When Victoria Police Commander Wayne Cheeseman huffed into his media conference on 19 October, armed with a box of rocks allegedly thrown by anti-fascist protesters, he engaged in a piece of theatre intended to malign anti-racists and praise far-right protesters. Cheeseman was also doing his bit for the wider campaign, supported by the Melbourne City Council, the Liberal Party and the mainstream media, to crack down on protests in Melbourne. 
That day, there had been two opposing rallies in the city centre. One was a far-right protest, attended by angry, racist nationalists waving flags and demanding an end to immigration. This protest was led and addressed by Matt Trihey, a member of the National Workers Alliance, a fascistic organisation with links to the Nazi National Socialist Network. A similar protest a few weeks before had ended in violent attacks on Camp Sovereignty, an Indigenous protest camp in a city park.
The other demonstration was an anti-racist counter-march. It involved at least 1,500 people marching against nationalism and white supremacy, the vast, vast majority of whom did so entirely peacefully. The police chose to target their fire on just one of these protests. 
Cheeseman ranted and raved at his press conference, about “issue-motivated groups” (left-wing people who are opposed to racism), and praised the far right who “protested by example”. This celebration of the well-behaved racists gave a predictable boost to the far right, some of whom called on social media for Cheeseman to become mayor. 
The mainstream media amplified the police commander’s calls, building on many months of campaigning about the need to restore “order” in the city. Chip Le Grand, political writer for the Age, quoted beleaguered business owners as part of his argument for scrapping democratic rights: “Prominent restaurant owner Chris Lucas wants the CBD to be declared protest-free for the rest of the year. While this would temporarily impinge on the right to assembly guaranteed by Victoria’s Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities, it would protect the countervailing rights of business owners, residents and ordinary visitors to the city”. 
The reality is that this anti-protest campaign was under way well before the anti-racist protest over the weekend. Cheeseman was saying what most of the establishment were already thinking, and some doing. Rock throwing and other counterproductive tactics simply gave the police and their allies more authority to pursue it. 
Their real gripe is the Palestine movement, remarkable in its scope, depth and longevity, and which has organised weekly rallies in Melbourne throughout Israel’s stepped-up genocide. This show of internationalism and solidarity against Western-backed violence is part of what had motivated the far right to organise. And it has been the catalyst for the authorities, in particular the Melbourne City Council, to call for restrictions on the right to protest, such as exist in New South Wales. The permit system there gives police the ability to veto the right to demonstrate, and while activists can sometimes overturn this in court, it requires access to lawyers and costs time and money, which left-wing activists often don’t have. 
Already, the Melbourne City Council has approved a plan to request state and federal governments to restrict protest rights in the city. This would <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-20/city-of-melbourne-councillors-vote-amendment-protest-disruption/105674980">include</a>
altering the routes of protests, moving them to parks or “stronger police intervention to minimise disruption”. 
Brad Battin, the Liberal leader, has likewise called for limits on the right to protest. Battin has pledged to introduce a permit system if the Liberals are elected at the coming state election. A Liberal press statement has Battin saying, “Under a government I lead, law abiding citizens will be prioritised ahead of those who seek to disrupt the activities of Victorians or endanger public safety”. The Liberals sleight of hand includes discussing protests and demonstrations in the same breath as machete crime and gang violence. 
Premier Jacinta Allen has so far resisted calls for a permit system, but her government has introduced other laws restricting protests. These include harsher penalties for people who lock on or glue themselves to surfaces—things that mainly environmental and anti-war activists engage in. 
Whatever happens, we have to defend the right to protest. We can’t let the very forces we are often protesting against take away our ability to challenge them. And we can’t let profit making for city businesses trump democratic rights. The best way to uphold and defend the right to protest is to keep getting out and protesting, and to make it impossible for the authorities to stop us.

Anneke Demanuele

Cops huff and media puff—we need to defend the right to protest in Melbourne

Fascists in Australia are trying to build a movement. We have to stop them. On 19 October, we will be counter-protesting the next round of “march for Australia” demonstrations—protests that are trying to capitalise on fascism’s international success. 
The far right is no longer just small bands of drunken neo-Nazis praising Hitler and organising small marches and pub gigs. Across the globe, fascists have entered the political mainstream, and far-right groups have become ruling parties. They are in government in the United States, India, Italy, Argentina and across Europe. If elections were held in the United Kingdom, Germany or France today, fascists would likely take key ministerial posts in far-right governments. 
In Australia, the far right has organised some of the largest street demonstrations in decades, and One Nation has gained in the polls. Inside the Liberal Party, there is a battle between the right and the hard right—Andrew Hastie quitting the shadow ministry to further campaign against migrants and climate targets and for increased militarism, and to build the far-right brand as the future of Australian conservatism.
The growth of the far right is, in many ways, inevitable under capitalism. The ideas of the far right are the ideas of capitalism taken to their logical extreme. And the program of the far right can suit the needs of the ruling class. That’s why, in the United States, the Trump regime is not meeting much opposition from the capitalists. 
What isn’t inevitable is the nature of the response to this growth of the far right. The Labour Party in the UK and the Democrats in the US offer one path: acquiesce, do nothing, and <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-remarks-at-immigration-white-paper-press-conference-12-may-2025">repeat the core messages of the right</a> and by doing so legitimate them. Trump, in <a href="https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-speech-department-of-defense-leaders-quantico-september-30-2025/">a speech</a> to the army top brass, as good as called out the Democrats for their lack of political response to his agenda: “I thought it would be met with fury on the left, but they’re sort of giving up, I must be honest with you. They’ve had it. They’ve had it with Trump”.
Where the centre parties do nothing, we have to stand against the growth of the far right. We need to build mass movements on the streets and take them on in other areas of our society. 
We need to make use of all political arenas that we can. That means organising forums and town hall meetings. It means postering campaigns, painting the town “anti-fascist”. We need left-wing political parties, like the Socialists, to grow everywhere and provide an anti-capitalist alternative to both the status quo and the far right. In 2023, we were able to deny Melbourne neo-Nazis their organising space, a gym in Sunshine, using protests and community pressure. Campaigns like that should be repeated when the far right attempt to set up spaces to build their movements. 
In Australia, we have the chance to push back against the far-right street movement because it still lacks coherent political leadership. 
We have to grow a confident and militant working-class movement. This is central because we cannot defeat the far right without taking on the capitalists. Only by getting rid of the system that breeds fascism can we ensure that this kind of politics cannot rear its head again. We may not be able to defeat the politics of the far right within the framework of capitalism, but we can challenge their current political organisations and build a left-wing alternative.
In Italy, a far-right government is currently in power. Despite this, a mass strike wave has developed against the genocide in Gaza, and crucially against the government’s support for it and its opposition to working-class action. As workers continue to develop their struggles, they can start to create a crisis for the far-right government and hopefully remove it from power. 
This shows us a pathway for defeating the far right. We have a responsibility to build these kinds of movements everywhere. The fight against the far right has to be a fight against this brutal system. 
In Australia, 19 October will be a crucial opportunity to build an anti-fascist movement and build the confidence of our side to take on the whole racist, rotten system.

