Inside Reform’s plans for a fascist takeover by Elia J. Ayoub

Welcome back! This week's article in focus is brought to us by Elia J. Ayoub and is reveals the realities Inside Reform’s plans for a fascist takeoverElia J. Ayoub is a UK-based Palestinian-Lebanese writer and researcher whose work focuses on authoritarianism, hauntings, and alternative futurities. He holds a PhD in Cultural Analysis from the University of Zurich on postwar Lebanon and an MA on the politics of Hebrew and Yiddish. He is the co-founder of From The Periphery media collective which includes his podcast The Fire These Times. He can be found on Bluesky, and he runs the Hauntologies.net newsletter.What can you do?Get to know your neighbours. As Minneapolis has been showing us, getting to know your neighbours is one of the most effective ways to keep each other safe. Unless there’s a safety-related reason for not doing so, I recommend getting at least to a first name basis. Dropping a postcard during the holidays or baking something small and cute and offering it to them goes a long way too. Read the Reform document in detail and spread the word. Make sure to associate Reform to Project 2025, ICE and Trump. We need to get rid of their “outsiders to the status quo” status and associate them to a brutal and fascist project that is already playing out catastrophically in the US. Reform wants to paint itself as he most British party, and we can instead make sure they are permanently tied to Trump.From an electoral standpoint, we need to think of the best tactic to keep Reform out of power, permanently. Tactical voting might be needed. I’m not an expert on this, but I think a reasonable way forward would be to maximise the influence of the Green party of England and Wales (and their progressive equivalents in Scotland and Northern Ireland and Wales) while working on pressuring Labour to abandon Starmerite cowardice and appeasement of the Far Right. I don’t pretend to know how, but other people probably do, and we can’t afford to wait and find out what a prime minister Nigel Farage would do.Learn from Minneapolis. Read: From Minneapolis: I’ve Never Seen Unity Like This (Margaret Killjoy) “Dispatch, Please Advise!” (Red-Winged Blackbird collective)Rapid Response Networks in the Twin Cities (Crimethinc) Minneapolis Responds to the Murder of Alex Pretti (Crimethinc)I’m a Minneapolis sociologist who studies violence. Here’s how ICE observers are helping (Nicole Bedera)ICE vs. Everyone (Erin West)Welcome to the American Winter (Robert F. Worth) The Moral Right to Defend Yourself Against ICE (Michael Gregory) Lies and Lawlessness (Timothy Snyder) State Terror Has Arrived (Masha Gessen) and The Battle for Minneapolis (Emily Witt). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.