Faux Messianism and the Twilight of the West

Civil war isn’t looming — it’s already live-streaming, orchestrated by oligarchs who feed rage while dismantling sovereignty.

by Mathew Maavak / September 20th, 2025

For years, independent geopolitical observers, including myself, have warned that the West is veering toward civil war or, at minimum, a prolonged paralysis of governance. This conviction has underpinned my decade-long advocacy for a “Greater Eurasian” autarky, based on the premise that a destabilized West poses the biggest threat to humanity in the near future. Even Donald J. Trump’s tariff mania reflects this reality. It is the desperate last card of a fading empire, signaling that “if we are going down, we’re taking the whole planet with us.”

The root causes of the West’s looming disintegration are too numerous to be enumerated but they include oligarchic funding of far-left and far-right movements, unchecked immigration, erosion of national identities, runaway inflation, deepening poverty, collapsing infrastructure, and engineered corrosion of traditional institutions. This spectacle grows more surreal as the same Western governments are willing to pour hundreds of billions into foreign wars from Ukraine to Israel while turning a blind eye to the critical welfare needs of their own citizens.

Strip away the noise and two primary drivers appear in this drama. First, runaway wealth concentration, where a microscopic oligarchy effectively owns nations as designated proxies of their respective deep states. Second, the obliteration of the political middle ground, leaving no space for rational debate or nuanced critique of the hypocrisies plaguing both left and right.

This Hegelian theme was crystallized by former U.S. President George W. Bush in the wake of the still-contentious September 11, 2001 attacks: “You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists.” Since then, the formula has metastasized into “you’re either with the patriots or with the globalists; you’re either with Israel or you’re an anti-Semite” — ad nauseam.

While the two primary drivers explain the root causes of the West’s terminal decline, two cinematic metaphors vividly foreshadow its future, namely The Purge and The Hunger Games.

For the uninitiated, The Purge depicts a near-future America marked annually by a 12-hour orgy of lawlessness where murder is legalized. Marketed as a cathartic “pressure valve,” it is nothing but social Darwinism in its purest form — an elite-orchestrated culling of the poor and marginalized to preserve control and inequality.

The Hunger Games thrusts us into Panem, which literally means “bread” in Latin. Here, a post-apocalyptic dystopia is fractured into twelve subjugated districts ruled by the opulent Capitol. Submission is enforced through annual televised death matches where child tributes are forced to kill or be killed, a spectacle that is equal parts entertainment and grotesque ritual of dominance over starving masses. The imagery is unmistakably reminiscent of ancient Rome’s social control strategy of bread and circuses (panem et circenses) as well as the shedding of blood. Christians being thrown to lions before roaring crowds in the Coliseum is the epitome of this stratagem.

Today, the formula endures in subtler forms via mass mediated spectacles, endless political tirades and the relentless quest for new bogeymen. The herd needs to be kept at “peak rage” while their overlords plot their demise.

Combustible Ironies

The West has been smouldering for years, but the recent deaths of American podcaster Charlie Kirk and Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zarutska — alongside a wave of far-right rallies from the United States to the United Kingdom to Australia — have thrown fresh accelerants onto an already raging fire.

In London, 110,000 flag-waving zealots chanted “Unite the Kingdom” as they torched effigies and brawled with police when they were not feasting on onion bhajis and samosas hawked by South Asian immigrants. The ghost of Kirk turbocharged this crowd who canonized him like a fallen messiah. U.S. Congressman Troy Nehls even declared that if Kirk had “lived in Biblical times, he’d have been the 13th disciple.” Yes, and I suspect that if that were the case, Judas would have never betrayed his Lord as the 13th member would have performed the deed.

Another catalyst in this religion-tinged drama was Zarutska, who was knifed to death on a North Carolina train, with her American Dream bleeding out thanks to a random, hate-motivated assault.

For some perspective, consider these inconvenient questions: Wouldn’t Zarutska be safer in Moscow or Nizhny Novgorod? Since the protracted conflict began in 2022, how many Ukrainians have been knifed to death on Russian soil compared to the supposed sanctuary of the West?

With Kirk’s death hoisted as a lightning rod at uber-patriotic rallies, one thing is certain — civil war may not be merely looming; it is already being live-streamed on X. Adding fuel to the fire, Elon Musk himself fanned Britain’s right-wing fury with a blunt warning: “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die, that’s the truth, I think.”

That is right. Let’s take law and order into our own hands to settle grievances, just as Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin did!

Make no mistake: it is not the pitchfork peasants who are driving this farce, but oligarchs pulling strings from their tax-haven bunkers. Can anyone seriously imagine Musk leading a personal charge against left-wing radicals in the streets of London or Sydney? What commonality does Musk share with the street rabble? This guy has rubbed shoulders with far-left politicians and oligarchs at technocratic assemblies such as the World Economic Forum. And now, he is their Christ-first messiah?

I wonder if the governments of the United Kingdom, the European Union, or Australia would charge Musk for inciting violence. I seriously doubt it. They will posture, perhaps wag a finger, but they will not act as these same governments are dependent on the very platforms, capital flows, and technologies that men like Musk control. To challenge him is to risk severing their lifelines.

Coronapsychosis Reality Check

The herd, as I have noted in a recent interview, is senseless, gullible and hopelessly amnesiac. They have always worshipped hierarchy and will follow any leader who can peddle dangerous  delusions. The outrage manifested across the Western world today is routinely calibrated like a pressure valve.

Just where were these self-proclaimed patriots and “Christian Nationalists” when Western security forces were punching, pummeling, and arresting ordinary citizens who dared oppose senseless lockdowns and mandates during the pandemic? Remember the time when even a Facebook post or “like” — contrary to the Ministry of Truth’s narrative on the pandemic — landed you in handcuffs? Even pregnant women with little children were not spared.

Where were they when churches were padlocked under the virus mania? Who coerced a hesitant populace into taking experimental mRNA vaccines? How many have died prematurely since taking the shots? And who continues to bury the data on side effects to this very day? If there was ever a cause worth rallying for, this is it. As someone who has suffered from a past vaccine injury, I would far rather see answers to these questions than salacious exposes over Brigitte Macron’s alleged gender.

But that’s what the multi-millionaire berserkers on the left and right are paid to do: to distract you from asking questions like these. And what have they really achieved? The Jeffrey Epstein files are now reduced to a nothingburger, with both left and right blaming each other for concocting them.

The “coronapsychosis” therefore was not an aberration but a rehearsal. The lockdowns, the mandates, the mediated fear porn were all meant to test how far the sheeple could be controlled, divided, and pacified under a fog of crisis. What follows now is merely the sequel, a post-pandemic purge within nations.

Rage is only permitted when it serves power. When truckers occupied Ottawa, they were smeared as terrorists. When parents questioned school closures or Drag Queen story hours, they were branded extremists. Yet now, like starved hogs suddenly released from their pens, the “patriots” are free to unleash their fury — so long as it is aimed at the bogeymen of the day, handpicked and curated by their masters.

‘Christ is King’?

As for those feverishly chanting “Christ is King” while waving Israeli flags, I would question their knowledge of the Bible. The flag itself features the so-called Star of David — a hexagram composed of six points, six triangles, and six sides within its inner structure. I hardly need to remind the reader what three sixes signify in Christian tradition. And when it comes to nationalism, what did Christ Himself say to the representative of the empire in His day? Simply this: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36).

I doubt the emotionally-charged “Christ is King” herd could even identify a Bible, let alone find that verse. And if they did, they might be startled to realize that the very flag they idolize would, for other theological reasons, be an anathema to the faith they so casually invoke. They should also research who is weaponizing Muslim immigrants as the “broom of the West.”

These mobs need to pick a lane. Either they call for a return to traditional national values and identity — a perfectly legitimate aspiration — or they should renounce their citizenship and openly fight for the Zionist cause. But when they howl about split immigrant loyalties while simultaneously pledging allegiance to a foreign power, it smacks of clinical schizophrenia.

Dark Days Ahead

The nationalist rage erupting across the West is not hypocrisy born out of desperation; it is a deliberate top-down strategy.