The far right is organising—we have to resist

The cabinet secretary in charge of public health is an anti-vax crackpot implementing billions in cuts for medical research. The defence secretary is a third-rate TV host who, when he’s not receiving Botox injections, <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/hegseth-boasts-i-know-exactly-what-i-m-doing-after-stunning-war-plan-leak">must publicly insist</a>: “I know exactly what I’m doing”. 
The administration includes people who openly say that women should be in the home, not the workplace; some even think <a href="https://19thnews.org/2025/08/pete-hegseth-doug-wilson-women-voting/">the Nineteenth Amendment,</a> which guaranteed women the right to vote, was a mistake. Energy policy doubles down on fossil fuels and nuclear power, while abandoning successful renewable energy investments. Tariffs are raising consumer prices and hampering domestic firms, while impoverishing swathes of the farm economy.
It all appears to be a leap into irrationalism. Why would the US government destroy the country’s research capability, sabotage its economy, and put crackpots and incompetents in charge of some of its most essential functions? Why does the Trump administration appear to want to turn back the clock to the 1950s, if not the nineteenth century? And why would leading corporate, government and university leaders support all of this?
It's difficult to address these questions with one overarching explanation—unless it’s simply that all these factors historically have been associated with right-wing and authoritarian governments. In The Reactionary Mind, political philosopher Corey Robin defines modern-day conservatism as “that unlikely alliance of the libertarian, with his vision of the employer’s untrammelled power in the workplace; the traditionalist, with his vision of the father’s rule at home; and the statist, with his vision of a heroic leader pressing his hand upon the face of the earth”.
The corollary is the political right’s defence of traditional social and economic hierarchies. In the Trump government, echoes of this defence of “tradition” can be found in support for policies that push women out of the workforce and encourage them to have more babies, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/04/25/nx-s1-5371718/pronatalist-birth-rate-musk-natal-conference">to take one example</a>. These “neo-natal” ideas are closely connected to other reactionary ideas such as white supremacy and transphobia.
In some cases, Trumpist tropes are easy to explain. The fossil fuel industry is a traditional Republican constituency, and the government is heavily invested in economic and political alliances with petrostates, especially the Gulf monarchies. So it’s no surprise that the administration is stuffed with climate change deniers and is hostile to renewable energy. It appears not to care about the climate crisis’s impact on humans, nor, even from its narrow imperial mindset, 21st-century supremacy in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/business/china-electric-grid.html">solar power</a> and <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/28/autos-chinas-electric-vehicle-juggernaut-is-reshaping-the-car-market.html">electric vehicles</a> being forfeited to the Chinese state.
Another reason for the seeming self-destructive irrationality of the Trump administration is that its 2024 electoral coalition, and the government it created, is something of a Frankenstein’s monster of disparate right-wing elements. Analysts have described this shotgun marriage in different ways. <a href="https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-three-headed-chimera-of-trumpian-destruction">To liberal Josh Marshall</a>, the “three-headed chimera of Trumpian destruction” is an amalgam of MAGA loyalists, Christian nationalists and “Tech bro” authoritarians. <a href="https://tempestmag.org/2025/02/trump-seizes-power-in-d-c/">To socialist Ashley Smith</a>, the Trump regime is a combination of “three factions with totally different political programs—traditional conservatives, neoliberal tech bosses and MAGA nationalists”.
Smith is closer to the structural components of the Trump regime, while Marshall is more concerned with its ideological composition. But both emphasise, correctly, the unstable nature of the forces undergirding Trump’s government. These disparate elements are mostly pulling in the same direction because the administration is on the offensive against “enemies” that they share: immigrants, “wokeness”, federal workers and the like. But there are underlying tensions between these groups. And a political payoff to one could undermine another. We’ve already seen a foreshadowing of this in <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/1/16/bannon-vs-musk-how-trumps-u-turn-on-h-1b-visas-has-split-maga">the fight between MAGA nationalists and tech oligarchs</a> over the question of visas for highly skilled migrant workers.
Between 2020 and 2024, Trump expanded his electoral coalition with newly minted constituencies such as RFK Jr’s anti-vax followers. The MAGA right brought these forces inside the Trump tent. To maintain their loyalty, the leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services and the nation’s public health agencies was handed to Kennedy and other prominent opponents of vaccines and COVID-era policies. Trump knows nothing about health or science, as his ramblings about drinking bleach or linking common painkillers to autism, show. 
But even as his administration’s policies have caused upheaval in the public health infrastructure, Trump has stood by Kennedy. Surely one might think that business and the tech oligarchs would oppose such anti-science thinking. 
We should remember that the likes of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/25/climate-science-deniers-downplaying-coronavirus-pandemic">Koch network and the fossil-fuel industry</a>—in league with “<a href="https://jacobin.com/2018/10/donald-trump-lumpen-capitalist-class-elections">lumpencapitalist</a>” <a href="https://counterhate.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/210324-The-Disinformation-Dozen.pdf">supplement peddlers</a> (the online snake oil hawkers of the 21st century)—financed much of the opposition to COVID public health measures. Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, which focused on individuals’ health and diet choices, <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/make-america-healthy-again-aims-to-make-public-health-your-responsibility/">aligns with neoliberalism’s “blame the victim” approach to cutting social spending</a>. Why should the government spend money on health care for those who make poor lifestyle choices, this Social Darwinist approach asks. 
Finally, the tech oligarchs think that artificial intelligence (AI), on which they are spending hundreds of billions, will be able to replace biomedical researchers, administer social programs and usurp skilled health care personnel. They plan to profit from all of these “innovations”. So, from one perspective, the US destroying its biomedical research enterprise makes no sense. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/business/larry-ellison-oracle-philanthropy.html">But to tech billionaires</a> who plan to use AI to remake that enterprise, it makes perfect sense.
A large proportion of Trump’s mass support—the core of the one-third or so of the electorate that is the “ride or die” MAGA base—holds religious ideas that are <a href="https://prri.org/research/one-leader-under-god-the-connection-between-authoritarianism-and-christian-nationalism-in-america/">highly authoritarian and anti-modern</a>. <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1933/330610.htm">Leon Trotsky’s observation</a> about Germany in the early 1930s comes to mind: 
“A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms ... Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters.”
These are not simply people susceptible to believing the various conspiracy theories promoted by Trump and MAGA influencers; They are an audience for various “culture war” issues the right uses to build support. While the US government has long supported Israel, the Trump administration’s embrace of the Israeli far right coincides with the increased influence in the Republican Party of Christian Zionist organisations, <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/09/christian-zionism-evangelicals-israel-trump-foreign-policy/">which cite Biblical prophecy in support of the Jewish state</a>.
And then there is the biggest wildcard, and source of chaos, in the administration: Trump himself. The president has longstanding ideological commitments that he refuses to drop, regardless of whether they make much sense economically or politically. Championing a tariff-driven, mercantilist economic policy is at the top of this list. 
Beyond a handful of commitments—mostly revolving around ways to boost his own power and to line his pockets—Trump is completely mercurial. Perhaps this is part of his self-promotion as a “strongman”, but it can also produce a situation in which, among his minions, “the knives are out for everyone”, <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/knives-everyone-author-michael-wolff-021305186.html">as Trump biographer Michael Wolff said earlier this month</a>.
That so much of what Trump and his administration does makes no rational sense doesn’t make them any less dangerous. And liberals who think that the 2026 midterm election or the end of Trump’s term will bring everyone “back to their senses” are deluding themselves.
US imperial decline, societal rot, and corrupt impunity at the highest reaches have paved the way for the confederacy of dunces and malefactors that have taken over the US government. The people who helped pave that path aren’t going to lead us out of it.

Lance Selfa

How did a bunch of crackpots get in charge of the USA?

