All the events of the past month since the killing of Charlie Kirk—the transformation of a fascist provocateur into a martyr of the MAGA movement, the mobilization of the National Guard against the so-called “enemy within,” and the open preparations to invoke the Insurrection Act—have demonstrated beyond any doubt that what is underway is a systematic conspiracy by the Trump administration to establish a dictatorship. Blinders are falling from people’s eyes. More and more Americans are saying, “I don’t recognize this country anymore.” The Land of Lincoln is being transformed by Trump and his arrogant satraps into the land of a would-be Führer.

This conspiracy entered a new and chilling stage on Wednesday, when President Trump convened a meeting in the White House that was presented as a “roundtable on antifa.” It was, in fact, a gathering of extreme right-wing political maniacs: neo-Nazis, Christian nationalists, racists, and Hitler lovers. They were assembled by Trump in what was clearly intended as a signal for all-out war against political opposition. An atmosphere of menace and imminent violence prevailed throughout the entire “discussion.”

Nothing like this has ever occurred in the history of the United States. The White House has been transformed into the headquarters of a conspiracy to legitimize fascism, brand anti-fascism as “terrorism,” and mobilize the repressive machinery of the state against the population. 

Seated alongside senior government officials—Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and senior adviser Stephen Miller—were a collection of neo-Nazi agitators, masquerading as “journalists.” The most repulsive of these aspiring executioners was Jack Posobiec, a neo-Nazi whom the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as having “collaborated with white supremacists, neo-fascists and antisemites for years.”

At the White House meeting, Trump declared that “we got rid of free speech” and denounced protests involving millions, including the upcoming October 18 “No Kings” demonstrations, as “paid operations” directed by a vast “left-wing terror network.” The various fascist personalities singled out the Democratic Socialists of America, CODEPINK, and other groups as accomplices of “antifa.” Trump accused Democratic governors and mayors of acting “illegally,” called for their arrest, and warned them, in the style of a mafia boss, to “be very careful.”

Noem claimed that the supposed “antifa network” is “as sophisticated as ISIS or Hezbollah,” while Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed to “take them apart brick by brick,” to “destroy the entire organization from top to bottom.” All those assembled at the White House agreed on the need to designate “antifa” as a “foreign terrorist organization.” This would sanction political repression and violence all the way up to assassination and mass murder.

But “antifa” is not an organization at all. It has no central leadership, no membership rolls, and no structure. When the Trump administration declares war on “antifa,” it means this literally: a war on anti-fascism itself, the criminalization of all opposition to dictatorship and repression.

During the discussion on whether to brand “antifa” a “foreign terrorist organization,” Trump turned directly to Posobiec and asked, “Would you like to see it done?” The fascist propagandist, who served as a key figure in the January 6 coup attempt, responded enthusiastically in the affirmative.

In his book Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them)—with a foreword by Steve Bannon and a blurb from Vice President JD Vance—Posobiec portrayed all revolutionary movements of the past 250 years to be the work of subhuman monsters.

“Leftists operate from envy,” Posobiec writes. “There is no way to reason with those who manipulate the have-nots en masse to loot and to shoot.” If it is impossible to reason with “unhumans,” they must be dealt with through other means. “Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” he wrote, “It is time to stop playing by rules they won’t.”

This is an open call for violence against opponents of Trump. Posobiec’s language is lifted directly from the vocabulary of the Nazis. His “unhumans” are a close translation of the Nazi term Untermenschen (“subhumans”), used to justify genocide against Jews, Slavs and other peoples. In 1942, SS leader Heinrich Himmler oversaw the publication of a pamphlet titled Der Untermensch, which declared that certain populations were “biological creatures” who are “only partial human beings.”

Posobiec’s “unhumans,” like Himmler’s Untermenschen, are those marked out for annihilation. “What we need are lists,” he wrote—lists of enemies, along with “men and women of action” to hunt down opponents in the media, education and the economy: “Let cultural Marxists tremble in fear…” At the CPAC convention last year, sharing the stage with Bannon, Posobiec declared, “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.”

Posobiec also told Trump during the White House event that “antifa” has existed since “the Weimar Republic in Germany,” that is, since opposition to the rise of Hitler. This is a theme promoted by others in attendance, including Andy Ngo, who, in his book Unmasked, complained, “While the Brownshirts are well remembered in contemporary Western society, the history of far-left paramilitaries in the German interwar years has faded to memory.” 

Hours after the fascist gathering, Mark Bray, a Rutgers University historian and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, was stopped from boarding a flight from Newark to Spain on Wednesday night. Bray, who had received death threats from Turning Point USA activists and was labeled by Posobiec a “domestic terrorist professor,” was attempting to leave the country with his family.

After passing through security, Bray was informed at the gate that their reservations had been “cancelled.” He wrote, “‘Someone’ cancelled my family’s flight out of the country at the last second. We got our boarding passes. We checked our bags. Went through security. Then at our gate our reservation ‘disappeared.’”

The only explanation for this cancellation is that someone in or around the administration sought to prevent Bray’s ability to leave the US and escape from threats against his life, and to send a message that he is being followed and targeted.  

