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.

Tom Bramble

‘Legitimate concerns’?

Last Sunday’s March for Australia was a significant moment for the far right across the country, as goons draped in Australian flags took to the streets in substantial numbers. In Melbourne and Sydney, they brought out close to 10,000 people, while in Adelaide, Brisbane, Hobart and Newcastle their numbers were in the hundreds or thousands. While the marches didn’t reach the size and militancy of the anti-lockdown demonstrations in Melbourne during the COVID era, they are the biggest explicitly racist demonstrations for some decades.
It was never made public who exactly organised the marches, which called for an end to mass immigration. But in many places, particularly in Melbourne, it was clear that the neo-Nazi National Socialist Network played an important role. Even where the NSN were less central, the strategy was the same: far right forces sought to build a relatively broader right-wing movement around anti-migrant racism. That is, this was an attempt by Nazis and their ilk to try and enter the mainstream of Australian political life. 
None of this would have been possible without the Murdoch press, which has clearly decided that becoming a Fox News tribute act is its best chance of staying relevant. Rupert’s local minions want to see Australia become more like the US and UK, where the far right is ascendant. So, they provided free advertising to boost the “March for Australia”, with the Daily Telegraph even publishing the official promotional leaflet. The Seven TV network, owned by billionaire Kerry Stokes, also publicised the rally, continuing its tradition of promoting filth like Pauline Hanson and Ben Roberts-Smith.
The movement produced by this classic alliance of fascists and billionaires was a predictable orgy of racism, anti-leftism and conspiracy theories. In a few cities, speakers promoted the “great replacement theory”, which posits that Western governments are consciously replacing white people with migrants. (Yes, those same governments that are incarcerating, deporting and drowning record numbers of refugees, migrants and asylum seekers the world over.) In Melbourne and Sydney, well-known neo-Nazis received rapturous applause, while in Adelaide the crowd went ballistic after a member of the NSN had a microphone wrenched from his hands, insisting on his right to speak. The Melbourne rally transformed into a terrifying pogrom against migrants and people of colour, before culminating in a violent attack on Camp Sovereignty, a protest camp led by Indigenous activists since 2006.
It's clear beyond doubt that the NSN played a key role in these demonstrations. But the despicable rhetoric was far from limited to the Nazis. Each and every speaker raged against migrants in their own deranged way, at times remembering to qualify their hate by insisting they were not against all migrants, before collapsing into calls to deport them all. Politicians Pauline Hanson, Malcolm Roberts and Bob Katter addressed the crowds.
The fact that the fascists can make what sounds like a coherent link between housing and migration is a result of much more mainstream racism. For years, we’ve been subjected to arguments about how migration is leading to higher house prices, led by the Coalition and encouraged by Labor. This is reinforced by the lies told by the housing industry about so-called housing shortages, which continue to be peddled by politicians, the mainstream media and the vast bulk of capitalist economists, despite being <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/housing-supply-not-problem">systematically</a> <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/migrants-are-not-to-blame-for-the-housing-crisis">debunked</a>. 
But the reality is that very, very few of those on the streets were mobilised by economic concerns. The typical attendee was a 55-year-old white man, the vast majority of whom would have owned their own homes and/or businesses. One of the main organisers in Melbourne is Hugo Lennon, heir to a property developer worth hundreds of millions. In any case, there were no signs on the day complaining about housing, rent prices, failing education or health systems, or any such issues. This was not a protest about living standards, but a national day of racism and bigotry. Anyone who pretends it had anything to do with the former is giving cover to the Nazis and their followers.
Unfortunately, the media and political class have taken the bait hook line and sinker, earnestly discussing how the housing crisis and cost of living issues triggered these demonstrations. This is echoed by political leaders, shamefully including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who described the far-right hooligans as possessing “legitimate concerns”. The anti-fascist left should have no truck with this line of argument. These racist thugs need to be crushed, not empathised with.
In Melbourne and Sydney, a coalition of anti-fascist activists argued that the weekly Palestine rallies should take on the issue politically, and the resulting mobilisations were the largest anti-fascist actions seen for many years. Elsewhere, the left was less organised and far less effective in responding. In any case, the far right had the element of surprise on the weekend. Knowing what we now know, it’s clear that the left needs to be better organised for the future, to take to the streets in a show of unity and strength only possible through united action. We have prevented the far right’s growth before, and we can do it again.
Having said that, developing a serious anti-fascist approach means looking at the wider context for this resurgence in far-right sentiment. Unlike during the days of Reclaim Australia (a revival of the far right in the mid-2010s), which was a peculiarly Australian phenomenon, today the far right is surfing a wave of international success. In many European countries, fascists and the far right are playing substantial roles both in government and opposition. In the US—the most powerful country on the planet—Trump is in charge, leading the most aggressively reactionary and authoritarian administration in living memory. Alongside Putin’s Russia, Israel’s ethno-nationalism has become a model and an inspiration for fascists the world over, even as they continue to hold deeply antisemitic views.
More broadly, the growth of the far right reflects the crisis in the old strategy of capitalist domination, sometimes known as neoliberalism. This model emphasised trust in the free market (except in its love of union busting) and was prepared to tolerate symbolic improvements around certain social issues. Now there’s been a hard shift back to economic nationalism as the ruling class respond to rising imperialist tensions. Inequality has risen dramatically alongside the drastic decline of trade unions, and the rich rely increasingly on authoritarianism and bigotry to keep workers repressed and distracted. 
But while it’s important to build anti-fascist coalitions and actions where possible, alone such work is inadequate. Capitalism creates the conditions where fascism can breed, and as long as it exists so too will the far right. Mainstream capitalist politicians, be they social democrats, centrists or conservatives, all promote “moderate” versions of the ideas that make up fascist ideology: bigotry, hierarchy, oppression and militarism. So aside from day-to-day battles, the urgent task remains to construct a powerful socialist movement with roots in the working class, with all its wonderful diversity. Only by developing such an instrument and then using it to overthrow the rich and make capitalism history, can we end the far right for good.

