The ban will apply to In-N-Out locations in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and Texas. Workers at In-N-Out locations in California and Oregon, “blue” states that have tended to adopt marginally better, but still woefully inadequate, policies in response to the pandemic, will still be allowed to mask.

The company has threatened workers who do not comply with the ban, who attempt to keep themselves and others safe by wearing masks, with disciplinary measures, “up to and including termination of employment.”

In-N-Out announced the rule in an internal memo circulated to its employees, whom the company euphemistically calls “associates.” The change in policy came to light when the memo was leaked on Twitter.

The memo states that an exception will be made for workers “who have a specific medical condition or other health concern that requires them to wear a mask,” but that such workers “must provide a valid medical note” to store management.

Evidently the company does not believe that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which is still claiming hundreds of lives every day in the U.S., constitutes a “health concern” in itself. The company also disregards the fact that six in ten people in the U.S. have underlying health conditions that increase risk of severe COVID-19 complications. 

No, the company places the onus on its workers to prove that they deserve the right to a safe workplace.

The memo is nothing new for In-N-Out. The company has been forced to close multiple locations during the pandemic due to non-compliance with COVID-19 ordinances. It has also resolutely refused to enforce vaccine mandates. The bosses have proven time and time again that they will gladly sacrifice their workers upon the altar of profit.

As infectious disease expert Dr. Judy Stone points out in a recent article in Forbes, “requiring proof of a disability might be considered a violation of the Americans with Disability Act.” Getting a doctor’s note is also onerous for many workers, due to the singularly astronomical costs of health insurance and care in the U.S., the difficulty of even scheduling an appointment, and the loss of wages incurred by taking time off work. Moreover, although the internal memo promises that employees requesting an exemption to the ban are not required to disclose “confidential medical information,” the company still requires that “the medical note should clearly state the reason for the exemption” — an absurd contradiction in terms, and a gross violation of health information privacy law.

Face masks are a basic component of personal protective equipment (PPE), and their use has proliferated during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. As Dr. Stone notes, In-N-Out’s policy directly contravenes official guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which advise that everyone should have the right to wear a mask in public.

How does In-N-Out justify its policy of reckless endangerment, its blatant disregard for its workers’ lives?

According to the memo, the purpose of the new face mask ban is to force workers to “show their smiles and other facial features.” (Ah, of course! Nothing brings a smile like the risk of illness, disablement, and death!) But then the company, leaning a bit too much on euphemism, tips its hand: the face mask ban, continues the memo, will “promote clear and effective communication” between workers, management, and customers, with the aim of creating “customer-centric” restaurants.

The true purpose of the ban is transparently to enforce labor discipline and to appease the section of reactionary consumers who believe that restaurant and other service workers should serve them with a smile — even in the midst of a deadly pandemic.

The capitalist is driven by the profit motive, and by that motive alone. He buys the worker’s time, hour by hour, and for every hour’s wage he pays, he intends to squeeze the worker’s body to the last drop of productivity. And so he demands discipline, and he will use both carrot and stick — more often the latter, when dealing with unskilled, poor and low-wage, and easily replaceable workers — to get it. He demands that the worker never pause a moment to rest; he strictly curtails talk between employees; he waits like a hound to snap and bark at the first sign of idleness. He deplores that he must rent human beings, who tire; who need to break for food and water at regular intervals; who must pause to use the restroom, or to catch their breath between tasks, or to wash their hands. He institutes a regime meant to fashion human workers into machines, and he employs a team of managers to fit the workers to his mechanical designs.

That is why something as mundane and inoffensive as a mask, meant to keep the worker safe, is unconscionable to the capitalist: It hides one of the worker’s “parts” — her mouth — and therefore disrupts “clear and effective communication.” The hypothetical seconds the mask-wearing worker might spend repeating herself are, from the capitalist’s perspective, precious seconds that she could otherwise spend selling another burger to another customer — and he will not abide even a second of lost profit. Moreover, the worker who protects herself, her co-workers, the customers, her family, etc. from illness, who tends to her human needs and her human rights to health and safety, who reclaims even a thin cloth mask’s worth of agency and bodily autonomy, shatters the capitalist’s fantasies of tireless waged machines, humanizing not only the worker, but also her work, her part in the process of production — and that cannot be allowed.

The capitalist is a monster, no doubt, but an impossibly fragile monster — a monster who shudders with grave offense when faced with a bit of unprofitable cloth.

In-N-Out is brazenly violating its employees’ legal rights. It is forcing the workers to subject themselves to the perils of a debilitating and often deadly illness, amid an ongoing pandemic. That much is indisputable.

What does this prove? Only this universal fact of wage-labor: When the workers are disorganized, when we fail to combine in unions and take collective action, we are too weak to assert our rights in the only language the bosses understand — brute force. Only by inspiring fear in our exploiters with the constant threat of strikes and shut-downs can we secure and reaffirm our safety, dignity, and livelihoods.

Thanks to the workers’ sacrifices, their bosses, the owners, big shareholders, corporate executives, and high-level management of the big shipping firms, both U.S.-based and international, have made record-breaking profits during the COVID-19 pandemic. In that time, the stockholders’ and stockbrokers’ proverbial “line,” the rate of profit, has been consistently going up, with a record for shipping industry profits set in 2021 getting successively ”smashed” by last year’s margins.

Now these 22,000 and more workers want a contract. They want their wages raised to match inflation, expanded benefits and pensions, and job security. Their representatives have been negotiating with the shipping conglomerate capitalists, represented by the Pacific Maritime Association, an international shipping monopoly trust, since May 2022. Negotiations have been slow and painful.

Union representatives are vocally holding their ground. “We aren’t going to settle for an economic package that doesn’t recognize the heroic efforts and personal sacrifices of the ILWU workforce that lifted the shipping industry to record profits,” said the ILWU’s president Adams.

Holding their ground has historically paid off for the ILWU. Its workers are among the best-paid “blue collar” workers in the U.S., with full-timers earning a nearly $195,000 yearly income on average as of 2021. ILWU workers also receive “free” healthcare, large pensions, and other benefits. How have the ILWU workers won these gains? Their success owes partly to their tight organization and militancy, which goes down to the union’s roots: The ILWU was founded by Harry Bridges, a member of the Communist Party USA and a prolific labor organizer, who famously won a Supreme Court case against the federal government relating to his Communist activities. As a “red” union, the ILWU faced considerable state repression during the Cold War. The ILWU membership has also proven itself highly progressive: ILWU members regularly express solidarity with other union-organizing efforts and have also demonstrated and gone on strike against U.S. wars of imperialist aggression. In 2021, ILWU rank-and-file workers in Oakland, California refused to handle Israeli goods in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle.

But the ILWU’s success also owes to its narrow exclusivity — an exclusivity that has been described as “gatekeeping” and even “aristocratic.” That’s a fundamental problem.

What are unions, and what is their purpose? A union is an organization of the working class, typically of the workers in a given industry or craft, who have recognized the need to combine as one collective force in order to struggle for concessions — higher wages, expanded benefits, safer working conditions, job security, etc. — from the bosses and managers. Unions are, at their best, not merely organizations of workers, but of the working class; unions are the elementary form of independent proletarian organization, and the economic struggle they wage is an elementary form of the proletariat’s class struggle against the capitalists. Unions are vital to the proletariat’s early development. For, as Lenin said, “in its struggle for power, the proletariat has no other weapon but organization.” Unions are organic vehicles of working-class power, and while they cannot be the “end,” they certainly are one vital beginning. 

That is exactly why the ILWU’s model is fundamentally flawed. Rather than a vehicle to serve the organization of all workers in its industry (i.e., all dockworkers along the U.S. West Coast), the ILWU is tightly barricaded, and serves only as a vehicle of a highly privileged fraction of skilled longshoremen, clerks, and foremen. Rather than a vehicle for the collective power of the whole dockworking proletariat, the ILWU exclusively serves the dockworking labor aristocracy — that upper stratum of high-skill workers who, owing to their high-demand qualifications, enjoy much higher wages and other benefits, a much lower rate of exploitation, and much better living conditions than their low-skill (ergo replaceable) and consequently lower-paid, more intensely exploited, and precariously employed proletarian counterparts.

Employment as a longshoreman with ILWU membership is highly coveted by West Coast dockworkers. But the union’s closed-access policy means that membership can only be obtained by those workers who are highly skilled, have “put in their time,” and know the right people. It can take years, even decades, for a worker to obtain ILWU membership; often, a worker needs to know existing ILWU members to obtain the necessary references to be admitted. This is not the normal course for unions. The ILWU chooses to restrict its membership in this way.

Once a worker obtains membership, they are segregated into membership tiers — “Class A” workers, the longest-standing and highest-paid members, “Class B,” and “casuals,” who receive much lower wages, lack much of the benefits of their higher-tier fellows, and are not guaranteed the same hours. While the ILWU proudly boasts of the working and living conditions enjoyed by its Class A members — and rightly so — it is cagey about the conditions of “casuals” and other lower-tier members, refusing to publicly disclose such details to journalists as a matter of policy.

Is this any way to organize an industry, let alone the whole working class? The ILWU’s membership policy more resembles that of a medieval guild, an organization built to serve the journeymen, or the “aristocracy of labor,” at the expense of the novitiates and excluded workers, than an industrial, proletarian union, an all-embracing organization of proletarian solidarity.

Likewise, there’s something not-quite-proletarian in the ILWU leadership’s methods of struggle, and in the way it related to the rank-and-file membership.

