Tag: Republican Party

Nazis invade Drag Queen Story Hour in Ohio, with Republican politician’s support / by David Hill

With pistols on their hips and swastika flags in hand, Nazis, Proud Boys, and other white supremacists invaded a Drag Story Hour in Wadsworth, Ohio, to stir up hatred. | Photos via Twitter

Originally published in the People’s World on March, 17, 2023

WADSWORTH, Ohio—The playground equipment stood empty at a public park here on Saturday, March 11, as more than a dozen Nazis stood at attention and bellowed in unison multiple rounds of full-throated “Sieg heil!” salutes, aping Hitler’s legions of 80 years ago.

They were part of a large crowd that had gathered ostensibly for the “protection” of children who were there to participate in a reading group. The supposed threat endangering the kids of Wadsworth? Drag queens armed with children’s storybooks.

Approximately 50 participants gathered for the “Rock and Roll Drag Queen Story Hour,” which included a group reading of a children’s novel, “Elle the Humanist,” followed by “a Rock-n-Roll celebration of drag and life’s beautiful diversity,” according to the event’s organizers. The event was planned as a fundraiser for a local LGBTQ charity in remembrance of the victims of the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs last November.

Wadsworth City Council had granted a permit for the event earlier in the week, although the council president subsequently suggested that legislation would soon be introduced to prohibit “adult-type entertainment that involves children” in the future.

Wadsworth Brewing Company had withdrawn its commitment to host the event after receiving multiple threats, leading the organizers to apply for a permit to gather at Wadsworth Memorial Park.

The reading group and drag event was met by the organized vitriol of at least 200 fascists, Christian fundamentalists, Proud Boys, Patriot Front, White Lives Matter, and various unaffiliated opponents of LGBTQ rights. Attendees reported a large number of cars with out-of-state license plates in the parking lot.

Both local and national right-wing groups had planned the coordinated intimidation of participants in the Rock and Roll Humanist Drag Queen Story Hour for weeks leading up to the event.

Prominent right-wing organizers included Republican politicians such as Kristopher Anderson, candidate for the Ohio State House of Representatives in 2022. Anderson and his supporters shouted slogans against so-called “grooming” alongside proponents of overt Nazi imagery, open racism, and homophobia. At least one member of Anderson’s group was detained by police after assaulting an LGBTQ rights supporter.

Placed alongside his current work organizing mob intimidation of LGBTQ people, Anderson’s previously stated political positions plainly illustrate the alliance between fascist violence and pro-business policymaking: “Tax climate, regulatory environment, labor laws, and workforce development are all issues for businesses that Kristopher can help address at the State House.”

Local Republican politician Kristopher J. Anderson offered support to the right-wing forces that invaded the event. A prominent Trump supporter, Anderson ran for the state House of Representatives in 2022. | via Twitter

Video captured at the event circulated widely on social media throughout the weekend. Most striking were images of local police standing in defense of a large contingent of white men in red and black outfits carrying a large banner stating “There Will Be Blood” in an elaborate gothic font. The men chanted Nazi slogans and generally displayed belligerent and intimidating behavior for a contingent of cameras.

Other prominent imagery referred to the right-wing mythology of “grooming,” using a variety of homophobic and racist slurs. Before conservatives engineered their fake anti-drag queen hysteria, the term “grooming” was typically only used to refer to the practice of predators who prepared children and other vulnerable people for sexual abuse.

Men in tactical gear circulated throughout the large crowd. Ohio allows the open carry of firearms in many public places; it was unclear how many opponents of the Drag Story Hour may have been armed.

The four-hour demonstration came amidst a coordinated national right-wing campaign targeting the LGBTQ community with intimidation and violence under the auspices of concern for child welfare. Recent survey data suggests that sympathy for these ideas has permeated a large proportion of the Republican voter base, with as many as 45% of Republican voters agreeing with the statement that discussions on sexual orientation and gender identity represent “grooming” behavior.

The violent persecution of homosexuality was one of the first campaigns of the Nazi Party and its supporters after their ascension to power with the support of finance capital in Germany in the 1930s. In addition to the near total destruction of the German LGBTQ community, the Hitler movement galvanized and normalized the use of state violence to dispossess vulnerable individuals and was subsequently extended to an even wider population.

David Hill is a member of the Mike Gold Collective in Columbus. He follows labor, housing, policing, and workers’ issues in central Ohio.

Right wing’s anti-LGBTQ hate creates atmosphere for Colorado Springs shooting / C.J. Atkins

Tyrice Kelley, center right, a performer at Club Q, is comforted during a service held at All Souls Unitarian Church following an overnight fatal shooting at the gay nightclub, in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Sunday, Nov 20, 2022. | P. Seibold / The Gazette via AP

At least five dead. More than two dozen others injured. The LGBTQ community again shattered.

The mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs late Saturday night has echoes of the June 2016 Pulse nightclub attack in Orlando, where 49 people were murdered. We can only be grateful the damage done by the gunman in this latest incident, Anderson Lee Aldrich, was more limited.

The date of the attack—the eve of Trans Day of Remembrance, honoring the victims of anti-trans violence—seems to have been chosen intentionally.

Reports have it that two people present sprang into action to defend the crowd as bullets tore through the air, disarming the shooter, beating him with his own gun, and restraining him until police arrived.

“It’s an incredible act of heroism,” Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers told the Associated Press. Police Chief Adrian Vasquez said, “We owe them a great debt of gratitude.”

Certainly, their resistance should be applauded, but no one out for a night at the bar with friends should have to be on edge, prepared to fight for their lives at any moment.

