Por Paul Street
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I’m not talking about a single day national protest of an aspiring “king” or against “billionaire class oligarchy.” I mean a serious, ongoing movement for US-American regime change from the bottom and up, forcing the hand of the nation’s rulers.
What would flip that switch?
Genocidal Racism and Concentration Camps
Would that regime sweeping up tens of thousands of US-Americans’ brown-skinned neighbors into a giant expanding network of concentration camps do the trick?
Would the regime’s masked “immigration enforcement” gendarmes disappearing masses of supposedly “illegal” workers, neighbors, parents, loved ones, caretakers, friends, students, children, and siblings across state and even national lines help?
What if heavily armed regime thugs terrorized whole US neighborhoods and towns, including schools and churches in the sites it menaced?
What if these thugs and their commanders targeted their victims on the basis of skin color and ethnicity?
What if dozens died in the regime’s camps because the fascist regime denied proper care to its captives?
What if the regime sent people it kidnapped to torture camps in distant and lawless nations to which they had no historical connection (e.g., sending a Honduran asylum seeker from a US camp to a Rwandan camp)?
What if the regime’s head of state was a racist ogre who returned to power after a presidential campaign in which he echoed Adolph Hitler by saying that nonwhite immigrants were “poisoning our blood”?
What if this president called Somali Americans and a Somali American US Representative “garbage”?
What if he repeatedly referred to female reporters, politicians, and public figures he disliked as “bitches” and “pigs” (and other insulting terms)?
What if this brute habitually called Black elected officials “low IQ individuals”?
What if that president put up a social media post portraying the United States’ first Black president and first Black First Lady as apes?
What if the racist head of the US state further channeled Hitler by calling for more blue-eyed Scandinavian immigrants and granting asylum to white beneficiaries of South African apartheid – this while closing the nation to people from nonwhite nations and stripping temporary protected status from millions of nonwhite immigrants?
What if the regime’s Pentagon chief was a demented Christian white nationalist “crusader” who removed women and people of color from high military posts and renamed military bases after Confederate (Slave Power) military leaders?
What if that Pentagon secretary promoted within the military the arch-reactionary ideas of his pastor, an evangelical fascist on record with the claim that Black chattel slavery marked the high point in the history of US race relations?
Steps Towards Fascist Dictatorship
What if the regime attacked long-time norms and institutions of decency, civility, legality, free speech, and reasoned deliberation, moving rapidly to replace “democracy” and rule of law with the unvarnished rule of irrational and violent men?
What if it was determined to turn back the clock on decades of social justice, civil liberties, civil rights, and environmental victory, working relentlessly to remake US government and society on fascist – white supremacist, militantly patriarchal, xenophobic, and arch-authoritarian – lines?
What if that regime’s first action in the White House was to pardon 1600 putschists convicted for trying to cancel a previous presidential election in a physical attack on the US Capitol, an attack its cult leader had sparked and wanted armed with military assault weapons?
What if that president commuted the long prison sentences handed down to the nation’s top two fascist paramilitary leaders for their roles in the attempted putsch?
What if his second major action was to issue an executive order purporting to cancel the US Constitutional right of birthright citizenship – to rewrite the Constitution by presidential fiat?
What if this president sent out US military forces to occupy US cities on false pretexts?
What if this president behaved in accord with the belief that he is the law and the government?
What if he regularly depicted himself as a divinely ordained savior?
What if the regime’s nativist gendarmes murdered two immigrant rights protesters in a US city?
What if its Justice Department then blocked efforts to investigate these murders?
What if this president responded to a national day of protest of his authoritarianism by putting up a post portraying him flying a bomber that dumped liquid shit on citizens in the streets?
What if he told dozens if not hundreds of lies every week?
What if the regime’s president openly pined to become a strongman for life, half-“joking” about staying in power beyond the US Constitution’s two-term limit for presidents
What if he ordered a military parade in honor of his birthday and the placement of giant banners depicting his face on federal buildings?
What if that president “won” a second term thanks to stepped up racist vote suppression?
What if he continued to obsessively repeat the massively dis-proven and Hitlerian lie that a previous presidential election was stolen from him?
What if the regime repeatedly defied judicial orders?
What if the regime further mocked the principle of constitutional “checks and balances” by turning the US legislative branch into its supine handmaid?
What if it attacked the nation’s top universities, media firms, and law firms, insisting that these institutions exhibit cringing obedience to its Dear Leader?
What if it repeatedly declared fake states of emergency to justify its authoritarian measures?
What if it encouraged far-right violence against its perceived political enemies while labeling those who questioned its actions “domestic terrorists,” “Radical Left lunatics,” and “enemies of the people”?
What if it drafted draconian plans to crush and cripple dissent, identifying any criticism of dominant US social hierarchies and ideologies as criminal and treasonous?
What if the regime’s top political advisor boasted that sheer force rightly trumps the “niceties” of national and international law?
What if this advisor channeled the language and spirit of Adolph Hitler’s master propagandist Joseph Goebbels by saying this at an assassinated fascist youth leader’s memorial:
“We are the storm. Our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion. The light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello… Our ancestors built the cities… the art and architecture… the industry. To the enemy, I say this: You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can create nothing… You have no idea the dragon you have awakened”?