On Thursday, June 2, talks came to a halt, as the PMA capitalists and ILWU reached an impasse over pay and benefits. The next day, industrial action began: The union workers shut down major ports and terminals in Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Oakland in California and Seattle and Tacoma in Washington, “effectively shutting down” and “severely impacting” productivity, according to the PMA bosses. The Friday shutdowns were followed by similar actions the next Monday, June 5, when union workers walked off their day shift, forcing the largest terminal at the Port of Long Beach to close.

The bosses are getting nervous — but not fearful enough to concede. Rather than return to the negotiating table, the PMA is calling on the Biden administration to step in on their side, and convince the ILWU bureaucrats to betray the rank-and-file members.

Meanwhile, some union workers are losing faith in the ILWU bureaucracy and its opaque policy of cloakroom deals with the PMA capitalists. Despite purportedly serving as their representatives, the bureaucrats have consistently refused to share any information on the ongoing PMA–ILWU negotiations with the union-worker membership. The ILWU has agreed to a policy of non-disclosure — typical in union negotiations, but absolutely anathema to internal democracy.

The ILWU workers are taking militant, fearless, well-organized action from below to fight for their demands. Yet their representatives in the ILWU’s top leadership are shutting them out and keeping them in the dark. 

This lack of transparency is not some tactical necessity, nor is it an accident. Over the decades, ILWU bureaucracy has proven its ability to win gains for the union’s members, but it has done so largely by entering into a class-collaborationist alliance with the shipping industry capitalists and their bought-and-paid-for politicians in the Democratic Party. Behind closed doors — and even out in the open — they’re actually friends.

That’s why, for instance, back in October 2021, ILWU representatives met with President Biden, Vice President Harris, some of their cabinet, and various big businessmen for a cordial discussion that the union bureaucrats celebrated as a “historic White House meeting.” During a subsequent press conference, Biden personally thanked the ILWU’s president, Willie Adams, for doing his part to keep the workers working — and suffering disease and death — through the ongoing pandemic.

It is in this same spirit that Adams gave a glowing recommendation to Biden’s new Labor Secretary, Julie Su, while praising the administration’s outgoing Martin Walsh, who was instrumental in the Biden administration’s shameless betrayal of Rail Workers United in November. So much for Biden’s “most pro-union President in U.S. history” pledge! And so much for the cross-union solidarity so frequently preached by ILWU president Willie Adams.

At the end of the day, while they purportedly answer to and represent the union workers who elect them, the ILWU bureaucrats have more in common with the so-called “political class” in the federal and state governments than they have with their own union’s worker members. They would rather negotiate with the corporate executives, corporate attorneys, and other cronies who represent the interests of shipping industry magnates behind closed doors, shutting out the union rank-and-file; they would rather dictate a tentative agreement to the workers than seek the workers’ scrutiny, counsel, and approval on a democratic basis.

The opaqueness of the present negotiations, an attempt by the union bureaucracy to provide itself cover, in fact brings their collaborationist — we would say “opportunist” — character into stark relief.

Yes, the ILWU bureaucrats will flex their union’s militancy, the preparedness of the workers to take industrial action, to fight for their demands. Yes, the PMA bosses will get nervous, and call on President Biden to intervene. But at the end of the day, when the strike ends, the bosses and union bureaucrats will return to the negotiating table, eat calamari and lobster, drink whiskey, smoke cigars, and talk shop — shutting the workers out behind tightly locked doors.

Ultimately, it is the duty of the ILWU workers to extend solidarity to their fellow dockworkers, and their fellow workers in all industries — not only in the U.S., but the world over. They must demand that the ILWU open enrollment to all West Coast dockworkers. They must demand democratic transparency in ongoing negotiations from the ILWU top leadership. They must demand an end to the policy of class collaboration with the shipping industry magnates and their servants in Washington. And they must not wait — they must transform their union into a vehicle of the class struggle with their own hands, with their own voices, with their own workers’ democracy.

Many workers in U.S. shipping and transportation view ILWU members as a special class of labor aristocrats, who enjoy six-figure salaries, full benefits, stacked pensions, and ironclad job security to boot — and still demand more, even while the vast majority of transport workers are underpaid and overworked. In truth, the ILWU workers are right to demand more from the capitalists. But if the ILWU workers are not to be scorned as labor aristocrats by their fellow workers, then they must not rest content with exacting exceptionally privileged concessions from “their” capitalists. The ILWU workers, like the labor aristocracy in other industries, must take the initiative, and demand that their exceptional privileges be shared with the whole working class, from coast to coast, and in all countries.

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.

In the afternoon of Tuesday, May 2, 2023 — one day after International Workers Day — a white supremacist murdered Jordan Neely, a homeless Black man known locally as a street performer, particularly for his Michael Jackson impersonation. The murder was not carried out under cover of darkness, nor even under color of law.

No, the murderer was not a cop — as is usually the case — but, according to reports, a former U.S. Marine acting in his “civilian capacity” as a deputy pig. The method of killing was not a gun, but a strangulation by choke-hold.

The NYC murder comes almost three years after the murder-by-suffocation of George Floyd at the hands of four Minneapolis police officers, and almost nine years after the murder-by-strangulation of Eric Garner, who was choked to death by several NYPD pigs, while repeatedly crying out the now-infamous phrase, “I can’t breathe!”

NYPD officers took the murderer into custody for questioning and light refreshments — such are the “perks” offered by the white-terror police to a white man who murders Black people. Recognizing the civilian-fascist terrorist as one of their own, the pigs at the New York Police Department released him the next morning without charges — signaling to other would-be deputy fascists that they have free reign to murder Black civilians at will.

In fact, a wave of white terror has swept the U.S. Empire of late. In “defense” of private property and “decorum,” vigilante white men across the Empire have deputized themselves to maim and murder Black and other oppressed people. To be merely suspected of petty theft, trespassing, loitering, or indecency — in this case, to be homeless and in need of help — by the wrong sort of white man often amounts to a death sentence.

A harrowing video of the murder was uploaded to Facebook, and has circulated on social media and via news outlets: The victim flails, attempting to break free of the murderer’s hold. But he is prevented from escaping by two other men, who help the white vigilante hold him down — one Black man, who restrains the victim’s arms by grabbing his wrists, and one white man, who applies pressure to the victim’s shoulder. After several minutes, the victim loses consciousness. Onlooking passengers verbally reassure themselves that he has merely fainted, and will be alright.

In fact, tragically, the victim has suffered brain death. Soon after the incident, he will be pronounced dead at a nearby hospital, after attempts to revive him fail.

Derek Chauvin suffocated George Floyd to death by kneeling on his neck for eight brutal minutes. Yesterday’s killer, reportedly a Marine who has yet to be identified by the NYPD, kept Jordan Neely in a murderous chokehold for nearly fifteen minutes. This was no desperate act of self-defense or “heroism.” It was a cold-blooded murder, executed by a trained marine who’s served in this country’s imperialist armed forces.

In the moments just before the murder, the victim, a 30-year-old, unarmed, emotionally distressed, and apparently homeless Black man, was begging for food and other material aid. He exclaimed to fellow subway passengers, “I don’t have food, I don’t have water, and I’m fed up.” In his anguish, he expressed a thought that many unhoused persons have after suffering years of deprivation and despair: “I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die.”

A witness, Juan Alberto Vazquez, the freelance citizen journalist responsible for filming the murder and uploading the video to his Facebook page, Luces de Nueva York (“New York Lights”), confirmed that the victim did not attempt to touch or otherwise harm anyone. Vazquez recounted in an interview that the victim boarded the northbound F-train in a state of psychological distress, and began “yelling” at other passengers for help. The situation became tense, and likely uncomfortable, but not violent.

That is, until the white vigilante-murderer decided that the punishment for being homeless and distressed in public was summary execution. The murderer then lunged at the victim, tackled him to the floor, wrapped his arms around the victim’s throat, and squeezed.

Perhaps the vigilante-murderer believed himself a “defender” of the “peace.” Perhaps he just wanted the thrill of murdering a defenseless Black person. It doesn’t matter — murder is murder.

Whatever the case, a pattern is emerging in this year’s wave of vigilante violence: confrontations over property. A homeless person expressed his desperation in a public space, and in so doing created a “disturbance” sufficient to be considered a “threat.”

Shockingly, none of the other train passengers intervened to help the victim. Instead, they sat by and watched as the life was slowly choked out of him. The only two passengers who intervened did so to aid and abet the murderer.

Jordan Neely paid for this bystander inaction with his life.

Even more alarming is how common such white-vigilante murders of Black people are across the U.S. Empire — a country in which the Jim Crow regime and other forms of racist apartheid have ostensibly long-since been abolished.

Little more than two weeks have passed since the attempted murder of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl at the hands of an armed white man. Ralph was unarmed, and his only “crime,” as is well-known, was accidentally going to the wrong address to pick up his little siblings from a friend’s house.

The incident provoked outrage in Kansas City, Missouri, not least because the would-be child-killer, Andrew Lester, was released without charges by police within 24 hours of the attempted murder. Kansas City police eventually arrested Lester and charged him with multiple counts of assault — but only after the Black community of Kansas City and their allies poured out into the streets, demanding justice, over the following days.

Thankfully, Ralph survived. He was soon discharged from the hospital to recuperate at home in the care of his family, and is expected to make a full recovery, despite having suffered a bullet-wound to the forehead.