Manufactured chaos is the last resort of a civilization in decline. By stoking fury against immigrants, minorities, and phantom enemies, elites divert scrutiny from themselves. Every rally, every clash, and every viral slogan functions as a pressure valve, ensuring the masses expend their fury on each other rather than uniting against their taskmasters.

But what happens when the riots spiral beyond control? Martial law is one obvious outcome, but it cannot endure without new scapegoats. That is why a steady diet of demonized villains — Russia, China, Iran and to some extent, India — must be sustained through a carousel of manufactured crises and false-flag spectacles.

For the BRICS nations, the warning is clear. They must insulate themselves from the West’s unraveling by fortifying supply chains, diversifying trade grids, and cultivating self-sufficiency. Continuity in the face of chaos will be their greatest weapon in the dark days ahead.

Dr Mathew Maavak is a regular commentator on risk-related geostrategic issues. Read other articles by Mathew.

Charlie Kirk Becomes Alive

by Dan Lieberman / September 21st, 2025

On Wednesday, September 10, a shot was fired at a Utah college event, and Charlie Kirk became alive. Relatively unknown to the public outside of the Right Wing fringe that gains shekels and adoration from the misinformed, miscalculating, and mistaken cadre of misplaced Americans, Charlie Kirk became a household name; more than that, Charlie Kirk achieved immortality. Flags at half-mast, Medal of Freedom, statues planned, all for a young man who used the principles of establishing megachurches and planting their orators and turned college campuses into megacampuses, with him as the orator.

Don’t intend to demean his life and ridicule his death. I perceived Charlie Kirk to be a charlatan, who twisted facts and reality to pursue an agenda that suited his pocket, who deserved condemnation, and maybe a few years in purgatory, but did not deserve a fatal bullet that silenced his rhetoric and amplified his message. His family members merit regrets for the act and sympathies for their loss.

Objectives that Charlie Kirk’s divisive rhetoric intended to achieve in life — cancel the Woke and disable the Left — have found their yellow brick road, and the Trump administration is set to stroll down that road, with the help of the jingoist and sanguine media. All reports I have read categorize the killing as a political act and predict “tit for tat” killings leading to a possible civil war. Trump’s initial response urges that to happen. To the question, “How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?” the US president replied, “I tell you something that is going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right are radical because they don’t want to see crime … The radicals on the left are the problem – and they are vicious and horrible and politically savvy. They want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone, they want open borders. The worst thing that happened to this country.”

At this September 15 writing, I find no evidence that the alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, had any political motivation in the killing. Recitations of “the frightening rise in political violence in the United States,” (what is new in violent America?) hides and distracts from the frightening rise in dangerous and hysterical political discourse. Motivation in the killing of Charlie Kirk leans to a personal grudge in a personal situation — Kirk had disturbed Robinson, who had an intimate relationship with another male who was trans gendering to female. An extreme reaction, but disturb the disturbed and the outcome is often extremely disturbing — murdering the lawyer in a divorce case, murdering a judge after harm by a verdict, murdering a swindler who caused grief to others. Motivation in this case has not been defined, so why eagerly insinuate a political motive that is certain to cause havoc and arouse the public? Why not be calm and favor a motive that is more plausible, prevents havoc, and calms the public?

Not one voice for peace and order; megaphones for violence and disorder; the way of those who lead our society. If Harry Truman and his Democratic Party had not approved United Nations Resolution 181 for political reasons, there would be no Israel and no genocide of the Palestinian people; if the leaders of the Democratic Party had nominated sure winner, Joe Biden, instead of friend and sure loser, Hillary Clinton, there would no Donald Trump in the presidency; if the Democratic Party had not soothed Joe Biden’s feelings and realized their commitment to the American public by allowing more reliable candidates to enter the race at an earlier date, there would have been no return of Donald Trump and changing of the presidency to ruling autocracy. These small thoughts of personal gain engineered huge losses for the world.

Keeping Charlie Kirk alive advances ignorance and violence in the 50 states. The idolized man pedaled half-truths, clichés, and simplified arguments to a simplified audience who could not engage in an erudite dialogue and espoused clichés. He found a niche with college Republicans who were clipped by more outspoken students. To his credit as a political organizer, he gathered Republican college students into a more meaningful political force and accomplished much for the Republican Party, but successful political organizers do not warrant the accolades he is receiving and the future monuments that are being designated for him, especially when the efforts have been self-serving.

Kirk was not proceeding well until “he and others adopted a more edgy and confrontational style of engagement, [and] people started paying attention, including deep-pocketed donors and political strategists.” Kirk learned that deceit and Faustian bargains are a route to successful politics and living a comfortable life. The Trump administration has greatly lowered the bar on what is determined to be greatness.

Jesus Christ’s described life was similar to most apocalyptic preachers. Death and resurrection gave him fame. So it is with Charlie Kirk, but doubtful that it will be as long lasting. In with a blast and out with a whimper. One advice to his family ─ if they want him to be properly remembered, they will inform the Israeli authorities not to proceed with canonizing him by having a street named for him in the city of Netanya, a mural painted in Ashdod, and a missile inscribed “In memory of Charlie Kirk.” Identifying him with the genocidal Israelis will change his remembrance from the sweet “accomplishments in the political firmament, “ to an aggravating “enemy of mankind.”

Dan Lieberman publishes commentaries on foreign policy, economics, and politics at substack.com.  He is author of the non-fiction books A Third Party Can Succeed in America, Not until They Were Gone, Think Tanks of DC, The Artistry of a Dog, and a novel: The Victory (under a pen name, David L. McWellan). Read other articles by Dan.

Kirkwashing: Right Sanitizing Charlie Kirk’s Legacy

Kirkwashing: Right Sanitizing Charlie Kirk’s Legacy

by Bill Berkowitz / September 17th, 2025

In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder, right-wing politicians, Christian evangelical leaders, podcasters, and conservative media outlets are casting him as a martyr for free speech, for truth, and for Christian values. President Donald Trump called Kirk “a martyr for truth and freedom,” praising him as someone who “fought for liberty, democracy, justice and the American people.” Turning Point USA, the organization Kirk founded, called him “America’s greatest martyr to the freedom of speech he so adored.”

At a prayer vigil that drew hundreds to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., on Sunday night,

House Speaker Mike Johnson told the crowd that Kirk’s “movement was a ministry,” rooted in the belief that “our rights do not derive from the state or a king. They come from the King of Kings.”

As The Forward’s Benyamin Cohen reported, “The vigil, which drew Republicans, Trump administration officials and Kirk’s loyal followers, crystallized the narrative that has come to dominate the conservative universe in the days since his assassination: that he was more than a political activist — he was a martyr in an existential struggle between good and evil.”

But no matter how the right spins it, Charlie Kirk was no Martin Luther King, Jr., no Medgar Evers, no Malcolm X. Far from embodying the principles of those leaders. and despite his tragic death, there is no way to hide his record of homophobia, anti-feminism, anti-immigration, anti-abortion, and hostility toward civil rights. He dismissed the separation of church and state, as “a fabrication.” He stood firmly with the gun lobby with his inviolate pro-gun views.

In the rush to canonize Kirk, one should not forget that Kirk embodied division and scapegoating.

At Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia, the Rev. Howard-John Wesley countered the right-wing’s narrative, delivering a searing and emotional critique of efforts to sanitize Kirk’s legacy.

“Charlie Kirk did not deserve to be assassinated,” Wesley said. “But I’m overwhelmed seeing the flags of the United States of America at half-staff, calling this nation to honor and venerate a man who was an unapologetic racist and spent all of his life sowing seeds of division and hate into this land.”

Kirk regularly disparaged the Civil Rights Act,  the landmark 1964 legislation outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin. Speaking at AmericaFest in December 2023, Kirk called Martin Luther King Jr. “not a good person” and “awful.”

At the same event, Kirk said “we made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s,” and “passage … created a ‘permanent DEI-type bureaucracy.’”

He often criticized affirmative action and made inflammatory comments about Black people and other racial minorities, including saying “In urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target White people” on his podcast in 2023.

