This is the third installment in an exclusive Occupy.com series about the modern Republican Party’s embrace of fascism as a political strategy. Click the hyperlinks to read parts one and two.
For those of us who have been following the January 6 hearings over the last few months, legal accountability for former president Donald Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection is appearing to take shape. The Department of Justice also appears to be nearing the indictment phase of an investigation into Trump’s alleged theft of top-secret documents – some of them potentially pertaining to nuclear secrets – following the FBI’s execution of a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida last week.
But as central of a figure the former president has been, he’s merely a symptom of the fascist turn the Republican Party is taking, not the root cause. And fascism can’t be truly defeated until it’s also been uprooted.
Defeating fascism with grassroots direct action
History has already shown that when fascism takes root and spreads to the highest levels of government, society, and culture, its defeat only comes after democratic nations join forces and meet it in the battlefield with guns, bullets, and bombs. But like cancer, fascism in its latent phase can be eliminated if diagnosed and treated early enough.
As has been discussed in parts one and two of this series, the world’s two most notorious fascist leaders – Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini – came to power only after a decade-plus period of hyper-local vigilante violence (led by Mussolini’s Blackshirts and Hitler’s SA/Brownshirts) and informational warfare via the use of strategic propaganda (Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the Beer Hall Putsch trial). Identifying and shutting down both fascist propaganda sources and efforts of fascists to publicly gather and organize is crucial in order to prevent the fight against fascism from morphing into a full-fledged war.
In recent years, American fascists have become more emboldened in their organizing efforts. A 2021 conference held by the America First Political Action Committee (AFPAC) – founded by a man who has described himself as “just like Hitler” – featured U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) as a headlining speaker. The 2022 event attracted even more elected officials, with U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), Lt. Governor Janice McGeachin (R-Idaho), and state senator Wendy Rogers (R-Arizona) joining Gosar on the speaker’s list. AFPAC is considered the far-right alternative to the mainstream Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), even though just weeks ago the 2022 CPAC audience gave a warm welcome to Hungarian leader Viktor Orban despite his recent statements against race-mixing in Hungary.
The fascists of 1920s Italy recognized the power of organizing, and resoundingly defeated the socialists of their time by using violence to prevent socialists from gathering in public. Anti-fascists in the US haven’t shied away from violently confronting fascists when they publicly gather, though these instances are a small representation of what anti-fascist action (also known as “antifa”) actually looks like.
In an article for national security analysis website WarOnTheRocks.com, University of Pittsburgh professor Michael Kenney and Soufan Center senior fellow Colin P. Clarke explained the day-to-day operations of American antifa activists:
“Activists’ “repertoires of contention” include a mix of violent and non-violent practices… supporters create websites, write articles, post videos, distribute leaflets, and organize public events. They expose and intimidate white supremacists by “doxxing” them, publishing their private information on the Internet in order to embarrass them, build support against them, and — whenever possible — get them fired from their jobs. At protests, some anti-racists, taking a page from their anarchist counterparts, form “black blocs,” especially when they expect to scuffle with the police or confront white supremacists. In these formations, protestors wear black clothes and masks to create a more intimidating presence and make it harder for the police to identify individuals for arrest and prosecution.”
What does antifa look like in practice? In June, an unknown tipster alerted police in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, about a plot by a white supremacist group to riot during the city’s Pride event, which resulted in 31 arrests of white supremacist militants from multiple states. A 2020 event organized by neo-Confederates in Georgia was abruptly cancelled after local anti-fascist organizers made their intentions known to stage a counter-protest. In 2019, the Discord server for white nationalist group Identity Evropa – one of the groups present during the violent 2017 Unite the Right gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia – was leaked, resulting in the publication of the group’s leadership and organizing structure. The group quickly abandoned its former name and rebranded itself as the American Identity Movement.
If we seek to prevent large-scale violence against a unified fascist government, it’s important to make it impossible for fascists to unify. Weaponized research of anti-fascists and digital mobilization against fascist leaders and groups is an incredibly valuable and underutilized tool that can prevent fascism from gaining further ground.
Adopting anti-fascist framing in our language
“The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.”
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., The Three Evils of Society
A core part of combating fascism is being unafraid to use accurate language to describe it when it manifests. As has been discussed in parts one and two of this series, fascists throughout history have used violence as a means of achieving political goals, and have sought to extinguish democracy given that democracy is incompatible with fascism. The past several years show that, judging by these criteria, fascism is spreading at an alarming rate even after Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election and in spite of his looming legal problems.
It’s incumbent upon journalists to be unafraid to use the txerm “fascist” or “proto-fascist” to describe what we’re seeing. The steady march to pass state laws with the goal of making voting more difficult, and the ascension of Republican nominees for election overseer positions who doubt the legitimacy of the 2020 election, are clear evidence that the anti-democracy component of fascism is growing in power and influence. And the wave of politically motivated violence sweeping the country shows the seeds of fascism are germinating.
The January 6 insurrection is just one example of how the burgeoning fascist movement in the United States is now in its insurgency phase, as it steadily carries out acts of targeted violence in the service of its political objectives (which is also how the FBI defines terrorism). Individually, these acts of violence could be seen as isolated incidents in which mentally unstable individuals with easy access to guns committed mass murder. But in a larger context, it’s difficult to view this wave of violence as anything other than fascist guerilla warfare carried out by the movement’s most dedicated shock troops.
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The deadly mass shooting at the grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York this July that killed 10 and wounded three was done as an intentional act of racial warfare, according to the shooter’s manifesto.
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The man behind the December 2021 mass shooting in Denver, Colorado wrote a misogynist manifesto before killing five and injuring two more.
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The gunman behind the 2019 mass shooting in Gilroy, California that killed three people (including a six-year-old) and injured 12 more cited an 1890 white supremacist manifesto.
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The perpetrator of a 2018 mass shooting at an El Paso, Texas Walmart posted a manifesto online alluding to his hatred of Hispanics before killing 23 people.
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That same year, a mass shooter killed 11 and wounded six at a synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, and his posting history on far-right social media app Gab was full of violent anti-Semitism.
One thing the January 6 Committee hearings have been lacking is the voice of expert researchers who specialize in studying the origins and motivations of far-right militants. The voices of journalists and scholars like Spencer Sunshine, Molly Conger, Zach Roberts, and others should be elevated in the national conversation surrounding the insurrection to help more Americans understand how violent far-right movements materialize, and the conditions in which they spread. By better understanding what creates fascism, we can have a better understanding of how to deprive it of the conditions it needs to fester.
The word “radical” comes from the Latin word for “root.” Martin Luther King’s call for a “radical redistribution of political and economic power” in his 1967 speech, The Three Evils of Society, is a call to address the root causes of hate that Dr. King dedicated his life to defeating. The fight against fascism doesn’t end with putting Donald Trump in jail or voting Republicans out of office, but with establishing a society built on fairness, justice, and democracy, that makes it impossible for fascism to take root.
Fascism didn’t spring up overnight, and as Orban’s CPAC speech and far-right terror attacks like the massacre at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand demonstrated, the fascist movement is global in nature. But by disrupting their efforts to organize, holding their leaders accountable for their crimes, and creating a society inhospitable to fascism, it can be eventually eradicated if enough of us take a stand before it takes over.