Seth Stang, a 34-year-old trans man who counts two friends among the dead, said outside a makeshift memorial at Club Q on Sunday:

“It’s like having a bucket of hot water dumped on you…. I’m just tired of running out of places where we can exist safely.”

But that is the reality for queer people in America when a constant bombardment of hatred and scapegoating is rained down on them by the fascist wing of the Republican Party and its Evangelical base.

That point was driven home for this writer just this past summer in small-town Oklahoma, where, for the first time, I saw the host of a drag show wearing a pistol in a holster on his hip. The absurd thing is that such an action didn’t seem unwarranted by anyone present. It was a symbol of the normalization of living in constant fear, like children accustomed to the notion that a school shooting could occur in their classrooms.

Authorities say Aldrich has been tight-lipped since being taken into custody, sharing no hints of his motive. Speculation is of course swirling as to whether family politics might have played a role; his grandfather is California State Assemblyman Randy Voepel, a confirmed MAGA Trumpite.

Voepel cheered on Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt, comparing it to the American Revolutionary War. “This is Lexington and Concord. First shots fired against tyranny,” Voepel told the San Diego Union-Tribune at the time. “Tyranny will follow in the aftermath of the Biden swear-in on January 20th.”

Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert regularly spews anti-trans and anti-gay hatred.

Even if Voepel’s politics did influence his grandson’s decision to become a mass murderer, the California lawmaker is just one soldier in the right-wing’s army of hate. All the leaders of this fascist movement have blood on their hands after what happened at Club Q.

Rep. Lauren Boebert, who represents Colorado in the House of Representatives, offered her “prayers” Sunday morning. Typical. She has spent years vilifying LGBTQ people, calling Muslim members of Congress “the jihad squad,” celebrating gun culture, and spreading QAnon conspiracy nonsense. But when the violence finally explodes, she pretends to be the caring Christian.

Boebert was intimately involved in the Jan. 6 effort to destroy U.S. democracy. She led a pre-attack tour for one of the groups that invaded the Capitol, and she voted against certifying the 2020 election results. She barely won re-election in the midterms earlier this month, nearly becoming a casualty when the GOP’s “red wave” failed to materialize.

Anti-gay and anti-trans rhetoric has been a building block of Boebert’s political career. She called the Equality Act—a bill which would make LGBTQ rights permanent—an effort to enforce the “supremacy of gays, lesbians, and transvestites.”

Boebert says LGBTQ people are “perverting” America and that no kid should be allowed to come out until they are 21. When schools offer LGBTQ-inclusive curricula, she calls it a case of “the Left grooming our kids” sexually. “Take your children to CHURCH, not drag bars,” she tweeted.

The rogues’ gallery of Republican hatemongers includes many more besides Boebert, though. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, determined to out-Trump Trump, pushed his “Don’t Say Gay” bill into law just months ago, making it illegal to mention sexual orientation or gender identity in the classroom. He’s almost guaranteed to seek the Republican nomination for president in 2024.

The right-wing propaganda machine amplifies and repeats the hatred of these elected officials. Fox News commentators Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham regularly make anti-trans and anti-gay hit jobs a feature of their programs. “Liberals are sexually grooming elementary students,” scream the TV headlines. “Puberty blockers are not healthcare.”

The constant promotion of a political agenda saturated with the demonization of a particular group and then the outbreak of violence against that group cannot be separated. One begets the other—just look at the history of fascism.

There is a direct correlation between the far-right, Evangelical wing of the Republican Party waging a “culture war” against trans kids and drag queens and the shooting that happened in Colorado Springs. The leaders of the GOP helped cause this.

As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Sunday, referring to Boebert and others in the GOP, “You have played a major role in elevating anti-LGBT+ rhetoric and anti-trans lies while spending your time in Congress blocking even the most common-sense gun safety laws. You don’t get to ‘thoughts and prayers’ your way out of this. Look inward and change.”

But we have no reason to expect Boebert and the rest to change their ways. Their entire careers have been built on this kind of hatred and division. As for gun laws, with a Republican majority set to take charge of the House in January, there will be no movement on that issue, either.

The rainbow flag flies at half-mast with a black mourning banner attached. | AP

But even the gun laws already on the books can only work if local law enforcement and prosecutors enforce them. A year and a half ago, Aldrich, this weekend’s shooter, was arrested for threatening his mother with a bomb. The entire neighborhood had to be evacuated, and police spent hours negotiating with Aldrich to convince him to surrender.

But did prosecutors charge him with kidnapping or menacing? Apparently not. And did authorities trigger Colorado’s “red flag” law, an ordinance allowing them to seize the weapons of persons deemed a danger to themselves or others? No. Aldrich was allowed to keep the guns and ammunition he possessed when he took his mother captive.

No one can say whether triggering the red flag law against Aldrich would have prevented his attack on Club Q with an AR15-style assault rifle, but there’s the possibility five lives might have been saved.

Today, we mourn the lives lost in yet another mass murder. Six years after the Pulse massacre, the amount of work to be done to combat the hatred of the right is even greater.

The Equality Act still hasn’t made it out of Congress, stalled in the Senate since February 2021. Anti-trans and anti-gay bills litter the agendas of state legislatures across the country. Too many transphobic, homophobic, racist, and Islamophobic politicians and preachers still have platforms to spread their hatred.

“I could have lost my life—over what?” asked survivor Joshua Thurman, who hid in a dressing room to escape the gunman Saturday night. “What was the purpose? We were just enjoying ourselves. We weren’t out harming anyone. We were in our space, our community, our home.”

But this is not just a community of victims. Queer people—in all their racial, ethnic, national, sexual, and gender diversity—are also fighters. We have to be in order to survive.