Omar Hassan

When fascists march, the left must get organised

You may have seen one of the hundreds of videos on social media (or more recently also <a href="https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/subscribe/news/1/?sourceCode=DTWEB_WRE170_a_GGL&amp;dest=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailytelegraph.com.au%2Fnews%2Fnational%2Fprotesters-rally-troops-ahead-of-march-for-australia-rallies-on-august-31-heres-what-you-need-to-know%2Fnews-story%2F0c64229d1fca403dfcdc96a625feb637&amp;memtype=anonymous&amp;mode=premium&amp;v21=GROUPA-Segment-2-NOSCORE">stories in the Murdoch press</a>) promoting the “March for Australia” protests against <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DN1vRmA3p8l/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&amp;igsh=dXF5eGM5ZHpjeTdn">“mass migration”</a> that are set to take place in cities around the country this Sunday 31 August. 
The talking points in these videos and other promotional materials for the rallies track closely with those on the event <a href="https://marchforaustralia.org/">website</a>. There, next to the claim that “80 percent of Australians want immigration reduced”, is the question, posed under the heading of “weakened identity”: “who are we as a nation, when one in three people were born overseas?” 
This, to anyone familiar with theories and narratives popular on the far right, could be taken as a pretty unsubtle reference to the “<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1600910X.2025.2499827#abstract">great replacement theory</a>”, according to which mass migration is a conspiracy being carried out by Western elites to replace the white population with immigrants from the global south. 
In its contemporary iteration, this theory arose from the work of French far-right novelist and conspiracy theorist Renaud Camus, but its origins trace back to late 19th century European antisemitism and it has been passed down to contemporary far-right and neo-Nazi movements via the writings of Adolf Hitler and other 20th century fascists. When neo-Nazis held a mass march in the US city of Charlottesville in 2017, for instance, one of their favoured chants was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/16/charlottesville-neo-nazis-vice-news-hbo">“Jews will not replace us!”</a>
The fact that an association with these kinds of theories is barely concealed beneath the veneer of respectability that March for Australia organisers have fostered is cause enough for concern. Perhaps though it’s all a coincidence? The more mainstream forces involved in the rallies certainly would like us to believe so. To get to the bottom of it, let’s dive a little deeper.
On 3 August this year, a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/DM4gT4HBSHy/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link">video</a> by Sam Bamford calling for a rally against mass migration was posted to TikTok and Instagram. The post quickly gained traction, reaching hundreds of thousands of views in a few days. According to a subsequent public <a href="https://x.com/i/spaces/1djxXVWlqNNGZ/peek">X Spaces stream</a> with one of the nationwide organisers of the rally who goes by the name of “Bec Freedom”, the video’s virality prompted certain unnamed individuals to reach out to Sam and to put him in touch with her. Since then, Sam has relinquished any involvement in the rallies, and responsibility for organising them has passed to people described in the stream as “trusted individuals” within the far-right movement.
There have been several developments that point to the involvement of neo-Nazis from the National Socialist Network (NSN). The “March for Australia” website was created on 8 August, the day before the NSN’s national conference, which took place in the Victorian town of Bacchus Marsh on the weekend of 9-10 August. Notably, the website uses the same content management system and fonts as the NSN’s “White Australia” website. 
Perhaps most damning though is the fact that among the revolving cast of <a href="https://x.com/tassiekaz/status/1958911146297368891">state organisers</a> named on the march’s Facebook events, those who have been identified (most are using aliases) have either been NSN members, or have worked closely and directly with the NSN in the past. This includes Matt Trihey (one of the on-again, off-again Victorian organisers), who is a founder of white supremacist organisation the <a href="https://voxpol.eu/nazis-at-the-salad-bar-the-national-workers-alliance-and-mixed-unclear-and-unstable-ideology/">National Workers Alliance</a> and former <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/12/australian-white-nationalists-reveal-plans-to-recruit-disgruntled-white-male-population">Lads Society</a>member who was most recently in the news for getting <a href="https://www.news.com.au/national/federal-election/white-supremacist-crashes-friends-of-abc-candidates-meeting-in-seat-of-kooyong/news-story/be9520dc5a6a55df4c4c411d98d9bb82">punched in the face</a> by an elderly woman at an election event in Kooyong earlier this year.
Once the march began to gain traction online, <a href="https://x.com/purplepingers/status/1956547447750070659">notable Zionist organisers</a> and far-right content creators from different cultural backgrounds expressed interest in attending and helping to promote the rallies. This prompted an angry tirade from none other than NSN leader Tom Sewell, who complained in an 11 August post on his telegram channel that “after only just arriving home from our summit today [the NSN’s 9-10 August national conference], I have been informed that foreign fifth columns are attempting to hijack our August 31st public rally for Australia. Australians must say NO to Israeli, Palestinian, Chinese and Indian foreign interference trying to hijack our common-sense patriotic spirit. White Australians must assemble on August 31st against the traitors and foreigners who are trying to destroy our great nation!”
Even on the more outwardly “respectable”, public-facing level the veneer has sometimes slipped. In the X Spaces stream mentioned earlier, “Bec Freedom”—the main public face of the rallies on a national level—<a href="https://x.com/tassiekaz/status/1955069467681231141">stated that</a> the march is to “protect white culture, heritage and way of life”. In a previous X Spaces stream she also said that “we need to see violence” like what happened in the <a href="https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/cronulla-race-riots">2005 Cronulla Riots</a>. This argument wasn’t met with disgust or apprehension, but by her co-hosts saying it didn’t go far enough.
On available evidence then we can only come to one conclusion. The March for Australia isn’t some wishy washy far-right populist event patched together by suburban “mums and dads” with legitimate concerns. It has been initiated and built with direct neo-Nazi involvement every step of the way. And at its core isn’t limited to the demand for a reduction in rates of immigration, but the plan to build a movement that will violently target anyone deemed not to fit with the NSN’s vision of a racially “pure”, Nazi-led, white Australia.
Wherever possible, these rallies should be actively countered by socialists, pro-Palestine activists, and all those concerned with standing in solidarity with migrants and against the far right and fascism (in Melbourne a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DNka6mTRLIW/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&amp;igsh=Zng5OHI5N2c1NHp4">counter rally</a> has been organised meeting at 11am Sunday at the State Library). Against their hatred and division, we must advance a vision centred on anti-racist solidarity, collective action and democracy to advance working-class interests against the dog-eat-dog ideologies of capitalism that Nazis aim to take to their most barbaric extremes.

Jordan van den Lamb

The neo-Nazis behind the ‘March for Australia’

