A lieutenant of the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department has been charged with multiple counts, under federal and municipal law, of obstructing justice, perjury, and leaking classified police information. The charges all relate to Lt. Shane Lammond’s longstanding acquaintanceship and collaboration with Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, a fascist civilian paramilitary militia.
Federal prosecutors allege that Lammond aided Tarrio and his associates during the Capitol Hill putsch of January 6, 2021.
On that day, an armed mob of MAGA fascists, numbering 2,000 and primarily led by Tarrio’s contingent of 200 Proud Boys members, marched on the U.S. Capitol Building as part of a half-hearted putsch. Their ostensible intent was to reinstall Donald Trump, who lost the 2020 presidential election by a considerable margin, as President of the United States; in fact, this was an experiment in fascist mobilization — a training or staging exercise, test-run, or proof of concept, if you will. Trump had spent the weeks following election day in November 2020 mobilizing his most militant supporters with false claims of a “stolen” election. (The majority-Democrat House of Representatives would later impeach Trump for a second time in retaliation.) The rioters actually breached the Capitol’s inner chambers and drove elected officials and staffers into hiding. Still, the attackers failed to capitalize on their victory — apparently owing, in part, to legitimate surprise that they were so rapidly successful.
One rioter was shot and killed during the assault. In the months that followed, four police officers committed suicide. Many cops were distraught at the “family” infighting: They had been forced to confront their mostly white, mostly middle-class fascist paramilitary brethren with a modicum of the repressive violence they normally reserve for terrorizing Black and other colonized people and the desperately poor.
Since January 6, 2021, more than 1,000 individuals have faced criminal charges, including “sedition,” relating to their participation in the putsch.
Federal prosecutors unsealed the charges against Lammond on Friday, May 19. They allege that Lammond aided Tarrio and his associates during the Capitol Hill putsch, specifically by supplying Tarrio with classified information via text messages. If convicted, Lammond, a “veteran” officer with over 20 years on the force, and a “decorated” “intelligence expert” (who was evidently not intelligent enough to avoid incriminating himself), faces a maximum of 30 years in prison.
One might ask, why would a “decorated” police officer such as Lt. Shane Lammond aid a terrorist like Enrique Tarrio? As a police officer, wasn’t it his duty to prevent terrorism and to catch terrorists?
Actually, the police exist for one reason, and one reason only: To maintain the existing social order by means of violent repression.
What is the existing order in the U.S.?
The United States of America was founded as — and remains, to this day, regardless of how our rulers brand it — a settler-colonial empire. This country was built upon the enslavement of millions of Black Africans and upon genocidal campaigns of land-conquest against this continent’s Indigenous peoples. Dispossession of the colonized remains the economic foundation of the U.S. Empire. In order to keep the oppressed peoples from rising up and overthrowing the colonialist order, the U.S. Empire must arm itself with a powerful repressive force — in fact, the most powerful military and police forces in world history. It is impossible to understand the ubiquity of police terror and brutality against Black and other colonized peoples today if one fails to recognize that the U.S. Empire’s police forces have their origins in settler militias, organized and armed by colonial governors, planters, and land-greedy settlers in order to massacre and drive out Indigenous communities, recapture escaped slaves, and terrorize ethnic and religious minorities.
The U.S. Empire is also ruled by a dictatorship of the capitalists. Originally, when the settler colonies that would later form the U.S. declared independence from Britain, they were ruled by three powerful classes: the big merchants, who owned massive fleets, and whose profits largely derived from the trans-Atlantic slave trade; the bankers, who financed the former; and the slaveholding planters, who grew rich by exploiting the enslaved labor of Black Africans upon their massive plantation estates. Capitalism, in its modern, industrial mode, developed in this country during the 19th Century, first in the “free” North; gradually, as the “frontier” West was colonized, it was transformed into a site of open battle between the capitalist and slave-plantation systems, which led directly to the U.S. Civil War; after the Union’s victory over the slaveholder-dictatorship Confederacy and the legal abolition of slavery, capitalism also began to develop in the South. The big merchants, bankers, and planters converted themselves into industrialists — the “barons” and “captains” of American steel, coal, rail, manufacturing, agriculture, and other industries — and financiers. As capitalism developed, so did monopolies, and the new monopolists retooled the country’s existing state machinery, including its police forces, to serve their new dictatorship.
Those police were reorganized and given an additional purpose: to act as the guardians of capitalist private property in the U.S. Empire’s developing industrial cities, and to crush any and all organized proletarian resistance, even as labor agitation and open revolt raged throughout the 19th century. But as the economic structure of the U.S. Empire changed, its colonial substructure remained intact, and the institution of U.S. policing never forgot or forsook its colonialist origins in slave-catching, plantation enforcement, “frontier” massacres, and white terror.
In sum, it is no accident that police in the U.S. Empire have deep links with civilian-fascist paramilitaries. This is not an unintended “flaw” in the way this country’s police forces are organized; it is a consciously reproduced “feature” of any colonialist police force. Police function, by design, as the crucible of U.S. fascism. As the saying goes, “Cops and Klan go hand-in-hand.”
But if that’s the case, if civilian-fascist paramilitaries like the Proud Boys ultimately serve to uphold the U.S. Empire’s settler-colonial, white supremacist, capitalist order, then why has the Federal Government cracked down in recent years on the fascists involved in the January 6, 2021 putsch?