While Republicans like Boebert and DeSantis mimic figures like Hitler and Goebbels, we should look to the queer anti-fascists who fought back against these Republican role models. People like Willem Arondeus, an openly gay member of the anti-Nazi resistance in German-occupied Holland during World War II. Because of his sexuality, for decades his name rarely appeared in the history books.

However, Arondeus was one of the most dedicated and creative organizers of the Dutch Underground. In 1943, he and a group of resistance fighters—including other gay and lesbian comrades—blew up a public records building containing documents that the Gestapo used to track down Dutch Jews and other targeted groups.

Willem Arondeus, a queer anti-fascist fighter in the anti-Nazi underground in the Netherlands during World War II. At his execution, he defiantly declared: ‘Homosexuals are not cowards.’ | United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Arrested and put on trial, Arondeus remained defiant. His message to the fascists just before they executed him: “Homosexuals are not cowards.”

That is still true today, as the two courageous Club Q patrons who took down Aldrich in the midst of his shooting spree showed. Queer people are not cowards, and we will unite with other oppressed people and allies to take down those who want to commit violence against us. And using our ballots, we will take down those who encourage that violence—in 2024 and every time the polls are open.

As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article reflects the opinions of its author.

C.J. Atkins is the managing editor at People’s World. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from York University in Toronto and has a research and teaching background in political economy and the politics and ideas of the American left. In addition to his work at People’s World, C.J. currently serves as the Deputy Executive Director of ProudPolitics.

People’s World, November 21, 2022, https://www.peoplesworld.org/

Republicans Will Never Stop Trying to Destroy Social Security / by Ben Beckett

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) speaks during a news conference with House Republicans outside the US Capitol on March 11, 2021. (Drew Angerer / Getty Images)

GOP leaders are threatening to cut Social Security and Medicare if they take back the House this fall. Elected Democrats won’t have the will or power to stop them unless ordinary Americans are willing to put up a real fight.

If Republicans take back the House this fall, they want to cut Social Security and Medicare. And according to Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy in an interview last week, they’re prepared to shut down the basic functions of government by holding the national debt ceiling hostage in order to do it.

That would be catastrophic for everyone who will rely on either program at some point in their lives — which is to say virtually the entire country. Given the two programs’ immense popularity, successfully undermining them would also be a blow to the very idea of public programs as ensurers of human welfare and dignity.

Social Security remains immensely popular. Eighty two percent of respondents were in favor of expanding benefits in a June 2022  poll, and less than a quarter were in favor of privatizing even part of the program. Similarly, significant majorities of voters support expanding Medicare to cover more forms of care as well as more people.

That might explain why McCarthy’s only option to cut the programs amounts to blackmailing the nation. Refusing to raise the debt limit, as Republicans have repeatedly done in the past, forces most parts of the government to shut down entirely. That creates difficult situations for millions of people, especially when the shutdowns last for an extended period. But because Republicans’ long-term strategy is based on degrading the government’s ability to carry out most of its functions, they generally feel they have little to lose from shutting it down.

“[I]f people want to make a debt ceiling [for a longer period of time], just like anything else, there comes a point in time where, okay, we’ll provide you more money, but you got to change your current behavior,” McCarthy said, later refusing to rule out cuts to either program when asked.

Other House Republicans are gunning for a fight even more strongly. “You have two simple leverage points: when government funding comes up and when the debt ceiling is debated,” Texas Republican Chip Roy said.

So far, to their credit, Democrats are not taking the bait. “I will not cut Social Security. I will not cut Medicare, no matter how hard they work at it,” President Joe Biden said last week. House Democrats have also seized on the issue in the final weeks of campaigning, promising to protect the programs against McCarthy’s and the GOP’s threats.

But it would be a mistake to get too comfortable. At the same event, Biden also ruled out the idea of eliminating the annual debt ceiling altogether, which would remove Republicans’ leverage to cut the programs. That idea is supported by Biden’s treasury secretary Janet Yellen, among others.

Perhaps more significant is Biden’s long history of proposing freezes, cuts, and privatization to Social Security and Medicare. As Branko Marcetic has reported, Biden has been an active advocate for cutting the programs since the 1980s, often allying with Republicans and opposing the majority of his Democratic colleagues to try to do so.

Biden campaigned on raising the retirement age when he ran for president in 2008, while also saying he would “absolutely” consider cutting the programs. Notably, he did not campaign on cuts to the programs in 2020, changing his tune as Bernie Sanders attacked his record on the issue.

On multiple occasions, Biden outraged Democratic colleagues during his term as vice president when, during negotiations with Republicans, he proposed cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and other programs seemingly on his own initiative. As Marcetic put it, this behavior caused congressional Democrats at the time to “believe Biden had gone over to the [Republican] Cantor-Kyl side.”

Nor is there much reason, beyond that one quote from last week, to believe that Biden has really transformed in recent years. Biden has continued a Donald Trump program that many experts say is designed to lay the groundwork to privatize Medicare. In May, Biden nominated a longtime proponent of privatizing Social Security to the program’s advisory board.

Of course, no one who proposes cuts to the programs will call them that. They will be couched in phrases like “reform” and “strengthening.” The programs’ supposed insolvency will be presented as a given, with “reforms” the only “responsible” way to ensure their continued existence.

Facing immense pressure to get things done in a divided Congress, a notoriously difficult group of conservative Democratic senators, and a House GOP willing to crash the economy and close the government to get what it wants, how strongly would Biden really stand against cutting programs he’s said he wants to cut for forty years? The answer depends on the actions of ordinary Americans. If we want to protect Medicare and Social Security, we’ll have to prepare to mount a popular movement against the GOP’s plans.

Ben Beckett is an American writer in Vienna.

