The Republi-fascist Party’s top dogs are down with the murder of those who rise up against racism. In the early morning hours of August 25, 2020, the teen fascist Kyle Rittenhouse killed two people with an illegally owned AR-15 at a Black Lives march in Kenosha, Wisconsin. A big Trump and police fan, the Illinois resident Rittenhouse answered the call of a local fascist militia, the “Kenosha Guard,” in response to protests and riots sparked by white Kenosha policeman Rusten Shesky’s savage attempted murder of the young Black man Jacob Blake. With the approval and support of militarized Kenosha County police, Rittenhouse patrolled Kenosha’s riot zone with a military assault weapon he was too young to legally own. Rittenhouse shot his first victim, Jo Jo Rosenbaum, five times. When protesters tried to disarm the active shooter, knocking him to the ground, the teen fascist turned and murdered Anthony Huber, a skateboarder, in an assault widely viewed on cell phone video. After committing his second homicide of the night, Rittenhouse walked freely past Kenosha County military police with his arms in the air while Black Lives protesters futilely told the gendarmes that he had just shot two people. The police who let Rittenhouse go unmolested and leave town were commanded by David Beth, an openly moronic and racist county sheriff who said the following in response to the arrest of Black shoplifting suspects in 2018: “I’m to the point where I think society has to come to a threshold where there are some people that aren’t worth saving. We need to build warehouses to put these people into it and lock them away for the rest of their lives…. Let’s put them in jail. Let’s stop them from, truly, at least some of these males, going out and getting 10 other women pregnant and having small children. Let’s put them away.” After Rittenhouse was belatedly apprehended and charged with murder, the young terrorist was defended by no less of a fascist than his very own beloved U.S. president, Donald “White Power” Trump. Rittenhouse was treated as a hero by the nation’s alt-right and much of the mainstream right-wing, including Fatherland (FOX) News anchor Tucker Carlson. The sallow Nazi cultist Anne Coulter tweeted that she wanted Rittenhouse as her next president. Amerikaner Trumpenvolk streamed contributions to the killer’s defense fund. In an action that spoke volumes about further fascist violence to come, Trump made a special point of stopping in Kenosha on the last night of the 2020 presidential campaign. As president, Trump, some may recall, had wanted to deploy the US military to crush the 2020 Black Lives George Floyd Rebellion with live ammunition. After he was exonerated in a deeply flawed trial overseen by a ridiculous right-wing judge, Rittenhouse was hosted by his hero Trump at Mar a Lago. He’s been on the Republi-fascist lecture circuit ever since. He recently spoke at Kent State University, where four antiwar protesters were shot dead by the Ohio National Guard. Think about the meaning of that amidst the recent remarkable wave of campus protests of the ongoing US-Israel Crucifixion of Gaza, the so-called Israel-Hamas War. Less than a week after Rittenhouse carried out his Trump-approved paramilitary killings in Kenosha, a Federal Fugitive Task Force under Trump’s command murdered Michael Forest Reinoehl, who was suspected of killing a Patriot Prayer-affiliated white-supremacist in Portland, Oregon. This brazen police- state execution of Reinoehl was instantly applauded as just “retribution” by Trump at a campaign rally. It was meant to send a message: defending Black lives and fighting back against fascist thugs is punishable by death, ordered from the highest level. Reinoehl was marked for assassination because he used legally protected armed force to prevent the far-right terrorist Arron “Jay” Danielson from murdering one of Reinhoehl’s Black comrades. Danielson was a longtime fascist street fighter who spent much of his last day violently attacking anti-racist social justice protesters. He was armed with a can of bear mace, a retractable metal baton, and a handgun. His confrontation with Reinoehl occurred as pro-Trump militia members drove (to Trump’s applause) pickup trucks through downtown Portland, shooting paintballs and pepper spray and engaging in fistfights with antiracist/antifascist protesters. The assassination/execution of Reinoehl was rapidly applauded by the Christian white nationalist Attorney General William Barr, who absurdly said that the killing of an “admitted Antifa member” was “a significant accomplishment in the ongoing effort to restore law and order.” (There was and is no membership organization called “Antifa.”). As the World Socialist Wes Site (WSWS) observed, Reinhold’s killing was part of a broader fascist evolution in the Trump administration’s conduct: “The murder of Reinoehl occurred the same week that Jeremy Logan, co-chair of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, was kidnapped and placed in an unmarked van, then detained for more than a day by federal agents….The methods used by the [fascist Augusto] Pinochet dictatorship in Chile—snatch squads, disappearances and extrajudicial murders of political opponents—are appearing in the United States…Reinoehl’s death was a state-sanctioned killing, carried out with the support of the Justice Department and the White House. Just minutes before Reinoehl’s death was announced, President Donald Trump tweeted a demand that the police take action to apprehend Danielson’s killer. ‘Do your job and do it fast. Everybody knows who this thug is,’ Trump declared.” One month to the day before Rittenhouse killed in Kenosha, Garret Foster, 28, was shot to death at a Black Lives Matter protest in Austin, Texas on the evening of Saturday. Foster’s killer was then active U.S. Army Sergeant Daniel Perry. Foster was legally carrying an assault weapon, an expression