But how did Ralph survive? When he fled Lester, bleeding from his head, he was barely able to walk, let alone run; he was screaming for help, but he was in an unfamiliar neighborhood, and there was little he could do. Police had sent out a public warning that a shooting had occurred, and instructed residents not to leave their homes. Most neighbors, obeying the cops, ignored Ralph’s pleas for help — until, at last, two neighbors intervened, providing Ralph, who had collapsed near their house, with first aid, and calling an ambulance for him. It is only thanks to this relatively small act of basic neighborly decency and kindness — of solidarity — that Ralph survived and is expected to recover in full.

Sadly, Jordan Neely was not so “fortunate.” This time, the murderer was successful — exactly because not a single passenger in that train car did the right thing.

All the victim in this case would have needed to survive was for a few people to break the vigilante-murderer’s grip on him. If only someone had pulled the murderer’s arms off of the victim’s neck, and attended to the victim to ensure he wasn’t injured, then he most likely would have survived. And, if only someone — optimally, a mental health professional trained to respond to such cases without involving the police, and as an alternative to police violence — had talked with the man, whose only “crime” was being homeless and desperate for aid, then he might have gotten the help he needed.

Instead, another Black person is dead — and, at least for the present, his white murderer has walked free, under the blue aegis of the colonialist police.

Only in the following days will we know whether the civilian-fascist, white supremacist, deputy-pig terrorist murderer will be charged by his badged, blue-uniformed brothers-in-arms for his crimes. If he is brought to any semblance of “justice,” it will be so only because the Black community and their allies in New York City, joined in solidarity by masses across the country, rise up in outrage and demand justice now. And if, on the other hand, the vigilante-murderer is allowed to walk free, we will then have a clear sign that the state-terrorist pigs in the NYPD know that they can deputize lynch-mobs with impunity.

Justice and peace, in other words, are in our hands — in the hands of the working-poor and oppressed masses of this country. So, too, are the very lives of our brothers and sisters.

The duty of the cops is not to “protect and serve” the people, but to terrorize, brutalize, incarcerate, and repress us.

Only we, the oppressed, can keep our brothers and sisters safe. Only we, the oppressed, can be our siblings’ keepers.

While Title IX, which built upon and extended protections in the famous Civil Rights Act of 1964, represented a progressive step toward the legal equality and political freedom of women, its sex-based language has allowed for legal ambiguity with regard to its amendment’s application to the rights of transgender people in education.

Namely, some elected officials and judges interpret “on the basis of sex” to refer to some concept of “biological sex” — and more narrowly to the “female” or “male” marker on an individual’s birth certificate. In other words, this interpretation holds that only “sex assigned at birth” is protected under Title IX. The problem with this interpretation is that how “biological sex” is defined in law is at odds with advancements in science: It has long been accepted by experts that a “biological sex” concept of humans’ bodies that reduces to a simple male–female dichotomy oversimplifies the matter and fails to encapsulate a diversity of experiences.

Put another way, human gametes (eggs and sperm) are indeed binary, but human bodies, and human experiences, are much more complex. Sexual development is now understood as an extremely complex “dance” of genetic, environmental, social, and psychological factors that does not fall into a strict binary. Outdated legal definitions of sex (and thus also gender) in the U.S., and in most countries, fail to reflect this.

On the other hand, some elected officials and judges interpret “sex” in Title IX and other laws to be interchangeable with the related concept “gender,” and therefore also “gender identity,” a legal category that depends not on one’s “sex assigned at birth,” but the way an individual self-identifies, and the way an individual really lives their life.

In 2010, the Obama administration’s Department of Education, in response to growing popular support for the rising transgender rights movement, became the first to adopt the latter interpretation of Title IX’s “on the basis of sex” clause. The department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) issued non-binding guidelines to Federally-funded institutions, including colleges and universities, with regard to single-sex classes, and who is eligible to participate in single-sex spaces. The Obama administration’s OCR held that “All students, including transgender students and students who do not conform to sex stereotypes, are protected from sex-based discrimination under Title IX,” and that schools “generally must treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity in all aspects of the planning, implementation, enrollment, operation, and evaluation of single-sex classes.”

For a few years, between 2010 and 2017, transgender students, particularly in public colleges and universities, enjoyed a modicum — but only a modicum — of non-binding legal protection in education. Transgender students would at last be institutionally recognized as their self-identified gender, and thus afforded protection against sex-based discrimination — a long-awaited and long-fought-for reprieve. 

But the reprieve was never consolidated or expanded, and was not to last. Democrats in Congress never passed an amendment to Title IX, clarifying its protected categories in line with the Obama administration’s interpretation, during Obama’s presidency. Thus, when Obama’s second term as president ended and Trump entered office, the new extreme-right Department of Education eliminated the modicum of protection afforded by the previous administration’s guidelines. In 2020, the Trump administration’s Department of Education began to withhold Federal funding from colleges and universities that upheld the Obama administration’s guidelines, or which otherwise protected the rights of transgender students.

Internal documents leaked to The New York Times in 2018 showed that the Trump administration was preparing to “define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with,” and planned to institute rules whereby “Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.”

Again, it should be noted that genetic testing alone is wholly inaccurate in determining sex. As with previous and existing pseudoscientific policies, such as phrenology and blood quantum, the point is not to make “scientific sense” of social phenomena and their legal aspects, but to systematize bigotry and codify it in law.

Parallel battles over Title IX have been fought through the U.S. judiciary.

In the notable recent case Adams ex rel. Kasper v. School Board of St. Johns County, Florida, the plaintiff, a mother of a transgender boy, sued the county school board, which had prohibited her son from using the boys’ bathroom; he was instead forced to use either the girls’ or gender-neutral bathrooms. The plaintiff argued that this constituted sex-based discrimination as prohibited under Title IX. A district court judge ruled in favor of Adams, finding that his right to be protected from discrimination, under Title IX and under the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, had been violated by the school board. The ruling represented a small, fleeting win for transgender rights. But the St. Johns County school board appealed, and in 2022, the 11th Circuit Court overruled the district court. The court’s 7–4 majority held that transgender students are protected neither by Title IX nor by the Fourteenth Amendment, and may be legally discriminated against by schools and other institutions.

The U.S. judicial system has become increasingly reactionary in recent years, stacked both with Trump-appointed extreme-right fascists and with Obama- and Biden-appointed “law and order” “moderate” fascists. A diminishing number of liberal judges, and vanishingly few “progressives,” are issuing a proportionately smaller number of legal “wins” for LGBT and women’s rights. In the meantime, the extreme-right conservative crusade, waged by the Trumpite faction of the Republican Party against LGBT people and women, especially in the domains of marriage equality, reproductive healthcare, transgender legal recognition, and care for transgender youth, is gaining traction in state legislatures and Federal courts.

What are the purportedly pro-LGBT, “progressive” Democrats doing to counteract and fight back against this extreme-right fascist Republican crusade? Unfortunately for us, next to nothing. At most, the Democrats are using their one-seat majority in the Senate and their hold on the presidency to block the Republicans from instituting a regime of wholesale elimination against LGBT people, and a regime of absolute repression against women. But the Democratic Party is far beneath the task of fighting for our civil rights and liberties, and that is proven by the fact that, during the two years it maintained majorities in both houses of Congress, and the presidency, from 2021–23, it did next to nothing to convert popular will into law.

The Democratic Party, by and large, represents not progress, not advancements to civil rights and liberties, but merely the “left-wing” of U.S. fascism. It functions as a weight on one “side of the aisle,” that “balances out” the “right-wing” of U.S. fascism, represented by the Republican Party. In the aftermath of every Republican expansion of fascism — take the many extreme-right laws and policies introduced under the Trump administration, for instance — the Democrats assume control of the sinking ship, stabilize the wreckage, and, most importantly, consolidate the expansion. The Democrats do not fight the fascism of the Republican Party; they enable it.

Now, in line with this purpose, the Biden administration’s Department of Education has proposed a new interpretation of Title IX with regard to transgender students. One might expect the outwardly pro-LGBT administration to propose an expansion of Title IX to unequivocally and fully protect transgender students at every level of the U.S. education system.

Unfortunately not. The Biden administration instead proposes a compromise with the fascist Republicans on the “question” of transgender rights.

A document published by the Department of Education on April 6, 2023, titled “FACT SHEET: U.S. Department of Education’s Proposed Change to its Title IX Regulations on Students’ Eligibility for Athletic Teams,” states the following:

The [Biden administration’s] proposed rule would establish that policies violate Title IX when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they are.

So far, so good. Except,

The proposed rule also recognizes that in some instances, particularly in competitive high school and college athletic environments, some schools may adopt policies that limit transgender students’ participation. The proposed rule would … [give] schools the flexibility to develop their own participation policies.

This is a highly euphemistic, weasley way to say that, under the Biden administration’s proposed Title IX rules, “in some instances,” schools will be allowed to discriminate against transgender students. The proposed regulation reads:

If a [Federal Government-funded school] adopts or applies sex-related criteria that would limit or deny a student’s eligibility to participate on a male or female team consistent with their gender identity [i.e., more correctly, “that would discriminate against transgender students”], such criteria must, for each sport, level of competition, and grade or education level: (i) be substantially related to the achievement of an important educational objective, and (ii) minimize harms to students whose opportunity to participate on a male or female team consistent with their gender identity would be limited or denied.

What this complicated jumble of words means, what the Biden administration is really proposing, practically and bluntly speaking, is this: Discrimination against transgender students in schools is permitted, so long as the school officials are nice about it.

So much for the “most pro-LGBT presidential administration in U.S. history” — as some gullible liberals have lauded Biden. So much for the “party of LGBT rights.”

