “migrant threat”. |
European Dictatorships: Spain
“U.S. Fighters in the Spanish Civil
War: A Left Legacy in the Fight Against Fascism” BY Roger
Bybee.
Brigadistas: An American Anti-Fascist in the
Spanish Civil War is a page-turner of a graphic novel, illuminating
the courage and commitment of young Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,
who put their lives on the line against fascism in Spain. The Brigadistas left
behind a profound legacy of courage and international solidarity for the U.S.
left that still resonates today.
From Weimar to Gaza
“The Global 1933.” Editor.
mronline.org (10-19-23).
Originally published: Resumen: Latinoamericano and the
Third World on October 16, 2023 by Gustavo Petro
(more by Resumen: Latinoamericano and the
Third World) (Posted Oct 18, 2023). [Petro is the President of Colombia.} WarGaza, Global, Israel, Middle
East, PalestineNewswire. The barbarism of consumption based on the
death of others leads us to an unprecedented rise of fascism, and thus to the
death of democracy and freedom. It is barbarism, or global 1933, as I call it.
1933 was the year when Hitler rose to power.
What we see in Palestine will also be the sufferings in the world of all the
peoples of the South. . . . MORE
click on title.
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