Wesley criticized people with “selective rage” who condemned Kirk’s killing but not the killing of Minnesota state Sen. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Democrats who were shot dead in their home in June, as well as those who “tell me I oughta have compassion for the death of a man who had no respect for my own life.”

“You do not become a hero in your death when you are a weapon of the enemy in your life,” Wesley said to raucous applause.

And that is the deeper truth obscured by the calls of martyrdom: Kirk’s death, while tragic, cannot cleanse his legacy of division, nor should it be used as a rallying cry to sanctify a politics of hate.

Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. Read other articles by Bill.

Charlie Kirk

by Ted Glick / September 15th, 2025

I knew almost nothing about Charlie Kirk when he was killed on September 10, other than that he was a leading organizer and thought leader for MAGA. One of the first things I saw in my email inbox about him after that misguided, violent act that took his life referenced the fact that he publicly supported dialogue between the Left and the Right. Here’s that quote, prominent on his website: “We heal our divides by talking to people we disagree with… You heal the country when you allow disagreement.”

I agree with these words. To what extent he acted upon these words I do not know.

I do know that he was a huge Trump backer and enabler, and Trump is all about division and hate. I wonder if Kirk ever said a word of criticism about this fact about the man he helped elect President and whose policies he advocated for until he died.

USA Today came out with an article after he died summarizing what can only be called his racist, sexist, homophobic views.

It remains to be seen how many Trump/MAGA supporters follow what Kirk said about healing the country through allowing disagreement and talking to those we disagree with. The Republican Governor of Utah, where the killing took place, seems to have done so, to his credit.

For those of us on the political Left, the Kirk murder and Trump’s efforts to use it to ratchet up attacks on us, using a very broad, hysterical brush, should be just the latest lesson about the importance of nonviolent tactics as we continue to strengthen our resistance movement.

It appears as if Trump’s alleged killer was not a Leftist. His family appears to be very Republican and pro-Trump. Perhaps as he went out on his own he was exposed to ideas and facts he had not known about before, but unfortunately he doesn’t seem to have been exposed to the importance of nonviolence and dialogue in efforts to oppose what is seen as wrong.

I’m not a pacifist. I support people defending themselves, their family and their community as necessary against violence of any kind. But acts like those alleged to have been taken by Tyler Robinson are not self-defense; they are self-defeating and destructive.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed the way forward, with active and militant, mass nonviolence at the center of that way. In his famous “Beyond Vietnam” speech at Riverside Church in NYC in April, 1967, he said this: “We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Charlie Kirk did not like King. He said the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a mistake. About King he reportedly said, “MLK was awful. He was not a good person.” I wish Kirk was still alive so that, perhaps, someday, through dialogue with people who disagreed with him, he would have changed his mind.

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Ted Glick has been a progressive activist and organizer since 1968. He is the author of the recently published books, Burglar for Peace and 21st Century Revolution, both available at https://pmpress.org. Read other articles by Ted, or visit Ted's website.

Latinx Workers Are Organizing Fierce Resistance to Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Agenda

Media narratives about a Latinx shift to the right obfuscate ongoing anti-Trump insurgencies led by Latinx communities.

By Paul Ortiz , 

Truthout

August 18, 2025

People march in support of immigrant rights and against mass deportation on the streets of Los Angeles as part of International Day of Action and Solidarity with Migrants on December 18, 2024.Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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The recent escalation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and armed state attacks on immigrants in Los Angeles and other cities is in large part a reactionary response to democratic insurgencies led by Latinx workers in the wake of the 2024 presidential election.

From the antebellum period through the Haymarket insurrection of 1886 to the present, immigrant workers have presented grave threats to the rule of capital by engaging in labor internationalism, union organizing, and coalition building with progressive elements of the middle class. While ICE and other federal authorities have used incarceration and deportation as weapons against immigrant organizing campaigns for over two decades, today’s war on workers is a renewed effort by capital and the state to keep Latinx workers in a state of abject terror and powerlessness. The outcome of this struggle will most likely decide the fate of the labor movement as well as the future of the anti-MAGA resistance in the United States.

Foiling media narratives of a “Latino turn to the right,” Latinx workers have led the resistance to Donald Trump’s presidency from early days, helping organize protests against the incoming government’s anti-labor policies in over 100 cities in the weeks after Election Day. These direct actions drew the participation of human rights advocates, small business owners, labor unionists, students, and others to demonstrate against President-elect Trump’s threat to deport upwards of 10 million immigrants from the United States. Understanding that Latinx workers have been in the vanguard of the struggle to save democracy is a necessary step in creating a broad-based freedom movement.

The Latinx working class registered its outrage at the outcome of the 2024 presidential election by engaging in a wide range of protest activities including hunger strikes, boycotts, rallies, teach-ins, and countless “stay at home” actions in the weeks after November 7, 2024.

Today’s war on workers is a renewed effort by capital and the state to keep Latinx workers in a state of abject terror and powerlessness.

The National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) called for a “Day of Action and Solidarity”on December 18 to overlap with the United Nation’s “International Migrants Day.” Announcing rallies in Atlantic City, New York City, Houston, Trenton, Philadelphia, and other cities, Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director of NDLON, declared:

Our fight is not for dignity. Because we already have enough of that, in abundance. Our fight is for respect and equality. Both friends and adversaries benefit from our labor, but you don’t want to accept our humanity. Our fight is to ultimately remind you of this: if you take our labor, you must respect our rights. You must accept our humanity. And if you ignore it, we will make you see it.

Thousands of Angelenos answered NDLON’s call and organized a march on December 18 from La Placita Olvera near the center of historic downtown Mexican Los Angeles (founded in 1781 by Afro-Mexicans) to the nearby ICE center to register their dissent to Trump’s promised war on the immigrant working class. Marchers carried homemade signs reading, “Protecting immigrants and destroying walls,” “Immigrants’ rights are human rights,” and “Migrant workers do the work.” Teacher and union member Angélica Reyes described herself as an “Indigenous immigrant on this continent.” Reyes asked her students at Santee High School “to reflect on Trump’s election and his threats to separate families.”

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The first Latinx strikes aimed at President-elect Trump’s vows to incarcerate and deport millions of immigrants were announced before Christmas. Sam Ruiz was one of many Latinx activists who deployed social media to register their dissent against the president-elect’s immigration policies. Ruiz used his TikTok platform of more than 146,000 followers to spread messages in Spanish and English calling for a general work stoppage of migrant laborers between January 11 and January 18. Ruiz channeled the Latinx anger surging across social media platforms in the weeks after the election:

When my community speaks, it says it feels like they’re trying to make migrants look like the new modern slaves. So we’re planning a strike 10 days before Trump takes office. A week without work to see if they can turn around and look at our community and how we contribute to this country … We have truckers, construction workers, field workers, restaurant workers, and hospitality workers. In Las Vegas, we’re creating a pretty big movement and it feels bigger than what happened in Florida with Ron DeSantis after SB 1718 was passed.

Over 1,000 people rallied in St. Louis on February 1 carrying picket signs saying, “Immigrants Make America Great.” Latinx workers and their supporters used the rally as a springboard to organize a weeklong strike of Latina/o labor and businesses in the greater St. Louis area between February 11-18.

“Our fight is not for dignity. Because we already have enough of that, in abundance. Our fight is for respect and equality. Both friends and adversaries benefit from our labor, but you don’t want to accept our humanity.”

Businesses participating in the strike included landscaping workers, bakeries, clothing boutiques, markets, and nightclubs, among others, as I documented in my Labor Studies Journal article on “Latino Workers, the 2024 Presidential Election and the Future of the Labor Movement.” Reflecting on the money he would lose during the weeklong strike, Antonio García, owner of La Tejana Mexican Store and Taqueria, said, “No amount of money can replace peace of mind.” García planned to “dip into his business’ emergency funds to pay his workers. ‘We were going to lose some money that week, but we’re going to gain a lot more.’” Reportedly more than 50 St. Louis-area businesses participated in the strike.

