Refuse Fascism (RF) was established shortly after the November 2016 U.S. presidential election in which Donald Trump unexpectedly defeated the presumed heir to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton. Stunned and outraged by Trump’s victory, a number of influential members of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP)—a Maoist organization that seeks the violent overthrow of America’s capitalist economic system—collaborated to establish RF on the premise that a Trump presidency heralded the rise of Nazi-like fascism in the United States. The most notable founder of this new organization was RCP member Carl Dix, who has frequently called for the freeing of convicted cop-killers Mumia Abu Jamal and Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, both of whom Dix classifies as “political prisoners.”
RF laid out its political and ideological platform in a December 2016 manifesto depicting President Trump as an illegitimately elected “fascist” and declaring: “In the name of humanity we REFUSE to accept a fascist America!” Emphasizing the fact that Trump had lost the popular vote to Mrs. Clinton by some 2.5 million votes, RF characterized the Electoral College—which of course was where Trump had won the presidency—as an outdated and useless “product and legacy of slavery.” The illegitimacy of the Electoral College was compounded, said RF, by the fact that “Republican Party representatives and operatives have over the years … systematically suppressed the votes of Black, Latino and poor people” by means of such measures as Voter ID requirements. Moreover, RF tried to draw a connection between nonwhite voter suppression and “the overturning of the Voting Rights Act [VRA] in 2013 by the Supreme Court”—a gross mischaracterization of the Court’s decision to strike down an anachronistic VRA provision that required certain states to obtain federal pre-clearance for any proposed changes to their election laws.
“More fundamental,” said RF in its manifesto, “is the illegitimacy of such a fascist regime” as Trump’s. Noting that “Hitler himself came to power through the process of elections and established legal procedures,” RF charged that Trump:
In an effort to prevent a Trump presidency from even getting off the ground, the RF manifesto exhorted leftist agitators nationwide to pour into the streets by “the tens of millions,” so as to “create … a profound political crisis” that would stop “the fascist regime” from being “able to take the reins of government.” But when Trump’s January 2017 inauguration ultimately proceeded on schedule, RF shifted its objective to “driving from office” Trump and his “Legion of Doom” cabinet of “white supremacists, woman haters, science deniers, religious fundamentalist zealots, and war mongers.”
Toward that end, RF drafted a petition titled Refuse Fascism Call to Action, which charged that the Trump “regime,” in its quest “to establish a fascist order under the signboard of ‘America First,‘” had already “begun subverting the separation of powers [and] the separation of Church and State, called for a new nuclear arms race, demonized the press, [and] dismissed the very concept of truth [by] substituting their own fabricated ‘alternative facts.‘” Asserting, further, that “there is method to Trump’s madness” that “echoes Hitler” and is “more dangerous to the world than even Hitler,” the RF petition claims that President Trump’s brand of fascism promotes “xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny, and the aggressive re-institution of oppressive ‘traditional values.‘”
Refuse Fascism is the classic embodiment of the modern Left’s method of political argumentation: no demonstrable facts whatsoever, just a long series of reckless smears and defamations.
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