The Trump Administration Just Declared War on Anti-Fascists... Because That's What Fascists Do.

According to their latest propaganda performance art piece, The Trump Administration has announced a new “counterterrorism” strategy, targeting what they call “violent Left-Wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists.”Not the Patriot Front or the Proud Boys. Not Neo-Nazis. Not the Evangelical thugs crashing Pride parades, health clinics, and civil rights protests. Not homegrown, white, Conservative males (who comprise the lion’s share of our mass shooters).They’re coming for Americans who oppose fascism. Let me say that again: An American presidency is openly declaring war on Americans who oppose fascism. If there’s ever a moment that should finally rouse the last of us out of the thick haze of laziness, wishful thinking, and American exceptionalism, it should be this one.Career sociopath Sebastian Gorka, the administration’s senior director for counterterrorism, who authored the declaration, promises that they are setting their sights on what they describe as those whose ideology is “secular, anti-American, radically pro-transgender and anarchist.”Let’s unpack that Right-Wing code language, a bit:Secular, in other words, those people not fully indoctrinated into the extremist Evangelical fundamentalism that mocks empathy, worships war, eradicates vulnerable people, and pines for Armageddon so their Conservative White Daddy God can return.Anti-American, as defined by a cadre of lawless grifters whose contempt for the Constitution is complete; traitorous insurrectionists with no allegiance to its precepts and no desire to uphold the elemental freedoms and inalienable rights it promises.Radically pro-transgender, meaning anyone who believes that people’s bodies, bathrooms, and healthcare decisions aren’t anyone’s damn business but their own, and that queer people should be allowed to live in peace from Evangelical theocracy. Anarchists, in other words, ordinary people who will not quietly comply with a brutal regime of supremacist White House squatters who are dragging this nation backwards, toward the days when women and people of color were legislatively and legally erased.Here’s the thing, friends, if opposing fascism amounts to terrorism, we’re now all facing a fascist regime, and we’re all going to need to respond to it the way Americans have for the past 250 years: we’re gonna have to fight it.I am anti-fascist, and I’m willing to bet that you are, too.This is not a declaration of membership in some non-existent group that our leadership has declared a phony holy war on, but a collective statement of intent. We are not claiming affiliation with an imaginary organization, but testifying to our purpose here in this beautiful land that we love dearly.We are fiercely, steadfastly, unapologetically anti-fascist, because Americans are supposed to be and have always been.We’re anti-fascist because that’s the whole reason this nation exists to begin with, the oppressive crucible of coercion that our freedoms were first born out of.We’re anti-fascist because the hundreds of thousands of our forebears who courageously fought and died on foreign soil were anti-fascist.We’re anti-fascist because up until recently, every single president we’ve ever had marshaled our nation’s military and economic power to defeat fascism, not to traffic in it.We’re anti-fascist because fascism is a mortal threat to free speech, to freedom of expression, to body autonomy, to cultural diversity, to life, liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness for every human being who calls this place home or wishes to.And simply by virtue of the fact that we are anti-fascist Americans, we are dangerous to this Administration, which actually says more about them than it does about us. We haven’t lost the plot here; they have.So, yeah, Trump and his sycophantic hate-mongers can run this false flag high up the partisan propaganda flagpole in the hopes that their fear-addled, easily manipulated, increasingly uninformed, miserable rank-and-file fall for it, and some of them may.But the rest of us: the vast, sprawling, disparate majority see through the facade and will not have our gaze diverted away from their criminality and inhumanity, and we will not shrink back in the face of their desperate, blustering bravado. We will not relent in our daily, unwavering, nonviolent opposition to authoritarianism, to theocracy, to illegality, to unconstitutional overreach, and to State-sponsored brutality.The Trump Administration needs to understand that the lion’s share of this nation is anti-fascist; that’s what Americans are supposed to be, it’s what most of their ancestors were.If they want to declare a white extremist holy war and take the side of fascism, I say, “bring it on.”And the decent, compassionate, truly spiritual, actually patriotic people here will remind them how Americans respond to violent authoritarian regimes.History is recording these days, friends. I want to go on record as being anti-fascist and fighting its attempts to destroy this flawed but beautiful experiment in Democracy.I hope we all do.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. 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