The St. Louis actions were part of a national “Day Without Immigrants” demonstration that was held the week of February 3. Latinx workers, their families, and supporters carried signs at rallies and marches held across the country demanding an end to deportation, detentions, and labor exploitation. According to Mike Elk of Payday Report, strikes of Latinx workers and demonstrations were held in at least “120 cities, 40 states, and Puerto Rico…” Grassroots participation was so widespread that many businesses shuttered in solidarity with the protests. In Kent County, Michigan, Mary Martinez, a restaurant proprietor, paid her workers for time off to participate in the protest. In an interview conducted for my scholarly article in Labor Studies Journal, she said: “We are hard workers. We have support in this community. We have a business, we have a house, we have a good family, no bad record, so we are good people in this community … but afraid that this [federal anti-immigrant action] will go to another level.”

A small restaurant owner in Redwood City, California, said: “We stand with our immigrant communities. They are the backbone of the food industry. Without them, it wouldn’t exist.” Workers and small businesses organized protests in small towns, rural areas, and big cities. Carlos Solorzano-Cuadra, CEO of the Hispanic Chambers of Commerce of San Francisco, California, reported that out of “…approximately 11,000 Hispanic/Latino businesses registered in various Hispanic chambers in the Bay Area … We have approximately 65 percent of them closed today in support of the Day Without Immigrants.” Solorzano-Cuadra estimated that nearly half of the 90,000 Latinx-owned businesses in California were closed on February 3 in solidarity with “The Day Without Immigrants.”

In West Chicago, one small business posted a sign in English and Spanish stating, “In support of our immigrant people, on Monday February 3, we will be closed.” The Chicago Tribune reported:

In the shadow of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, some business owners and workers from Elgin to Chicago Heights took action Monday: They closed their businesses and stayed home from work. The goal they said, was to send a message about the contributions immigrants make to their communities and local economies.

David Fernández, a board member of the area Chamber of Commerce said on February 3 that, “18th Street is empty, no foot traffic. I counted 34 closed businesses in a 2-mile drive on 18th Street between Damen and Halstead.”

Latinx resistance had an immediate impact. When Trump targeted sanctuary cities that offered protections to undocumented workers, Tom Homan, Trump’s so-called border czar, complained that mobilizations of workers and their communities in cities like Chicago and Denver were making it difficult for the federal government to incarcerate immigrant workers. “Sanctuary cities are making it very difficult,” Homan noted. “For instance, Chicago … they’ve been educated on how to defy ICE, how to hide from ICE.”

If we are serious about building a “resistance” that can take back the republic, we must join immigrant workers wherever we are and start fighting back.

The Day of Action and Solidarity and the Day Without Immigrants actions constitute part of a long history of Latinx labor and political organizing in the United States, including Gilded Age Mexican American railway strikes, activism in the Industrial Workers of the World and leadership in the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in the 1950s. Latinx communities and their allies organized the historic El Gran Paro Estadounidense, on May 1, 2006, in response to congressional efforts to criminalize immigrant workers. This was the largest general strike in the history of the Americas.

Between 2016 and 2024, Latinx workers contributed to Black Lives Matter protests, and engaged in union organizing campaigns with the Amazon Labor Union, the California Fast Food Workers Union, home health care drives in Florida and many other industries. These emerging freedom movements have also revived a venerable tradition of cross-class solidarity hearkening back to years when support for workers from businesses, students, and the middle class played a critical role in the industrial unionism of the New Deal era as well as in United Farm Workers unionizing drives of the 1960s and later.

Trump’s invasion of Los Angeles, the militarization of ICE, and initiatives like Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” seek to stamp out these incipient social movements and to crush democracy wherever it appears. The values that immigrant workers, their communities, and their allies express when they organize together — values such as empathy, mutual aid, and solidarity — threaten the power of ruling class Americans such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Stephen Miller. If we are serious about building a “resistance” that can take back the republic, we must join immigrant workers wherever we are and start fighting back.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Paul Ortiz  is a professor of labor history at Cornell University. He is the author of An African American and Latinx History of the United States, which has recently been banned by the Department of Defense and a growing number of libraries and school districts. His forthcoming book, A Social Movement History of the United States, will be published by Beacon Press.

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Catalina Friesen serves with a mobile clinic in Ontario

Morgan Birch was puzzled when her four-month-old daughter, Kimie, suddenly fell ill with a fever and rash.

At first, the Alberta mother assumed it was a common side effect of immunisations - or perhaps a case of chicken pox. Ms Birch then consulted her 78-year-old grandmother, who recognised Kimie's illness immediately.

"That's measles," her grandmother said. Ms Birch was stunned, as she thought the disease had been eradicated.

A lab test later confirmed her grandmother's hypothesis: Kimie had measles, likely contracted after a routine visit to the hospital in the Edmonton area a few weeks earlier.

Kimie is one of more than 3,800 in Canada who have been infected with measles in 2025, most of them children and infants. That figure is nearly three times higher than the number of confirmed US cases, despite Canada's far smaller population.

Now Canada is the only western country listed among the top 10 with measles outbreaks, according to CDC data, ranking at number eight. Alberta, the province at the epicentre of the current outbreak, has the highest per capita measles spread rate in North America.

The data raises questions on why the virus is spreading more rapidly in Canada than in the US, and whether Canadian health authorities are doing enough to contain it.

In the US, the rise of measles has been partly linked to vaccine-hesitant public figures, like Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr - although he has since endorsed the measles vaccine as safe.

But Canada does not have a prominent RFK Jr-like figure in public health, noted Maxwell Smith, a professor of public health at Western University in southern Ontario.

"There are other things that need to be interrogated here I think," Dr Smith said. "Looking at the Canadian context adds another layer of complexity to this."

Measles overall is on the rise in North America, Europe and the UK. Cases in the US reached a 33-year high this year, while England reported nearly 3,000 confirmed infections in 2024, its highest count since 2012.

Canada's 2025 figures have surpassed both. The country has not seen this many measles cases since the illness was declared eliminated in 1998. Before this year, the last peak was in 2011, when about 750 cases were reported.

The MMR vaccine is the most effective way to fight off measles, a highly contagious and dangerous virus, which can lead to pneumonia, brain swelling and death. The jabs are 97% effective and also immunise against mumps and rubella.


Morgan Birch
A photo of Kimie with a visible red rash on her body, a common symptom of measles.

How measles spread in Canada


The hardest-hit provinces have been Ontario and Alberta, followed by Manitoba.

In Ontario, health authorities say the outbreak began in late 2024, when an individual contracted measles at a large Mennonite gathering in New Brunswick and then returned home.

Mennonites are a Christian group with roots in 16th-Century Germany and Holland, who have since settled in other parts of the world, including Canada, Mexico and the US.

Some live modern lifestyles, while conservative groups lead simpler lives, limiting the use of technology and relying on modern medicine only when necessary.

In Ontario, the illness primarily spread among Low German-speaking Mennonite communities in the province's southwest, where vaccination rates have historically been lower due to some members' religious or cultural beliefs against immunisation.

Almost all those infected were unvaccinated, according to data from Public Health Ontario.

Catalina Friesen, a healthcare worker at a mobile clinic serving the Mennonite population near Aylmer, Ontario, said she first became aware of the outbreak in February, when a woman and her five-year-old child came in with what appeared to be an ear infection. It later turned out to be a symptom of measles.

"This is the first time I've ever seen measles within our community," Ms Friesen told the BBC.

Cases spread rapidly from that point, reaching a peak of more than 200 a week across Ontario by late April.

While new confirmed cases have since dropped sharply in Ontario, Alberta has emerged as the next hotspot. There, the spread happened so quickly that health officials were unable to pinpoint exactly how or where the outbreak began, said Dr Vivien Suttorp, the medical officer of health in southern Alberta, where cases are the highest.

She, too, said she had not seen an outbreak this bad in her 18 years working in public health.

Ms Friesen noted that Canada has a higher concentration of conservative Low German-speaking Mennonites than the US, which may be a factor behind the higher number of cases.

But Mennonites are not a monolith, she said, and many have embraced vaccinations. What's changed is the rapid spread of anti-vaccine misinformation both in her community and beyond after the Covid-19 pandemic.

"There's hearsay that immunisations are bad for you," Ms Friesen said, or are "dangerous".

This is amplified by a general distrust in the healthcare system, which she said has historically ostracised members of her community.