A wave of censorship and political intimidation is sweeping the United States. Led by key figures in the Trump administration, including the president, the country’s vast far-right movement is pressuring employers to sack or silence left-wing workers and to purge outspoken political progressives from state and state-funded institutions. One of the latest casualties in this war on the left is a history professor in Texas, Tom Alter, who was fired last month for speaking, in his own time, at a socialist conference. 
A judge has since <a href="https://www.puntorojomag.org/2025/09/27/judge-rules-for-tom-alter-as-battle-against-university-continues">ordered the university to reinstate Alter</a>, but management has indicated that it will continue investigating him. The following is the original statement and call for solidarity released by his organisation, <a href="https://socialisthorizon.org/">Socialist Horizon</a>.
--------------------
Defend free speech! No to fascists! Reinstate Professor Tom Alter Now! 
Beloved tenured history professor and Socialist Horizon member Tom Alter was summarily fired on 10 September by Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse for expressing his views in a virtual conference unrelated to the university. This action cannot stand. Socialist Horizon calls on people everywhere to join us and demand that Professor Alter be reinstated to his tenured position.
President Damphousse fired Dr Tom Alter based solely on a video published online by an extreme right-wing provocateur who infiltrated and secretly video-recorded segments of a virtual socialist conference with the intention of publishing information to slander and attack conference participants. In videos posted on their website, this person declares that they are a proud fascist who tries to monetise exposure of the left as an “anti-communist cult leader”. This grifter publicly exhorts followers to embrace fascist ideology and take action, is an antisemite that states that Jewish people “chose to die in the Holocaust”, is a self-declared racist and xenophobe, a homophobe and a transphobe that spews hate speech throughout their platform that is solely designed to inflame and incite.
After the fascist’s “exposure video” reached President Damphousse, he summarily fired Dr Alter, a tenured professor, without questioning or investigating the content, without considering its authenticity or validity, without any form of due process, and violating existing state law and campus policy, which requires a formal due process procedure.
What did Alter talk about that triggered fascists, and that Damphousse considers so unacceptable? 
The statement issued by Damphousse to terminate Dr Alter unambiguously affirms that he fired Alter for what he said at that conference, stating no other reason, and accusing Alter of “inciting violence”. But his speech, a transcript of which can be viewed <a href="https://universitystar.com/32736/news/texas-state-terminates-history-professor-over-comments-made-at-conference/">here</a>, in no way calls for violence. 
Alter spoke against this cruel and unjust system and argued in favour of replacing it with socialism, and he advocated organising politically to achieve this. Alter’s political views <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/694835/image-capitalism-slips.aspx">reflect</a> those of nearly half of the total US population. Almost half now oppose capitalism and 40 percet favour socialism over capitalism. Alter’s views are far from subversive; they reflect the mainstream. It is a just cause that more and more people are joining, one people believe to be worth fighting for, and represents a change in thinking that is scaring the bigots, fascists and capitalists. 
It is in fact the fascist infiltrator who incites violence against oppressed people, and in this case, directly against Alter. It is Alter’s employer, Texas State University, that inflicted violence: stripping Alter of his job, refusing him any due process, casting him and his family into the uncertainty of unemployment and making them a target for the extreme right, while slamming the door shut on his free speech and academic freedom. Alter’s First Amendment right to speak, guaranteed by the Constitution, has been violated, as has his academic freedom—a protected right developed by his national faculty union, the American Association of University Professors.
The fact that a marginal fascist streamer with a dangerous and extremist ideology can pressure the president of a prestigious public university system to illegally fire a tenured professor for his opinions is alarming. Most concerning, if we do not stop this, it will set a precedent that will embolden the most dangerous bigots, right-wing extremists and fascists who will continue to target people across the country. If they can influence and direct the president of the Texas State University system so easily—who else will they go after?
We call on President Damphousse to stop this flagrant attack on constitutionally-protected free speech, to undo this wrongful termination, and to immediately reinstate Dr Tom Alter to his teaching position. 
The termination of Dr Alter is a serious attack that upends his livelihood, his professional and academic career, and sets a very dangerous precedent. President Damphousse’s actions appear to be in accordance with the far-right politics of Texas politicians Greg Abbot and Ted Cruz, as well as being in line with that of Donald Trump, who has used the office of the presidency to wage war on his political opponents. 
Damphousse’s actions align with Trump and the far-right forces trying to impose and enforce an authoritarian regime that wants to silence critics, crush political dissent, and attack anyone they perceive to be oppositional to their project. Even more threatening, Damphousse’s actions strengthen the power and influence of fascists and enable the most violent and reactionary groups to also attack and take action against anyone they deem to be part of the left. 
It is Trump who inflicts violence against millions through his authoritarian political attacks that target people of Colour, women, transpeople, immigrants and refugees, people with disabilities, impoverished and unhoused people, and the working class as a whole. It is the far right and the fascists who are building movements to harm innocent and vulnerable people. It is this capitalist system that Alter spoke against that inflicts mass violence, condemning billions to hunger, poverty and war, while a handful accumulates ever-growing obscene amounts of wealth that is stolen from the rest of us.
Alter is being attacked because he is telling a truth that many people in the United States believe today: that capitalism is ruining their lives and that socialism is a better system. If Dr Tom Alter can be fired for expressing his personal beliefs and principles, then people everywhere are in danger. If he can be fired for expressing a point of view at a conference, away from his work and in his daily private life, then none of us are safe. 
His case must draw support from people of all sectors of society: workers, teachers, nurses, students—anyone and everyone who upholds the value of free speech. As the great anti-slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said, “The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected”.
We call on everyone to join us in building the broadest possible solidarity campaign to win this decisive battle.
The attacks on Dr Tom Alter and socialist politics will not intimidate Socialist Horizon. We will defend our comrade and we will continue fighting for the very cause he is being attacked for: justice, freedom and equality. We will also continue building the organisation that it will take to win it.
Dr Tom Alter is not only a beloved faculty member at Texas State but also an advisor to several student organisations. He is the author of a celebrated history of socialism in the American South, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press). He is also the father of two children. Socialist Horizon demands that Texas State University immediately restore Tom Alter’s position as associate professor of history. 
Socialist Horizon also calls on all organisations and individuals that defend the basic democratic right to free speech and reject fascism and authoritarianism, and all socialists in particular, to join this fight. This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defence of free speech and against fascism.
Follow the <a href="https://socialisthorizon.org">Socialist Horizon website</a> for campaign updates.

Socialist professor targeted in US censorship campaign

The most glorious moment of this year’s federal election was watching Peter Dutton not only lose his long-desired bid to be prime minister, but lose his own seat in parliament as well. It was almost as satisfying as watching former Prime Minister John Howard suffer the same fate in 2007.
Dutton’s spectacular failure represented a thorough rejection of his right-wing agenda. Buoyed by Donald Trump’s US presidential victory last year, Dutton pivoted to include some soft-MAGA styling in his own campaign—attacking Welcome to Country ceremonies, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags, work from home arrangements and, at times, immigration. Voters turned away in droves.
The following leadership battle between Sussan Ley—the more moderate candidate—and Angus Taylor—on the harder right—resolved in Ley’s favour. The commentariat renewed the argument that followed the Coalition’s loss of government in 2022: that for the Liberal Party to regain government, it needed to shave down its harder right-wing edges. It also needed to calm the factional warfare and unite behind a leader.
This is not what is happening. The party’s hard right is asserting itself very publicly to try to shape the party in its own image.
First was Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who shot to the head of Australia’s far-right scene as the leader of Peter Dutton’s No campaign during the referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. During this year’s election, she told a campaign rally that she wanted to “make Australia great again”. A few days later, a Christmas snap of Price and her husband in MAGA hats hit the media. Following the fascistic March for Australia demonstrations last month, Price fronted the media to share the rally-goers’ concerns about “mass migration”. She singled out Indian migrants, arguing that Labor allowed higher levels into the country to boost its vote. A week of bitter party infighting ensued, culminating in Price losing her spot in the shadow cabinet after she refused to declare confidence in Ley.
Western Australian Liberal MP Andrew Hastie was the next to break ranks. He threatened to quit the shadow frontbench if the party recommitted to net zero emissions by 2050. Hastie followed this up with a truly MAGA-esque series of posts across social media. In one, he shared a black-and-white picture of a bygone White Australia: mum and dad with their two young sons tending the lawn of a classic 1960s suburban brick home. In the caption, he wrote that the Liberal Party “might even die as a political party” if it doesn’t curb migration, questioning “What is the point of politics, if you’re not willing to fight for something?”. 
In a video titled “Australian First”, Hastie poses with a vintage red 1969 Ford Falcon sedan, bemoaning the loss of domestic manufacturing and “Aussie cars, made by Aussie workers, for the Australian people”. And, of course, there are references to the “evil” and “violent” “radical left”, Christian iconography and the need to fight the decline of the West.
This is all widely understood as Hastie’s first moves in a bid for Liberal Party leadership, a campaign that has been publicly endorsed by Price, Liberal MPs Garth Hamilton and Henry Pike, and backed by a number of other Liberals speaking anonymously to the media. Bear in mind that Ley won the leadership by only four votes: 29 to Taylor’s 25.
There’s some confusion about this posture. If Trump-style politics was so thoroughly rejected by the Australian electorate less than six months ago, why double down on it? Sometimes there’s more to politics than immediate electoral victory. These are ideological people with a vision for society—and that vision fits with a rising hard-right norm across the Western world. Even if that hasn’t yet filtered into Australia, people like Hastie and Price can still feel like this is their movement’s historical moment and their duty to propagate it. Politics isn’t just about tailing mass opinion—it’s about intervening to shape it.
It’s worth comparing this to how the Labor Party responded to its loss of government in 2013 and subsequent near-decade in opposition. Party leaders concluded that public infighting had been electorally detrimental, so they needed to present a united front. In practice, this meant the more left-wing figures inside Labor shutting up and backing whatever the leader said. Think of MPs like Ged Kearney, who publicly supported refugee rights for years but, since entering parliament, has shut her mouth on the question. Or think of how the party treated WA Senator Fatima Payman who crossed the floor to support a Greens motion recognising Palestinian statehood. 
The far right has failed to enter the mainstream here for several reasons. Primarily, Australia has not experienced the same level of economic and political crisis and chaos as the northern hemisphere. The centre has held—albeit with declining support each election. 
But there is a base for harder right politics: in the most recent election, far-right outfits polled a combined 13.6 percent—almost 2 million votes. Recent polling indicates that support for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has increased from 6 to 11 percent since the May election and is now at 16 percent in NSW. But the far right has failed to coalesce around a single party or leader, as with the AfD in Germany, National Rally in France or Trump in the US. This hampers its ability to build a movement.
It’s impossible to predict how a more cohered far-right movement could emerge in Australia. But it’s possible that, rather than happening outside the Liberal Party, it could emerge within it, or as a split from it. As the Teal Independents continue to soak up the more moderate Liberal base, this becomes more likely. And people like Hastie are in many ways the more likely candidates. It’s rarely the street thugs who rise to the top. Hastie, with his SAS soldier background and elite Sydney private school education, is far more typical. Trump, after all, is a billionaire born into wealth.
Again, this is not to predict anything. But it should be read as a warning. The far-right threat exists in Australia, not just on the streets but inside the traditional major party of Australian capitalism.