Jacobin, October 26, 2022, https://jacobin.com/

Survey Shows US Voters Want Congress to Expand—Not Cut or Privatize—Social Security / by Kenny Stancil

Activists participate in a rally urging the expansion of Social Security benefits in front of the White House on July 13, 2015 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

83% of likely voters support Democratic proposals to expand Social Security benefits while just 7% support GOP plans to end the program in five years, giving the majority party a golden opportunity to maintain control of the House and Senate.

Voters in the United States overwhelmingly support Democratic proposals to expand Social Security for all recipients to cover higher costs of living and oppose Republican proposals to completely end the federal program—established during the New Deal era to improve economic security for retirees, people with disabilities, and widows and widowers—before the end of the decade.

That’s according to a new survey conducted from June 17-21 and published Monday by Data for Progress, which found that a whopping 83% of likely voters support expanding Social Security benefits to keep up with rising costs, including 86% of Democrats, 84% of Republicans, and 79% of independents.

Nearly two-thirds (65%) of likely voters are very concerned about Congress cutting monthly cash transfers for the program’s 66 million current beneficiaries, and more than half (53%) are very concerned about lawmakers privatizing Social Security.

Privatization of the program remains unpopular across the political spectrum, with 68% of likely voters—including 75% of Democrats, 70% of Republicans, and 59% of independents—opposed to Wall Street-backed schemes that would facilitate the movement of Social Security benefits from a guaranteed government fund into the volatile stock market.

The findings of the poll should be of interest to President Joe Biden, who is hemorrhaging support among Democratic voters and has come under fire in recent weeks for nominating Andrew Biggs—an American Enterprise Institute senior fellow with a history of backing Social Security privatization—to serve on the independent and bipartisan Social Security Advisory Board.

Social Security Works, a progressive advocacy group, has highlighted Biggs’ role in the George W. Bush administration’s failed attempt to privatize the program in 2005.

While Biden pledged on the campaign trail to support an expansion of Social Security, he has previously backed slashing the program’s benefits. Biden was vice president when former President Barack Obama proposed a “grand bargain” with congressional Republicans that would have included cuts to Social Security.

Last month, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) led the introduction of the Social Security Expansion Act, which would lift the cap on income that is subject to the Social Security payroll tax and boost the program’s annual benefits by $2,400.

According to Data for Progress, 76% of likely voters—including 83% of Democrats, 73% of Republicans, and 73% of independents—support imposing, for the first time, payroll taxes on individuals with annual incomes above $400,000 per year to fund an expansion of Social Security benefits. Currently, only those making $147,000 or less are subject to the Social Security payroll tax.

Meanwhile, a little-noticed budget document published last month by the Republican Study Committee (RSC)—a group to which nearly 75% of House Republicans belong—reiterates right-wing myths that the program is headed toward insolvency and calls for raising the retirement age by three months per year through 2040. As a result, people born after 1978 would not be eligible to receive full Social Security benefits until the age of 70.

The RSC’s bid to postpone Social Security eligibility, outlined in their so-called Blueprint to Save America, is not even the most extreme GOP proposal on offer, considering what Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), has put forward.

Scott’s widely panned 12-point “Plan to Rescue America” proposes hiking taxes on the poorest 40% of U.S. households and sunsetting “all federal legislation” after five years—a move that would eliminate Social Security, Medicare, civil rights laws, and other measures unless Congress actively votes to reauthorize them.

Just 7% of likely voters support ending Social Security in five years, according to Data for Progress, which may help explain why Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) refused to endorse Scott’s policy agenda in March.

Nevertheless, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), ranking member of the powerful Senate Budget Committee, said last month during a debate with committee chair Sanders that “entitlement reform is a must,” indicating that the GOP is once again laying the groundwork to gut Social Security, Medicare, and more if it regains control of Congress in November’s pivotal midterm elections.

Likely voters, when informed that congressional Democrats are proposing to expand Social Security benefits while their Republican counterparts are proposing to swiftly terminate the program, told pollsters that they would be most likely to support a Democratic candidate over a Republican one by a margin of 55 to 31.

This suggests that campaigning on Social Security expansion could help Democrats maintain or even bolster their slim majorities in the House and Senate.

Common Dreams, July 11, 2022, https://www.commondreams.org/

The Highland Park Shooting and American Fascism Now / by Stephen F. Eisenman

Fireplug and Coneflowers in the Author’s Garden, Highland Park, Illinois, 2013. Photo: The Author.

Highland Park Memoirs

I heard about it from my daughter, Sarah, in Chicago.

“Dad, did you hear about Highland Park?” That was an ominous beginning. She continued: “There was a shooting during the 4th of July Parade. A bunch of people were killed.”

My heart sank. I lived in Highland Park for almost 15 years, from 2001-2015. Sarah too. I had been there just a few weeks ago to visit my dear neighbors Hannah and Joe, and to meet up with Sarah.

“You ok, sweetie?”

“Yeah, but it’s really bad.”

“Let me hang up and find out more.”

I looked at the NYTimes and Guardian and texted Hannah – she and her husband were out of town and ok. I told my wife Harriet, who was out pulling weeds in the garden. I was tearful; she consoled me. Though I hadn’t lived there in a while, Highland Park was a big part of my life. It was where I bought a house with my former wife in late 2001; where I ran hundreds of miles in the beautiful forest reserves; where I taught my dog Echo how to catch a frisbee; where I wrote three books; where I recovered from injuries after a bad car crash; where Sarah went through a very challenging (for all of us) adolescence; where I started a new life after my divorce; and where Harriet and I were married by a rabbi, with Echo as our witness, in 2014.