The anti-migrant onslaught in the United States is being significantly expanded with a US$170 billion injection into the border and immigration regime. 
Even before this injection of funds, militarised raids have laid siege to Latino communities. Teams of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs have descended on farms. And it has become routine for heavily armed, masked goons to <a href="https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/07/10/what-goes-on-in-americas-immigration-courts">abduct people</a> from immigration hearings, leaving undocumented people deciding whether to risk arrest by showing up or risk becoming more of a “criminal” by missing their court date.
President Donald Trump <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/us/politics/trump-immigration-deportations-arrests.html">had been stymied</a> in his administration’s first months in his attempt to reach unprecedented levels of deportations. But the massive assault that started in Los Angeles in June began to turn the situation around, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trumps-immigration-record-far-high-arrests-low-deportations-rcna217752">breaking the record</a> for the most immigration arrests ever. Now, it looks like all systems go for the president’s fascistic agenda. 
The program is real, not rhetoric
In April, <a href="https://azmirror.com/2025/04/08/ice-director-envisions-amazon-like-mass-deportation-system-prime-but-with-human-beings/">ICE Director Todd Lyons pledged</a> to make the deportation process “like (Amazon) Prime, but with human beings”. The administration has a target of 3,000 arrests per day, a tenfold increase on last year’s number. Trump’s “border tsar,” Tom Homan, in early July called for at least 7,000 arrests per day, which would amount to 2.5 million per year.
Migration cops exhibit exceptional cruelty as they attempt to reach these massive government targets. Agents recently camped outside of a hospital for a week to re-apprehend a woman who suffered a health crisis caused by the initial raid, which left her “handcuffed and covered in vomit” for more than eight hours, <a href="https://lapublicpress.org/2025/07/ice-agents-glendale-hospital-waiting-to-arrest-a-patient/">according to a report in the Los Angeles Public Press</a>. 
ICE leaders now <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/04/immigration-officials-increased-detentions-collateral-arrests">openly encourage</a> agents to target as many migrants as possible—without warrants or even evidence of criminality. These “collateral” arrests of random people boost deportation numbers as much as any other. Since January, there has been a thirteen-fold increase in arrests of migrants with <a href="https://austinkocher.substack.com/p/55654-people-now-detained-by-ice">no criminal history</a>, and now almost two-thirds of all people in ICE custody reportedly have no criminal conviction. 
When a journalist pointed out these statistics, Homan got openly racist enough to suggest that a person’s “<a href="https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/white-house-border-czar-suggests-ice-can-detain-people-based-physical-rcna218285">physical appearance</a>” was a good enough reason for ICE to target them. And shamelessly, raids have expanded to workplaces and community hubs where they expect to find vulnerable undocumented people. 
There is a discrepancy between the number of arrests and the number of deportations because not all arrestees are legally allowed to be deported immediately. But the administration is trying to lower the bar by expanding classifications for expedited removal and <a href="https://www.nycbar.org/reports/the-trump-administrations-early-2025-changes-to-immigration-law/">expediting the removal</a> of those already in proceedings. It has increased the pool of officially targeted immigrants by <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-deportations-million-more-undocumented-legal-status-b2773394.html">removing legal protections for more than 1</a> million people. It is also seeking more deals with underdeveloped countries to take payments in exchange for deportees who can’t be sent back to their countries of origin. 
With the massive cash injection to support these attacks, Trump’s stated goals of a million deportations per year start to seem more frighteningly possible than ever. 
Immigrant prisons are reaching new depths of horror
The federal government has allocated an extra $45 billion to expand the country’s detention facilities. The prisons are packed with hundreds more people than they have beds for, sometimes at <a href="https://ig.ft.com/us-immigration-detention/">triple their capacity</a>, and brutal new tent cities are being built. Among them is the so-called Alligator Alcatraz, where cages inside tents were thrown up in eight days to hold hundreds of migrants on a remote airstrip in the sweltering Florida Everglades. 
This effort has fuelled a boom in the for-profit immigrant prison system. Most of these for-profit prisons are incentivised to hold as many people for as long as they can, so they overcrowd facilities, deny medical care and keep sick people detained for as long as possible. The leading prison profiteers involved, Geo Group and Core Civic, have been raking in record profits from human misery and speculating on even better years to come. 
They also use part of their profits to lobby for policies that strengthen their position. Detained migrants accused of crossing the US-Mexico border illegally <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/new-ice-policy-blocks-detained-migrants-from-seeking-bond-f557402a">will not be able to seek bond</a> to be released while their case is processed through the courts. So now, in the months or years in which they are awaiting a decision on their status, they will be trapped in these immigration gulags while prison capitalists will rake in greater profits each day. 
ICE is becoming more powerful
ICE is the primary agency responsible for the arrest, detention and deportation of immigrants within the US. The agency aims to hire 10,000 new agents, nearly tripling its force of arresting officers, and creating the potential for the spate of raids unleashed on Los Angeles to be repeated elsewhere at an even greater scale. 
This already brutal machine has been forged into a <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/ice-secret-police-horrifying-team-trump-laughing-1235384250/">ghoulish army</a> of masked people snatchers under the Trump administration. They’ve become even more explicitly politically reactionary, using <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/11/canary-mission-how-us-uses-a-hate-group-to-target-palestine-advocates">Zionist hate groups</a> to find lists of anti-genocide activists to brutalise.
This injection of resources will make ICE the <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/09/politics/ice-cbp-police-los-angeles-immigration">best-funded</a>
police agency in the US—more well resourced <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/ice-funding-world-militaries-b2790466.html">than the vast majority</a> of the world’s militaries. 
The immigration machine is becoming embedded 
One of the other morbid innovations of the Trump administration has been to coopt virtually <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/ice-operation-trump-focus-immigration-reshape-federal-law-enforcement-rcna193494">all federal policing agencies</a> into the immigrant oppression machine. This builds on the legacy of cooperation between local law enforcement agencies and ICE that was established through the Bush and Obama eras in the 287(g) program. When agencies sign onto these programs, local police are deputised as immigration agents and act as a force multiplier for ICE. 
Since Trump came to office, these agreements have <a href="https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/immigration-challenges-implementing-the-one-big-beautiful-bill/">increased more than sixfold</a>. More than 6,200 local cops are already deputised as immigration agents. The targeting of people for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfdA9nIDUfk">minor infractions</a> in the hopes that they will be deportable has been an increasingly common pastime for local police, and more migrants are running out of space to breathe. 
Trump’s budget will <a href="https://www.themarshallproject.org/2025/07/12/trump-budget-bill-police-immigration-criminal-justice">further entrench</a> this cooperation: US$15 billion has been earmarked for local and state collaboration with immigration enforcement. This triples federal expenditure for these agencies. 
People are still fighting
It’s not all bad news, however. Even before the explosion of immigration protests in June, there had been more immigrant rights protests in the <a href="https://acleddata.com/2025/06/12/us-expert-comment-la-demonstrations-the-most-explosive-escalation-of-tensions-between-demonstrators-and-police-since-blm/">first five months</a> of 2025 than in the previous five years. And despite the brutal crackdown that followed the Los Angeles protests, people are still confronting ICE outside <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/us/ice-immigration-protest-san-francisco.html">immigration courts</a> and demonstrating against <a href="https://www.wuft.org/politics/2025-07-14/protesters-rally-against-proposed-ice-detention-facility-in-clay-county">proposed jails</a>. In one instance, doctors and nurses <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/ontario-medical-office-immigration-enforcement-arrest/">tried to protect</a> vulnerable workers when they took shelter in a California medical clinic. 
An Economist/YouGov poll in July found that 52 percent of Americans think that Trump’s immigration policies are too harsh, up from 40 percent six months ago. A Gallup poll also found that the share of people wanting immigration reduced dropped from 55 percent last year to 30 percent today. So while only a minority of people are fighting against the government, the number of people hostile to Trump’s policies is growing. 
The administration has unleashed a brutal attack, and the future is frightening, but the situation remains volatile. What we witnessed last month in Los Angeles shows the potential for a fightback. Let’s hope the next fight is even bigger.