What we really have is the party of “compromise” — compromise with fascism. What we really have, in the Democratic Party, is the left-wing of U.S. fascism — a left-wing that continually makes overtures to the extreme-right, that routinely sells out the most oppressed for momentary bumps in opinion polls, and that, in the long-run, serves only to consolidate the rise of U.S. fascism in its most brutal, militaristic, terroristic form.

Our only response to the Biden administration’s half-measured, two-faced, compromised “protections” of transgender rights must be an emphatic “Not good enough!”

We must always demand more. We must demand full equality before the law, full and unequivocal legal protections for transgender people, absolute guarantees for our civil liberties. We must demand no compromises with fascism.

And we must not ask nicely. We must rid ourselves of the illusion that we can “vote in” the change we need; we must dispense with the idea that “our” representatives will listen to us, if only we call their offices and write them “firm, but polite” letters.

Comrade Assata Shakur rightly said, “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”

No, we must win our demands from our oppressors. We must force them to concede to popular will. Pleading will accomplish nothing. We must speak with the force of the only language our oppressors understand — the language of the unheard oppressed, of mass demonstrations, boycotts, occupations, and more. We must speak the language of organized mass political struggle, and we must not relent until our popular demands are met in full.

Only then will the civil rights and liberties of transgender people be converted from a political ideal to a political reality. Only then will we win the justice we seek.

The Republican bill, should it become law, would bar transgender girls from participating in gender-divided sports in public schools, and bar transgender women from participating in gender-divided sports in public colleges and universities.

The Republicans passed their bill in the House with a narrow 219–203 majority; the vote split exactly on party lines, with all House Republicans voting for it, and all Democrats voting against. It will now be sent to the Democratic-majority Senate, where it will almost certainly be defeated, again along party lines. If the bill does pass in both houses of Congress, President Biden has promised in a recent “Statement of Administration Policy” document that he would veto it, which would kill it.

However, in the same document, and in other statements, the Biden administration has conceded that it considers some discrimination against transgender students in sports “fair.” Biden’s only problem with the Republican approach is that “one-size-fits-all” discrimination would be a step too far, and that a more “nuanced” regime of discrimination against transgender children would be preferable — such is the “left-wing” of U.S. fascism.

But discrimination is only the tip of the iceberg; what lies beneath the waves is the means by which the Republicans intend to enforce their discriminatory regime.

The Republican bill uses a scientifically outdated, oversimplified, and incoherent definition of “biological sex” as the basis of its anti-trans measures: It defines “females” and “males” according to “reproductive anatomy” as noted by a doctor at the moment of an individual’s birth, and recorded on that individual’s birth certificate. The bill stipulates that “inspection” of “reproductive anatomy” would be legally required to determine whether some children and some college students have the right to participate in sports in their respective public schools and universities.

In a statement, House Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, a Democrat who aligns with her party’s “progressive” wing, and whose daughter is transgender, protested against the bill, and focused on this aspect in particular. “How do you verify a girl’s ‘reproductive anatomy’?” asked Jayapal, rhetorically, referring to language in the Republican bill, “If a young girl, if your daughter, doesn’t look ‘feminine’ enough, is she subject to examination? This is absolutely absurd.”

The answer to Rep. Jayapal’s second question is a horrifying affirmative.

The Republican bill would not only discriminate against transgender youth; it would accomplish this by instituting a regime of child sexual abuse in public schools. Transgender girls, as well as cisgender girls who do not appear sufficiently “female,” would be subject to inspections of their genitalia by school officials. In no uncertain terms, and with zero exaggeration, if this bill became law, children in public schools would be required by law to expose their private parts to adult public school staff, merely to participate in school sports and other phys. ed. activities.

At first glance, it may seem self-contradictory of the Republican Party, which presents itself as the party of “common sense” and “family values,” to have also made itself the party of institutional child sexual abuse — the party of pedophilia. But that’s the thing about fascism — it doesn’t have to make sense. Fascism outwardly embraces irrationality, for the sake of justifying its inward-facing logic: cruelty, and cruelty for its own sake. Critical scholars of (and against) fascism have long recognized that there is no coherent, integral “theory of fascism,” nor can there be. For instance, the British Communist leader Rajani Palme Dutt wrote:

The reality of Fascism is the violent attempt of decaying capitalism to defeat the proletarian revolution and forcibly arrest the growing contradictions of its whole development. All the rest is decoration and stage-play, whether conscious or unconscious, to cover and make presentable or attractive this basic reactionary aim, which cannot be openly stated without defeating its purpose. 

In other words, fascists will always hide their programs of reactionary violence — their state repression of the oppressed masses and our struggles for freedom — their real, fascist aims, behind palatable marketing: behind “family values” and similar slogans. Fascists will always lie, and have long-since proven themselves very skillful liars, from Mussolini and Hitler to “our” American Trumpites. That’s why what a fascist tells you he wants is irrelevant; what matters is what he really intends to do. 

It is therefore no surprise that the Republican Party fascists present themselves as defending the rights of “biologically female” girls and women, even when, with the very next breath, they pass a bill to institute a regime of child sexual abuse against girls — cisgender and transgender alike — in public schools, and a regime of invasive “medical” inspections of women athletes’ bodies — again, cisgender and transgender alike — at public colleges and universities. The goal of this horrific legislation is not to “save women’s sports,” as some of the sex-criminal fascist Republicans claim, but to invade women’s bodies, and for that reason it presents a danger not only to transgender women, but also to our cisgender sisters.

Rajani Palme Dutt wrote that “Fascism has produced nothing, and can produce nothing. For Fascism is the expression only of disease and death.”

The fascism of the Republican Party is nothing but the agonized howling of the declining and decaying U.S. Empire, and the Republican pedophile fascists are nothing but the representatives of the extreme-right faction of this empire’s ailing monopoly-capitalist dictatorship. For as long as this settler-colonial, white supremacist, capitalist empire lingers and staggers on through the march of history, as long as it continues to prolong its inevitable demise, the fascist Republican Party will produce nothing but misery for and terror against the dispossessed, the poor and exploited, the marginalized and vulnerable, the wretched of the Earth.

American fascism will produce this misery because the Republicans and Democrats alike already know what growing numbers of the oppressed masses are every day coming to realize: Only the wretched of the Earth, conscious of the need to organize ourselves as a political force, willing to stand and fight, and no longer paralyzed reactionary terror, have the power to overthrow our oppressors. Only the wretched of the Earth can bring her, and ourselves, salvation.

SpaceX’s public relations team have tried to diminish the company’s failure with almost unbelievable euphemisms. “Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation,” read one SpaceX tweet, referring to the explosion. The company went on to congratulate itself on an “exciting” test. These statements, which accord with the company’s “Fail fast, but learn faster” motto, have been widely mocked by Twitter users, racking up thousands of replies and quote-tweets.

SpaceX has indeed failed — but it has “learned” at a much slower rate than Elon Musk, the company’s world-famous owner, would like to admit, and with exorbitant costs.

Back in 2016, Musk first began pitching the biggest, most powerful spacecraft of all time — a spacecraft capable of fulfilling Musk’s bizarre, painfully unrealistic, and ultimately doomed fantasy of someday ruling over the first human colonies on Mars — which he christened the Mars Colonial Transporter. At that year’s International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, Musk unveiled rough schematics for the more sensibly renamed Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), and promised that SpaceX was already working on it. The SpaceX ITS was presented as having the capacity to transport as many as one-hundred settlers to Mars. By 2022, Musk promised, the first ITS mission to Mars, carrying colony-starting cargo, would launch; a follow-up mission, carrying the first human Martians, would then launch in 2024.

Needless to say, SpaceX failed to deliver, and Musk’s interplanetary colonization fantasy remains just that — a billionaire con-artist’s fantasy.

Soon thereafter, in 2017, Musk revised the ITS down to about three-quarters of its initially promised size, and renamed it again to an unexplained “BFR.” The project’s purpose was also revised: Instead of far-flung fantasies of colonizing Mars, the BFR would be used, like most spacecraft are, for launching satellites into Earth’s orbit. Finally, BFR was renamed to Starship, and a new, still simpler model was released.

Musk’s fans and investors were disappointed, but to keep them from becoming altogether disenchanted with his long-con, he promised in 2019 that the first unmanned Starship test launch would be conducted within six months, and that the first manned Starship flight would follow in 2020. Those due dates passed by without a word, but Musk made similar promises over the next few years. In 2022, for instance, he announced on Twitter that the first Starship would be conducted later that year. But the remainder of 2022, as we know, also passed by without a word about the new spacecraft.

Finally, as of April 2023, the wait is over. But the “payoff” for everyone’s anticipation was, rather than a successful unmanned flight, a spectacular explosion — or, if you will, a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”

According to statements from Musk, Starship development alone has cost SpaceX as much as $10 billion since the ill-fated Mars Colonial Transporter was first announced. Despite failing to show any return on investment since then, and despite repeated delays, false promises, and failures, Musk and his capitalist cohorts have profited. Why? Because, as it happens, the billionaires aren’t playing with their own money — they’re playing with ours. SpaceX receives most of its corporate income from lucrative, taxpayer-funded government contracts, especially with NASA, or else from other Federal Government-contracted firms like DARPA, and stands to lose nothing if and when it fails to deliver on its end of the bargain. Our capitalist-serving rulers in Congress are more than happy to keep those contracts coming. That’s why an unscrupulous con-artist like Elon Musk can proffer years upon years of empty and downright delusional promises, but still rake in billions of dollars in personal profits.

