Amidst Trump’s bellicose rants about “lunatic radical leftists,” masked armed gangs called Immigration and Customs Enforcement are roaming city streets, kidnapping people for walking or driving while brown, grabbing people at their court hearings, invading apartment buildings from the air and destroying everything while zip-tying the terrified residents, including children.

The Kirk assassination did not trigger the Trump regime’s reign of terror against the U.S. population and the Constitution’s limits on arbitrary executive power, all of which was already well underway. But the assassination has further sharpened the polarization in which the crisis is rapidly accelerating. The speed with which the right wing and Supreme Court majority are wiping out the Voting Rights Act, Black federal employment, and anti-discrimination protections is a whole story in itself.

By sending troops into U.S. cities as well as assorted power grabs, including ordering indictments of political opponents, Trump is systematically testing how far beyond Constitutional and legal limits he’ll be allowed to go. With the peremptory murder-bombing of boats off the coasts of Venezuela, he’s also openly preparing a U.S. war against that country without even a disguise of Congressional approval.

Even if Trump himself appears unwell and incoherent, as in his spoiled-brat rant about not being gifted the Nobel Peace Prize, the machinery behind him is all too alive and menacing. The government shutdown is a power play to show that the Republicans in Congress can just refuse (actually, they don’t dare) to negotiate over the murderous health care cuts in Trump’s big, barf-bag budget bill.

 Incipient Police State

Right now it’s alleged “illegal” immigrants being rounded up on the streets, shackled and packed into detention centers under hideous conditions, and sometimes “disappeared” as in the hundreds who have disappeared without a trace from the infamous Florida “Alligator Alcatraz.”

But the incipient all-purpose police state threatens the entire society. After the Trump proclamation of “war on the left” under the new National Security memorandum (see below), some chilling historical precedents are worth citing — even if they may seem (for the moment) wildly disproportionate to the scale of today’s U.S. post-Constitutional twilight zone.

Hands Off demonstration, Fremont, CA (Alex Chis)

Early in the regime of Adolf Hitler, in February 1933 the Reichstag (German parliament) building burned down in suspicious circumstances. This much-debated event helped set in motion the Nazi government’s drive toward a full-scale terrorist regime, the destruction of the labor movement, deadly persecution of “undesirables” and anti-Jewish laws that greased the skids toward full-scale genocide.

In the Soviet Union as the Stalin regime consolidated power, in December 1934 a prominent and potential Stalin rival Leningrad Communist Party chief Sergei Kirov was gunned down by a lone assassin with no clear motive. Victor Serge’s chilling novel The Case of Comrade Tulayev is based on the events that followed. Seizing on this murder, Stalin would launch the Great Purges that took millions of lives and completed the bureaucratic counterrevolution that turned the Soviet Union into a fully totalitarian state.

Closer to our time, “in September 1999, a series of explosions hit four apartment blocks in the Russian cities of Buynaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk, killing more than 300, injuring more than 1000, and spreading a wave of fear across the country. The bombings, together with the Invasion of Dagestan, triggered the Second Chechen War.” (Wikipedia)

The panic around these bombings brought about the violent “war on terror” under the newly ascendant Vladimir Putin. There remains widespread suspicion that the bombings had been orchestrated by the Russian security services — and a number of whistleblowers, journalists and a dissident oligarch who claimed as much wound up dead. The consequences of the police-state regime that Putin has constructed are too numerous to recount here.

We are not living today, of course, in Nazi Germany, Stalin’s USSR or Putin’s Russian Federation. We have rights, means of information, and widespread popular antipathy toward Trump, as tools for resistance and fightback. The point is that we have to use them.

 The Memorandum

“This is the first time in American history that there is an all-of-government effort to dismantle left wing terrorism,” Trump’s homeland security advisor Stephen Miller said, referring to the issuance of Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” known as National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-7. This blueprint for constructing a MAGA police state was obviously in preparation long before the Charlie Kirk murder.

Outlining an all-front war against any and every expression of “anti-Christian, “anti-American” and “anti-capitalism” dissent, particularly on the left, the document spells out that “A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies — including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them — is required.”

The explosive specifics are laid out by investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein in his piece “Trump’s NSPM-7 Labels Common Beliefs As Terrorism ‘Indicators.’” We can expect the new campaign to combine the traditional tactics of surveillance and smear campaigns, McCarthyism and COINTELPRO with the latest technology, some of it developed and supplied by Israeli tech companies.

Outrages like the “investigation” of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and the groups it helps fund, such as the well-established Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, are just the beginning. So are high-profile prosecutions of figures like James Comey and New York state attorney general Letitia James, undertaken against the judgment of career federal prosecutors, to satisfy the revenge lusts of the hulking orange blob in the Oval Office. Those cases are likely to mostly collapse, but will have the intended effect of terrorizing lower-profile people without the visibility and fundraising capacity to fight the power.