Brendan Stanton

Trump is creating ‘one big beautiful’ gulag state

As the mass ICE raids began on Friday in Los Angeles, members of the socialist group Tempest participated in rapid response and other protest efforts with mass organisations into the weekend. The Community Self-Defence Coalition, in which Tempest members participate, is a key formation that coordinates LA’s rapid response efforts. Tempest’s LA branch members were actively involved in defence efforts during skirmishes across downtown LA, the pitched battle in the city of Paramount and rapid response efforts to repel ICE in the city of Pasadena. They compiled and recorded their experiences throughout the weekend, covering the first days of mobilisation. All photos are by the Tempest LA branch and friends. This piece was first published at <a href="https://tempestmag.org/">Tempest magazine</a>.
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FRIDAY 6 JUNE
The first day involved nearly a dozen raids near downtown Los Angeles, Sun Valley and North Hollywood neighbourhoods, and LA County suburbs, including Pomona. Emergency rallies were called and converged around the downtown Metropolitan Detention Center. After dispersing protesters there, different law enforcement officers went over to the adjacent district of Chinatown to stage late night around 9pm. There was a lot of contradictory and confusing information spread across different protest chats throughout the night. At first, we were told that they were setting up for a night raid; later, word on the block was that they were setting up for Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan’s press conference at 7am the next morning. Dozens of FBI agents stationed in a parking lot in Chinatown on Hill St., later joined by Border Patrol, LAPD, and Homeland Security. Protesters quickly gathered to monitor and heckle them, soon outnumbering law enforcement, which also reinforced their numbers. Know Your Rights information was blasted on megaphones in English, Spanish, and Cantonese, as protesters informed local residents of their rights.
Things became more intense as armoured personnel carriers and additional law enforcement personnel poured in, although it was still unclear why they were staging in Chinatown. Some protesters, including bikers, tried to block vehicles from entering the lot. Some identified undercover officers and their vehicles on the protesters’ side and successfully heckled them to leave. Others followed various vehicles exiting the lot to figure out where they were going. Soon, law enforcement occupied the whole street beyond the lot to pressure the protesters out. Loud popping sounds started, with some claiming that they were sound cannons being blasted by the police. The pressure from protesters continued into midnight, after which all law enforcement retreated without explanation. There were no further reports of mass raids and Homan’s press conference the next day. (Homan later appeared on television the next afternoon to announce the deployment of the National Guard.)
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-1.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
SATURDAY 7 JUNE
On the second day, rapid responders rushed to the city of Paramount in the morning, located about a half hour drive south of LA, upon reports of an ICE raid at a Home Depot. Paramount developed into a war zone throughout the day. Paramount is a majority low-income and Latinx area, and one of LA’s key industrial regions. The organised left has little presence in this area, but the militancy seen on 7 June demonstrates the spontaneous power of Brown working-class youth in defending their communities. ICE cars were seen burning. Hundreds of law enforcement officers were deployed throughout Paramount, throwing tear gas and flash bombs as protesters fought back and the Home Depot barricaded itself for safety.
As the Paramount battle stretched on, supporters continued to respond to different reports of ICE raids across LA, as some continued to support detainees at the downtown detention centre. More people began gathering back at the detention centre early in the evening. Around 100-150 protesters were there around 7pm. LAPD gathered en masse to use tear gas and shoot pellets at protesters in this area between 8 and 10pm. Most of the street around the detention centre was cleared out and occupied by hundreds of LAPD officers. In the meantime, Homan confirms on national television that he’ll be federalising the California National Guard for deployment in LA, against Governor Gavin Newsom’s dissent. It was unclear that night what this meant or when exactly the Guard would arrive. The day-long battles in Paramount stretched west into the city of Compton, which was one of the last sites where militant mobilisation continued that day.
There were reported ICE sightings at probably six other locations throughout southern California but the majority of protest and state activity occurred primarily in the vicinity of the Home Depot in Paramount and Compton that went into the early morning Sunday, and again at the Downtown LA Metropolitan Detention Center where protesters had been gathered the entire day.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-2.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
SUNDAY 8 JUNE
LOS ANGELES
On 8 June, Angelenos woke to the news that over 2,000 National Guard had been deployed. A protest in the predominantly Latinx working-class Boyle Heights neighbourhood was planned by Centro CSO and other immigrant rights and local groups for the morning. Crowds had also already begun to gather back at the detention centre downtown.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-3.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
Activists gathered at Mariachi Plaza to protest the ICE raids of the previous two days. Speakers included labour movement icon Dolores Huerta. Speakers generally emphasised not only the rights of immigrants but also applauded the courage and rapid response of the activists gathered, as well as the importance of showing the Trump administration that people will continue to fight back against his draconian methods. The gathering mobilised to march down 1st Street for 1.5 miles to the Federal Metropolitan Detention Center on Alameda Street where they met a larger crowd of activists that had been gathering from the previous two days. Within minutes of arrival, the authorities fired upon the crowd of protesters, presumably with only tear gas, and the front of the crowd began to disperse. There did not appear to be any serious injuries, though many seemed unprepared for tear gas, and some were adversely affected. The Centro CSO organisers, worried about crowd safety, encouraged those remaining from the Mariachi Plaza rally to return to Boyle Heights. Many of us stayed to record the events, in particular the fully militarised presence of local, state, and federal authorities, including the National Guard. I left soon afterward when the tear gas became too overwhelming.
The crowd at the detention centre remained at about 100-300 people for the next two hours and had not yet encountered further violence. Protesters stood off with the ~20 California National Guard members stationed at the rear of the building. Eventually, a squadron of ~15 LAPD cars arrived further down the road, pre-positioned to block one exit along the walled-in road. A large portion of the crowd then moved around the guarded door and went around the corner, escaping a potential kettle. The police formed a line around their vehicles and appeared to fully surround a portion of the protesters, but did not make arrests.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-4.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
Around this time, a rally called by the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) at the city hall nearby began to march toward the detention centre. It was unclear whether the march was part of the original rally plan or if the crowd spontaneously decided to march. This mass contingent arrived just in time to reinforce the surrounded protesters near the detention centre. As they arrived, the police were forced to retreat promptly. Thousands of protesters continued to flood the streets outside the detention centre throughout the afternoon and occupied the nearby intersection at Alameda and Temple. Some remained around the intersection while others continued to march. This contingent went through Little Tokyo back to the Federal Building.