Musk’s failures at SpaceX mirror his more recent blunders as the newest owner and CEO of Twitter. In 2022, Musk offered to buy Twitter, entered and completed negotiations, and then attempted to back out, before being compelled by a lawsuit to complete the $44 billion acquisition.

The social media company has been deteriorating ever since. The platform has suffered continual technical disruptions as Musk has insisted on “streamlining” basic Twitter features, and complaints from Twitter users of an increasingly broken website and app have become ubiquitous in recent months; not long ago, some tech experts believed that the platform might suddenly and irreparably collapse. Musk has also laid off hundreds of Twitter employees — over half of the “veteran” staff — over what amounted to personal grudges and ego-tripping, effectively depriving the platform of the skilled labor that built it, and shooting himself in the foot.

Musk, who identifies, to no one’s surprise, as a conservative Republican, has also reneged on pledges to make “free speech” on Twitter absolute — to make the platform what he pretentiously called a “digital town square.” Instead, the new Twitter CEO has instituted wide-ranging censorship against pro-LGBT activist networks, Palestinian journalists, his own critics, and other voices that run even remotely counter to his reactionary politics, while at the same time promoting fascist conspiracy theories.

This combination of technical incompetence, instability, and noxious politics has driven away advertisers, as most brands increasingly tend to avoid association with hate speech that stands to alienate large portions of their consumer bases.

The result? As of late March, only about five months after he was forced to purchase Twitter in October 2022, Musk admitted that Twitter’s total value has plummeted by more than half, from the $44 billion Musk found himself legally obligated to pay to around $20 billion. In other words, Musk’s impulsiveness lost him around $24 billion within five months — and those are just the losses he’s incurred in his Twitter misadventure.

As Twitter implodes, Musk’s electric vehicle manufacturer, Tesla, is reeling from two years of financial decline.

A coalition of Tesla’s capitalist shareholders, fearing that Musk’s repeated failures, public embarrassments, and long-term mismanagement of SpaceX and Twitter will hurt the firm’s public image, and thus their own profits; they are calling for the company’s board to “rein in” Musk. Tesla’s Q1 net income has dropped by 24% relative to last year, despite Musk’s failed tactics of repeatedly slashing prices on Tesla vehicles in the U.S., China, and other markets in the hope of attracting new buyers. The firm’s stock prices are falling, and some capitalist economists expect it to “crash” soon.

In the aftermath of a dismal 2023 Q1 investor report, released Thursday, and another embarrassing SpaceX explosion, concurrently, Tesla shares fell by nearly 10%, dropping Musk’s personal wealth by nearly $13 billion overnight.

Tesla’s image has also been marred by a workers’ rights scandal involving racist abuse. The firm has lost the second of two civil trials in which the plaintiff, Owen Diaz, a Black former employee, sued Tesla for nearly $160 million in punitive damages, after suffering years of racist hate crimes from managers and fellow employees in his workplace. The court has awarded Diaz a mere $3 million — a “slap on the wrist” for the giant firm.

In sum, Musk, like most billionaires who swell daddy’s fortune into a bigger fortune, is at heart a con-artist, in practice a bungling clown, and in principle a parasite. Musk’s fortune has swelled only for the same reason that the abdomen of a mosquito swells when, by its good fortune, it finds an opportune victim, and it will just as readily burst.

What is really unfortunate about this parasitic circumstance is how wasteful it is, how much it impedes scientific and technological progress.

Musk brags that SpaceX’s Starship model is the most powerful rocket ever built — although evidently not powerful enough to make it out of the atmosphere, putting it categorically behind Cold War-era technology. 

Instead, the really alluring prospect of the SpaceX Starship model is its (yet to be proven) reusability. All existing spacecraft are good for only one use, because they are severely damaged upon reentry from space, due to the friction and heat generated by any object that plummets through Earth’s atmosphere, and from impacting Earth’s oceans; it is cheaper for space agencies to simply build a new rocket, rather than to repair one that’s completed a journey. A reusable spacecraft would reduce the cost of a launch from a few billion U.S. dollars (the cost of building a brand new spacecraft) to several million (the cost of transport, rocket fuel, and other secondary costs alone), which could fundamentally change the economy of space exploration.

Unfortunately, these great technological prospects have been left not in the capable hands of the world’s foremost experts, enjoying the full backing of public confidence, but in the bungling hands of one man who happened to inherit a fortune. Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971, under that country’s apartheid regime. His father, Errol Musk, is a capitalist politician in South Africa who owned shares in a Zambian emerald mine that hyper-exploited colonial labor — information that Musk is now aggressively trying to remove from the public consciousness. And yet Musk presents himself not only as a self-made billionaire, but also as a self-made rocket science expert, despite admitting that his knowledge on the subject amounts to a handful of textbooks he claims to have read and some rambling phone conversations with actual scientists several years ago. Musk’s “supergenius billionaire” facade has been further cultivated by his frequent appearances on talk shows, where sycophantic talking heads gush over his every word, his online cult in spaces like Reddit, populated by easily duped liberal technocrats, and his occasional cameos in superhero, spy, and sci-fi movies, series, and franchises, such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

In truth, however, spacecraft are built by highly educated, extensively credentialed, professionally trained engineers, who have dedicated their lives to their field — not by clueless-amateur billionaires playing at an “eccentric boy-genius” persona. Just like his billionaire fortune, Musk’s charade of expertise, and his entirely fictitious claim to “scientific” fame, is more a product of the circumstances of his birth, the fact that he “walked the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket” as a teenager, than of any scientific merit or accomplishment.

Anyone can see that entrusting so much potential for technological progress to one clownish billionaire, or even to a corporate board of billionaires, is a bad idea. (Hence this real-world situation is the set-up for myriad dystopian fictions.) The problem is that, in a society dominated by the capitalist mode of production, the sciences and technology cannot advance otherwise than for the profit of enormous profiteering firms, owned in the main by a relatively small class of opulent monopoly-capitalist oligarchs. These firms have concentrated the vast majority of productive property, including the means of scientific production, in their corporate hands, and the result is that science itself is at the mercy of our capitalist overlords.

Wealth is built not by the supposed “genius” of the few capitalists, but by the labor of the many, by the workers they employ. Science is no different: The scientific knowledge and technological innovations expropriated by capitalist firms as their own, with a regime of patents, trademarks, and paywalls, were toiled over with the brains and hands of the many scientists — science workers — and engineers forced to subjugate their expertise to serve the profit-motive of their capitalist employers.

Only by overthrowing and abolishing the dictatorship of the capitalist parasites, and only by abolishing their irrational, anarchic mode of production, can science be liberated, and be repurposed to serve a liberated populace.

The announcement of her forthcoming release follows the orca’s belated “retirement” last year. Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut is the second-oldest known living orca in the world.

The Miami Seaquarium, its parent firm, the Dolphin Company, and that firm’s owner and CEO, Mexican multimillionaire Eduardo Albor, are hailing the announcement as a big win for animal rights activism. Albor has associated himself and his company with billionaire-funded nonprofit corporation Friends of Toki. He presents himself to the public as a concerned philanthropist, environmentalist, and animal lover.

The truth of the matter is that Albor is, first and foremost, a capitalist — a profiteer — and that his decision to release Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut was made, first and foremost, because holding her in captivity is no longer profitable. She is too old to continue performing; the stress has undoubtedly shortened her lifespan, and would kill her if she were forced to continue. Her death by overwork would doubtless bring a wave of negative publicity crashing down on the Miami Seaquarium and its owner, damaging the company’s public image and, ultimately, hurting its bottom line. Now, after decades of profiting from her misery, the firm that owns Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut has agreed to release her. This is not charity. This is not justice. This is a public relations stunt.Meanwhile, since 2018, far in the “background” of the corporate media buzz surrounding the “philanthropic” pursuits of “concerned” capitalists, an Indigenous-led campaign for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s freedom has carried on, gaining international support. The campaign is directed by the Lummi Nation through their nonprofit organization Sacred Sea. The Lummi, also known as the Lhaq’temish, are a federally recognized tribe native to a part of the Salish Coast, with a reservation in present-day Whatcom County, Washington. The goal of Sacred Sea’s campaign is to “right the wrong of Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s capture, and safely and responsibly bring her home to the Salish Sea.” To this end, the nonprofit has prepared a “comprehensive” operational plan, summarized as follows:

Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut lives in a concrete tank that is barely bigger than she is. She cannot dive and swim freely; she cannot escape the relentless Florida sun or hurricane dangers. The chlorinated water in which she swims is devoid of all life. Killer whales see with sound, as well as with vision. Her acoustic isolation is an extreme cruelty, akin to solitary confinement in a prison cell far from home.

By contrast, the Xwlemi Tokw [Lummi Home] that has been designed and would be custom-built for her is a large netted structure within a secure and protected area in her natal Salish Sea waters. She will have ample space to swim and dive; the waters will be full of natural life. She will breathe the air of the Salish Sea, she will hear the birds, keep company with the fish, swim over kelp beds, feel the pull of the tides and currents. We believe that water is alive, and has memory. Her home waters will embrace her. 

The Xwlemi Tokw will give access to spiritual practitioners, scientists, and veterinarians who will continue to assess and fulfill her changing needs. The Operational Plan details every aspect of the Xwlemi Tokw, including maintenance systems, long-term environmental assessment protocols, and on-site risk management.

Since the Lummi Nation’s 2018 resolution to fight for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s freedom and return, Lummi activists and their allies have employed protest and public awareness tactics. Moreover, according to Sacred Sea,

In 2019, two individual Lummi women invoked the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and announced their intent to sue Miami Seaquarium if the Seaquarium would not agree to collaboratively work out a plan to safely bring Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut back home to her family in the Salish Sea.