Eleanor Morley

The far-right threat inside the Liberal Party

Dissent and lose your job. That’s the principle of the campaign to turn Charlie Kirk into a MAGA martyr.
The second Trump administration has always placed a heavy emphasis on the repression of dissent. Almost immediately after his inauguration, he made good on his promise to attack the Palestine solidarity movement, using everything from masked ICE goons to suspension of federal university funding grants. He has campaigned to erase anti-racist ideas from public life under the guise of attacking the hated “DEI”. Even before Kirk’s death, Trump’s second term was the high watermark of the US right’s long war on “cultural Marxism”, which dates back at least to the war on terror, when Kirk’s predecessors like Ann Coulter tried to officially rehabilitate McCarthyism.
Kirk’s death opens a new phase, marked by one Louisiana Republican’s vow to “cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals”. (The phrase “cancel with extreme prejudice” originated during the Vietnam War in US military and spy organisations as a euphemism for murder.) Anyone who uttered a critical remark about Kirk would now be targeted by a campaign to sack them from their job, endorsed from the top by Vice President J.D. Vance: “Call them out. And hell, call their employer”.
This was not just about people in public life—university professors like those Kirk had targeted with his “professor watch-list” or public figures like Jimmy Kimmel. Academics, journalists and entertainers are important scalps in creating a climate of repression: their downfalls can provide a model for bosses to follow, and a threat for workers. 
But the movement to “cancel” aimed at workers with no real public profile: teachers, airline employees and all kinds of white-collar and retail workers have been targeted and suspended or sacked. Dissent has been punished everywhere from the Nasdaq to Freddy’s Frozen Custard &amp; Steakburgers in Quincy, Illinois, which sacked an employee for posting “another one bites the dust”. 
This is repression that goes beyond state power. Trump’s ICE agents rounded up Palestine solidarity protesters for deportation, and his National Guard has been sent on theatrical tours of major cities. But to repress dissent more thoroughly, the US right is turning to the fundamental form of oppression that defines capitalist society: bosses’ power over workers.
That basic power relation of capitalism shapes the production and distribution of ideas. That’s most obvious in the case of massive, privately owned media conglomerates, like those that organised the disciplinary suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and are currently lining up to purchase TikTok. But it’s about more than the media. Capitalism represses dissent by making it dangerous to speak your mind if you want to keep your job.
Right-wing political activists know it, and they have always taken advantage of it to repress the left while claiming to be the champions of individual liberty. That’s why, immediately after Kirk’s death, the “Charlie Kirk Data Foundation” appeared to centralise the reporting and purging of anti-Kirk workers, and that’s why Vance pointed his MAGA followers to use the power of the capitalist class to control their opponents.
The model is familiar. The USA was never a fascist dictatorship, but up to the 1960s, it was an extremely authoritarian society. Figureheads at the top—FBI directors, members of Congress or conservative activists—would send the signal for repression, set the talking points and issue public denunciations. Intellectuals, artists and journalists could serve as public examples, denounced and blacklisted from public life. But whether it was the Red Scare or segregation, the grunt work of authoritarianism in the USA was often carried out by private employers and property owners. For millions of anonymous workers, their livelihood depended on keeping their heads down, fitting in and staying out of trouble.
What kind of authoritarianism is this? Former Vice President Kamala Harris called Trump a fascist. Then, having lost the election, she just disappeared, unseen until she got a gig at a real estate agents’ conference on the Gold Coast. But the Democrats’ hysteria in the 2024 election, followed by their astonishing passivity, shouldn’t be a cause for complacency. The US state may not experience an overnight transformation into a one-party dictatorship after a Reichstag fire, but Trump’s presidency represents a genuine attempt to establish a less free society.
This is more than a culture war. For socialists, movements like Black Lives Matter and the Palestine solidarity movement are still missing the key ingredients of working-class leadership and anti-capitalist politics that they need to challenge seriously the oppressions they aim to destroy. But for a conservative, they still look like a serious danger: a growing hostility to US foreign policy in elite institutions, mass hostility to the police in big cities. Trump and his allies are on a mission to wipe out basic ideas of social equality and anti-racism, to make them dangerous, to push them to the margins of society.
The truly odious nature of Charlie Kirk helps in that cause. In the aftermath of his death, the slightest scepticism about his far-right ideas has become the litmus test for the right.
In their new era of ascendancy, conservatives and bosses have gleefully adopted small-l liberal ideas. “Psychosocial safety” has become an excuse to attack trade union activists. “Anti-racism” is a major concern for right-wingers only when it comes to crushing Palestine solidarity. Now the Republicans have embraced “consequence culture”. 
Those liberal ideas mostly sidestepped the question of class. Now class must be absolutely central in the left’s response to clarify the repression that is unfolding. Trump’s war against “woke ideology” is an attack on the living standards and rights of workers. Those early days of Musk’s DOGE delegitimised the very idea that the state could ever regulate capitalists or redistribute wealth, and provided models for how to treat workers with cruelty, deliberately humiliating them before mass sackings. Now the sanctification of Kirk has provided pressure—or an excuse—to identify and purge any troublemaking employee.
The response to Kirk’s death is a bosses’ war on free speech, and it’s part of a broader turn in the West towards the silencing of dissent. Bosses’ power to sack and control employees is becoming a central plank of new right-wing authoritarianism. Workers’ power will be central to resisting and overturning it.