At this point, the crowd was too large to be effectively organised. Some remained at the detention centre, others continued to march, while a smaller group occupied the freeway.
A formation of LAPD officers opposed the crowd of ~200 protesters, who kept a close distance from the line. The police continued to shoot volleys of less-lethal weapons into these different sites, though protesters remained steadfast for hours. Pro-Palestine slogans and clothing were not only ubiquitous, but many of those furthest in the front defending the protests from the police were wearing keffiyehs. We witnessed multiple people around us injured. Street medics helped many protesters tend to their injuries. The police soon declared unlawful assembly but were unable to fully sweep the intersection for hours. At one point, the police declared that they would begin arrests in a minute, but were halted by a protester’s car that slowly rolled through the intersection with a child sitting at the window, raising a Mexican flag with his fist up. The crowd protected them, and the sweeps were delayed for another half an hour.
After another stand-off, the protesters crossed over the median of the freeway, stopping the flow of traffic in the opposite direction. As soon as this happened, the police widened their line and began shooting flash bangs in the sky above the protesters on the freeway. Peaceful protesters were met with disproportionate state violence that increased with time, including being fired on with less-lethal guns from rooftops. Several Waymo automated cars were burned. Significant numbers of protesters remained in the streets at various points around downtown LA into the evening and after nightfall. They were forced off the freeway but continued to march to other locations. As the protesters’ numbers grew thinner, police aggression increased. By sunset, the remaining protesters were forced to construct makeshift barricades using benches and signs.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-5.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
PASADENA
In Pasadena, word got out early in the morning across rapid response chats that ICE and DHS agents were staying at three local hotels: the Westin, Dena Hotel, and the new AC Hotel. There were reports of ICE agents questioning hotel workers who were servicing the rooms. By noon, Unite Here and the National Day Laborers Organizing Network brought out more than one hundred people from Pasadena and Altadena to inquire about and protest ICE’s presence. Faith leaders, community organisations and politicians, including Mayor Victor Gordo, showed up afterwards, and the crowd swelled to several hundred. Speakers at the rally denounced the intimidation and the hotel’s collaboration with ICE as they profit from family separation.
Throughout the day, protesters marched and circled the block, vowing to stay until ICE left. Some of the ICE vehicles’ tires were damaged. The protest served as a rallying point for the community. Community organisations like AUSIIME and the pro-immigrant band Los Jornaleros del Norte kept spirits high throughout the day with chants, cumbia, and anti-ICE songs. After several hours of protests, local politicians who had been intermediating with management announced that ICE had been asked to leave the hotel, and the crowd erupted in jubilation. Still, protesters did not leave until the agents had checked out and continued waiting, anticipating any movement. Since the morning, workers had been informing the rally of potential ICE movements, and everyone anticipated the humiliating exit from the hotel. After fixing their popped tires under the hot sun, ICE agents began to exit swiftly from the parking structure where protesters waited for them at all exits. As vehicles swerved through the parking structure, they were chased out by triumphant protesters who celebrated their victory, chanting “Si se pudo!” (We did it!)
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-6.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
MONDAY 9 JUNE
Early in the morning, families of several workers (mostly women and youth) who were detained in Friday’s mass raid at Ambiance garment factory gathered for a press conference, assisted by the Garment Workers Center and other community organisations. A Tempest member assisted with security. The detained workers were the main providers in their families, and the families shared that they have not been able to hear from them yet. They called on ICE to free them, and to leave our communities. A group of over 100 people gathered to support them, including Palestinian and Palestine solidarity organisations, Indigenous organisations, progressive clergy, and other community nonprofits. The families also shared that Ambiance has still not released the workers’ owed wages to them, and a delegation of them went to the company offices after the press conference to demand these wages. There was no visible police presence or counter-protests, but many of us were informed throughout the event that ICE activity was beginning again in other parts of LA, including in Huntington Park, and the Fashion District again just a mile away from us. Many attendees went directly to the Grand Park rally to support David Huerta and SEIU right after.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-7.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
Later that morning at 11am, there was a rally at Grand Park in downtown led by SEIU in support of SEIU California President David Huerta, who was detained for participating in the protest against the mass raids at the detention centre on Friday. There was a curiously light police presence at first, despite the clashes over the weekend. In addition to SEIU International and various locals, many other major unions were present, including AFSCME, UHW, LULAC, Teamsters, UNITE HERE!, ILWU, LIUNA, IBEW and IATSE. There were also representatives of various civic and community organisations, like Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE), LAUSD, CARECEN, UCLA Labor Studies and LA County. The DSA-endorsed City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado was also present and spoke.
The general theme was that David Huerta’s arrest is also an injury to all of us. It was a demonstration of around 2,000 to 3,000 people that affirmed courage in the face of the federal presence sent by Trump. A band, Las Cafeteras, performed some songs like “La Bamba”, “If I Was President”, “Stand By Me”, which also asked the audience what they would change if they were president for a day. Prominent labour leaders spoke and affirmed labour’s role in the fight against fascism, including SEIU president April Verrett, Dolores Huerta, NAACP president David Johnson (who connected workers’ and civil rights, drawing on the Black struggle). Johnson powerfully declared that the Black struggle has taught him that saying nothing about the oppression of the most vulnerable would be an invitation for more abuses against everyone. Representatives from Justice for Janitors USWW, like Luis Fuentes, spoke about David Huerta’s labour bona fides.
But there was little emphasis on the need to build a resistance outside of the Democratic Party. Dolores Huerta emphasised nonviolence and the need for electoral strategies during the midterms, which was reaffirmed by the SEIU political policy director. Another policy representative spoke about the importance of forming coalitions with allies in other movements, emphasising the need for strength in numbers and solidarity.
Police presence and pressure began to ramp up toward the end of the rally, as a student walkout that morning converged at the nearby Federal Building. Hundreds of students and other community members began to join, and police vehicles from other cities, such as Vernon, Torrance and San Marino, appeared.
The Trump administration announced the deployment of Marines into LA around this time, as mass raids ramped up targeting many cities across Orange County, south of LA.
The situation remains highly fluid, and more protests are sure to occur in the coming days and weeks. There have already been reports of heightened ICE activity for the next 30 days. Tempest LA branch members will continue to participate and report on any resistance activities.
This piece was first published at <a href="https://tempestmag.org/">Tempest magazine</a>.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-8.jpg" alt="" /></figure>