"We are sometimes put down or looked down upon because of our background," she said, adding that she herself has experienced discrimination in hospitals based on assumptions about her beliefs.


Vaccine hesitancy on the rise


Experts say it's tough to pinpoint why measles have spread wider in Canada than in the US, but many agree that cases in both countries are likely underreported.

"The numbers that we have in Alberta are just the tip of the iceberg," said Dr Suttorp.

But there is one big reason driving the outbreak: low vaccination rates, said Janna Shapiro, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto's Centre for Vaccine Preventable Diseases.

Dr Shapiro said there is "an element of chance" at play, where a virus is introduced to a community by accident and spreads among those who are unprotected.

"The only thing that is going to stop an outbreak is getting those vaccination rates up," she said. "If the public is not willing to get vaccinated, then it will continue until the virus can't find anymore receptible hosts."

In general, studies show that vaccine hesitancy has risen in Canada since the pandemic, and the data reflects that. In southern Alberta, for example, the number of MMR vaccines administered has dropped by nearly half from 2019 to 2024, according to provincial figures.

Covid-19 vaccine mandates were fiercely opposed by some during the pandemic, prompting the so-called "Freedom Convoy" protest in Ottawa where truckers gridlocked the city for two weeks in 2021.

That opposition has since expanded to other vaccines, said Dr Shapiro.

Pandemic-related disruptions also left some children behind on routine immunisations. With measles having been largely eliminated, families likely did not prioritise getting their kids' vaccinations up to date, Dr Shapiro said.

That is not the case for Ms Birch, who began routine immunisations for her baby Kimie as soon as she was eligible. But Kimie was still too young for the measles vaccine, which is typically given at 12 months in Alberta.

Dr Suttorp said Alberta has since lowered that age cap in response to the recent outbreak, and there has been an uptick in people taking the vaccine.

Health units across the country have also tried to encourage people to get vaccinated through public bulletins and radio advertisements. But the response is notably more muted than that during the Covid-19 pandemic, health officials say.

Kimie has since slowly recovered, Ms Birch said, though she continues to be monitored for potential long-term effects of the virus.

The Alberta mother said she was saddened and horrified when she learned her daughter had measles, but also "frustrated and annoyed" at those choosing not to vaccinate their children.

She called on people to heed public health guidelines and "protect the ones that can't protect themselves".

"My four-month-old shouldn't have gotten measles in 2025," Ms Birch said.

TEXAS NORTH 

How the far right is evolving and growing in Canada


People walk along downtown Ottawa’s Wellington Street during the so-called “freedom convoy” protest against COVID-19 measures on Feb. 17, 2022. The pandemic served as the perfect platform for far-right conspiracies to spread their narratives. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang


THE CONVERSATION
Published: November 14, 2024 

In early 2022, thousands of Canadians descended on Ottawa as part of the so-called “Freedom Convoy” in protest of the government’s pandemic-related restrictions. Many were opposed to the government’s power to impose lockdowns, masking and vaccine mandates.

Wittingly or not, they were also taking part in a vast communications effort from various groups and individuals on the far right.

Our new book on the far right in Canada, The Great Right North, shows that events like the Freedom Convoy are representative of where the far right is going, how it is recruiting, how it is communicating internally and with Canadians at large, and how it is progressing in the national political discourse.

Historically, Canada has always had a few active far-right groups, including the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and Nazis and fascists before the Second World War.

It also saw various semi-successful attempts at federating smaller formations during the 1980s and, in the 1990s, under the umbrella of the Heritage Front, which turned out to be co-founded and led by a CSIS operative.

But that was then. Now, the far right has a different strategy.

Ku Klux Klan members in Kingston, Ont. on July 31, 1927.

 (National Archives of Canada/John Boyd)

The evolving far right

Inspired by the widespread Islamophobia that followed the 9/11 attacks, old and new groups, influencers and ideologues have started blending their narratives into broader popular concerns.

New and growing far-right groups have emerged: Pegida Canada, La Meute and others, with tens of thousands of followers. Alongside ordinary Canadians preoccupied with national security, identity and the country’s ability to effectively welcome an influx of immigrants, far-right propagandists were weaving their white-supremacist, anti-government and yes, their old hate for Jewish people, who are accused of being behind it all.

Today, these views are often spread through a relatively sanitized discourse, leaving behind the symbols and the language of the previous generation of extremists and adopting a new populist, average-Joe appearance.

The COVID-19 pandemic further served as a platform to peddle globalist conspiracy theories and cultivate contempt for governments, news media, science, racialized people and any form of speech that might contradict the white supremacist discourse of the far right.

The broad appeal of hard-working truckers, “freedom” and pandemic anxiety was successfully mobilized into a mass movement that inspired far-right groups around the world.

This inspiration is propagated online by ordinary people who like and share snippets of information without necessarily realizing their deeper meaning or their links to extremist groups. Some of the main sources of that inspiration are hyperactive, notorious influencers who carefully cultivate their status as far-right influencers. Others are old-school ideologues, often curating entire online libraries of hate literature.

Usually hidden under a more palatable discourse, sometimes in the form of apparently benign memes, their worldviews are making inroads in our political culture via massive dissemination. The continuous flow of propaganda makes few, if any, direct victims. However, it provides far more traction in public debates on issues such as immigration, security and identity.

A woman wears a Make Canada Great Again cap during a demonstration opposing the government’s immigration policy near the Canada-U.S. border in Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Que., Oct. 19, 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes

How the far right recruits

Far-right progression is taking place in broad daylight, against a backdrop where the far right is happily riding the wave of populism, geopolitical crises, economic uncertainty and the feeling of neglect that pervades the middle classes in most western countries.

As part of our research, we have interviewed active, deliberate recruiters seeking like-minded people in various sympathetic venues, who told us they approach likely candidates directly, unpack their ideological wares and wait for reactions. But this is not the most worrying form of recruitment; it is high in effort and low in results.

In our research, we found that today “recruitment” is not so much about adding members to groups. It’s about adding adherents to a worldview. Individuals who go from one political problem to the next, in an infinitely changing galaxy of groups, ideas, controversies and people constantly re-inventing themselves with new ideological nuances, special focus on sometimes arcane matters, and adapting as best they can to current events.

Within the general chaos, some overarching, common beliefs can be found. That the state and its institutions, as well as the democratic foundations of western societies, are corrupt, weak or desperately vulnerable to mismanagement. That white Canadians are threatened by replacement and disappearance by scheming elites.

Consequently, cultural, ethnic and social polarization are constantly underlined, and presented in a manner that justifies the repression of various populations deemed to be dangerous. Though very few will engage in physical violence, it is constantly legitimized, and often praised, when described, suggested or committed as the key to achieve political objectives.

Anyone searching online for information on almost any social or political topic is likely to come across multiple rabbit holes leading to the self-sufficient, airtight bubble of the far-right infosphere. This is the realm of incels, white supremacists, neo-nazis, Christian nationalists and the like.

Beside their far-right views, these entities have almost nothing in common, other than the conviction that accessing various public forums is a powerful way to attract public attention and, eventually, approval of their worldview.

This far-right infosphere is a massive supermarket of support groups, and is a powerful infrastructure of organic recruitment. It is led by gurus and influencers but also by ordinary individuals in discussion groups and chat rooms. It is propelled by digital platforms whose operating logic is not to favour quality information but rather content that is better at provoking engagement. One prime driver of engagement is controversy, a far-right specialty.

A CBC news report about the Québec-based far-right group La Meute.

Paths to the far right

We studied at length the various processes that lead people to engage with far-right rhetoric or with a specific group, and to eventual commitment, i.e. participation in some kind of action, whether illegal or not.

We found different paths for those who spread hate propaganda and symbolic violence, and those who engage in physical violence. Both include lone actors or very small groups.

We divide the physically violent into two categories: small groups who look for trouble as entertainment, often joining together for socializing and for protection; and the explosive, desperate violence of disorganized individuals, most of whom were already vulnerable, living with intense economic, familial, social or psychological stress. The latter, locked in echo chambers, use social media to confirm beliefs that crystallize and, in some cases, lead to violence.