Whether such legal action would meet with any success within the white supremacist U.S. court system, dominated by capitalist and settler interests, is doubtful. But such “lawfare” tactics could prove ruinous to the Miami Seaquarium’s public image, and hit the firm where it really hurts: its revenue stream.

Fortunately for the Lummi Nation’s campaign, theirs isn’t the only potential legal threat the Dolphin Company faces.

In 2021, the U.S. Department of Agriculture investigated the Miami Seaquarium, and reportedly found that Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut was suffering in abhorrent living conditions. The water in her tank, drenched with chlorine, was “turbid” with filth, plastic, and chipped paint. She had endured years of malnutrition caused by the Seaquarium’s policy of chronically underfeeding her; her diet consisted of mostly rotten food, despite the objections of a veterinarian. She had sustained major injuries, including a jaw fracture, after being forced to perform dangerous jumps and somersaults, despite her advanced age. She was provided with no shelter from the oppressive Miami sun, which, in addition to painful overheating, can damage orcas’ eyes.

The protesting veterinarian would be fired by Miami Seaquarium shortly after the USDA’s report on Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s living conditions was published.

Now, in 2023, the Dolphin Company has at last agreed to cooperate in implementing the Lummi Nation’s “operational plan” for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s rehabilitation and rematriation to the Salish Coast. In all likelihood, mounting pressure from multiple sides was the true impetus for the Miami Seaquarium’s sudden “ethical” awakening. Capitalists know no other morality than the profit-motive.

The announcement of Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s forthcoming release and reintroduction to her northern Pacific birthplace has again brought into the light that the horrific abuses of capitalism extend not only to humans and livestock animals, but also to any animal, no matter how rare or remote, that the capitalists can harness and exploit for profit.

All available evidence from scientific research indicates that orcas are sentient. They have magnificently complex social structures, rivaled in the organic world only by simian primates and elephants. They feel, by all appearances, a range of complicated and nuanced emotions and have intricate interpersonal bonds. They communicate with each other in something resembling language, and separate pods (small social units) even have varieties of this “language” resembling unique dialects. They are capable of abstract thought and planning, and of applying elementary logic and mathematics in novel ways in order to solve problems. They cooperate in teams when hunting, quite literally “herding” and corralling schools of prey fish, in a method known as “carousel feeding,” similar to how human hunters might pursue herds of deer or bison. They evidently have long memories, as pods can navigate thousands of miles of ocean together to complete regular migrations. Mothers affectionately sing to their calves, passing down “pod songs,” unique to each social unit, that the newborns remember and recite for the rest of their lives. The orca’s enormous, highly developed brain contains spindle neurons, a rare class of neurons associated with intelligence, found only in hominid apes (including humans), some monkeys, raccoons, and elephants. Most males live for 30 to 60 years; most females, 50 to 80 years, with some recorded living into their early 100’s.

While we believe that we should avoid anthropomorphizing (that is, reading human traits into nonhuman animals), it is difficult to deny that we can see many aspects of ourselves — our human minds, emotions, relationships, and societies — reflected in these animals. We can only speculate about the subjectivity, the mind, the internal life of an orca (in other words, what it is really like to be an orca, from her own perspective), but it seems undeniable that orcas, as with some other nonhuman animals, are endowed, in their own ways, with sentience.In a 2021 article, Lummi Nation leaders Raynell Morris and Ellie Kinley discuss the “people below the waves” in strikingly empathetic terms — terms of relatedness:

Our teachings hold that we have kinship bonds — as well as cultural and spiritual ties — to a particular clan of killer whales who live in the Salish Sea. They are our relatives, and so we call the J, K, and L pods of the Southern Resident orcas by their Lummi family name, Sk’aliCh’elh (Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut means “daughter of Sk’aliCh’elh”). 

We are taught that our Lummi and Sk’aliCh’elh families mirror each other. Our connection to the Salish Sea defines our people, as it does with the orcas. Salmon is essential to our identity and survival, as it is with the orcas. Our Lummi notion of “self” is inseparable from kinship and community; so, too, it is with the orcas. Family is sacred to us all…

In the 1960s and ’70s, about one-third of the Southern Resident orca population was captured and sold to aquariums and theme parks. For several decades, many of our own Lummi children were taken and sent away to boarding schools and foster care. Bringing those children back into our families and community has been healing. Sk’aliCh’elh children were sold to marine parks, where most of them died.

The authors also relate a heart-wrenching account:

This past spring, Lummi tribal members traveled to Miami and joined with members of the Seminole tribe, on whose homeland the Seaquarium is built, along with a nontribal filmmaker. After paying for their tickets to see “Lolita,” they took their seats in Whale Stadium, the arena surrounding Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut’s tank. The tribal members began to sing, drum, rattle, and pray. Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut began her routine. The filmmaker, who had attended and recorded previous shows, noticed that Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut was not responding to the trainer’s cues as usual. She would not perform. Many people have spoken for her, but we believe that this time, in the presence of ceremony, she was speaking for herself.  

Despite their sentience and our relatedness, when orcas are captured and forced into the inhumane and dehumanizing process of capitalist production, they, like all organisms, including human beings, are reduced to mere objects — commodities, profit-generating machines, privately owned means of production. A whole entertainment industry has been built upon kidnapping orcas from their natural habitats, stealing orca calves from their mothers, caging them in distressingly small and solitary enclosures, isolating them from fellow orcas and depriving them of social lives, perversely compelling them to breed and to bear offspring, subjecting them to cruel experiments, torturing them in order to “train” them as show animals, and forcing them to perform for crowds of human onlookers.

For her part, Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut was forced to perform for over 50 years before she “retired.” Only at the relatively advanced age of 57 will she be allowed to return to the waters where she was born. Unfortunately, her release cannot be immediate: She first must be taught by veterinarian specialists how to hunt in a specially designed enclosure — for she was deprived of the chance to learn from her pod — and she needs to grow a substantial amount of muscle — for the conditions of her captivity, inhabiting the cramped tank to which she has been confined since adolescence, have caused her muscles to atrophy. Only after a few years of rehabilitation will she have a chance to find her way back to her pod.

According to Morris and Kinley, “Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut still sings the [pod song] her mother taught her when she was a baby. Family is everything to these killer whales. Bringing Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut home will heal a very specific wound: It will make her family whole again.”

We hope that they’re right; we hope that their prediction is realized.

We look back with horror, and rightly so, at the depravities of mass entertainment in past epochs — for instance, the bloodsport competitions forced upon Rome’s slaves in the Colosseum. Future generations will look back with similar horror upon the depravities of our own, capitalist epoch, and their horror will be no less justified. Our grandchildren, or their grandchildren, or their grandchildren, and on, will wonder with disgust at how we could abide the caging and torturing of sentient animals for the purposes of live mass entertainment and, above all, capitalist profit; they will judge us and our times unkindly; they will feel immense gratitude at the circumstance that they were born into a more civilized, repaired world, a world in which such barbarities have receded into history.

Why are we writing about this issue in a Communist newspaper?

Communism means the universal and total liberation of humanity from all forms, modes, and structures of oppression — including the abolition of all colonial regimes and the decolonization of all stolen and subjugated lands. Communism means not only the abolition of social classes and of private property, and therefore the elimination of poverty and exploitation, but also the abolition of all other manifestations of social and interpersonal violence inherent to class societies — an end to all wars, genocides, deportations, occupations, plundering, and other violence between populations. This has been well established since Marx. We hold that the first step in the long historical march of Communism on this continent, North America, must be, and can only be, its complete decolonization — the abolition of the illegitimate settler-colonial empires occupying it, the U.S. and Canada, the rematriation of all Indigenous lands, the liberation of all colonized peoples, and the eradication of all racism. Moreover, we believe that Communism would be incomplete, if we failed to also champion the liberation of nonhuman animals, to work for the ecological restoration of our planet — our only home — and to safeguard the continuation of life as we know it in this and future eons.

Morris and Kinley write as follows: “Our late beloved hereditary chief of Lummi Nation, Tsilixw, told us that if we heal our orca family, if we heal the salmon, if we heal the Salish Sea, we will heal ourselves. We believe he meant our Lummi selves and also, broadly, our human selves, our species.”

We believe it is the duty of every Communist to wholeheartedly support Indigenous liberation struggles, and to unite these struggles with the struggle against the capitalists — the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes and the poor of all countries, without distinction of ethnicity, race, or religion — the struggle for socialism.

The upcoming criminal trial, The People of the State of New York versus Donald J. Trump, is the first in U.S. history against a former U.S. President.

In the week since the indictment was announced, the capitalist media’s sensationalizing headlines have promised the public a political-procedural melodrama of Shakespearian proportions: “A President Faces Prosecution, and a Democracy Is Tested” warns the New York Times, and almost jubilantly exclaims that a “taboo has been broken” and a “new precedent has been set.” “Trump indictment marks a first for U.S. democracy. It may not be the last,” the Washington Post foretells, pondering “whether the case will ultimately strengthen or weaken the rule of law.” The Wall Street Journal proclaims, “Donald Trump Indictment Sets Historical Marker,” and argues that the indictment “represents an extraordinary moment for America.” We could go on…

Even some in the “socialist” press have been swept up in the latest Trump sensation: For instance, People’s World, the not-quite-official online paper of the more-or-less-official Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), boldly asserts that “a group of ordinary citizens on a Manhattan grand jury [yes, that is how juries are selected in the U.S. — randomly] exercised democracy [??] by indicting former President Donald Trump,” and warns of “a new threat to democracy” — glossing over the obvious question: What democracy? — should Trump evade trial.