The battle of Los Angeles

Labor’s trouncing of the Liberals in the federal election represented a clear popular rejection of former Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s partial embrace of Trumpian politics. Nonetheless, the extreme right, both within the Liberals and Nationals and outside of them, is far from disappearing from the political scene. It remains a threat to workers and all the oppressed and needs to be confronted.
The far right outside the Coalition parties, despite its fragmentation into about ten separate groups, maintained the significant gains from the 2022 elections on the back of the reactionary anti-vax and anti-lockdown protests. In the Senate, far-right outfits polled a combined 13.6 percent (almost 2 million votes)—up slightly from 13.3 percent in 2022.
The menagerie of extreme-right and semi-fascist parties—including One Nation, Trumpet of Patriots, Family First, People First, Libertarian Party, Citizens Party, the Christians and other fragments—is stridently pro-business, “free enterprise” and hostile to anything vaguely smacking of “progressiveness”. They all champion an array of racist, extreme nationalist, climate denialist, pro-nuke, anti-vax, anti-immigrant, anti-abortion and “anti-woke” policies.
The reactionary emphasis varied a bit. In some rural areas, vile Aboriginal bashing was at the fore (notably the Libertarian candidate who achieved sizeable votes in the area around Goondiwindi in Queensland). In others, the emphasis was on denouncing multiculturalism or wind farms or hostility to Labor’s “creeping communism” (if only!) or calls for a royal commission into COVID health measures.
The sadly resurrected Family First, running again after missing the last couple of elections, unsurprisingly emphasised policies to “encourage and incentivise monogamous, heterosexual marriage” and opposition to “LGBTIQA+ gender fluid ideology”. Its top candidate in NSW, Lyle Shelton, was the leader of the failed campaign against marriage equality.
But Family First also embraced a long list of other standard far-right policies: cutting government spending, opposing multiculturalism, raising military spending to 3 percent of GDP, exiting the Paris climate accords, supporting nuclear power, cutting immigration, encouraging small and family businesses, banning Muslim migrants and an emphasis on “reading, writing and arithmetic” in schools. As a bonus, the party also encouraged shooting sports. Who and what to shoot was left unspecified.
A newcomer to the far-right gang is Gerard Rennick’s People First party. Aided by his profile as a sitting senator, and running on a joint ticket with Katter’s Australian Party, Rennick gained 4.7 percent of the Queensland Senate vote, challenging One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts on 7.1 percent for the final seat.
Like numerous other far-right leaders, including Pauline Hanson, Bernie Finn (Family First’s Victorian Senate candidate) and Craig Kelly (heading the joint Libertarian/HEART/People First NSW ticket), Rennick is a product of the Liberal Party, forming People First only after losing his Liberal National endorsement last year.
Rennick almost makes Hanson seem moderate. When still a Liberal, he advocated closer ties with Putin’s Russia because “they’re part of the West; they drink, they’re Christians, they play soccer, they’re Caucasian”.
In 2020 on Sky News, Rennick denounced the supposed “communist takeover of the classroom and the bedroom”, which he argued was an even bigger threat than the Chinese government. He also claimed Labor’s proposed free child care for three-year-olds was a conspiracy “to strengthen the role of the state”.
Rennick is a fanatical climate change denier, claiming that the Bureau of Meteorology tampered with data to “perpetuate global warming hysteria”. One of People First’s core policies is to remove all government references to climate change and abolish the Climate Change Department, along with the Multicultural Department.
People First also calls for denying entry to people from “radical nations”—they don’t mean Trump’s America—expelling all “illegal” immigrants, forcing foreign-born citizens to wait ten years to access Centrelink , embracing nuclear power and ending funding for Welcome to Country.
Nonetheless, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation remains the largest reactionary outfit with just over 40 percent of the total far-right Senate vote. It benefited from the demise of Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party and the Liberal Democrats to improve its first preference vote by 1.3 percent to 5.7 percent nationally.
Hanson also benefited from the decision of the Liberals and Nationals to preference One Nation, something that even the crusty old conservative John Howard refused to do. This was a clear message from Dutton that Hanson’s vile racist rantings were an acceptable part of mainstream politics.
As a consequence of the preference deal, the NSW electorate of Hunter was turned into a runoff between One Nation and Labor. Thanks to the Nationals’ preferences and those of far-right fragments, One Nation candidate Stuart Bonds went from a primary vote of 16 percent to 41 percent in the two-party preferred count.
The Hansonites gained two new senators—one in NSW and the other in Western Australia—for a total of four. They were aided by a more favourable preference flow this election and in NSW gained most of the Legalise Cannabis voters’ preferences. 
One of the new senators for this party that supposedly stands up for hard-done-by battlers is Tyron Whitten, the boss of a Western Australian construction company employing 1,000 workers. The other is Warwick Stacey, who, in true Trumpian fashion, called to “make Australia strong again”.
After being “educated” at exclusive Sydney Grammar and Britain’s Royal Military College Sandhurst, Stacey became a troop commander in the British 22 SAS regiment. On leaving the army, he worked as a military consultant in the Middle East. Despite these years serving British
imperialism, Stacey demands migrants “respect Australian values” and “the country’s way of life”.
The far-right racist and fascist-style vote is disproportionately concentrated in rural areas, various regional centres and on the periphery of some major cities. In the Senate, it was strongest in Queensland (18.2 percent), followed by WA (13.5 percent), SA (12.4), NSW (12.3), Victoria (11.9), Tasmania (11.5) and lowest in the ACT (1.2 percent), where One Nation did not even bother to run. 
In the Northern Territory, the combined far-right vote fell from 15.2 percent to 10.2 percent in part because Trump lover and darling of the racists, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who headed the Country Liberal ticket, gobbled up some of the reactionary vote.
In regional Queensland, the far right obtained more than 25 percent in at least five House of Representatives seats, including 29 percent in Wright (Lockyer Valley, Beaudesert and Gold Coast hinterland), 27 percent in Flynn (Biloela, Blackwater, Emerald, Gladstone) and 25.6 percent in Maranoa (Chinchilla, Dalby, Goondiwindi, Kingaroy, Warwick). In many individual booths, the reactionaries obtained extremely high votes: 40 percent in Hatton Vale, 39.5 percent at the Blackwater pre-poll, 39 percent in Laidley, 36.6 percent in Miles, 35.3 percent in Grandchester, 34.5 percent at the Sarina pre-poll, and many more.
But it was not just Queensland. The far-right vote reached 28.8 percent in the western NSW seat of Parkes (with 38.8 at the Cobar pre-poll and 46.1 on the day), followed by 24.5 percent in Hunter (Hunter Valley) and 20.2 percent in Riverina plus another 4.8 percent for a right-wing independent.
In rural Victoria, the top far-right vote was in 21.7 percent in Nicholls (centred on Shepparton, including 35.4 percent at the Puckapunyal army base and 28.2 percent in polarised Broadford, just outside Melbourne, where the Greens got 12.6 percent and Labor 34.6 percent), 18.2 percent in Mallee and 17.7 percent in Gippsland.
Both the Liberals and the far right failed to break into outer-suburban working-class suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney. Indeed, in most of these areas, their votes fell.
An exception was the northern Melbourne seat of Scullin, where the far right polled 18.7 percent, up 1.3 percentage points. The far right also got a sizeable vote of 16.6 percent in the Sydney seat of Lindsay (Penrith and St Marys) where six far-right candidates ran, including old time Nazi Jim Saleam (1.1 percent), plus 14.4 percent in both Macarthur (Campbelltown) and Labor’s Ed Husic’s seat of Chifley (Mt Druitt and Quakers Hill). 
So what are we to conclude from all this? First, that while the far right did not have a breakthrough this election, it is not going away.
Moreover, the far right’s Senate vote of almost 2 million understates the support for many of its appalling policies. There is only a smidgen of difference between the likes of Hanson and Rennick and the hard right of the Liberals and Nationals.
As well, the strong flow of preferences in NSW from Legalise Cannabis to One Nation indicates that many voters for protest parties are far from rejecting obnoxious racist politics. 
This is all in a context in which Labor’s priorities are very clear. It is ruling for the big end of town, not workers.
With the union movement in a very weak state and tied to Labor’s coat-tails, rising discontent and disillusionment could provide a fertile breeding ground for the far right. We can’t be complacent.
So far in Australia, the far right has not been able to form one strong united party like the National Rally in France or develop one authoritative popular leader like Donald Trump. Pauline Hanson has been incapable of playing that role and has failed to build an active base in the major cities or among young people.
Moreover, the street-fighting fascist movement remains weak and mainly confined to the small openly Nazi National Socialist Network.
But we can’t assume that the far right will never get its act together. The experience of country after country in Europe, even in liberal Scandinavia, is that fascist-style politics can quickly make inroads.
We need to rebuild a fighting union movement to stand up for the interests of workers and the oppressed. We need to be prepared to confront far-right groups when they mobilise on the streets.
Most importantly, we need to build a socialist political alternative to the far right. A socialist movement that takes on the rich and powerful, that defends the rights of the mass of people and offers hope of a better world for humanity, not a bleak Trumpian dystopia.