D. Taylor

Charlie Kirk’s legacy: a bosses’ war on free speech

CHICAGO—Donald Trump and the MAGA right wasted little time in capitalising on the gruesome 10 September murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Before authorities in Utah, where Kirk was killed, had even located a suspect, Trump and the MAGAverse were blaming Kirk’s death on an amorphous “left”. Within days, leading right-wingers—not just MAGA “influencers” but Trump officials up to the vice president—were calling for repression against the left.
Vice President Vance led the charge, encouraging right-wingers to monitor social media and to report to employers anyone who made light of Kirk’s killing. Because so few people really made light of Kirk’s murder, the dragnet changed to sweep in people who were insufficiently deferential to MAGA’s desire to turn Kirk into a martyr. The Washington Post
fired award-winning journalist Karen Attiah when she simply criticised Kirk’s legacy by quoting him in his own words.
The government-orchestrated attack on free speech reached a crescendo when Trumpite Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr suggested that the broadcast network ABC, a subsidiary of the Disney Co., could save itself from regulatory problems by removing late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show from the air. ABC dutifully complied, announcing the “indefinite” suspension of Kimmel’s program on 18 September.
Kimmel’s offence, according to Carr and the MAGA right, was to imply that Kirk’s killer was “one of theirs”. Subsequent information—revealed after Kimmel’s monologue—cast doubt on that assertion. But no matter. Carr had achieved his purpose. It put media corporations on notice that the government would be policing their speech—in direct violation <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/what-the-constitution-says-about-free-speech-on-the-airwaves">of the letter of the law that created the FCC in 1934</a>. The ever oafish Trump then said he’d like other networks to fire their late-night comedians, for whom the president provides an endless supply of comedic material.
What MAGA didn’t anticipate was the pushback the Kimmel cancellation received. Most Democrats and even a few Republicans criticised Carr’s move. Boycotts and cancellations of Disney streaming service subscriptions increased. The unions representing writers, actors and musicians who worked on Kimmel’s show mounted protests. More than 400 well-known actors and performers issued a statement condemning ABC, and New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani pulled out of an ABC-sponsored event in protest.
Within a few days, Disney reversed itself and announced that Kimmel’s show would return to the air. Now, two networks of local ABC affiliates, Nexstar and Sinclair, have also backed down. But we shouldn’t think that the battle for free speech is won.
First, the government pressuring private entities to censor speech it doesn’t like has been the Trump administration’s modus operandi
since it returned to office in January. It has cut billions in research grants to universities, leading many to discipline students or faculty who had protested Israel’s war in Gaza, or to scrap university programs that met with administration disapproval. It announced it would deny security clearances to law firms considering representing clients suing the administration. Trump filed frivolous lawsuits against CBS’s and ABC’s news operations—which he certainly would have lost if they had gone to trial—leading their parent companies to make multimillion-dollar settlements.
Second, the success of a wealthy, well-known and nonpolitical entertainer like Kimmel can obscure the larger attack on free speech and the left that MAGA will continue to prosecute. <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/09/18/charlie-kirk-comments-prompt-firings-across-us/86216872007/">More than 100 people have been fired or disciplined</a> for comments made after the Kirk killing. That includes <a href="https://cwa-tseu.org/free-speech/">Dr Tom Alter</a>, a tenured professor at Texas State University, fired after a troll with fascist and antisemitic sympathies reported to Alter’s employer that the professor <a href="https://www.puntorojomag.org/2025/09/13/defend-free-speech-no-to-fascists-reinstate-professor-dr-tom-alter-now/">had spoken at a socialist conference</a>.
Trump issued an executive order declaring “antifa” (short for “antifascist”) a domestic terrorist organisation. Although no provision in US law permits Trump to do this, his action is a signal to federal law enforcement. Federal agencies like the FBI could conduct investigations, infiltration of organisations and arrests of people on the left—which, in Trump world, means just about anyone who opposes the administration’s policies. Given that “antifa” is not an organisation nor even a coherent ideology, the vagueness of the target is a weapon in the hands of law enforcement. 
Another way that the administration will attack liberal and activist organisations is by weaponising the tax code. US tax law provides educational, charitable, religious and social organisations an exemption from paying federal taxes if they do not engage in partisan politics or electioneering. The administration has also supported legislation that would allow the Treasury<a href="https://www.nonprofitvote.org/whats-the-nonprofit-killer-bill/">
secretary to designate any organisation as “terror-supporting”</a> without any proof or due process. The feds can revoke tax-exempt status and compel organisations to pay millions in fines. Merely the threat of those penalties could lead organisations such as immigrant rights groups, which are mounting opposition to Trump’s deportation regime, to curtail their activities.
One final, but by no means less important, aftershock of the Trump administration’s actions and rhetoric since Kirk’s murder is the licence it gives to right-wing elements to wreak violence on their opponents. Trump’s and Vance’s claims that “the left” is a uniquely violent force in US politics is the <a href="https://www.cato.org/blog/politically-motivated-violence-rare-united-states">exact opposite of the truth</a>, according to the libertarian Cato Institute—hardly a friend to the left. The “permission structure” that Trump, Vance and others in the administration are creating will make right-wing violence like the 2017 murder of antifascist protester Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh or Kyle Rittenhouse’s 2020 vigilante murders of Black Lives Matter activists more likely, not less.
Developments since Kirk’s death should clarify some points amid the noise and social media vitriol. They have exposed the lie that conservatives and the far right are somehow champions of “free speech” against a censorious left “cancel culture”. When billionaires like X’s Elon Musk and Fox’s Rupert Murdoch own massive communications platforms from which they spread conservative and far-right ideology into the body politic, it’s hard to take the claim seriously. With few exceptions, the right’s pretensions to “free speech” were always phoney and mostly raised when others used their free speech to criticise the right’s bigotry.
But observing that the right’s free speech rhetoric is disingenuous shouldn’t let mainstream liberals off the hook. The attacks on university activists protesting the war in Gaza didn’t begin with Trump. They started under the Biden administration, with the support of the White House and most Democrats. And the liberal MSNBC network fired commentator Matthew Dowd for comments he made on live TV only a few minutes after Kirk’s killing.
In contrast, championing free speech has always been central to the left. From the abolitionist press in the pre-Civil War era to the Industrial Workers of the World’s free speech fights in the early 1900s to opposition to McCarthyism in the 1950s to the Free Speech Movement at the University of California in 1964, the best part of the left and workers’ movement has always defended free speech.
Free speech and freedom of organisation and assembly are crucial for defending and extending other rights. The first nine months of the Trump administration have demonstrated that elite institutions like universities and the corporate media are willing to “bend the knee” to an increasingly authoritarian government if they think their profits, endowments or investments will be served. On the other hand, ordinary people, organised to push back on the Trump administration’s predations, have shown a far greater willingness to defend our rights.
The actions of thousands of ordinary people across the country have impeded the administration’s efforts to kidnap our immigrant neighbours off the street. And ordinary people sitting on grand juries in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, have refused federal prosecutors’ attempts to criminally indict people arrested for protesting immigration authorities or the administration’s military deployments. The real defenders of democracy in the US are much more likely to be found at street demonstrations or at “know your rights” trainings than in the halls of Congress, the courts or corporate boardrooms.