One might have assumed that the invitation of fascists to the White House, where their calls for the political suppression and violent overthrow of constitutionally protected rights were endorsed by the president, would have been answered with a storm of protests. But nothing of the sort has happened. The open embrace of fascists in the White House has been met with near-total indifference from the political and media establishment. No leading Democrat—including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, or Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders—has issued a single statement on the gathering of neo-Nazis and white supremacists in the executive mansion.

The major network TV news programs gave it no coverage. The Washington Post, the principal newspaper covering the nation’s capital, has nothing on the front page of its website. The New York Times, the main media organ of the Democratic Party, published only a perfunctory report focused narrowly on Trump’s claim to have “taken away freedom of speech,” omitting any reference to the fascistic threats and declarations made by the participants.

The silence extends to the various organizations that operate in and around the Democratic Party as well. Jacobin magazine, the organ associated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has published nothing on the White House’s fascist meeting, the invocation of the Insurrection Act, or the threats against Bray and the cancellation of his flight.

The DSA itself, which was explicitly threatened at the White House meeting on “antifa,” posted a brief pro-forma statement Thursday afternoon: “DSA affirms our fundamental right to free speech and assembly. We will not be intimidated by the Trump administration’s cronies, and we will continue our struggle for democracy to the end.”

The DSA says that they “will not be intimidated,” but if that is all they have to say in response to a direct threat from the White House, then they plainly are. Moreover, the issue is not only the “fundamental rights” of the DSA, but the overthrow of the Constitution and the establishment of a dictatorship. Nowhere does the organization explain how its proclaimed “struggle for democracy” is to be waged, because for the DSA the answer is always the same: to subordinate opposition to the Democratic Party, which through its silence and inaction is enabling Trump’s coup.

There is enormous popular opposition to Trump’s dictatorial agenda. Millions are preparing to take part in the upcoming “No Kings” demonstrations on October 18, with more than 2,100 protests already scheduled in cities and towns across the country. The administration’s threats, its deployment of troops to major cities, and its plans to invoke the Insurrection Act are preemptive moves against the developing movement of the working class and youth.

There is every reason to believe that the Trump administration will seek to incite violent incidents to provide a pretext for repression. All those who are planning to participate in what are planned as peaceful protests must be on guard against and avoid falling into traps laid by provocateurs. 

However, the demonstrations, motivated by profound determination to defend democratic rights, must confront critical political and strategic truths.

First and foremost, the assault on democratic rights is aimed against the working class. In the final analysis, Trump is seeking to create a political system in which workers are deprived of all means to defend their most basic social interests. His administration’s program is being implemented in the government shutdown, now in its second week.

Trump is boasting of exploiting the opportunity to destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs, gut social programs, and strip millions of health care, housing, and retirement benefits. The same government that is deploying troops in American cities is spearheading a social counterrevolution against every gain won by the working class.

Second, Trump does not act as an isolated individual. He speaks and acts for the American capitalist oligarchy, which has concluded that its wealth and power can no longer be maintained through democratic means. The corporate and financial oligarchs who dined last month at the White House and showered Trump with praise are motivated by the same interests which led ruthless sections of the German ruling class to raise Hitler to power in 1933 and support his dictatorship.

The mega-billionaires are convinced that the capitalist system requires a massive reduction in entitlement programs and overall living standards of the working class. Moreover, they want the elimination of all restraints on the use of military power to secure their global economic interests. Trump has been placed in the White House to implement this fascistic program.

Third, the Democratic Party will do nothing to oppose this drive. Whatever tactical differences it may have, it is also an instrument of the financial-corporate oligarchy and the military-intelligence apparatus and shares Trump’s basic goals: the defense of capitalist wealth, the prosecution of war, and the suppression of any movement from below. Its silence and complicity express its class character. What it fears above all is a mass movement of the working class that would threaten the foundations of capitalist rule itself.

From the recognition of the situation as defined above, it follows:

Fourth, the defense of democratic rights requires the independent political mobilization of the working class, the only social force capable of halting the descent into dictatorship. It numbers in the hundreds of millions, exercises the decisive role in the economic process of production, and has the potential power to bring the oligarchs to their knees and force a massive and democratic distribution of power and wealth.

Moreover, the vast American working class is part of an international working class that makes it possible to wage the struggle against capitalism on a global scale.

The October 18 protest demonstrations should mark the beginning of a counteroffensive against Trump’s dictatorial and fascistic rampage.

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) urges that in every workplace, factory, neighborhood and school, workers and student youth must begin to discuss and organize resistance to the assault on democratic rights. The savage assault on immigrant workers and their families must be stopped. Moreover, all political organizations and individuals targeted by the Trump regime must be defended. For its part, the Socialist Equality Party will defend all victims of government attacks, regardless of differences over program and strategy.

Rank-and-file committees must be formed to coordinate this struggle across industries and borders. The SEP has taken the initiative to develop the fight through the formation of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). The fight for this strategy and program among the youth is being conducted by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE).

The fight against dictatorship is inseparable from the fight against capitalism and for socialism. To defend democracy, the working class must take power into its own hands, expropriate the financial oligarchy, and reorganize economic life on the basis of human need, not private profit. Only in this way can the descent into fascism and dictatorship be stopped.