What if the regime’s head of state and war chief ordered more than 800 top military officers from across the US Empire into a military auditorium to tell them that the nation’s top adversary was “the enemy within,” meaning the president’s political enemies, and that the Pentagon should use cities as “training grounds” for foreign wars?
What if the regime conducted a “retribution” campaign of vengeful political prosecution, weaponizing its Justice Department to punish the president’s perceived critics and enemies?
What if the regime campaigned for and aligned with neo-fascist parties in Europe – a grotesque insult to the 260,000 US troops (including my mother’s beloved older brother Connie Freed) who died fighting the Nazi Third Reich and its allies?
What if the regime and its party undertook a many-sided attack on the integrity and possibly even the occurrence or acceptance of the 2026 US mid-term elections, an attack including the sparking of a massive state-level campaign to gerrymander majority Black and Democratic Congressional districts out of existence? What if this neo-Jim Crow attack was green-lighted by a fascist Supreme Court that the president and his cult party created during a previous administration and that subsequently enabled the president’ return to power in defiance of the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment – this while also granting him lifetime immunity from prosecution for any crimes he commits in connection with his “official presidential duties”?
What if the president expressed hostility to the occurrence of future election and made clear his refusal to accept election outcomes he doesn’t like?
What if the regime obstructed the release of criminal investigation files demonstrating its head of state’s long close friendship with an epic sex-trafficker and sexual abuser of girls and likely containing evidence that the president himself is a pedophile?
Fascist Imperialism
What if the regime carried out a monumentally illegal and immoral campaign of extrajudicial executions in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, a campaign that killed hundreds of Latin Americans without offering evidence for the claim that its victims were “enemy combatants” transporting illegal drugs to the US?
What if the regime defended its criminal “double tap” slaughter of incapacitated victims of a first strike, clinging for life to the wreckage of their boat?
What if the regime doubled down on this Western-hemispheric “gunboat diplomacy” by kidnapping and jailing Venezuela’s elected head of state, killing dozens of Cubans and Venezuelans in the process?
What if the regime followed this crime by ordering Venezuela to hand over control of its petroleum industry to criminally eco-exterminist US oil companies?
What if it imposed an embargo on the export of Venezuelan oil to Cuba, leading to the death of Cuban hospital patients?
What if the regime’s head of state repeatedly threatened to “take Cuba” and “do whatever I want with it”?
What if the regime joined with its genocidal client state Israel to launch a monumentally criminal, unprovoked war of imperial aggression against Iran, murdering thousands of that nation’s civilians, including hundreds of children?
What if the regime’s leader sickened the world and revealed its genocidal nature by repeatedly threatening to wipe out the whole civilization of Iran, sending it “back to the Stone Ages where it belongs” if Iran’s government did not accede to his wishes?
What if the regime openly backed Israel’s Judeo-fascist wars of genocidal annihilation in Gaza, Lebanon, and the Palestinian West Bank?
What if the regime’s head of state told The New York Times that “I don’t need international law” and that the only relevant and legitimate restraint on his conduct was “my own morality, my own mind”?
What if he called for the prosecution of six Congresspersons for “treason” for posting a video in which they informed military personnel of their right and duty to refuse to carry out illegal orders?
What if the regime tried to rename the Department of Defense as the “Department of War,” insanely claiming that the original name was a product of leftist “woke” culture?
What if the regime’s Pentagon chief expressed contempt for long established rules of international law and military engagement, upholding a “warrior ethos” that trumped “tepid legality” with “maximum lethality”?
What if the regime rejected weapons controls and provocatively ordered the resumption of nuclear weapons testing while pursuing and encouraging chaotic military nationalism across a world chock full of thermonuclear arms and menaced by ever more advanced and dangerously automated systems for delivering those weapons?
Attacking Science, Public Health and the Climate
What if the regime carried out a massive and sustained attack on US environmental regulations, climate science, medical research, and higher education?
What if it attacked US renewable energy production on a planet that is nearing irreversible climate catastrophe caused by the excessive extraction and burning of fossil fuels?
What if it slashed funds for federal emergency management and relief in a time of ever more extreme weather driven by the climate crisis it denied and fueled?
What it if attacked basic public health measures and agencies, including cancer research and vaccine readiness in a world full of pandemic menaces and other grave epidemiological and medical threats?
What if the regime pushed tens of millions of US-Americans off health insurance to spite a previous president it hated because of the color of his skin and his party identification?
What if it removed millions of US-Americans from food assistance eligibility because it sees the poor as lazy and inferior “useless eaters,” disposable and surplus people unworthy of existence?
What if its president told an audience of his wealthy backers that the federal government can’t afford to pay for Social Security and Medicare because it needs to fund war?
What if the regime killed hundreds of thousands of people abroad by slashing global health funding at the behest of a fascist Afrikaner tech multi-billionaire?
Mental and Moral Unfitness Indicating the Urgent Need for Removal
What if more than 40 elite medical and psychiatric experts sent to Congress a detailed letter presenting evidence that the debilitated mental and moral health of the regime’s leader “present[s] a clear and present danger to our country and to the world” – a letter that ended by saying that the US president was “mentally unfit to be the President of the United States and that steps to remove him from office must be taken with the greatest urgency”?
What if the regime’s reigning wannabe dictator-for-life combined fascism with an epic, unprecedented level of corruption, “monetizing” the US presidency to garner $10 billion in profits from foreign payments, corrupt oligarchs, digital assets and cryptocurrency holdings?
Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022).
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