Mick Armstrong

The far right continues to make gains in Australia

German politics has shifted sharply to the right following the federal election in February. Former corporate lawyer and multi-millionaire Friedrich Merz will now lead a conservative coalition government after the collapse of the previous “green light” coalition of Social Democrats, Liberals and Greens. The far-right Alternative für Deutschland achieved its best election result ever, coming second, amid mass anti-fascist demonstrations and a surge in support for the left-wing party Die Linke. 
Last month, Willi Schulz, a member of Workers’ Power based in Berlin, was in Melbourne to present a series of talks at the Marxism Conference. He sat down with Red Flag’s Robert Narai.
Could you start by outlining the main features of the crisis of European and German imperialism in which the far-right has been able to grow?
To understand the rise of the far right, we must understand the specific features of the European Union (EU) in times of intensified struggle for the reorganisation of the world. Geopolitically, the EU remains a minor power compared to the other imperialist powers, such as the US and China, which are now locked in a competition for global supremacy, and Russia, which it sees as a competitor. 
The EU is the third attempt by German imperialism to secure its place in the sun, co-led by French imperialism. However, to this day, it has failed because it is not a coherent state but an alliance of states with their own ruling capitalist factions and interests. Attempts to build ties through transnational capital, such as Airbus, have not been able to compensate for this. The EU, as an imperialist project, is the weakest link in the imperialist chain.
The neoliberal constitution of the EU, designed to get rid of the last elements of welfare state policy, has exposed the EU as undemocratic and aggressively neoliberal, which is being used by the far right to pit their nation against the EU elites.
The consequences of the 2007-08 financial crisis were imposed on the weak states through austerity policies. Large parts of southern Europe were impoverished, while in the north they were labelled lazy and unproductive. Chauvinism against the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain) was stoked. To this day, the EU has not been able to recover politically and economically. This is a strategic weakness for Germany and France.
The class struggles in Greece and the capitulation of the left-wing Syriza government were a historic defeat for the European labour movement and represent demoralisation. 
The suffocation of the Arab Spring and the so-called refugee crisis that followed have divided Europe. The EU responded with isolationism and Fortress Europe, most recently in the form of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) and the EU-Turkey deal. State racism is already on the rise, justified as a way of weakening the right wing, while in reality they just intensify each other. 
As the leading nation of the EU, German imperialism is not only a military lightweight; the end of globalisation presents it with massive economic challenges. Carried by global supply chains, capital and goods exports to most of the world, and formerly heavily dependent on Russian gas, the German economy has been thrown into shock. The attack of Russian imperialism on Ukraine was a global political turning point. Immediately afterwards, then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz proclaimed a “turning point” and with it a $100 billion arms package.
The European rearmament program of Merz and von der Leyen, spurred on by Trump, represents an attempt to overcome the weaknesses of German imperialism. 
This is the terrain on which to understand the rise of the far right: a strategic crisis of the ruling class, an undemocratic EU, the rise of nationalism, scapegoating of refugees, internal chauvinism and a failure of the workers’ movement.
Who are the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)? How has this crisis helped facilitate their growth?
The AfD emerged in 2013 as a Euro-critical party that wanted a strong currency for the German market. It represented a break from the ranks of the conservative party, which historically had been a compromise between different factions of capital, a compromise that seemed to have broken down and which they wanted to break from. During the so-called refugee crisis, the right wing of the party, which has a fascist core, grew stronger and has been growing steadily ever since. It now makes up about three-fifths of the party membership and continues to grow. 
The AfD has about 53,000 members. Since its secret 2023 conference in Potsdam, it has gained at least 13,000 new members. 
The AfD first ran in the federal elections in 2017, achieving 12.6 percent, 10.4 percent in 2021, and now 20.8 percent in 2025. In the latest poll, it stands at 24.5 percent. What is particularly dramatic is that it has not only won over small business owners and some of the middle class, but has also scored well above average among people in poor economic situations (39 percent), blue-collar workers (38 percent) and the unemployed (34 percent). It also became the second strongest party among young voters (18 to 24 years old). Trade union members voted 23.2 percent for the mainstream conservatives, 21.8 percent for the AfD, and only 20.6 percent for the Social Democratic Party (SPD). 
It has been able to grow due to disillusionment with the mainstream conservative party (CDU/CSU) and the SPD. Their policies of refugee-bashing, militarised borders and law and order are increasingly adopted by the mainstream parties and help legitimise them as a false opposition to the establishment.
The strategic reorientation of the bourgeoisie and the organisation of a party in which fascist forces can grow is what characterises the AfD. With the joint anti-migration vote together with the CDU/CSU and other parties at the end of January 2025, it showed that it is prepared to stand as a kind of shadow coalition for the conservatives if the Social Democrats are not ready for their fundamental attack on the working class. The support from the US administration, whether it be Musk speaking at the party conference or J.D. Vance supporting the European right at the Munich Security Conference, shows that they are increasingly being seen as an option. However, due to its opposition to the strategy of German monopoly capital (the EU), it is still not considered a reliable partner. 
On the streets, however, the AfD is far from being a purely right-wing populist force, but rather a gathering place for reactionary and fascist currents. Since the federal elections alone, the number of open attacks on leftists and migrants has increased. There have also been armed attacks on refugee shelters. Fascists are marching openly again, something that had declined sharply since the emergence of the AfD. 
The AfD has not yet fulfilled its historical mission, but it stands ready. Its inclusion in a possible federal government would certainly mean a split in the party, but also a reorientation of German politics and, with it, of Germany's relationship to the EU. But to do so, it would have to break with its strategic orientation toward Russian imperialism. 
The new government will be another grand coalition, this time led by the ultra-conservative Friedrich Merz. What is their program?
The previous government—the “traffic light coalition” of Social Democrats, Liberals and Greens— fell apart over the question of a strategy for German imperialism in times of heightened crisis. They could not agree on the amount of debt required to remilitarise Germany. Merz has already faced opposition from within the ranks of the new coalition; for the first time in German history, the initial vote failed to inaugurate him as chancellor. It shows how weak this new coalition government is already.
Merz faces the problem of having to lead a period of open rivalry with the US. His government’s program is characterised by making Germany fit for war, strengthening its own authoritarianism in “defence” of democracy, expanding a massive racist deportation regime, and pushing ahead with historic cuts and privatisations to strengthen its own ruling class.
In terms of the question of the massive rearmament of German imperialism, they have cancelled the debt brake so that the German state is allowed to have unlimited debt to rearm itself. They want to spend 3.5 percent of GDP on the military, which is three times more than just 10 years ago. They are trying to expand the German armed forces by reintroducing a “voluntary” form of compulsory military service. They are supporting an EU nuclear rearmament program. 
They want to see if they can solve the crisis of the car industry by transforming individual Volkswagen factories into producing tanks. At the moment, the German state is already producing more artillery munition than the US. 
They want to sell off infrastructure and state property to revitalise German capital. Eight percent of public sector staff will be cut, but not in the security agencies. Then there is the so-called investment program where 500 billion will be spent over the next 12 years. This will be put into the investment of private capital to make it more competitive. Companies will be able to write off 30 percent of their investments to be refunded after their tax return. The corporate tax rate is to be reduced. Environmental standards are to be reduced. 
The new government wants to completely abolish the right to asylum. They have proposed a mass deportation campaign of refugees to Syria and Afghanistan. They want to deny the right for legal support for refugees in their trials against their deportation so they cannot defend themselves in the courts. They want to introduce a card payment system so they can financially control what refugees can and cannot do. This will be accompanied by increasing demonisation of Arabs as a source of violence through so-called “Israel-related antisemitism”.
They want to massively attack traditional working-class rights by getting rid of the eight-hour day and changing it into a 42-hour maximum work week where there is no maximum daily work amount. They want to abolish the Bürgergeld (unemployment benefit) and reintroduce a sanctions system. They also want to increase the pool of unemployed workers by giving retirees the option to work longer for lesser taxation. 
The incoming attacks on the labour movement are linked to restrictions on democratic rights. For example, massive criminalisation of the environmental movement and solidarity with Palestine. These attacks are defended as necessary to protect democracy from external enemies such as China and Russia. 
The trade unions have welcomed aspects of the government’s statements (investment program), are demanding co-management of certain areas (AI in the workplace) and remain silent on other issues (militarisation, deportation). Their connection to the SPD makes them guarantees of social peace and demobilisation for the ruling class. 
The AfD will benefit most from this state of affairs. We can already see that in the Bundestagswahl (federal election) results for 2025. The AfD have already increased their popularity relative to the conservative party in the latest poll. This is before the new government had even formed.
Polarisation to the right is not the only dynamic at play in Germany. What does the polarisation to the left look like?
Since 2023, millions of people have taken to the streets against the AfD. 
The initial protests were in response to the 2023 Potsdam conference of fascists, members of the AfD (some of them also fascists) and also members of the conservative party who were revealed to have been discussing a program of “re-immigration” (deportation) of German migrant citizens. These were the strongest anti-racist and anti-fascist mobilisations in over a decade. Millions of people were in the streets, not just in the urban centres but in rural areas as well. 
Earlier this year, there were demonstrations of millions against the breaking of the “fire wall” around the fascists: the conservative party tried using the votes of the AfD to pass an immigration bill.
There have also been mass blockades of AfD party meetings. Last June, 70,000 people participated in a huge demonstration against the AfD party meeting in Essen. The movement has also made its way onto university campuses and is very active. 
But the movement is making a moral argument that “you shall not be racist; you shall not be fascist.” It is not challenging the overall program. It is not challenging anti-migration policy, and on the question of Palestine, it’s weak.
This polarisation has also expressed itself in the Bundestag [German parliament]. Die Linke, a reformist party which, until recently, was in crisis, has been the only party that has stood in opposition to the politics of the far right. 
It has attracted 60,000 new members who see the party as the focal point for opposition to the incoming attacks of the coalition government and against the rise of the AfD. It has been students and mainly young women who have joined and massively changed the character of the party. Its vote doubled in the last election and won 8.7 percent. Now, tens of thousands are getting active and want to fight. They challenge the rise of the far-right on campuses. They mobilise against meetings of the AfD. One of their members in the Bundestag called on demonstrators to “join the barricades” during the recent mass demonstrations. They are a factor on the streets. 
At the same time, it fights for the expansion of the welfare state, redistribution, disarmament and pacifism (instead of revolutionary anti-militarism). This corresponds to the prevailing consciousness. It is a reformist force and ultimately a bourgeois program within the labour movement. It focuses on social issues rents, and the rising cost of living. 
It is passive on other issues. It does not see anti-racism and anti-fascism as part of the class struggle. It rejects the idea of open borders. It remains silent on the reactionary deal on Ukraine and is divided and paralysed on the issue of Palestine. It expelled the anti-Zionist Ramsis Kiliani from its ranks. In the second chamber (Bundesrat), it voted for rearmament and the investment program, thereby giving the incoming government a free pass. It supported a second vote to inaugurate Merz as chancellor.
The 60,000 new members mentioned above have also shifted the balance between the party's wings. There is a right wing that fights for stability and hopes to form government with the Social Democrats. Then there is a left-wing that is connected to the new, activist base. The leadership believes it can take hold of the state machinery and wield it for socialist purposes. But as we know from history, this program is doomed to fail.
This is the core problem, because the politics of Die Linke are no less wrong than when it was founded. As a party, it does not want to smash capitalism, but to soften its excesses. The question arises, for example, whether it wants to govern or organise resistance. At the same time, its members expect opposition to the government and the AfD. This is where the real value of the party lies.
What are the tasks for revolutionaries in Germany today?
The main task of revolutionaries is the struggle for revolutionary class consciousness. This means helping organise resistance against the new grand coalition led by Merz. It is the Merz government and its attacks on working class and oppressed people that will help fuel the growth of the far right. At the same time, we have to relate to the people who have been radicalised by the struggle against the far right and convince them of revolutionary politics. 
All these struggles are in resistance to the attacks of the ruling class and its murderous gangs on the streets, but as revolutionaries we cannot just fight the excesses of capitalist oppression. We must link these struggles in the building of a revolutionary party. The development of a program that starts from the central struggles and dominant consciousness of the fighting sections of the working class and shows the necessity of smashing the capitalist order, which is irreconcilable with it. 
We must be the dagger in the back of our ruling class.

Robert Narai

Why is the far right on the rise in Germany?

