Fascists don't come to their senses
A dangerous weekend of autocracy
Welcome to a Sunday edition of Progress Report.
I’m writing this introduction on a train home from Philadelphia, where I spent the day reporting for a piece on a major impending escalation of the long-running battle between Starbucks Workers United and the world’s biggest coffee chain.
The two sides were on course to reach a contract agreement by the end of last year, but the installation of a new fast food CEO (who made $96 million for just four months of work) and Donald Trump’s evisceration of the NLRB have together conspired to bring negotiations to a crashing halt. There is simply no legal upside for Starbucks to offer their employees a living wage or decent regular hours, but instead of consolidating whatever gains were made and taking a crummy financial offer, the union is going back on the offensive.
SBWU is plotting a pressure campaign that it hopes will create enough of a public headache that the beleaguered company will finally decide that it’s better to settle and pay what is essentially a pittance (the equivalent of one day’s profit) to end the pain. It’s one of the few hopeful signs from a movement that’s been knocked on its ass over the past nine months, and it’s being powered by a coalition of workers that has everything to lose right now.
SBWU has an outsized number of openly trans and queer baristas among its membership, and instead of being chased back into the closet by the ongoing assault on their rights and lives, they protested today on a busy street in Rittenhouse Square, openly and defiantly themselves. These are the fighters you want in your corner, because unlike the the wealthy, bloated, bloviating pundits who suggest throwing them under the bus, their entire lives have been a fight.
I’ve got a big interview on voting rights scheduled for tomorrow, with more original reporting on the way. Tonight, we’re looking at the political battle that we’re facing against an encroaching fascism and the leaders who have never not run from a fight.
Note: The far-right’s fascist takeover of this country is being aided by the media’s total capitulation to Trump’s extortion. It’s never been more critical to have a bold independent media willing to speak up against the powerful. That’s what I’m trying to do here at Progress Report.
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The Trump administration accelerated its march to fascism this month, using the murder of Charlie Kirk and shooting outside an ICE facility in Dallas as pretext for an impending violent crackdown on political rivals and individual liberties.
Authoritarian creep began as soon as Donald Trump was sworn into office for the second time, when he unleashed an army of masked ICE operatives to terrorize immigrant communities and anyone who else who looks like a foreigner; the latter was recently rubber stamped by the Supreme Court. The national guard invasion of Los Angeles this summer represented an escalation of federal force against American citizens, and instead of a high mark, events this week suggest that it was only a preview of what is to come.
Monday’s executive order declaring “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization was legally dubious, but it set up an important pathway for the administration’s actions later in the week. On Friday, Trump signed a national security directive called National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which orders the federal government to focus on preventing so-called “leftist” political violence. Little-noticed amid the furor over the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, it casts an egregiously broad net that turns common beliefs into indicators of terrorist intention.
Via Ken Klippenstein’s newsletter, the federal government is now targeting organizations and individuals who allegedly harbor any of these views:
anti-Americanism,
anti-capitalism,
anti-Christianity,
support for the overthrow of the United States Government,
extremism on migration,
extremism on race,
extremism on gender
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.
Simply expressing any of the above views, many of which are incredibly vague or based on undisclosed conservative biases — what constitutes traditional American views on morality or extremism on gender? — can be enough to justify federal investigation and even arrest. As Klippenstein notes in his alarming and essential write-up (again, read it all here), it’s ostensibly the same policy as the policing of pre-crime in the Philip K. Dick novel Minority Report.
“The Attorney General shall issue specific guidance that ensures domestic terrorism priorities include politically motivated terrorist acts such as organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder,” the memo states.
Federal agencies are authorized to take preemptive action against perceived ideological actors under the pretense that their left-of-center beliefs will ultimately lead to violence. This can include everyone from activists to kids who post on social media; the directive explicitly mentions online forums as pipelines for supposed leftist violence.
NSPM 7 should also provide justification for the administration’s looming crackdown on liberal donors and nonprofits, including George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, which promote pro-democracy efforts around the world.
The directive is very clearly the work of Trump’s chronically constipated aide Stephen Miller, who has relentlessly accused the left — which is far more organized in his fervid imagination than reality — of moral depravity and diabolical conspiracies against his warped American ideal. For older and more grizzled reactionary leaders, such a coordinated federal campaign against the left is no doubt seen as retribution for the effort in the ‘80s and ‘90s to root out far-right white nationalist cells in the western United States, as Trump’s campaign kickoff in Waco, TX indicated. All of the people, from the protestors at Ruby Ridge to Timothy McVeigh, would have utterly hated Stephen Miller, a Jew from Southern California.
The national security state’s weaponization against perceived ideological threats that include “extremism on migration” all but puts the blame for the shooting at the ICE facility on the left, despite zero evidence existing to back up that assertion; it was, after all, immigrant detainees who were shot and killed in Dallas. But the truth is besides the point, because drawing a direct link that connects pro-immigration groups, anti-ICE protesters, and the murders in Texas provides all the cover necessary for Attorney General Pam Bondi to dispatch federal agents to ICE facilities nationwide under the aegis of preventing domestic terrorism, as she announced on Saturday.
“These are coordinated attacks by radical extremists,” Bondi argued, without evidence. “Anyone who threatens or assaults our federal officers will be arrested and charged FEDERALLY, not in some liberal state court. Same goes for anybody who is funding and aiding these extremists. You will be dismantled brick by brick.”
Thanks to Trump’s directive on Friday, Bondi’s threat to take down anybody who funds or aids extremists creates an extraordinarily broad category of activists and liberal groups in the DOJ’s crosshairs; organizations that protest, publish op-eds, provide services to immigrants, and organize for pro-immigrant policies and candidates could all find themselves crushed by the federal government’s vast legal and security apparatus.
Not coincidentally, these are also the groups that tend to back Democrats, even when they offer tepid-at-best responses to fascism.
Bondi mention unrest around ICE in Portland in her statement, alluding to an even more severe directive issued by her boss on Saturday. Earlier in the day, Trump announced that he has sent National Guard troops to Portland to combat protestors, with authorization to use “full force” to quell dissent. The announcement followed an unusual buildup of troops outside of an ICE facility in South Portland, where the federal government has been assaulting and arresting protestors. Local police officials have blamed federal troops for instigating the violence, an inconvenient fact that did not make it into Trump and Bondi’s pronouncements.
Unfortunately, the damning truth about the protestor-abusing fascist forces didn’t appear in any retort from Democratic leaders, who responded with this simple zinger:
Improbably, Senate Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer had an even more facile response when asked on TV this morning how he planned to push back against Trump’s ongoing invasions of American cities:
For those unable or unwilling to watch (and I don’t blame you), Schumer appealed to the non-existent common sense of a Republican Party that has long since abandoned any pretense of caring about democracy: “I’d hope some of them [Republicans] would join us in legislation to prevent it from happening,” he sputtered. “I know they’re loyal to Trump and does whatever he wants but this is so far stepping over the line.”
Jeffries and Schumer will be at the White House for budget negotiations tomorrow, which will almost certainly begin with meek pleas for bipartisanship and end in another total capitulation. They are an embarrassment, and their voluntary impotence makes them just as dangerous and Trump and the violent psychopaths in his Republican Party. But at least we know that in advance; you can’t be disappointed if you expect it. We just have to prepare to fight for a Democratic Party worthy of calling itself an opposition party.
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