of his determination to provide armed defense for anti-racist protesters who faced regular death-threats from white-supremacists in and around Austin. Sgt. Perry claimed that he came across the protest by accident while working as a ride share driver, and that he fired in “self-defense” after Foster allegedly pointed an AK-47 at him. But this was certainly not the case. In June of 2020, when Trump tweeted that Black Lives “protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes” protesting in Oklahoma would face “a much different scene” than anti-racist protesters in New York or Minneapolis, Perry responded as follows: “Send them to Texas and we will show them why we say don’t mess with Texas.” Perry was subsequently convicted of murder by a Travis County jury that agreed with prosecutorial evidence showing that he was motivated by white supremacism and that he had sought out the lethal encounter in Austin. Twelve jurors rejected Perry’s claim to have acted in self-defense, which was contradicted by numerous eyewitnesses. But so what? Yesterday, Texas’s neo-Confederate and neo-Nullificationist Republi-fascist governor Greg Abbott pardoned Perry. The pardon restores Perry's rights as if he’d never been convicted, including the right to own firearms. Perry is free to kill again. Gosh, why didn’t Abbott free him sooner, so that Perry could have brought a weapon to terrorize anti-genocide protesters at the University of Texas-Austin, where Abbott recently made a grand showing of repressive state power? Maybe Abbott would like to deploy Perry for nativist duty in Eagle Pass, where the Republi-Nazi Texas governor had ordered a open military stand-off with US Border Patrol. Travis County District Attorney José Garza is sickened by the fascist pardon. In a statement on Abbott’s offensive action, he said that Abbott and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles have "made a mockery of our legal system." Further: "Their actions are contrary to the law and demonstrate that there are two classes of people in this state where some lives matter and some lives do not. They have sent a message to Garrett Foster’s family, to his partner, and to our community that his life does not matter." Garza added that the same message has been sent to the “community members who gave up their time to be on the grand jury and trial jury.” Well, yes. Fascism is about the rule of force and men, not the rule of law. It’s not for nothing that Trump sees Rittenhouse as a “hero” and pardoned violent fascist monsters like Joe Arpaio and the deranged Navy Seal war criminal Eddie Gallagher, who Trump called – get this - a “warrior against the deep state.” A “mockery of our legal system”? Yes, but whose legal system? Donald “Proud Boys Stand By” Trump himself killed untold tends of thousands of Americans with his insane white-supremacist pandemo-fascist covid idiocy and tried to overthrow previously normative US bourgeois electoral democracy and rule of law in a subversion campaign that included a literal physical putsch attempt — an attack on the US Capitol that he wanted armed with military assault weapons. He also stole a ton of classified and top secret federal documents and obstructed federal efforts to retrieve them. And “our legal system” is letting this malignant fascist asshole off free to take back the presidency and quash all the many absurdly belated federal charges against him (and nullify the state charges against him). Protesters of this lethal criminal’s return to power (courtesy of the neoliberal nothingness of the dismal Weimar/Vichy Dems) next year will want to be ready for all the Kyle Rittenhouses and Sgt. Perrys and James Alex Fields, Jr.s and county militia men out there ready to use firearms and automobiles to murder antifascist, anti-genocide, Black Lives, Brown Lives, social justice and revolutionary activists with the expectation of applause and protection from monsters like Abbott, Trump, and a host of Republikaner governors across red/brown state Amerika. A longtime trade unionist and democratic socialist friend of mine in red/brown Iowa – where the fascist legislature has granted legal immunity to those who run over protesters with cars and trucks – reports that he is “shopping for a weapon for the first time in my life.” Who can blame him? If he gets armed and trained, maybe he can save some lives in coming months and years. (Imagine a new version of James Alex Fields, Jr, starting up his car on the way to crash into a crowd of 200 protesters at an intersection? Would it not be your duty, if you had the equipment and skill, to at the very least shoot out his tires before he could potentially murder and maim dozens of people? But for the presence of armed Redneck Rebellion protectors, Cornel West reported, he and many other anti-racists would have been killed by neo-Nazi white supremacists in Charlottesville in August of 2017). During the George Floyd Rebellion in Iowa City, I witnessed two white supremacists barely talk a third white supremacist out of bringing an assault rifle out of his Ford F-150 pickup truck to menace a group of 700 or more students and community members facing off against state and country troops guarding Interstate-80. A trooper said something interesting to a young white female protester up there on Dubuque Street: “we’re not afraid to put you in body bags.” Why should fascist freaks like Rittenhouse and Sgt. Perry be afraid to put us in body bags with powerful people like Gov. Abbott, Iowa’s Republi-Nazi governor “Killer Kim” Reynolds, fascist dog-murderer and covid enthusiast Kristi Noem (the revanchist governor of South Dakota) in charge, and with Adolph Trump quite possibly heading back into the most powerful and dangerous office on Earth? |
Saturday, May 18, 2024
Reflections on a Pardon in Texas and the Fascist Amerikaner Menace ~~ Paul Street
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