Far-right sentiments are constantly evolving, and appear to be growing in Canada. It is important for governments, institutions and others seeking to address extremism to understand the ways people are being drawn to the far right and its online echo chambers.

Authors

Stéphane Leman-Langlois

Professor, School of Social Work and Criminology, Université Laval

Aurélie Campana

Professeure titulaire de science politique, spécialiste des extrémismes, Université Laval

Samuel Tanner

Professor and Department Director, School of Criminology, Université de Montréal
Disclosure statement

Stéphane Leman-Langlois receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Aurélie Campana receives funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council from Canada

Samuel Tanner receives funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council from Canada.

 

Trump versus Harris: Is fascism coming to the United States?

By Bryan Palmer

Published 5 November, 2024

First published at Socialist Project.

Leonard Cohen, poet laureate of Canada’s 1960s, offered a closing anthem to the twentieth century in his 1992 lament “ Democracy.” In an earlier year of revolt, 1968, Cohen had refused his country’s most prestigious literary prize, the Governor General’s Award. “The world is a callous place,” he reportedly said, “and he would take no gift from it.” He would later be the accepting recipient of many honours, including the Order of Canada.

Two decades later, confronted with the changing global landscape, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the crumbling Soviet Union, Cohen reflected on how and where democracy might be realized. Now a celebrated songwriter, Cohen looked to the United States, where his music was produced and marketed for world-wide audiences. He saw the “sorrow in the street” of working-class grievance; “the holy places where the races meet” that were never far removed from white supremacy; the gender difference scratched into human relationships expressed in “the homicidal bitchin’/that goes down in every kitchen/to determine who will serve and who will eat”; and the deserts created domestically and internationally by an America confident in its imperial dominance. Yet for all of this, 1992 seemed a bridge to a better future. “Democracy,” yet to be realized, “is coming to the U.S.A.” Cohen insisted. Amidst turmoil, tension, and recognition of revolt’s righteousness, Cohen was nonetheless hopeful.

So, too, were others, albeit of a different bent. Proclamations of “the end of history” came from ideologues of the right and postmodernists of the ostensible left. Capitalism, finally victorious over its century-and-a-half nemesis — actually existing, and undeniably deficient, socialism — promised boundless prosperity and expansive profits for those pulling the now unrivalled levers of possessive individualism. Windows of political and economic opportunity opened widely, offering a luxuriating vision of a new world order.

“Third Way”: Seemingly progressive populism

This was the moment of Democratic Party revival in the United States. Bill Clinton ushered in a new era of seemingly progressive populism, the slogan “It’s the economy, stupid” propelling the Arkansas Governor into the White House. It was the beginning of a “Third Way.” The polarizations of the past were supposedly swept aside as a politics of social amelioration and advance adjusted to market realities. The political project designated democratic, now tethered to an unbridled regime of accumulation, would ironically usher into being new imperatives of inequality, especially pronounced at the intersections of race and class. The new regime of accumulation, premised on the ideology of austerity’s attack approach to social provisioning of all kinds, dismantled entitlements associated with the “Great Society” rhetoric of the 1960s, gutting the welfare state and undermining programs associated with health care, housing, and a host of other post-World War II liberal reforms. A prison-industrial complex and profit-driven mass incarceration criminalized poverty. The war on the working class, proclaimed with such ferocity by Ronald Reagan’s breaking of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) 1981 strike, continued unabated.

History, of course, did not end. The Soviet Union imploded, to be sure, but it bounced back, proving something of a bête noire to its competitors in the capitalist west. The once-Soviet collectivized economy was pulverized by market imperatives; the apparatus of the state overtaken by ensconced apparatchiks. The result was a plundering of the primitive accumulation of the Revolution of 1917, a socialized economy looted to establish an unregulated, predatory market society orchestrated by oligarchs umbilically tied to an authoritarian state. This proved an irksome thorn in the side of hegemonic capital and its global agendas. China, following a course less drastic than the upheaval inside the Soviet Union, refused to succumb to the impulse of capitalist restoration that proved so destabilizing in the demise of the Soviet Union. As the People’s Republic kept a firm political grip on authority but opened the floodgates to enterprise and internationalization of trade and commerce, it surged economically. Planned economies, however compromised, remained a threat to capital’s quest for unimpeded dominance globally.

Moreover, as the 1990s progressed and transitioned into the twenty-first century, social democracy’s fading sun finally set. Faith in the infallibility of capitalist markets (now dubbed neoliberalism) decimated the politics of a moderate, parliamentary left and did little to resolve problems of wealth’s disproportionate distribution. In Britain, Tony Blair’s Labour Party gave up anything resembling the socialist ghost. The political economy of the new millennium wrote finis to the moderate, reform-oriented parties and programs of a left that had clearly lost its moorings.

The economic foundations of largesse on which democracy’s post-World War II promise rested precariously certainly wobbled. At times, they seemed to sink. The calendar of capitalist crisis took a quantitative leap forward. From 1945-71, the world’s capitalist economies suffered 38 economic recessions, downturns, and panics, but in the period 1973-97, this almanac of attack rose to 139. The regime of accumulation continued apace, concentrating wealth and power. In a crude capitalist variant of social Darwinism, periodic crises weeded out weaker, individual capitals. Businesses fell by the economic wayside. Authority and its material blessings continued to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Democracy was apparently not forging ahead in the advanced capitalist nation states of the west, of which the US was first among un-equals. Instead, an economy increasingly recognized as unstable derailed it.

Financial crisis of 2007-10

This mercurial, downwardly spiraling materiality culminated in a 2007-10 financial meltdown. It rocked the global economy: revelations of reckless financial practices at the pinnacle of corporate power and within seemingly secure state-backed institutions exposed just how vulnerable the well-being of masses of people had become. Their safety net of owning a dwelling, an asset with seemingly never-ending rising value that had provided the one protection many working families retained against decades of deteriorating economic well-being, suddenly disappeared. A sub-prime mortgage meltdown collapsed the housing market, wiping out what constituted many working-class families’ only substantial equity. Decades of ceding capital a free reign left the majority of the privileged nations of the Global North vulnerable, the façade of well-being behind which their lives unfolded perilously unhinged.

The crisis of 2007-10 revealed this and more. It cracked the edifice of the European Union, and convinced many who proclaimed Karl Marx and the socialist project dead with the 1989 demise of the Soviet Union to rethink their optimism of the capitalist will. A much-needed dose of intellectual pessimism appeared necessary. Perhaps the acquisitive, accumulative drive of the profit system was not all that it was heralded to be.

This kind of thinking had to be marginalized and sidelined, however. Capitalism’s infinite capacity to overreach in pursuit of profit was somehow different than those many households crumbling in debt and despair. This latter group could be left to pick individual selves up by their solitary bootstraps; large economic interests, however, were judged too big to fail. The bailouts for capital exposed the big lie at the core of neoliberalism. Markets could not govern. Corporations needed to be rescued from themselves. Less than a decade later, a pandemic-initiated economic recession dealt neoliberalism’s cherished repudiation of Keynesianism a final blow: money needed to be pumped into the market to save the capitalist system from collapse.

The political fallout from these years of escalating capitalist crisis registered in democracy — never historically realized — coming under increasing attack. Far right parties and authoritarian political sensibilities gained ground rapidly. An ideology of globalism, seemingly hegemonic, gave to way to nationalisms of the most bellicose and xenophobic kinds. Much heralded advocates of free trade quieted under the ideological tsunami of protectionism. Capital’s intransigence and state legislation took their toll on unions and working-class remuneration. Immigrants were vilified; racism ran rampant in the mainstreaming of white supremacy. The politics of right-wing populism, authoritarianism, shameless buffoonery, hucksterism, and audacious corruption were normalized, exemplified in the rise of figures such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Marine Le Pen in France, Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, and Donald J. Trump in the United States. Explicitly and proudly defiant fascist movements, while undoubtedly galvanizing minorities, were on the march in many capitalist nation states. They even secured significant footholds in the now increasingly unstable political settings of what had been, prior to the political earthquake of 1989, homelands of actually existing socialism, however compromised.

