Time To Build a United Front Against Fascism
By Lorenzo Canizares
12/24/21
The Sense of Urgency that I and some others have indicated several times in the past regarding the state of our democracy is finally gaining speed. Many nationally and locally important players in our fight for a better tomorrow, are understanding that we need to quickly wake up and drink the coffee and start battling with people that a few months ago many of them we didn’t consider an enemy, but now they are making clear that in spite of their appearance of being part of polite society they are being accessories to a Fascist takeover of our society.
Now that facts have been coming out, many people are now realizing the depth of the problem that this nation faced in the January 6th insurrection. Some that at the beginning took it as an act of bumbling idiots are now realizing that we were very close to a Constitutional Crisis. People are realizing that this was a well-planned event that almost succeeded in their goal of placing the 2020 elections results in question while Donald J. Trump was still president of the USA.
Just think what would have happened if Mike Pence, who now seems to be back in the Trump fold, had refused to certify the election? What would have happened if Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had gone along with Trump request to find 11 thousand votes?
They were very close, and they know it. They are also enjoying, at least temporarily, the fact that subpoenas are being ignored and people like Steve Bannon are still free to go around organizing for a takeover of the United States government. And since white supremacy is an ideological mainstay of their Fascist cause they also know that white supremacists get a pass when the time is to get indicted for a serious charge like sedition.
Notice that NONE of the insurrectionists has been charged with sedition. As Anthony Conwright said recently in an 1-2/22 article in Mother Jones “Supremacy and Sedition” talking about the insurrectionists, Mr. Conwright said “They stormed the Senate floor, stole mementos, and seized government files. They told us what they were to do – for weeks ahead of time, in some cases – and they very nearly did it. But no one has been charged with sedition, because America does not talk about violent expressions of white supremacy as sedition. Even when it manifests as a coup against America itself.”
The insurrectionists being nominally led by Donald Trump have major financial resources backing them. They can wait their time and plan adequately to be able to inflict pain on the American people and the Democrats. There is no sense of hurry in their part. Jason Stanley, in an article of 12/22/21 for the British publication The Guardian, titled “America is now in Fascism’s legal phase.” Mr. Stanley states “The history of racism in the US is fertile ground for fascism. Attacks on the courts, education, the right to vote and women’s rights are further steps on the path to toppling democracy.” That’s preparing the ground part.
Barton Gellman in a 12/22/21 article in THE ATLANTIC brings out the legislative component of the legal phase “For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.”
What are we doing to counteract this assault on our democracy? The House has passed voting rights and election reform bills, but the legislation has been sitting for months in the Senate. President Biden is very much aware of the need to pass this legislation to avoid a situation where the minority controls the majority. In order to get this passed we are going to need to kill the filibuster. We all know this won’t be an easy task.
In the people’s front there is much we can do. And we have to move quickly with a sense of urgency. We need to build the United Front Against Fascism. We can’t be shy about what we are doing. This is one of those times in a nation’s life you are either for or against. The stakes are too high for ambiguities.
I do believe that we still have some room to save this nation without a major confrontation. But in any case, we need to start flexing out our muscles in case we need to use them. Vigils are being called all over the nation on January 6th, 2022, to defend our democracy and protest encroaching Fascism. Our time has come to do our part. And January 6th is just the beginning.
Defending Democracy