I never made many friends there, but I didn’t care about that. I had friends enough in Chicago and L.A. And then there was the gift of Hannah – a brilliant and funny art historian (U. of Illinois, Chicago), and her kind businessman husband, Joe Reinstein. Joe and I didn’t have that much in common except for being Jewish, enjoying gardening and liking to make jokes. He sounds a little bit like Jack Benny. Many of you, dear readers, won’t have a clue as to who that is, so please look him up on YouTube.

Highland Park, a city of 30,000, is about one-third Jewish. When my former wife (Catholic) and I moved up to there in 2001, some of our Northwestern University colleagues were surprised that we relocated to such a bourgeois suburb. To quiet the teasing, I told them that we moved there so I could “be among my people.” That shut everybody up. Then as now, identity politics ends discussion. In truth, though I am a cultural Jew, I haven’t stepped inside a synagogue since my bar mitzvah in 1969, not including other people’s bar mitzvahs and weddings.

Now, after the shooting, Highland Park was going to become one more of those names on a list that includes Parkland, Sandy Hook, Buffalo, and Uvalde. The grim consolation is that the list is now so long – and growing longer every day — that Highland Park will soon be displaced in memory by another mass casualty event. In a few years, it will be a footnote. But not for the people whose family members were killed or wounded; not for the town’s other residents who will remember that infamous day, and not for a north Florida transplant who remembers the place with fondness.

Outline of a critique of fascist violence

In time, we’ll find out much more about the confessed killer, Bobby Crimo. But my friend Sue Coe nailed the profile in an email she sent me before he was identified: “He will be a 20-something white male, who hunts, goes online in his bedroom, and over excites himself.  His mother/grandmother/caretaker, who he hates, does his laundry, and cooks his food.  He won’t have many friends; past fellow students will say he was a loner. Maybe there’s a manifesto, posted online, ripped off from some other moron.” She forgot to mention that he will be a Trump supporter, rare for someone his age, and rarer still in Democratic Highland Park or nearby Highwood where the killer lived with his father and uncle. Sue is clever but not clairvoyant – she described what has recently become the typical profile of the mass shooter.

Crimo may have a diagnosable psychotic illness such as schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, or delusional disorder. Alternatively, he might suffer from a less totalizing, but still debilitating mental illness such as borderline personality disorder or depression. He apparently attempted suicide in 2019. In online raps (or rants), he claimed to be compelled to kill. But whether there is a plausible diagnosis or not, the question will be the same: Why did this 21 y.o. kid decide to buy an assault weapon and kill or injure dozens of people he didn’t even know? Answers won’t be found in the DSM but in the convergence of fascism and Republican Party politics.

Fascism is a well-understood political formation, but easier to recognize in hindsight than foresight. It cannot be defined, as some have tried to do, by a delimited set of attributes, for example: 1) militarism and a culture of violence, 2) the leadership (Fuhrer) principle, 3) antagonism to democracy, 4) deferral to the authority of elites, 5) racism, 6) strict control of both gender expression and sexual reproduction, 7) denigration of science, 8) the ubiquity of lies and conspiracy theories, and 9) the bringing of government and civil society to heel in order to enforce one-party rule. The problem with this list or any other, is that it establishes an ideal type that exists nowhere except the mind of the investigator.

Then what use are the words fascist and fascism today? They serve as a warning, enabling us to recognize especially toxic political speech and behavior, and prepare ourselves for the behemoth lying in wait. Does the rampant racism, violence, corruption, and electoral fraud of the last president and current Republican Party mark a fascist turning point in the United States? Does Republican debasement of the Supreme Court – marked by its denial of women’s autonomy, endorsement of gun culture, refusal to accept EPA authority to prevent a climate catastrophe, and endorsement of a theocratic state — indicate the rise of fascism?

To be sure, U.S. capitalist democracy was deranged from the start by slavery and genocide. When those practices were ended or curbed, it was still marked by racial oppression, gross inequality, and environmental degradation. Despite that, U.S. politics has been self-correcting to a surprising degree, staving off fascism when it seemed imminent. The first Ku Klux Klan (1865-1900) was stymied by Progressive Era legislation and policing, and the second (1915-1940) by the Great Northern Migration (which depleted the Black population of the South) and by the democratic solidarity that arose after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and Germany’s declaration of war against the U.S. Fascism in other words, has frequently been incipient, but countervailing tendencies were always stronger. However, that pattern – a glide to the right matched by a lurch back to the center — may be changing.

During the last three decades or so, neo-liberal capitalism has sustained a highly productive collaboration with Christian nationalism and other versions of far-right, populist extremism. They are strange bedfellows. The goal of the first is to ensure the highest possible profits for the longest possible time, regardless of the human or environmental consequences. The climate crisis has made this stance existential. Continued economic growth and increasing profits – the lifeblood of large business enterprises — is simply incompatible with environmental responsibility. For that reason, fossil capital, along with its confederates in the weapons, aerospace, steel, and home building industries, is waging a war against the coming era of environmental regulation and economic planning that must inevitably curb growth. That’s what the recent Supreme Court decision, West Virginia vs EPA, was all about. It was a big win for capital against the environmental movement and American labor. Working people, especially the non-white sector, are the first victims of climate change. In addition, the Court’s ruling will be used to attack workplace health and safety laws.

The goal of the second group, the far-right Christian nationalists, anti-abortionists, militias, and self-proclaimed fascists, is to establish a new nation of white Christian, Aryan, or “legacy” Americans who will reclaim the power they believe was taken from them by the Jews, Blacks, feminists, and queers who sought to “replace” them. Their cultism (QAnon, Stop the Steal, anti-Vax, etc), gun-rights militancy and religious enthusiasm has little in common with the secularism and public reserve of the corporate heads, lawyers, bankers, lobbyists, and advertising executives who comprise the neoliberal faction of U.S. conservatism, but they share one fundamental principle: that the only salient economic and political unit is the individual and the family. The neoliberal faction adds a proviso — codified by the Supreme Court in Citizens United — that corporations have many of the same rights as people.