Sensationalism gets views and clicks, which translate into profits for corporate media shareholders. But sensationalism doesn’t lend itself to establishing a straightforward timeline.

In 2016, near the end of that year’s general elections, Stephanie Clifford (better known as Stormy Daniels), a celebrity pornographic and television actress and director, memoirist, and lapsed Republican Party politician, claimed that Trump, then running for President of the United States, had solicited sexual services from her in 2007. Clifford gave several interviews, and later detailed her allegations in her 2018 memoir, Full Disclosure.

Trump has maintained that the affair never happened. But the evidence against him is, if not “beyond a reasonable doubt,” still extremely damning. (And “beyond a reasonable doubt” is a standard, let us be clear, that means something much different to a billionaire than it does to millions of Black people prosecuted and incarcerated by this country’s inhuman state machinery.)

According to the New York Times, Clifford first attempted to sell her story as an exclusive to the National Enquirer, a right-wing tabloid, in October 2016. David Pecker, then CEO of the Enquirer’s parent company and publisher, American Media, Inc., and a long-time personal friend of Trump, intervened on the Republican candidate’s behalf.

Pecker shielded Trump from other sexual affair scandals with what’s called the “catch and kill” tactic — purchasing exclusive rights to a story specifically to not publish it, so that it gets buried and an individual’s reputation is protected — multiple times: The Wall Street Journal reported in 2016 that Pecker had paid $150,000 for the rights to a story from Karen McDougal, a celebrity model and actress, about a 2006 affair with Trump, but never published it. The New Yorker magazine similarly reported later in 2016 that Pecker had paid $30,000 for the rights to a story from a Trump Tower (Manhattan) doorman, alleging that Trump had fathered an illegitimate child during an affair with his housekeeper. Both stories eventually surfaced regardless, and Pecker was removed as American Media, Inc.’s CEO in 2020.

But when Clifford offered to sell her story to the Enquirer, Pecker instead arranged for Trump’s personal lawyer, advisor, and “fixer,” Michael Cohen, to meet with Clifford’s attorneys to offer her a large sum in “hush money” — $130,000. After taking office as President in 2017, Trump reimbursed Cohen.

Obviously this is all incredibly scummy — scummy in a way that only the extremely rich can afford to be. And it is only one of many instances of Trump’s personal depravity.

The Stormy Daniels scandal was followed by the so-called “golden shower” rumor, which Trump also denies. The rumor gained mainstream and social media attention especially after former FBI director Robert Mueller’s 2019 Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election. The so-called “Mueller Report” alleged that Russian government agents had blackmailed Trump during and after the 2016 elections with an as-yet-unpublished video, supposedly recorded at the Ritz-Carlton, Moscow hotel, in which Trump admits his “golden shower” kink.

We hardly need to state that Trump, like all billionaires and high-level capitalist politicians, is a pervert, a reprobate, and, in all likelihood, given his connections to the “late” Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring, a serial rapist and pedophile. It can surprise no one when a man with almost unlimited wealth and power is corrupted, not only politically, but in every possible sense, and beyond any semblance of humanity.

But proving that Trump’s actions, and those of his agents — paying off past escorts — were illegal under U.S. (federal) or New York (state) law, within a legal system designed to protect the wealthy and powerful, while criminalizing the poor and dispossessed, is another matter.

As it happened, the U.S. Department of Justice was then investigating Cohen for a number of felonies relating to tax and bank fraud. Because the “hush money” Cohen paid to Clifford and another woman directly aided Trump’s presidential campaign, federal prosecutors treated it as an illegally outsized campaign donation, and thus further charged Cohen with breaking campaign finance laws, namely “causing an unlawful campaign contribution” and “making an excessive campaign contribution.” In August 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to eight felonies, and, looking to secure a lighter sentence for himself, turned and ratted on his former boss — then-President Trump.

Almost immediately after Cohen’s guilty plea, on the basis of his assistance to federal prosecutors, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, in turn, opened an investigation into Trump himself. That investigation has lasted almost five years.

The first major push came in August 2019, when the Manhattan District Attorney subpoenaed the Trump Organization. The next month, Trump’s lawyers filed a countersuit to avoid handing over his tax returns. This suit made its way slowly through the U.S. court system, all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled in July 2020 that holding the office of President of the United States does not grant Trump the right to refuse to comply with a criminal investigation. Trump’s lawyers then filed a second countersuit, which was again defeated in the U.S. Supreme Court in February 2021. Trump’s lawyers were then immediately forced to submit eight years of documents to the Manhattan DA. By July 2021, the DA had charged the Trump Organization and its CFO, Allen Weisselberg, with running a massive, 15-year-long tax scheme. Weisselberg would plead guilty and agree to testify against the Trump Organization (but not Trump himself) in August 2022; the Trump Organization would be convicted in December 2022.

The investigation appeared to be barreling directly toward Trump. But then, last February, two high-profile prosecutors, Mark Pomerantz and Carey Dunne, resigned from the Trump investigation in frustration when the new Manhattan DA, Alvin Bragg, brought the investigation to a halt and refused to indict the former president. Pomerantz stated in his letter of resignation that he believed the DA’s office had obtained ample evidence of multiple felonies committed by Trump, sufficient to secure convictions, and branded Bragg’s decision to halt “a grave failure of justice” that ran “contrary to the public interest.” Pomerantz later detailed his account of the investigation and his decision to resign in a book, published in February this year.

The capitalist media declared the criminal investigation dead. Democratic Party politicians and media talking-heads, as well as the party’s supporters, were livid. 

However, in January 2023, the DA called a grand jury to consider charges against Trump. When it became clear that an indictment was likely, political attention, from both the Republican and Democratic parties, and media coverage returned to the case.

Speculation as to political motives aside, the timing is undeniably convenient.

Trump is no longer President, but has announced his plans to run for a second term in 2024. Given his popularity among the Republican voter base, would be very likely to win his party’s nomination, should he face a primary challenger. Meanwhile, as the cost of living across the U.S. continues to explode, and the next periodical capitalist economic crisis looms, Trump’s likely challenger, incumbent President Joe Biden, becomes less popular with every passing day. A prolonged trial is likely to damage public opinion of the Republican Party, at least for a few months — and that might be just the boost the Democrats need to keep hold of the Presidency and to avoid outright losing their one-seat majority in the Senate. (On the other hand, the renewed press might benefit Trump, who has proven his ability to turn any controversy into free advertising.)

Yet, of course, Democratic Party politicians and their corporate media talking-heads are insisting, with one voice, that the investigations into Trump and the recent indictment against him are not at all politically motivated, and certainly not the result of a political conspiracy to take down the former President.

But anyone with any sense knows, at the very least, that there’s something fishy — something too convenient — about the Democrat line.

We are not arguing that Trump didn’t break the law and commit several felonies — he certainly did. That, in fact, is just the point: Individual capitalists and entire capitalist firms break their own laws every single day, habitually, as a simple fact of doing business, and most never see the inside of a courtroom for it. Trump is, of course, a slimy, stinking monster, but he’s by no means an extraordinary monster, and his personal stench, however foul, is, putting aside all pretenses, indistinguishable from the common stench of Capital.

What makes Trump’s case special? What makes this moment special? Why was Trump only indicted now, when, according to the very prosecutors investigating him, he could have been indicted well over a year ago?

Lenin once wrote, “When it is not immediately apparent which political or social groups, forces or alignments advocate certain proposals, measures, etc., one should always ask: Who stands to gain? In politics it is not so important who directly advocates particular views. What is important is who stands to gain from these views, proposals, and measures.”

Who stands to gain from Trump’s recent indictment? That remains to be seen. But we certainly know which forces hope to gain, and which stand to lose.

Clearly, the Democrats hope to preclude the threat of another Trump campaign, in which the one-term President would face an increasingly unpopular Biden. Clinging to their narrow hold on the Federal Government, which already slipped significantly in the 2022 midterm elections, the Democrats hope to bring widespread disrepute to the Republican Party generally, retain the Presidency for another term, and win back some of their lost ground in Congress in the 2024 general elections.

Meanwhile, Trump is attempting — successfully, it would seem — to turn his indictment to his advantage. His main base of support, the most reactionary elements among the majority-white middle classes, widely and unquestioningly believe that a government captured by various boogeymen (the the “deep state,” George Soros and a cabal of “woke” Jewish financiers, funding “critical race theory,” “antifa,” and “gender ideology” in schools, and so on) is out to get Trump, in order to destroy America, and that the forces of patriotism, under the MAGA banner, must unite to restore the country. Trump has proven capable at tapping into this mass delusion and converting it into real mobilization: such conspiracy theories are what inspired Trump’s failed Capitol Hill putsch of January 6, 2021, in which some 2,000 fascist rioters (assisted by police), believing that the election had been “stolen” from Trump, stormed the U.S. Capitol Building. Trump is now, as always, presenting himself as a fighter for white America, and rallying his voter base behind him, raking in donations and creating a groundswell of energy for near-future fascist mobilizations. In mid-March, Trump predicted that he would be arrested “within three days” (needless to say, he wasn’t, and hasn’t been), and called for his supporters to prepare to riot.

Other high-profile Republican politicians are looking to seize their moment in the spotlight. Most notably, the fascist Governor of Florida, Ron Desantis, who’s risen to federal prominence in recent years by riding the wave of post-Trump reaction, announced that he would not allow Trump to be forcibly extradited to New York, even though Trump himself announced plans to fly to Manhattan and turn himself in. Desantis is widely believed to be planning a run for President in 2024, which means that he is likely to challenge Trump in the Republican primaries.