Free speech under attack in the US

The death of Charlie Kirk has made me think about the growth of the right-wing presence on US campuses during the last three decades. The student right during these years morphed from Ronald Reagan boosters into the neo-Fascist <a href="https://threewayfight.org/what-charlie-kirks-life-and-death-can-tell-us-about-the-u-s-right-in-the-age-of-trump/?fbclid=IwY2xjawM4ESNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHu8PqzTEntFEztYxLQuEmyv4smjV33BW_JmQofQ3W6Q8P5lUO81PBwPWMsvq_aem_l9157vR0G7XvFPGl73RotA" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Christian nationalists</a> of Turning Point USA. Yet one of the major reasons for the success of Charlie Kirk and his roadshow was the weakness of the campus left. Another was the financial and political backing from the <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/turning-point-usa-donations-surged-pandemic-rcna37143" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">rich and powerful</a> from its very founding, despite its origin mythology of starting out in Kirk’s family’s garage.
Scanning through many articles documenting the growth of Kirk’s “nonprofit” foundation during the past decade is like watching a well-capitalised media start-up with aspirations to become a global player. Turning Point’s <a href="https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/800835023/202501359349304810/full" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">IRS tax return</a> reported, for example, that it had revenues over $86 million in 2024. Kirk received a salary of over $285,000 and another $99,000 in compensation. Not huge in corporate terms. But, for student politics, this was unprecedented. This <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&amp;v=WORO-OgThig" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">gushy video tour</a> of Turning Point’s headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2019 gives an idea of the burgeoning confidence of Kirk and his entourage.
The post-sixties campus
Whether you date the decline of the campus left in the waning years of the Vietnam War or in the decade that followed, when the New Left turned to the working class, it was pretty clear by the late 1970s and early 1980s that the right had begun to build a significant presence on college campuses. Not everywhere at once, of course, it was a herky-jerky process. The Republican Party, however, took building their campus operations far more seriously than the Democrats, who, from my perspective, appeared virtually non-existent, disorganised and had little political appeal.
The Republicans drew many of their future leading cadres from battles within the College Republicans and against the student left, liberal faculty members, and administrators. Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, for example, future Republican presidential campaign managers and advisers, first cut their teeth in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/05/us/man-in-the-news-fierce-ambition-karl-rove.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">College Republican politics</a> in the 1970s. On campuses previously known for their liberalism and radicalism, typical of the media coverage of the time was a New York Times article from 1984, “Students Leaning to the Right”:
“In his freshman year at Princeton University, Peter Heinecke joined a campus organization so low key that hardly anyone knew it existed. It was the Princeton University College Republicans. ‘It was pretty much a dead thing’, Mr. Heinecke recalled. So much so, in fact, that nobody even bothered to renew the club’s registration with the Dean’s Office. That was last year.
“This year, in the flush of President Reagan’s re-election victory, the College Republicans is very much alive. Membership has grown from a mere handful of students a year ago to 200, with double that on the mailing list. As unusual as the conservative trend might seem at Princeton—a traditionally liberal school—it is hardly an isolated example. On campuses across the nation, students are increasingly becoming aligned with the Republican Party.”
The College Republicans were joined in their efforts by local initiatives that gained a national following, such as the <a href="https://dartreview.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dartmouth Review</a>, founded at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in 1980. Anti-apartheid activists built <a href="https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/journeys.dartmouth.edu/dist/3/834/files/2016/05/DivestmentProtests-MandelaHall-1985.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“shanty towns”</a> on the Dartmouth campus to highlight the racial oppression and poverty of the Black majority in South Africa in 1986. Calling themselves the Dartmouth Committee to Beautify the Green Before Winter Carnival, twelve Dartmouth students—ten of whom were on the staff of the Dartmouth Review—attacked and destroyed the shanties with sledgehammers on Martin Luther King Day. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/13/us/at-dartmouth-the-right-borrows-the-protest-mantle-of-the-left.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">According</a> to an article in the New York Times:
“But the shanty episode is only the latest part of a long campaign by The Review against most of the moves the college has made in the last decade to show sensitivity to women, nonwhites and homosexuals. ‘There is freedom of speech here as long as you’re firmly left of center’, said Roland Reynolds, the editor of The Review. ‘It’s the idea that you can’t criticize people who happen to be black, who happen to be women.’ He described the crew that attacked the shanties as ‘the Bernhard Goetz of Dartmouth’.”
Bernhard Goetz was the infamous New York City <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/771433/fear-and-fury-by-heather-ann-thompson/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“Subway gunman”</a> who shot four Black teenagers—and paralysed one of them—claiming they tried to rob him and he was defending himself. That a Dartmouth Review editor would openly identify with a racist vigilante, while its staff eagerly participated in a sledgehammer attack on anti-apartheid activists, speaks volumes about their racism and embrace of political violence against their opponents on the campus by 1986. The Dartmouth Review had rich and powerful friends, including <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2015/12/08/the-crusade-against-political-correctness" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Ronald Reagan</a>. This was long before Charlie Kirk was around.
In the early 1990s, the campus far right received a boost from then-President George H.W. Bush with his infamous attack on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01kX1WGdJWc" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“political correctness”</a>—a forerunner of the current attack on “woke”—during his commencement speech at the University of Michigan in May 1991. Bush was not known for his emotional displays, but he clearly enjoyed giving the speech, buoyed by the support of many students in the audience. Bush’s attack was enthusiastically taken up by the <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2015/12/08/the-crusade-against-political-correctness" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">mass media and intellectual pundits</a> with the broad support of the Republican establishment and a correspondingly weak response from the Democrats and most college and university administrators.
I was a member of the <a href="https://joeallen-60224.medium.com/international-socialism-is-my-north-star-c3730df819ba">International Socialist Organization</a> at the time, and we were one of the few socialist organisations that tried to build on a handful of college campuses despite our small size. We immediately recognised the threat that Bush’s attack on “political correctness” posed to the small, very limited gains made by African-Americans and other minorities, women and working-class students, who had suffered major setbacks during the two terms of Reagan’s presidency. Bush’s election triumph in 1988 was viewed by many of us as Reagan’s third term. The ISO <a href="https://archive.org/details/whats-behind-the-attck-on-politically-correct" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">published a pamphlet</a>, What’s Behind the Attack on Politically Correct?, by Lance Selfa and Alan Mass. They wrote in the introduction:
“No sooner had President Bush announced the end of the war against Iraq than he declared a new war at home. The battle wasn’t to be fought with weapons, but with idea. Its armies would be made up of right-wing ideologues, media pundits, university faculty, and students, not soldiers.”
The ISO was much better prepared to deal with this new witch hunt than many groups in the US left that had little to no campus presence. Even though we had a tiny number of members nationally in early 1990 (possibly 200), we bolstered our presence during the buildup to and war against Iraq during the latter half of 1990 and early 1991. We launched the National Network of Campuses Against the War, though short-lived, and we were able to project ourselves beyond a handful of campuses.
Under the perfect sun
In 1992, I was living in San Diego, California. An old friend and comrade, Phil, and I were trying to build a branch in a city that hadn’t had a previous branch of the ISO. I know that there were more than a few people who thought that our effort was more like a long vacation. I saw it as a fun adventure. San Diego had a reputation for being a <a href="https://archive.org/details/underperfectsuns00davi/page/n14/mode/1up?view=theater" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">major tourist destination</a> and very conservative. Our small ISO branch was largely active at the University of California at San Diego campus located in La Jolla, a rich, scenic seaside enclave. The campus felt more like a resort. Our campus club was called the International Socialist Club.
But San Diego had a radical tradition, despite being a Navy town with major Marine Corps bases nearby and having a large Christian evangelical presence. Socialist writer, novelist and historian Dan LaBotz <a href="https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/the-intellectual-autobiography-of-an-american-leftist/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">recalled</a>:
“I finished high school in 1963, went to Southwestern Community College in Chula Vista, then to San Diego State, graduating in 1968, and a year later went to the University of California at San Diego where I studied literature with <a href="https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/fredric-r-jameson-1934-2024/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Fredric Jameson</a>. I also sat in on <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Herbert Marcuse’s</a> undergraduate lectures on Marx and, on one occasion, convinced him to lead a discussion of the Paris Commune for the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, of which I was a member. I helped to form a small IS chapter that engaged in strike support. Already a supporter of the United Farm Workers then organizing agricultural workers in California, we joined boycott picket lines at grocery stores, and also participated in strike support at a tomato ranch. We also supported a Greyhound Bus lines drivers’ strike.”
UCSD did have some radical legacy, including the New Indicator newspaper and its “Disorientation Manual”, a radical introduction to the campus, and a weekly film series with a political discussion after. Within the city limits, San Diego was pretty much like any other big American city, but it was surrounded by suburbs that were a bastion of the Christian right, replete with a <a href="https://creationsd.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Creation and Earth Science Museum</a>. I remember my first night in the city—I was out jogging and paused to take a breath when a car stopped in front of me with a bumper sticker that proclaimed, “Rocks prove creation!”
In the early 1990s, historic changes were beginning to reshape San Diego. The post-Cold War and post-Gulf War reorganisation and downsizing of the defence industry, along with Bush’s recession that hit the city and county hard, especially housing construction, sent the economy into near depression. In 1992, however, it was the <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2011/08/19/no-justice-no-peace" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">rebellion in Los Angeles</a>, following the acquittal of three of the four police officers in the assault on Rodney King in April, that was a lightning bolt that shook up campus politics at the very end of the Spring.
President George H.W. Bush also faced a challenge from his right, first with fascist sympathiser Pat Buchanan in the Republican primaries, and then an independent presidential campaign with the strange character of Ross Perot. All of this took the swagger of the UCSD Republicans, who increasingly gave off the aura of a defeated army. But some of the others on the right saw an opportunity. Three weeks after the LA rebellion, hundreds of posters were plastered across campus, along with hundreds of invitations on cards placed at the cafeteria dining tables, inviting the campus community to a lecture sponsored by the Objectivist Study Group, the followers of <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/garbage-and-gravitas/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">right-wing crackpot</a> Ayn Rand.
The speaker was George Reisman, an economics professor at Pepperdine University and a well-known figure among followers of Ayn Rand. The title of his lecture was “Education and the Racist Road to Barbarism”. Reisman wanted to target ethnic studies at UCSD, which he denigrated as “worshipping your savage ancestors”. He had a long involvement in far-right politics stretching back to the mid-1950s. At a banquet dinner honouring Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man and mentor to Donald Trump, who was forced to resign from his committee assignments because of the swing public opinion against McCarthy, Time magazine <a href="https://time.com/archive/6869342/opinion-one-enchanted-evening/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a>:
“The noise rose several decibels when 17-year-old Columbia University Sophomore George Reisman of Students for America called Cohn the ‘American Dreyfus’ and barked: ‘Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy will be redeemed when the people have taken back their government from the criminal alliance of Communists, Socialists, New Dealers and the Eisenhower-Dewey Republicans.’”
Four decades later, he was at UCSD to attack Black and Latino students, faculty and administrators. Reisman was one of the direct connections between the old and new McCarthyism. The UCSD Department of Ethnic Studies at that time was two years old. Walking across campus that day, I saw many people reading the posters but not knowing quite what to make of them. Was this some weird prank? The Objectivists were a campus club, but not known for such provocative behaviour; they were dismissed as a small group of marginal weirdos with little cache. This meeting had all the hallmarks of an outside and well-funded operation.
Our small ISO kicked into high gear. We talked to everyone and every organisation on campus that we needed to picket the meeting and fill the hall to challenge whatever vile bigotries were going to be spewed out that night. Despite our hard work, we weren’t sure how many people were going to turn out. The night of 13 May, we began our picket with fifteen to twenty people outside the lecture hall. Phil made one of his class flyers, “Fight Racism. Defend Multiculturalism!”
It appeared to us that most of the crowd going into the lecture hall was from off campus; they gave off the vibe of being rich weirdos from La Jolla. Reisman and his coterie were incensed that we were protesting. They came out of the hall to stare at us and shake their heads. The hatred in his eyes was incredible. He went back into the hall, and then we came in. Our numbers grew, but at the beginning of the lecture we were outnumbered about two to one. There were about 50 of us and a hundred of them. The chair of the meeting began by reminding us that this lecture was to be copyrighted and not to be quoted without permission. There was a burst of laughter from our section of the audience. Reisman was not pleased.
Right away, he denounced us as “commissars” who stifled “free speech”. By the time Reisman’s lecture began, our supporters in the audience were about equal in number with the Objectivists. Reisman’s speech, with his repetitive drumbeat of the phrases “savage ancestors” and “western civilisation”, along with his sneering tone, enraged the audience. People exploded. “Don’t call my ancestors savages!”, Reisman snapped back, “Who the hell are you? Shut up!”, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. A Gulf War veteran, who wore a gas mask and biochemical gear, rose every time Reisman said “western civilisation”, holding a poster of a slave ship over his head and turning to the audience. He later told me an older woman kept punching him in the back of the head the entire meeting.
It was the only campus protest where I thought a fight would break out because people were so enraged by the provocative racism of the speaker. The meeting got so rowdy that the campus police were called, and slowly the meeting dispersed. The Objectivists were enraged but defeated. Darlene Price, the president of the OSG, told the San Diego Union-Tribune, “Everything we put into that meeting was destroyed. We received nothing”. Phil, who was also the faculty advisor to the International Socialist Club, told the disciplinary board: “When he [Reisman] mentioned savages, he was motioning toward the Black and Latino areas of the audience”. Despite their best efforts to get us kicked off campus and fine us, we prevailed in the disciplinary hearing.
Looking back three decades at the events that night, I see that all of the vile politics of Charlie Kirk were present then, and what was needed was the financial backing and political hustle to turn into a nationwide threat to us all. I also look back on it and think it shows that we can beat them.
Joe Allen is the author of <a href="https://authors.tertulia.com/allenojoe-draftv4iskv/books/teamsterland-reports-on-america-s-most-iconic-union-reports-allen-o-joe/B0FLDHKX48">Teamsterland: Reports on America’s Most Iconic Union</a> and <a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1441-the-package-king">The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS</a>. He lives in Chicago.