For neoliberal capital, this means that state or federal programs to regulate production, improve social welfare, and protect the environment are both non-sensical and counterproductive; they are based on the mistaken premise that societies exist and have collective interests that need to be safeguarded. For the far right — Christian nationalist, militia, anti-abortion, and the rest — exclusive focus on individuals and families means that any concatenation of social groupings that opposes their apocalyptic vision must be cast aside if not eliminated. Social movements of feminists, queers, Blacks, or any others, are anathema.

This mixture of neo-liberal and far right-populist extremism is highly volatile. It is also the basis of MAGA and Republican Party identity. When that world view is offered up by the former president and his congressional and mass-media followers and apologists, the consequences can be catastrophic: Witness the January 6 coup attempt, and the earlier, far right killings in El Paso, Pittsburgh, Poway, Buffalo, Uvalde…and now Highland Park.

MAGA triggers and the alien within

When I lived in Highland Park, I never locked my door. I know that’s a cliché about small-town life, but it was true. That doesn’t mean the practice is wise. Our house was broken into once, but instead of walking through the unlocked front door, the would-be thieves broke through a locked, glass side door. They didn’t manage to steal anything and hastily exited the front door, likely chased by Echo – notably nippy with strangers — who would not have passed up the chance to licitly bite a burglar. The police came five minutes after we called them and had great sport playing detective – dusting for fingerprints, checking for signs of forced entry, looking for shoe prints in the wet soil outside. They never caught the guys.

The idea that the Highland Park Police would ever have to deal with a murder, much less a mass murder was unimaginable to me. From 2000 to 2020, there hadn’t been a single killing in town. But everyone was aware of the threat guns posed, especially after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in December 2012. In June 2013, Highland Park’s City Council and Mayor Nancy Rotering introduced a measure banning assault weapons and large capacity magazines. I spoke in favor of the it at the June meeting dedicated to the subject, as did many others. However, there were a few who spoke up in opposition, repeating the standard NRA line that people, not guns kill people. One older woman waved a coffee mug and said it could be used as a lethal weapon – a wag near her dared her to try. Another speaker invoked the second amendment with the reverential awe usually reserved for the second commandment – people sniggered. The ban passed easily. It was unsuccessfully challenged in multiple courts, and ultimately survived a Supreme Court review – I doubt it would today.

I now wonder if the confessed killer’s father, Robert Crimo II attended that City Council meeting. He’s a gun lover and Trump supporter who helped his son obtain the rifle used in the shooting. He also ran for mayor of Highland Park in 2019 against the incumbent Mayor Rotering, losing by a margin of 2-1. In April that year, police visited the Crimo home after a report that Robert III (Bobby) had attempted suicide. No action was taken after his parents gave assurances that mental health professionals would be contacted. In September, the police again came to the Crimo household after receiving a call that Bobby had threatened to kill his family. They searched his room and found in his closet 16 knives, a dagger, and a sword. His father later that day claimed they were his, and the weapons were returned. The Highland Park Police promptly reported to the Illinois State Police that Bobby was a “clear and present danger” to himself and others. Despite that, in December 2019, the 19-year-old – who eight months earlier attempted suicide — applied for and was issued a Firearm Owner’s Identification Card (FOID). Because he was underage, the application was co-signed by his father.

The FOID application should have been denied because under state law, no gun permit can be issued to someone “whose mental condition is of such a nature that it poses a clear and present danger to the applicant, or any other person or the community.” In addition, a FOID must be denied to anyone who “has been a patient at a mental health facility in the last five years.” If Bobby’s parents had in fact contacted mental health professionals after the boy’s attempted suicide, they would have had to take him to “a mental health facility,” most likely Northshore Hospital’s Behavioral Health Center in Highland Park, just half a mile from where they lived. Apparently, both the Illinois State Police and the physician or psychologist who treated Bobby, failed to send notification to the Illinois Department of Health Services FOID reporting system.

A few days after being granted his FOID, and then again between June 2020 and September 2021, Crimo bought at least five guns, including two rifles, one of which was the semi-automatic Smith & Wesson M&P15 used in the killings. That’s similar to the guns used by the young, far-right killers in Buffalo and Uvalde. In late September 2020, Bobby attended a Trump rally in Northbook, Illinois. On January 2, 2021, four days before the capital insurrection, Crimo joined other Trump supporters to greet the soon-to-be- ex-president at an unidentified airport. On June 27, 2021, he posted a video of himself draped and dancing in a Trump flag. Sometime later, he had the number “47” tattooed on his face and painted on the side of his car. If Trump is re-elected in 2014, he will be the 47th president, though if the numbers are transposed — 7/4 – they represent the date of the Highland Park shootings.

We know less about Crimo’s actions in the weeks before the shooting, though more information may soon emerge. We know that in some of his most recent YouTube and other postings, he revealed his identification with soldiers, spies, assassins (Lee Harvey Oswald) and warriors — especially with the German SS. After the massacre in Highland Park, he drove up to another, famously Democratic Party stronghold, Madison, Wisconsin, with the intention of shooting up their July 5 parade too. Fortunately, he abandoned that plan when he got there and returned, more or less to the scene of the crime, where he was captured. Was the ongoing Trump saga – the former president’s unrelenting “stop the steal” rhetoric, claims of persecution, exhortations to “take our country back,” endorsement of the NRA, and invitations to violence – a trigger for Crimo? But if they were, why did Crimo attack innocent people at a patriotic parade? There is no obvious answer.