 Mass Firings

“Kirk Comments Have Generated Wave of Firings,” reports The New York Times (Sunday, September 28, A1) including “Even Private Speech” outside and unrelated to the workplace.

The paper “identified more than 145 such cases through news reports, public statements and interviews with those targeted. Those who have faced discipline are professors and health care workers, lawyers and journalists, restaurant workers and airline employees.”

One of those cases is Tara Marcelle, 43, a clinical nurse educator at a Phoenix hospital and an Air Force veteran, who is among those fired for supposed jokes about the Charlie Kirk killing. Others have been purged for social media posts opposing Kirk’s politics, even if they abhorred the murder.

Such cases make a mockery of any illusion that Kirk’s followers support free speech — although hardly anyone seriously believed that myth. More important perhaps, they show what happens because so few workers in this country have union protection.

People can be arbitrarily fired with almost no legal redress. Indeed, says professor Risa Lieberwitz at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, “Right now it’s quite an extreme level of fear that people have in speaking out.” And companies fear government reprisal if they don’t participate in the purge.

The Guardian (October 10, 2025) reports:

“A ‘climate of fear’ is still shrouding college campuses across the US, academics have warned, after a string of professors were fired or punished for their comments after Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

“As many as 40 academics have been dismissed in recent weeks, according to the American Association of University Professors. Many were targeted by rightwing campaigners, who seized on remarks they wrote or shared, and pressured their employers to take action.”

These purges are accompanied by the Trump regime’s drive to transform colleges and universities by using federal funding — today’s lifeline for science and academic work, on a scale unknown during 1950s McCarthyism — as weapons of coercion and manipulation over their research, curriculum and admissions policies.

 The Tom Alter Case

From the standpoint of free speech, the integrity of academic institutions, and the right of socialists to work as educators, one that stands out is the case of history professor Tom Alter at Texas State University. Shortly after becoming tenured, as a statement from his organization Socialist Horizons explains:

“Beloved History professor and Socialist Horizon member Tom Alter was summarily fired on September 10^th by Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse for expressing his ideas in a virtual conference unrelated to the university.

“The grounds for his dismissal were based solely on false accusations published online by self-declared fascist and “anti-communist cult leader” Karlyn Borysenko. We call on Dr. Kelly Damphousse and the TSU administration to retreat from this flagrant attack on the basic right to free speech and wrongful termination of Dr. Tom Alter. We call for his immediate reinstatement.

“Alter’s summary termination is a serious attack on free speech that could set dangerous precedents, contribute to Trump and the far right’s intention of imposing an authoritarian regime, and strengthen the influence of fascists and the most violent and reactionary groups. We call on all (organizations, etc.) to join us in building the broadest campaign to win this decisive battle.”

The lack of any shred of due process in this firing led a District Court to force Alter’s temporary reinstatement, with pay but no teaching assignments, but this was short-lived as the president staged a pro-forma hearing and again fired him.

A broad-based civil liberties and free speech campaign has been launched and is rapidly gaining support. Visit Committee to Defend Tom Alter for information, updates and ways to give support.

 Spreading Wildfire

The five-alarm emergency that the far right has created is a wildfire deliberately set in multiple locations, precisely to make it as hard as possible to combat.

Beside the reign of terror on immigrant communities are Trump and Hegseth’s call for the military to make U.S. cities “training grounds;” open calls for white Christian supremacy in the wake of the Charlie Kirk murder; threats of mass federal workforce purges under cover of the government shutdown; devastating public health emergencies to result from the conversion of HHS (Department of Health and Human Services) to RFK Jr’s personal brainless trust; and the Trump-Blair-Netanyahu “peace deal” to normalize the colonial obliteration of the Palestinian people’s homeland.

In several articles in this issue of Against the Current and in previous contributions, we’ve discussed many of these disasters and the resistance to them. We emphasize, again, that every particular defensive struggle — for free speech, for education, for human rights, for immigrant communities and for Palestine — contribute to the whole.

An estimated eight million people turned out for the October 18 “No Kings” rallies held in 2600 locations across the country, featuring a spectrum of diverse, creative and sometimes cheerfully obscene expressions. The common sentiment was that to show contempt for Donald Trump and his fascistic toadies Hegseth, Bondi, Noem etc. does not mean to “Hate America,” as the despicable House Speaker Mike Johnson would have it.

Can the energy of October 18 be sustained in the difficult and exhausting work of resistance? As we go to press, the future of the government shutdown, federal workforce cuts, ICE violence and much more all remain unresolved. There can be no illusions that Congress, courts or the Democrats can save us.

Today’s wildfire of repression and reaction is quite a long way from the Reichstag fire of Hitler’s Germany. The point is not to be either complacent, or despairing, but to use the rights we have to attain the justice that we so badly need.

The Editors, Against the Current

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