Joe Allen

Fighting the far right on campus: a small victory from the US in 1992

Far-right and outright fascist politics are on the rise across the West. Australia isn’t immune. The recent spate of far-right protests here is a wake-up call. 
The numbers taking to the streets as part of the “March for Australia” and subsequent mobilisations have been relatively small. Nevertheless, the fact that tens of thousands of people were prepared to join open neo-Nazis in what, as Omar Hassan argued in <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/when-fascists-march-the-left-must-get-organised">a recent article for Red Flag</a>, amounted to “a national day of racism and bigotry” is significant. 
These kinds of racist rallies need to be countered, wherever possible, by mass, united marches of anti-racists. Our effort to resist the rise of the far right can’t stop there, though. Just as concerning as the far-right street marches has been the high vote for far-right parties in Australian elections in recent years. Mick Armstrong analysed the far-right vote in this year’s federal election for Red Flag in June, finding that far-right outfits polled almost 2 million votes in the Senate nationwide.
Voting for a more racist Australia isn’t as politically significant as demonstrating for it. However, these numbers indicate that the supply of potential recruits to movements and organisations on the far-right fringe is far from being exhausted.
But viewing things only in terms of protest politics—of far-right mobilisations on the streets and counter-mobilisations by the left—fails to grasp the issue at its root. Racism and fascism are the deadly fruits of the poisonous social and economic conditions imposed on humanity by capitalism. And the fight against them must also, at its core, be a fight against the system as a whole. 
Alongside challenging the individual manifestations of far-right and fascist politics like the “March for Australia”, the left must also put forward a vision of a better and fairer society and of the means of fighting for and winning it. Not in the expectation that this will convince the kinds of hard-core racists who joined the marches on 31 August, but rather to give hope and purpose to the vastly bigger layer of working-class people who oppose racism and the far right (and any number of the other barbarisms of capitalism today, for example the genocide in Gaza), but who are in many cases so alienated from political life and from its mainstream representatives that they feel there’s no point in trying to do anything about it. 
It’s because of this widespread disengagement and political passivity that racists can expect, in many contexts, to spread their poison with little or no resistance. Historically, in times when a broader layer of working-class people was politically conscious and organised, it was very different: racists could expect to be challenged whenever they raised their heads, and this provided a degree of immunity to their ideas among the mass of more apolitical workers. 
How can today’s left get its message of anger, hope and resistance across to the currently sympathetic, but largely passive layer of workers required to recreate this scenario? How can we convince them that they have a part to play in heading off the threat from the far right and ensuring Australia doesn’t follow the same path as countries like the US, Britain and Germany, where fascists are, if not actually in power already, certainly knocking on the door?
A revival of socialist politics and organisation is key. We can see from examples overseas: we can’t depend on so-called centre-left political parties like the British Labour Party or the US Democrats to push the far right back. It’s the same with the Labor Party here. Albanese and Co.’s commitment to the status quo of capitalism and propensity to adopt elements of far-right political agendas as their own (for example, the ongoing brutality of their treatment of refugees) only adds fuel to the fire.
Some people who regard themselves as left wing complain about socialists supposedly “coopting” movements by selling newspapers and attempting to talk to and recruit people at rallies and other left-wing political events (never mind the fact that in many cases, the rallies and events have been organised in large part by the same socialists being accused of doing the coopting). 
But it’s precisely by building the ranks of organised socialists in Australia that we can counter the growth of the far right. We need more distribution of socialist publications, more meetings and political education and more recruitment to socialist organisations. We need to train new layers of hundreds, and ultimately thousands and tens of thousands, to go out into society and fight the far right and fascism on all fronts. In addition to countering them on the streets, we need to combat their ideas in our workplaces, schools, universities and local communities. And we need to ensure they don’t go unchallenged when they run in elections. 
The more effectively we can do this, the more it will encourage disengaged people to get involved, and the more powerful our movement will become.
Socialist Alternative members are involved in this struggle on every front. Our work as part of Victorian Socialists, and more recently the new socialist parties being formed in every Australian state and territory, is an example. In the federal election earlier this year, our members collectively spent thousands of hours knocking on doors and talking to voters in outer suburban areas like Thomastown in Melbourne’s northern suburbs—areas where the combination of the cost-of-living crisis and the failure to fund the new infrastructure and services required for a growing population were expected to play into the hands of the right.
The far right did, indeed, do well in these areas. In the electorate of Scullin (which incorporates suburbs like Thomastown, Lalor and Epping), the combined vote of parties to the right of the Liberals was 18.7 percent. At the same time, though, Victorian Socialists candidate Omar Hassan got 6.5 percent, a jump of 3.7 percent from the party’s 2022 Scullin result, despite the party only very recently establishing itself as a presence in the area.
It might not seem like much, but every conversation we had that convinced someone to vote for and identify with the socialists rather than the parties of the status quo or the far-right fringe was a small win. These kinds of conversations—through which we’re able to point out that it’s not migrants but the capitalist class and their political servants who are responsible for high rents, shitty wages and working conditions, or the chronic underfunding of local infrastructure and services—are among the fundamental building blocks of a new, healthier, political context.
Suburbs like Thomastown—the heartlands of Melbourne and Australia’s multi-ethnic working class—should be bastions of anti-fascist resistance. The more socialists can gain a foothold in these areas, not only in elections, but in the day-to-day life of the community, the more this latent potential could be realised. 
Imagine if every time the fascists raised their heads, workers from areas like this joined counter-protests, and if at election time the racist filth from parties like One Nation were treated with the anger and contempt they deserve. That’s the kind of all-encompassing movement against the far right and fascism that we aim to build: one that can not only push back and defeat the racists, but which can lay the basis for a struggle to overturn the entire poisonous system of capitalism that’s rapidly destroying our humanity and our world.