The war of “lawfare” raging in this country’s courts represents a factional struggle within the U.S. Empire’s ruling class of monopoly capitalists.
One of these factions is represented mainly by the “moderate” mainstream wing of the Democratic Party, currently headed by President Joe Biden, as well as by the vanishingly small and inconsequential “moderate” wing of the Republican Party. This faction’s main goal is stability: It wants to stabilize the U.S. Empire’s fascist regime at its present level of ascendency and brutality, because it believes (rightly so) that any expansion of fascism may provoke civil unrest. This faction remembers the Summer 2020 Rebellion that shook the country after the police murder of George Floyd, and it desperately wants to stave off any further mass uprisings for as long as it can. We refer to this faction as the left-wing of U.S. fascism.
The other faction is represented mainly by the recently ascendant extreme-right wing of the Republican Party, which has coalesced since 2016, and especially since 2020, around its political figurehead, Donald Trump. This faction’s main goal is expansion: It wants to expand the U.S. Empire’s fascist regime at all costs. It wishes to stave off the march of history, of progress, by intensifying the U.S. regime’s state terror and brutality against the poor and colonized masses, against women and LGBT people, and against other oppressed sections of the population. It stands for the openly terroristic dictatorship of the most depraved elements of the monopoly-capitalists, their allies among the predominantly white middle classes, and their lackeys in the military, police, and other institutions of the fascist state’s bureaucracy. We refer to this faction as the right-wing of U.S. fascism.
In the 2020 general elections, the Democrats won a majority in both houses of Congress and the presidency. The left-wing of U.S. fascism temporarily won power back from the right-wing. Since then, in order to consolidate their gains and carry out their program of fascist stabilization, the Democrats directed the Department of Justice and other arms of the Federal Government to carry out a minor campaign of repression against the most militant forces of the opposing right-wing faction. That campaign has even reached Trump himself; the former President is currently on trial for election-related criminal charges.
Such factional struggles are hardly out of the ordinary in a fascist regime. Take, for instance, the rise of the Nazis in Germany.
During the Weimar Republic era, a paramilitary force known as the Freikorps was instrumental in the rise of fascism. The Freikorps took in military rejects and veterans, indoctrinated them into fascism, and remilitarized them as shock-troop terrorists to be employed by the German state. When the proletariat of Germany, fatigued by the brutality of the First World War, but still highly organized and class-conscious, rose up in 1918–1919, the capitalist dictatorship employed the Freikorps to crush the revolution and assassinate its Communist leaders. The Freikorps retained their significance into the early 1930’s, and would be integrated in large part into the Nazi Party’s Sturmabteilung and Schutzstaffel paramilitaries. But in 1934, a factional struggle broke out within the Nazi Party, culminating in the Night of the Long Knives incident, in which Hitler’s faction carried out targeted assassinations of prominent Nazi Party leaders and jailed others, including some Freikorps members, in order to consolidate the Hitlerite faction’s control over the Nazi regime. Hitler would go on to denounce the Freikorps as “degenerates,” reversing his earlier endorsement.
Fascism in the U.S. Empire has not yet expanded to the stage of absolute despotism and omnipresent terror reached in Germany in 1934. But fascism in this country is expanding, and the struggles between its factions are intensifying.
The Trumpite Republicans are amassing their forces, both political, in the Federal and state governments, and paramilitary, in the streets. The Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, and the whole variety of civilian-fascist paramilitaries that have coalesced and grown in recent years, especially under the MAGA banner, are of the same type as the Freikorps in proto-fascist Germany, and they will be made to serve the same ends by our American Hitlerites. In cities across the U.S. Empire, these rabid dogs, these cops in plain clothes, are assembling to terrorize oppressed communities: They stand across from LGBT bars and nightclubs holding rifles. They stand across from Movement for Black Lives marches, alongside their blue-uniformed brethren. They stand across from reproductive healthcare clinics, threatening the patients who seek abortions and other health services and the doctors who provide them. They are ready at a moment’s notice to open fire, to commit lynchings and massacres, to enact the chaotic-yet-organized terror that only a civilian-fascist paramilitary can — no questions asked. And when the time comes, when fascism is absolutely ascendent in the U.S. Empire, those civilian-fascist terrorists who prove useful will be absorbed into the American Schutzstaffel; the remainder will be discarded.
The “moderate” Democrats, the “moderate” left-wing of U.S. fascism, are carrying out the present lawfare campaign against Trump and his most militant supporters not because they care about “safeguarding our democracy,” as they claim, but because they are desperately clinging to what remains of their power. Faced with the ascendancy of a new variety of U.S. fascism, the Democrats have been compelled to use the repressive force of courts and police — even against other police. But this cannot last forever; the weight of this regime’s internal contradictions will inevitably bring it to the point of collapse. As fascism continues to expand across the U.S. Empire, the question is therefore not whether the Democrats will fold, but when.
And as for the oppressed masses? We are poor and exhausted by the everyday facts of our lives; we are horrifically outgunned by the enemy state. Our only weapon is organization, and organization on an independent basis. Let the capitalist parties vie for hegemony in this country’s halls of power. Our task is to organize, educate, and arm ourselves, our loved ones, our neighbors, and our communities — to build power where we stand. Only by building popular power among the oppressed masses will we find the power to defeat and eliminate the fascist cancer, once and for all.