Democracy halted

Democracy, which Cohen thought on the march in 1992, seemed stopped in its tracks in the United States of the 2020s. Voter suppression gained a reinvigorated momentum. Riotous, threatening, and violent attempts to turn back electoral defeats of the political right sparked fears of insurrection and consolidated an undue faith in the rule of capitalist law that was itself destabilized by the robed authority of a now politically stacked and flagrantly unaccountable Supreme Court. A crescendo of conspiracy-driven theories and public demonstrations against attempts to ensure collective well-being, through combatting threatening public health crises with science-based campaigns of vaccination and the encouragement of socially responsible behavior, deformed political life. Many were fearful: it was not democracy coming to the U.S.A., but fascism.

Fear of fascism’s tightening grip on mainstream politics has paralleled, and is now associated with, the rise of Trump and his opportunistic right-wing populism. There are certainly grounds for being apprehensive. Trump, now described repeatedly as a fascist, has long defied easy categorization. Everyone from one-time Trump Chief-of-Staff, John Kelly, to high-ranking Generals and those Republican Administration officials fleeing the nightmare of the disorderly Make America Great Again White House, have jumped on this bandwagon of designation. It has become a rallying cry of the Democratic Party and its hopeful candidates for political office, high and low, an indication that the two-party system is showing signs of collapsing inward into a monolith. Liberal media outlets mass market the branding of Trump as a fascist. Many on the left echo this consensus: Trump, routinely likened to Hitler, is the new and ubiquitous face of American fascism, the lider maximo of a totalitarian movement.

An admitted authoritarian, and a shameless, self-promotional huckster, Trump’s eclectic mix of free marketeering, tax cutting, pop-culture alluding, isolationist nationalism certainly embraces much that fascism’s fetid program feeds on. That Trump embraces and enables racist, misogynistic, rabidly anti-communist, anti-labour views, and offensively promotes the entitlements of the rich, goes without saying. For many, this defines fascism: it is all that a progressive, mindful citizenry deplores. Trump is certainly deplorable. He is more than willing to pander to fascists — and virtually any political charlatan willing to bend the knee in loyalist supplication to his emperorship. Whether he dons the dress of a full-fledged fascist is nonetheless more of an open question than many are willing to admit, even as his recent rhetoric takes on more and more of the trappings of a “Blood and Soil” program.

Trump: Lining his own pockets

Trump’s aspirations, however, do not seamlessly fit with a fascist agenda: they do not quite appear to be those of a Hitler or a Mussolini, since they are far more brazenly about lining his own pockets. It is difficult to imagine Hitler taking time out from building the Nazi state to market chintzy merchandise from trading cards to self-promotional medallions, flog overpriced Bibles and $100,000 watches, or help launch a crypto-currency endeavor. Fascists traditionally utilized economic policy to prepare for and ultimately to wage war. Trump would prefer to avoid open war at all costs, although he is as bellicose as the next Republican hawk, not averse to dropping bombs on Afghanistan or engaging in the clandestine killing of those he considers the “terroristic” international enemies of his rule of the United States. But he banks on a message of withdrawal from orthodox foreign policy positions premised on America being a military leader of the “free world colossus” resonating with his mass base. Fascists abhor Communists, but Trump, who rhetorically follows suit in vilifying Marxists and wasting no opportunity to name-call his political rivals revolutionary leftists (and totalitarian fascists, as well!), is also willing to exchange “love letters” with heads of ostensible People’s Republics like North Korea. To the extent that Trump has a program, then, it is surely insufficiently coherent and consistent to qualify as resolutely fascistic. It defies even elementary adherence to the standard tenets of fiscal conservatism, to which Mussolini, after an initial short period of defiance, soon conformed. To be sure, there is much of the cult of the leader operative within Trumpism, but then this has always been a component of right-wing populism. Trump’s leadership, however, is long on free-wheeling performativity, and short on the structured development of consistent, grounded, and organizationally stable authority that is surely a hallmark of fascism. Fascism, like all forms of bourgeois rule, is about many things. The one element that it cannot do without is decisive leadership. Trump is rhetorically bombastic to be sure, but he lacks constancy.

The point that needs stressing is perhaps not how Trump is bringing fascism to America, but rather that his brand of governance inevitably culminates in chaos and accelerates the tendency toward crisis that is already built into capitalism, accelerating as the profit system confronts its growing contradictions. What capital foments economically, Trump stokes politically. The result is unquestioningly repugnant and dangerous, constituting a political mish-mash, a pastiche that certainly contains overtures to fascism. There are similarities, for instance, between Hitler’s “Beer Hall Putsch” of 1923 and Trump’s incitement of a Washington mob on 6 January 2022. The fundamental difference irrevocably separating these events is also obvious: Trump was in power but could not carry through anything approximating a full-fledged insurrection (for all the hue and cry raised subsequently by the liberal media and progressives of all sorts), let alone an actual coup d’état. Can anyone seriously suggest that Hitler or Mussolini in power would ever have allowed their grip on political rule to be threatened by electoral niceties and, if it was, that they would have acted with the wacky hope of winning through recourse to bizarre reliance on unorthodox understandings of how to manipulate arcane constitutional practices? Would either of these fascist strongmen have exhibited the vacillating indecision displayed by Trump during a transition of power he clearly wanted to reverse?

Bonapartism

Trump certainly exploits the escalating crises that have become endemic under late capitalism. In this, he shares the ground fascists have always cultivated. He is less the archetypal fascist, however, than an example of what might be called twenty-first century bonapartism. This bonapartism was described in its mid-nineteenth-century origins by Marx:

“Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation and being at the same time, like a conjurer, under the necessity of keeping the public gaze fixed on himself, … by springing constant surprises, that is to say, under the necessity of executing a coup d’etat en miniature every day, … [he] throws the entire bourgeois economy into confusion, violates everything that seemed inviolable …, makes some tolerant of revolution, others desirous of revolution, and produces actual anarchy in the name of order, while at the same time stripping its halo from the entire state machine, profanes it and makes it at once loathsome and ridiculous.”

Appearing as the benefactors of “all classes,” Marx stressed that bonapartists “cannot give to one class without taking from another.” With respect to the working class, bonapartism in the nineteenth century bears a striking resemblance to its equivalent in the twenty-first: “Dissolution of the actual workers’ associations, but promises of miracles of association in the future.”1 This is Trump’s pledge to coal miners and service workers, with his simplified promise to restore the energy extractive industry and abolish taxes on tips.

There are, of course, different kinds of bonapartism. Their relations to fascism demand a certain nuanced assessment. As Leon Trotsky noted in 1934, however, bonapartists generally represent and appeal to “the strongest and firmest part of the exploiters.” This judgement surely goes a long way toward an explanation of Elon Musk’s conversion to Trumpism. The passage of bonapartism to fascism, in Trotsky’s view, was necessarily presaged by disorder and was “pregnant with infinitely more formidable disturbances and consequently also revolutionary possibilities.” The bourgeoisie, inevitably fragmented, seldom uniformly, relishes “the political victory of fascism.” But its disparate components can often coalesce to the point that they are more than willing to countenance a “strong power.” We are seeing this, in the current moment, in capital’s hedging of its bets on a potential Trump victory, as with Jeff Bezos moving to squelch an endorsement of Harris on the editorial page of the newspaper he owns, the influential Washington Post. Bonapartism and fascism can transition into one another, but Trotsky insisted it was necessary to distinguish the distinct forms that governing power might assume. Yet he was also adamant that these different methods of political management were hardly “logical incompatible categories” of bourgeois rule.

Many on the left have been prone to proclaim that with the arrival of Trump on the political scene, “Fascism is already here.” This kind of undiscerning labelling can be seen, in Trotsky’s words, as “an attempt to … make easier” the appeal of social democratic/liberal elements that the “lesser evil” of bourgeois democracy, however craven, should necessarily command the allegiance of the masses. With Trump about to assume power and vanquish democracy, establishing fascism, the liberal order and the crisis-ridden capitalism that is its economic counterpart — having given rise to the very bonapartist politics paving the way to fascism — must be shored up electorally and a program of class struggle deflected.2

This seems remarkably applicable to the current conjuncture in the United States. In the progressive stampede to block access to Trump’s second bid for the presidency, left-wing elements align themselves too easily with the Democratic Party, embracing a “lesser evil” that is then often elevated to unquestioned virtuousness. The credentials of this compromised politics turn relentlessly on defeating an incipient fascism. Problems with this political practice are legion.