In sum, the two major factions of the ruling monopoly capitalists — the “moderate” fascist Democrats and the extreme-right fascist Republicans — are transparently vying with each other to come out on top in the coming legal and political battle.

But what about the working classes and the poor? What about the masses? What do we have to gain? Where should we stand?

The truth of the matter is, either way, that the working classes and the poor of this country have nothing to gain or lose from this fight. “Our” “democracy” is not, in fact, “on the line,” because the U.S., from its origins and at its foundations a settler-colonial empire, a white supremacist dictatorship of the capitalists, was never a “democracy” to begin with. Just as the ancient Greek city-states, the Roman Republic, and the Carthaginian empire were “democracies” only for the small class of slave-owners, wealthy merchants, and military leaders, but never for the mass of slaves, propertyless free laborers, poor craftsmen, and the other lower and middle classes, or any woman, so is modern capitalist society a “democracy” only for the capitalists and some other propertied classes.

Let our rulers take their battles to the courts, and let the courts decide who will be the victor and who will be “vanquished.” That is, after all, the U.S. court system’s real purpose: to mediate disputes that emerge within the ruling class, between one group of billionaires and another, one monopolist firm and another, one of our two major capitalist political parties and the other.

Our battle is in our workplaces, our communities, our homes, and our streets. Our enemies are the bosses who exploit us, the cops who police and terrorize us, the landlords who squeeze us of the greater part of our incomes, while we take refuge in hovels, and the politicians, on “both sides of the aisle,” who serve Capital. Our enemy is the whole rotten political system of the illegitimate U.S. Empire, and our true political war is the class war: the war to abolish the existing, unjust order and to establish a new, just order — a truly democratic republic, a socialist republic — in its place.

Information obtained from social media indicates that the 28-year-old shooter, who was at first identified by police as a woman, may in fact have been a transgender man.

We do not know the perpetrator’s motive. Police stated that the killer was suffering from, and receiving treatment from a doctor for, an “emotional disorder” related to the loss of a friend. His parents stated that they did not believe their son owned any weapons, and that he shouldn’t have been allowed to, due to his psychological condition. We also know that the killer formerly attended the Covenant School. The victims appear to have been shot at random.

Despite the uncertainties surrounding the Covenant School shooter’s motive and the little we know about his psychological profile, the latest concerted anti-trans narrative, already spinning through this country’s corporate media and its halls of power, goes that transgender people are, by virtue of being trans, by virtue of existing, mentally ill and prone to violence, and must be deprived of the right to own and bear arms, intensively policed, driven underground, and institutionalized.

To no one’s surprise — other than the beady-eyed, sieg-heiling drones who make a habit of watching Fox News and other fascist media — the facts don’t line up with the latest anti-trans scapegoating. A database compiled by the Violence Project shows that an overwhelming 97.7% of all known mass shooters have been cisgender men; all of the remaining 2.3%, with one exception — the latest mass shooting at the Covenant School — have been cisgender women. That means that the Covenant School mass shooting is likely the first in history committed by a transgender person of either gender.

This week’s tragedy-exploitation and scapegoating is only the latest push in a years-long campaign that has been ruthlessly waged by the right-wing of U.S. fascism to eliminate the civil rights of transgender people.

Only through a century and more of persistent struggle, and only thanks to immeasurable personal sacrifices borne by our communities and our activists, have LGBT people in this country gained even a modicum of social acceptance, safety, civil rights, and equality before the law.

But particularly in the last few years, with the ascendance of a new breed of rabid Trumpites, an increasingly fascistic Republican Party is going on the offensive in the Federal and state governments against LGBT, and especially transgender, rights. This offensive includes legislation to deprive transgender children of healthcare, to ban drag shows and crossdressing, and to redefine gender along incoherently “biological” lines. According to a mapping project created by the American Civil Liberties Union, 435 anti-LGBT bills have been introduced in state legislatures across the country in 2023, already breaking the previous record of 315 set in 2022. The vast majority of these bills have been and will continue to be defeated in their state legislatures, but that will not deter the Republican Party’s anti-LGBT crusade; the small minority that have passed severely curtail the rights of LGBT people, and the fascists will take every last inch of ground they can.

The GOP’s anti-LGBT crusade also coincides with its offensive against reproductive rights — bans on abortion, contraception, and other reproductive healthcare. These assaults have been enabled by the right-fascist Supreme Court’s decision in the 2022 case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the federal right to an abortion, ruled “constitutionally” protected by the Court in its decision in the 1973 Roe v. Wade case.

The State of Tennessee, where the Covenant School mass shooting took place, has itself been swept up in this anti-LGBT crusade.

On Friday, March 31, a Trump-appointed federal judge ordered a two-week delay on the implementation of a new Tennessee law, passed by a Republican-supermajority state legislature, aimed at banning drag shows across the state, citing its possible infringement upon First Amendment rights to freedom of speech. The judge’s order followed a legal challenge by a Memphis venue that often hosts drag shows.

Tennessee is also one of 11 states that have recently passed laws banning gender-affirming healthcare to transgender youth (with some laws restricting healthcare up to ages 21 and 26) and criminalizing medical doctors who provide transgender healthcare services. The legislatures of around 20 other states are considering similar bans. This is despite the wide consensus among experts and advocates that access of transgender youth to gender-affirming healthcare presents no danger, drastically improves quality of life, and lowers risk of suicide — a critical factor, given the extremely high rates of depression and suicidality among transgender youth.

Unfortunately, scientific consensus and advocacy alone won’t make a dent in the current anti-LGBT crusade. Fascists are not concerned with science or ethics. Fascism, by its very nature, embraces irrationality, pseudoscience, and cruelty. The objective harms wreaked upon vulnerable LGBT youth by anti-LGBT legislation is precisely its purpose. It is a policy of elimination.

In Nebraska, State Senator Machaela Cavanaugh began a filibuster in February in an attempt to block a bill barring minors from receiving gender-affirming healthcare. “If you want to inflict pain on our children, I am going to inflict pain upon this body,” she said. On March 16 of this year, Kentucky Republicans passed a similar ban in the face of mass public opposition, including those in the gallery of the Kentucky senate who screamed at the body. State Senator Berg, who lost her transgender son Henry to suicide this year, said “This is absolutely willful hate for a small group of people that are the weakest and most vulnerable.” As the bill passed despite her valiant efforts to block it, she openly wept.

The point of this fascist anti-LGBT crusade is simple: The Republicans are exploiting anti-LGBT and other reactionary beliefs and moods among large sectors of the public in order to regain their lost popularity. In order to recoup the GOP’s 2020 general elections losses (largely owing to mass discontent and disgust with the fascist Donald Trump administration), and their party’s lackluster performance in the 2022 midterms (which, in spite of the actively decaying Joe Biden’s souring public image and unpopularity, did not deliver a GOP “clean sweep” of both houses of Congress), the extreme-right Republicans are presenting themselves as the party of conservative Christian morality and regression in an era marked by expanding civil liberties.

There is also a struggle raging within the GOP: the “moderate” right-wing old guard, who have controlled the party since the 1980s, and the extreme-right Trumpites, who want to consolidate their growing influence in the Republican voter base, supplant the old “moderate” tendency, and establish themselves as the party’s dominant wing.

While the anti-LGBT crusade advances through the Federal and state governments and the U.S. court system, civilian-fascist militias are assembling in the streets, threatening to massacre transgender and gender-nonconforming people at bars, nightclubs, and other public venues. Only a few months ago, in November 2022, a fascist terrorist, motivated by anti-trans hatred and provoked by anti-trans news media sensationalism, stormed the LGBT-friendly Club Q nightclub in Colorado Springs, murdering five people before he was tackled to the ground by patrons and staff, disarmed, and beaten into incapacitation.

On the other “side” of U.S. politics, the Covenant School shooting has reignited calls by some sections of the Democratic Party, led by President Biden himself, for stricter “gun control” legislation, including a ban on military-grade rifles. Some well-meaning LGBT liberals believe that this liberal approach is the “answer” to the U.S. Empire’s “gun violence” epidemic. But the truth of the matter is that this horrific epidemic cannot be treated, let alone cured, with any amount of liberal reforms, for mass violence is, in the final analysis, nothing but the expression of ascending fascism, and fascism is built into the U.S. Empire’s very foundations: Fascism is the logical conclusion to centuries of the most barbaric regime of settler-colonialism, white supremacy, slavery, and world imperialism in history. The only “cure” is the utter abolition of the illegitimate U.S. Empire; only by overthrowing our capitalist rulers, dismantling their empire, and decolonizing this continent can U.S. fascism, and its attendant mass violence, be eliminated once and for all.

We know well that transgender people are far more likely to be the victims of violent crimes, including mass shootings, than the perpetrators. We must anticipate that violence against our friends, loved ones, and communities will only intensify and accelerate in lockstep with political and legal efforts to eliminate our civil rights and drive us back underground. We must prepare ourselves and our communities accordingly. Our oppressors will not voluntarily relinquish their arms; we must not relinquish ours. Our oppressors will not conscientiously emancipate us — they have no conscience. We must emancipate ourselves.

As we wrote last year, in the aftermath of the Colorado Springs massacre, LGBT people must defend ourselves. We must safeguard our own communities by arming and organizing ourselves for community self-defense — against civilian-fascist terrorists, against police brutality, and against an increasingly fascistic government, captured by political forces that openly declare their plans to exterminate us.