In Male Fantasies (1987), Klaus Theweleit described the transformation of de-commissioned German soldiers after World War I into mercenary militias called Freikorps. Those bands were responsible for political assassinations and the brutal repression of protesting German workers, communists, feminists, and social democrats. By the late ‘20s, they became the stormtroopers (Sturmabteilung) that enabled Hitler’s rise to power. Some became prominent Nazis, like Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration and death camps.

Many of the men studied by Theweleit were subjected to stern discipline as children – part of a normally pathological Prussian upbringing — and then further brutalized as soldiers in wartime trenches. Consequently, they developed a sense that they had been hollowed out, or that they had been overcome by an “alien within.” This foreign being was hungry and dangerous, and could find relief only in violence, especially against a crowd. While the solider was stern, bounded, firm and resolute, the crowd was vivid, thriving, shapeless, feminine, social, communal, and sexual – everything he was not, and it had to be destroyed.

Theweleit’s two volume book is widely cited – too widely – in studies of male sexual violence and the psychology of Nazism. There is no easy way to map a wide-ranging study of the literature the psychopathology of World War I veterans onto the mind and behavior of young, mass shooters today. But the preoccupations of the Highland Park killer – assassinations, school shootings, the SS, spies, guns, knives, and militias – suggests comparison with the young fascists in Male Fantasies who emerged in inter-war Europe, scarred and deadly dangerous, who hated crowds, and were ready to follow the orders of a charismatic leader.

Fascism, unlike Covid, can’t be diagnosed with a nose swab; but its symptoms are unmistakable and sometimes fatal. It’s fair to say it killed seven people in Highland Park and injured 30 others. It was also deadly in El Paso, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Uvalde. Urgent action is needed to stop the proliferation of assault weapons and guns with large magazines. But this essay is not about the need for gun control, or “gun safety”, essential as that is. It’s about the violence that again struck a U.S. community last week, and the need to resist the Republican far-right – both its corporate and Christian nationalist wings. Until their assault upon our health, safety, bodily autonomy, religious (or irreligious) freedom, and environmental future is stopped, the killing will continue.

Stephen F. Eisenman is Professor Emeritus of Art History at Northwestern University and the author of Gauguin’s Skirt (Thames and Hudson, 1997), The Abu Ghraib Effect (Reaktion, 2007), The Cry of Nature: Art and the Making of Animal Rights (Reaktion, 2015) and many other books. He is also co-founder of the environmental justice non-profit,  Anthropocene Alliance. He and the artist Sue Coe and now preparing for publication part two of their series for Rotland Press, American Fascism Now.

Counterpunch, July, 8, 2022, https://www.counterpunch.org/

Opinion: The Maine GOP doesn’t care about the lives of trans kids / by Ethan Strimling

Photo: A chalk drawing of the Transgender Pride Flag | MaineTransNet

In case you missed the news last week, the GOP ran one of the most disgusting culture-war ads we have seen in Maine in decades. In a shameless attempt to damage Democratic incumbent Gov. Janet Mills, the Maine Republican Party attacks an elementary school teacher for creating a lesson plan on LGBTQ history, struggles, and acceptance. 

The writing lesson, titled “Freedom Holidays,” is framed around holidays celebrating the freedoms of different groups of Americans: July 4th, freedom from Britain; Junteenth, freedom from enslavement; Women’s Equality Day celebrating the passage of the 19th Amendment. 

The teacher, Kailina Mills, then describes the people behind the acronym LGBTQ. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual. When she gets to “Transgender,” she explains how some people discover that the gender a doctor gave them at birth may not feel right later in life. She teaches about how LGBTQ Americans were legally discriminated against throughout much of our history and then, on June 26, 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court said that people of the same gender could love and marry whomever they choose. She finishes by assigning the students an essay to write about three LGBTQ activists of their choosing who led the fight for equal rights.

The teacher, in describing why she created the lesson plan, cited a 2020 study that found that gender identity is established by first grade. She said, “Those children and those families deserve to be represented in their school curriculum. Public schools are for everyone and should, therefore, include everyone.” 

The Maine GOP, on the other hand, calls this writing lesson about tolerance and acceptance, “radical” and “wrong for our kids.” They have put thousands of dollars behind their ad shaming the teacher and driving families with LGBTQ kids and their parents back into the closet. 

That same study found that almost all trans people, by first grade, dealt with significant stress around being a different gender than they were prescribed. Eighty-two percent of those questioning their gender consider suicide. Forty percent percent try. Too many are successful.

Shaming teachers from discussing LGBTQ issues and driving trans families into the shadows means more may try to kill themselves.

All so the Maine GOP can raise money and fire up their base in their campaign for the governorship.

Sadly, it must be noted that Governor Mills’ response to the attack was cowardly. Instead of standing up to the bigotry and showing Maine people she will defend our most vulnerable, she caved and voiced support for taking the lesson plan down. 

That said, there is a difference between being a coward in the face of a bully, and being the bully. Especially a bully who is putting the lives of our youth in danger.

Not only do all of Maine’s children deserve to be included in our curriculum, it is literally a matter of life and death. And right now the Maine GOP has chosen death. 

Ethan Strimling served ten years as Mayor and State Senator for Portland, Maine.

Maine Beacon, May 24, 2022, https://mainebeacon.com/

A plot to destroy U.S. democracy is centered in statehouses / by John Wojcik

Pennsylvania Republican state legislator, Doug Mastriano, as he appeared with MAGA supporters the night he won the Republican primary election. Mastriano, now the GOP candidate for governor, is both a 2020 election denier and a strong advocate of giving the Republican-controlled legislature in his state the power to nullify the people’s choice in presidential elections. AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

Hundreds of GOP state legislators in at least nine states have either already put in place or are now pushing new laws that will make Republican state legislators the decisive factor in who wins elections. The laws allow them to reverse the results of popular votes for president and select their own electors committed to their choice if a Democrat should win their states. The last chance to stop the threat is the 2022 elections currently underway. By 2024, when we vote again in a presidential election, it could be too late.

