CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

What would it take for tens of millions of US-Americans to take to the streets on a regular basis, rising in a sustained mass movement to cancel business as usual pending the removal of a virulent fascist regime atop the most lethal superpower in world history, before it’s too late?

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........

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