Editors

Countering the far-right threat: a fight on all fronts

Watching the footage of the March for Australia rallies on 31 August, it was impossible not to conclude that they were gatherings of hard-core racists. 
When speakers chanted “Send them back! Send them back!” and “Heil Australia!” and the crowd enthusiastically joined in, or when demonstrators held placards stating “Mass migration = silent invasion”, or when t-shirts sporting the slogan popularised by the 2005 Cronulla riots “Fuck off, we’re full” were a common sight, you didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out that these were racist mobilisations demanding a return to White Australia. 
Curiously, though, politicians and newspaper editors are now trying to convince us that these were not far-right mobilisations by racist dogs who should be shunned by society. The open Nazis, whose presence at the rallies could not be denied, did cop some flak. Victorian Police Minister Anthony Carbines called them “unhinged grubs”, and Nazi leader Thomas Sewell was remanded in custody on charges of violent disorder, affray and assault following the attack on Camp Sovereignty. 
But self-declared Nazis aside, Labor and Liberal alike are now doing their best to convince us that the rest of the crowd were essentially decent folk duped by fascists. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the crowd as “good people turning up to demonstrate their views” but who should be cautious about giving neo-Nazis a platform. Multicultural Affairs minister Anne Aly agreed: many of those attending had been “conned” by the far right. When asked to comment on the appearance of Pauline Hanson and Bob Katter as guests of honour at the Canberra and Townsville rallies, Aly could not bring herself to denounce even these out-and-out racists.
On the other side of the chamber, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley said that the rallies were “attended by people of goodwill but hijacked by violent neo-Nazis spouting hate and racism”.
It hasn’t just been right-wing politicians who have downplayed the bigotry on display. The Age
editors condemned the rally but said that “it must be acknowledged that many of those choosing to protest on Sunday were not racist”. ABC journalists chimed in along the same lines.
What has been the defence put up for the bulk of the March for Australia demonstrators? That they were motivated by “legitimate concerns”, including about the housing crisis, inadequate infrastructure and the cost of living. 
These naïve folk should under no circumstances be called racist or called out on their disgusting actions, apparently. Oh no, that would be “polarising” and, according to Albanese, would “push them further down the rabbit-hole”.
Accompanying this has been near unanimity across the political and media classes that there needs to be a “mature conversation” about immigration, thereby accepting the fascist claim that immigration is a cause for concern.
Some on the left echoed these sentiments. Student members of socialist group Solidarity at Sydney University argued that the rally was “not a White Australia rally, but a housing crisis rally” and that the attendees were “impoverished” and “concerned about the housing crisis”. Solidarity’s online coverage of the event included quotes from racist trade unionists in an apparent attempt to play up a division between open Nazis and “softer racists”. They seem to believe that if racist workers march, their involvement somehow mitigates the fascistic character of these rallies and presents an opportunity to split their ranks.
It doesn’t seem to bother those trying to play up the supposed “legitimate grievances” of the crowd or insisting there were “good people” on both sides that not one chant at these rallies called for any government action to ease the housing crisis other than an immediate halt to immigration. Nor that the only printed placard mentioning housing—“Stop mortgage rises—stop immigration!”—was produced by One Nation. Nor that Nazi speeches, according to an Age reporter, were met with “rousing cheers”, and the one attempt to take the microphone from a Nazi, at the Adelaide rally, was met with fierce opposition from the crowd who demanded that he be given the right to speak. 
Emphasising the “legitimate concerns” of organised racists only weakens the struggle against bigotry. It is imperative that anti-racists organise to resist the growth of a far-right movement; casting its adherents in the most positive conceivable light is an obstacle to that goal.
It is hardly new that racism is dressed up as innocent “concerns”. Just look at the many excuses given for people voting against an Indigenous Voice to parliament. Indeed, scabs always claim to have “legitimate concerns”, including that they will face financial hardship if they go on strike. Police informers always have “legitimate concerns” that they face a tougher sentence if they don’t cooperate with the cops. But how do you build a strike, how do you protect people from harassment and how do you fight racism if your starting point is to make excuses for the people who do their best to defeat your efforts? The task of the left must be to solidarise with the millions repelled by displays of bigotry, not to apologise for the racists or to explain why they adhere to rancid ideas.
We must call these demonstrations for what they are: not assemblies of innocents somehow hoodwinked into supporting unfortunate causes but collections of hard-core racists trying to cohere into a political force. They need to be crushed, not “understood”.
Government ministers won’t do this. They recognise these pigs as potential voters they don’t want to alienate. And they understand that every grievance directed at a migrant is one less directed at them. Labor depends as much as the Liberals do on promoting flag-waving and rabid nationalism as part of the broader project of running Australian capitalism. Even if the government is not about to slash immigration (because Australian capitalists depend on it), it understands that right-wing nationalism certainly helps things along when you’ve got spending on public services to cut, a war to prepare for and hundreds of billions of dollars of extra military spending to justify. It’s the same reason Albanese refused to call the “No” campaign in the Voice referendum racist: to do so would require him to fight them, and fighting racism is simply not in Labor’s DNA. 
The ALP wants to run the capitalist state which requires it to pursue racist policies. The Greens, to their credit, condemned the racists. But they won’t mobilise to take them on. The trade union leaders have done nothing to push back. To take on racism, we need socialist politics grounded in class struggle and opposition to all forms of oppression.

Cops huff and media puff—we need to defend the right to protest in Melbourne

The far right is organising—we have to resist

How did a bunch of crackpots get in charge of the USA?

Socialist professor targeted in US censorship campaign

The far-right threat inside the Liberal Party

Charlie Kirk’s legacy: a bosses’ war on free speech

Free speech under attack in the US

Fighting the far right on campus: a small victory from the US in 1992

Countering the far-right threat: a fight on all fronts

‘Legitimate concerns’?

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