The Biden/Harris Democratic Party

Many were willing to bloc with Joe Biden, for instance, despite abundant evidence demonstrating his obvious incapacities. Biden’s bumbling blunders and seeming senility cost him dearly, squandering credibility with a mass electorate, especially the young and the seemingly left wing. The answer was to parachute Kamala Harris into the 2024 Presidential campaign at the eleventh hour, ensuring that her opponents had little chance to mount an alternative opposition. Has there ever been a candidate for the American presidency who faced less in the way of interrogation from the left? Obama, perhaps, but even that assessment might be open to question.

As a United Auto Workers leader proclaims Harris “one of us,” she offers organized labour next to nothing, save for a continuation of the brokerage policies and practices of Biden’s tired and tottering regime. Biden’s approach to labour was of a piece with the Democratic Party’s complacent capacity to take for granted support from constituencies that have good reason to fear the governance of the Republican right. Outfitted with a union jacket on Labour Day, Biden proclaimed himself a backer of trade unions, talk and the fashion of the moment being cheap. His record, however, undressed the politics of representation exposing the bare-bodied economics of class allegiance. A contradictory, but unequal, dualism summed up the Biden administration’s labour practice: break a railway strike in 2022 and make a show of walking a picket line in 2023.

Harris, it is abundantly clear, will follow a similar class trajectory. She has now taken to proclaiming herself a proud capitalist. Small business and the ubiquitous if vaguely-defined “middle class,” loom large in her speeches, the working class far less so. Fuzzy promises to hold down the price of groceries will almost certainly falter and fail in the face of stiff capitalist opposition to the kind of deep regulatory incursions in the marketplace that would send the retail sector into coronary arrest. Raising the minimum wage, as she has convinced some she will do, is also likely to be another promise broken. For how can Harris claim, on the one hand, to stand for these reforms, at the same time as she is unable to answer persistent questions as to how she offers the electorate something different than the Biden years? Her hopeful coalition, uniting the likes of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Democratic Socialists of America with elements of the Republican Party notable for their past crimes against humanity, such as Dick Cheney, constitutes nothing less than a regroupment of the center-right political mainstream. Formed on the bedrock of Trump’s capacity to imperil democracy, this realignment is notable for its exorcism of anything carrying the faintest scent of radical, left-wing sensibilities. It appears to be dragging much of the broad left along in its wake.

A group of “Historians for Harris,” 400+ strong and many of whom undoubtedly consider themselves leftists, have recently prefaced a statement with the following, quite incredible, view of United States history: “As American historians, we are deeply alarmed by the impending election. Since 1789, the nation has prospered under a Constitution dedicated to securing the general welfare, under a national government bound by the rule of law in which no one interest or person holds absolute power.” This, surely, is an understanding of the history of the United States that even Leonard Cohen, as contradictory as his lament for democracy in 1992 was, would have retreated from, even refused. Cohen could not have countenanced this — and the term is used advisedly — whitewashing of America’s quest for democracy, forged from so much strife and struggle: “From the war against disorder/From the sirens night and day/From the fires of the homeless/From the ashes of the gay/…From the brave, the bold, the battered/Heart of Chevrolet.”

It is mandatory to recognize that political/economic actions speak volumes over symbolic stands and public presentations of convenience. As war ravages Palestine, and Israel engages in mass destruction of Gaza, extending its assault into Iran and Lebanon, Harris holds firm to the American commitment to support the Israeli state. She offers the dead of the southern Levant her condolences. Israel receives arms and the military defense of its airspace. That support comes carte blanche. The United States administration urges restraint, concern for non-combatants, and apparently presses for a ceasefire, while Benjamin Netanyahu, facing allegations of war crimes by the International Criminal Court, is fêted in Washington. Upon his return to Israel, Netanyahu then thumbs his nose at Biden, Anthony Blinken, and Harris, and simply ups the ante in his aggressive crusade of mass destruction and obliteration. No matter how brazenly and disproportionately the Israeli war cabinet pursues vengeance against all Palestinian peoples for the October 2023 Hamas act of terrorism, those governing the United States refuse to stop the flow of arms to Netanyahu or to forcefully bring his genocidal campaign to a halt. The war-mongering reactionaries who prop up Netanyahu’s leadership, keep him out of prison, and appear hell-bent on taking settler colonialism to new heights of vindictive violent dispossession have a free reign. Domestically, Trump and the Republicans concoct wild stories about illegal immigrants, their responsibility for violent crime, and decry the rampant barbarism that inevitably results from an ostensibly “open border” policy. Harris responds by promising to use her prosecutorial experience — which is receiving almost no critical scrutiny — to get tough on transgressors and tighten up things at the southern international boundary.

To be sure, on abortion Harris has been firm. The dismantling of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court and the epidemic of state legislation outlawing abortion remains perhaps the singular issue on which Harris offers an unambiguous rejoinder to what is widely perceived as an attack on a fundamental human entitlement. Yet even on this decisive matter, where Biden was reluctant to mouth anything of substance, Harris tends to zero in on the extreme medical consequences of abortion bans and unwanted pregnancies resulting from rape, incestuous or otherwise. It is less common to hear Harris offer an unequivocal defense of the right to choose, a language from the past that has seemingly gone into hibernation in the current cold climate. Fascism’s coming is feared, and this structures political opposition in a particularly skewed way.

A politics of confused positionings proliferates, however much one side is undeniably preferable to another: the moralism of a progressive but programmatically deficient left runs headlong into the chaotic meanderings of a bonapartist right-wing populism, decried as fascism. This opposition, elevated to a clash of righteousness among reactionary right wingers and sanctimonious progressives, structures choice along a spectrum of evil/less evil. When the smoke and mirrors of our distorted politics in 2024 are eventually placed in the rear-view of a future, it is likely that fascism will not have come to America. What will have survived, to the detriment of a genuine democracy and the realization of social justice will be a strengthened bourgeois hegemony, in which a rhetoric of aspiration, hope, and freedom masks the barriers to a truly egalitarian order. The greater danger to the struggle for a better world will then perhaps be recognized to have been those ostentatiously dressed in the garb of the lesser evil.

Stopping fascism that some see coming to America is indeed both necessary and laudatory. But to do that we need to know what fascism is and what it is not. Decrying attempts to define it, opting instead to catalogue characteristics that can then be associated with Trump, is not an answer. Moreover, if the means to stop what some claim is fascism proves to be a strengthening of the decrepit and crisis-ridden capitalism and its politics of championing a democracy yet to be delivered is the only way to turn back the far right, we need to seriously search out other ways of doing this.

If we are to sail on, in Leonard Cohen’s words, “To the Shores of Need/Past the Reefs of Greed/Through the Squalls of Hate,” it will not be in the sinking ship of capital, even if captained by a head of state singing loudly the praises of freedom and democracy. Flying flags of antifascism was once a dangerous occupation, undertaken by those willing to risk their lives in the armed struggle against totalitarianism in Germany, Italy, and Spain. Now the antifascist banner too often sags under the weight of bourgeois conventionality and the smug complacency it trades in. Any ship of state powered by the crisis-ridden profit system that has historically, if pushed to the brink, spawned actual fascist movements and elevated them to ruling regimes, will sink us all. The cost of sailing forward in this lesser evil vessel is likely to prove a bit of a Faustian bargain, a pricey proposition for any left worthy of the name. 

Bryan D. Palmer is the author of James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-1938 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2021), Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strikes of 1934 (Chicago: Haymarket, 2014), co-author of Toronto’s Poor: A Rebellious History (Between The Lines, 2016), and a past editor of the journal, Labour/Le Travail. He is Professor Emeritus, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario.

• 1

  Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 180, 178.

• 2

  Leon Trotsky, “ Bonapartism and Fascism,” Writings of Leon Trotsky [1934-35] (New York: Pathfinder, 1971), 51-57.