We already see how GOP state legislators are leading the way in attacks on women’s abortion rights, in purging and banning books from libraries and schools, in drawing gerrymandered district lines that make it impossible for Democrats and minority communities to win elections, in cutting tens of thousands of voters off the rolls, and in cancelling mail voting, ballot drop boxes and other measures to increase voter participation. It is clear that state legislative bodies are now the chief venue used by the GOP to ram their policies down the throats of the majorities of Americans who oppose those policies.

Less noticed, however, is the fact that they have a backup plan to use if all of the above measures fail them. They are passing laws that allow themselves to cancel the results of elections in their states if their candidates don’t win. The very state legislatures intended in the Constitution to help guarantee democracy are, as they were in the days of slavery and Jim Crow, used to cancel democracy.

A look at the recent past serves as prologue to where GOP state legislators are going today.

The New York Times on Sunday noted in a special report that at least 357 sitting Republicans in closely contested battleground states have used the power of their positions to try to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The 357 did this despite there having been no evidence of election fraud in their states.

The motivation was not always loyalty to Trump, who pushed the lie that the election was stolen. They were also aiming to get rid of new features of election practice introduced during the pandemic, including vote by mail, use of drop boxes, and other reforms. Those reforms were allowing the election of too many progressives, in their view. In any case, the idea that the election was stolen and that the small-d democratic reforms enacted in the pandemic must be ended is accepted now by the vast majority of Republican legislators in all the states.

The false stories about rigged elections and fraud motivated them to pass new laws making it more difficult to vote and easier to insert themselves into the process of vote counting by appointing the people responsible for conducting those counts. Their next move was and continues to be passing laws that allow them to become the final arbiter of election results.

Problem faced by the fascists

The problem faced by the fascist lawmakers in the GOP is that they do not yet have all the support they need from governors and secretaries of state. They require that backing in order to carry out their criminal overthrow of the Constitution. They expect that this problem will be solved if their hand-picked candidates for those offices win in the current 2022 election cycle.

They are twisting the meaning of a clause in the Constitution which gives state legislative bodies the responsibility to establish “the times, places and manner of holding elections” into meaning that they have the power to determine who is actually elected.

Donald Trump, of course, is cheering them on in case he decides to run again in 2024. He has admitted that he is backing candidates all over the country who want state legislators to be able to name electors. The threat to democracy by the GOP state legislators goes well beyond Trump, however, and can be with us for a long time if they are not stopped in the 2022 elections underway now.

One area of concern is the need to stop those among the 357 GOP legislators who are now running for higher office under the pledge that they will carry out and even increase the undemocratic laws they support.

Republican state senator Doug Mastriano from Pennsylvania is running for governor of the state. He was the initiator, months before the 2020 election, of a push for an “Election Integrity Commission” which studied election law and came up with the repressive measures now used across the country. He is promising, if he wins in November, to make everyone in the state register to vote all over again, and to back GOP legislators if they decide to overturn a presidential election.

Mark Finchem, a GOP state representative in Arizona, has pushed a theory of “election decertification,” the idea that an election can be decertified after it happens. He is a candidate for secretary of state in Arizona.

Where the fascistic crop of Republican state legislators are focusing their 2022 election efforts is in states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Nevada, and Georgia. In those states secretaries of state, and sometimes governors, acted to block their attack on democracy in 2020.

Again, with past being prologue, it serves to remember what happened January 2, 2021, four days before the House of Representatives was scheduled to meet to carry out its ceremonial duty of certifying the Electoral College votes in favor of Joe Biden. The House Committee examining the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol tells us that on Jan. 2, Trump led a Zoom call with more than 300 GOP state legislators. He pushed for them to change the certified results they had already sent to Congress, pointing to the dubious clause in the Constitution mentioned earlier, a clause they are now reinterpreting into law in their states.

Trump was saying that state legislators, not the courts or Congress, were the key to dismantling democracy in America.

Today, huge numbers of GOP state legislators are acting on that, using what they call the independent state legislators theory, which asserts that state legislatures hold absolute and exclusive power over presidential elections, including the appointment of electors to the Electoral College. The theory has never been affirmed by any court and is rejected by most legal scholars. Wherever it is accepted, or becomes law, it would be an unprecedented cancellation of democracy.

Thus far the fascist GOP state legislators who are taking away so many rights in their states have made their mark on the electoral process by radically changing voting procedures. A total of 54 new laws have been passed since the 2020 election that include restrictions on voting, not just placing limits on mail voting and drop boxes, but registration, the number of polling precincts and where they are located, no accommodation for rural voters, no leeway for delayed mail, outlawing provision of snacks and water (!) to voters standing for hours in long lines, etc.

Texas is one state where a new law gives state legislators the power to reverse the popular vote in presidential elections. When the law was first drafted and circulated it was mistakenly titled “Overturning Elections.” That error was corrected in time for the second draft.

John Wojcik is Editor-in-Chief of People’s World. John Wojcik es editor en jefe de People’s World. He joined the staff as Labor Editor in May 2007 after working as a union meat cutter in northern New Jersey. There, he served as a shop steward and a member of a UFCW contract negotiating committee. In the 1970s and ’80s, he was a political action reporter for the Daily World, this newspaper’s predecessor, and was active in electoral politics in Brooklyn, New York.

People’s World, May 23, 2022, https://peoplesworld.org/