US President Donald Trump’s first reign ended in flailing catastrophe. He was like a bad comic being booed off the stage. He was beaten fair and square by a demented, basement-dwelling Biden. His attempted self-coup was a discrediting farce: he was supported by no army divisions, but only the QAnon shaman. His cultural legacy was enormous yet seemed to leave little structural trace. 
He is back now, and different. He has already created a climate of fear. Political opponents have been disappeared off the streets, and he has hundreds of victims in a Salvadoran gulag. Universities have rolled over. Big law firms have pledged to give pro bono advice to help him repress the enemy within. His sadistic cuts to state programs aim to call into question the legitimacy of any regulation, any redistribution or any orderly administration of a big bourgeois state. How far can it go? Where can it end? What limits exist to this process?
In some ways, Trump’s first term concealed his true nature. The radical demagogue, who inspired the world’s fascists, was almost immediately bound by circumstance. When he came to power, his own party tried to constrain and control him. Throughout his first months in office, appointees rebelled, or he fired them. Scaramucci, Spicer, Flynn, Bolton—the whole gamut from ultra-Trump spivs to neocon fossils—came and went in a laughable whirlwind. The Democrats took back the Congress. Black Lives Matter was simply too big to repress; it meant that Trump’s first term was defined by a progressive movement of astonishing breadth and persistence, with enormous immediate cultural impact. 
“Trump’s famously sharp instincts, the ones that won him the presidency, have been subverted at every level”, Tucker Carlson complained when Black Lives Matter left Trump and the Republicans passive and irrelevant. COVID exposed Trump’s sheer personal stupidity. He was publicly mocked and deflated by his own scientists. The need for state intervention into the economy was made screechingly obvious. Trumpism appeared to have been refuted by reality.
Yet all this concealed an inner development. On another level, Trump was gaining in power—and radicalising.
Trump didn’t win in 2016 by accident. He had proved himself a campaigner of some genius. He could take power and give it to allies. Over time, more and more ambitious politicians came over to his faction. In 2016, he had few reliable, sophisticated allies; now, he controls the entire Republican Party at every level. In Project 2025, top policy minds provided a program and tactical outline for a radicalised reactionary presidency. Trump showed how a president could win while breaking the rules and defying the norms; for right-wingers, that opened up new and exciting possibilities.
Black Lives Matter made Trump seem weak while the protests were at their peak. But they also inspired a deep, violent racist reaction. In the same screed in which he bemoaned the failure of Trump’s instincts, Carlson explained to his audience of millions: “Our leaders are weak. Predators know it. That’s why this is happening”. What was needed? “American citizens are forced to defend themselves. They have no choice. No-one else is going to defend them.”
At the time, Trump was asking Defense Secretary Mark Esper if the army could be ordered to fire into the crowds. The answer was no. But the idea was there. Soon, the killer Kyle Rittenhouse would become a Republican hero, to be joined by Daniel Penny and even Derek Chauvin, the man who choked George Floyd, and for whom Elon Musk now wants a pardon. The protests at elite universities in solidarity with Palestine gave further drive to this current: use terror to crush anti-racist ideology, or future State Departmentemployees will sympathise with the enemy. Internal repression and imperial violence could come together—just like at the peak of the Cold War.
The pandemic had made Trump seem weak, but that radicalised his movement as well. Huge swathes of capitalists—not just Americans, but throughout the world—lived their worst nightmare: their system was paused to save people’s lives. For many, not least Elon Musk, the lesson was clear. Whatever it took—whatever mad ideas, whatever political alliances, whatever cost in human lives—regulation in general, and disease control in particular, had to be crushed.
The way that COVID radicalised capitalists has been too little discussed. Centre-left parties are embarrassed to mention it, and right-wing ones have largely embraced the insanity. When Trump ran for re-election, he had the support of a business community that had consciously decided to embrace far-right conspiracies and kill by disease if it meant they could wind back regulations and reduce taxes.
Here is the domestic program of Trump 2.0: repress dissent, merge state violence with mob rule and shift the class struggle in favour of the bosses. These factors coalesce against a Democratic Party with little to offer. Trump is not coasting; he is not just kicking the can down the road for another few years. He wants to change the world.
And he has what he needs to do it. He represents a section of the capitalist class that is willing to fight. He has thousands of trained, confident and energetic activists, inspired by a worldview and a vision of the future. He has a political party—though a strange one, in the American model—through which he can coordinate and implement his program. What, then, can stop it?
Don’t look to America’s great traditions. Trump is a radical, but he is also a traditionalist. His terroristic internal program, and the forces that drive it, have deep roots in US political structures—deeper, in many ways, than Biden’s bumbling liberalism. The history of the USA is, in large part, a history of violent state terror meted out at Blacks, immigrants, leftists and the poor. Some of the methods were direct state power: executions, deportations and mass imprisonment. 
The first Red Scare deported hundreds of radical “aliens” from the country in the years following World War One. The Smith Act of 1940 made radical politics a crime, and socialists were jailed under it. A follow-up, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, allowed radicals to be deprived of their residency rights and deported—just as Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are doing now. 
Showpiece executions—like that of the Rosenbergs in 1953—created an aura of dread that could pervade society. In the early Cold War, “loyalty boards” investigated, disciplined and blacklisted employees suspected of radical ideas or simply of supporting the free speech and civil rights of radicals.
However, repression in the USA is traditionally decentralised. Employers and intellectuals can see which way the wind is blowing and play along. Joseph McCarthy’s public hearings could imprison victims if they didn’t provide testimony. But they also gave a signal to private employers about who they should blacklist, and how they should terrorise their own workers. The state “loyalty boards” gave legitimacy to bosses purging “disloyal” or rebellious employees. Anyone who caused trouble—organising a union, denouncing McCarthy or opposing racism—could be denounced for their radicalism and sacked. 
It was a very effective way to crush the trade unions and enforce the bosses’ domination over the working class. In shipyards, dock workers were purged and blacklisted for failing to give correct answers to questions like, “What do you think of the Italian situation?” or “Does your wife go to church regularly?” The purge of the ports was particularly intense: any active trade union militant was a suspect. In another pernicious US tradition, anti-communist union bureaucrats enthusiastically helped management drive out unruly workers, collaborating in investigations and helping to pick targets.
Binding the public and private repression is the US tradition of the private death squad. The roots go deep, at least back to the Klan in the period after the Civil War. It’s familiar to most from the civil rights struggle: the lynchings, the church bombings, the kidnap and torture of Freedom Riders. Racism almost always helped justify the murders, beatings and bombings, even when the victims were white—because white subversives were disloyal to the race. Private killers often knew the state would turn a blind eye. These private killers overlapped with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which for decades was run as an internal political police—blackmailing, brutalising and in some cases probably assassinating subversives beyond any regular legal framework.
For much of the twentieth century, the US was a deeply authoritarian society. In parts of the country, it was a one-party state. Many of its policies were inspirational to European fascist regimes. Yet it was all established and maintained without any open coup, any apparent “revolution”, or any Nazi-style party in uniforms: it always called itself democracy, not totalitarianism. The American authoritarian tradition, on which Trump draws, operated through a patchwork collaboration of state institutions, bosses, right-wing union officials and private thugs.
Trump draws on that tradition, but it’s unclear if he can completely re-establish it. It’s one thing to maintain a violent and authoritarian society that has existed for decades; it’s another to recreate and reimpose it once it has been largely vanquished. Resistance is likely, and Trump’s institutional capacity to hold the line is unknown.
But the authoritarian history of the US shows that faith in the “democratic resilience” of the US or its liberal institutions is misguided. For most of its history, the country has been nominally democratic but substantially authoritarian. In times of repression, liberal institutions caved, or joined in, seeking their own advantage. Trump’s project is serious. He has a vision, he has activists, he has organisation and he has the backing of an aggressive class that wants to fight. To resist his attacks, our side needs the same.

D. Taylor

Trump 2.0 is reviving America’s worst traditions. How far can it go?

Over the last few weeks, Tesla has become the target for a growing, largely social-media-organised campaign across the United States. This past weekend alone, CNN <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/01/business/tesla-takedown-musk-doge/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a>:
“Demonstrators gathered at more than 50 Tesla showrooms across the United States on Saturday in protest of CEO Elon Musk’s role in slashing government agencies as part of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency established by President Donald Trump.”
This was probably an undercount. If you follow the mainstream media alone, you’ll miss out on some protests. Our protests in <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/568634392836661" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Chicago</a> have received no media coverage, and there has been scant coverage of protests in the suburbs. While many protests have been organised by <a href="https://indivisible.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Indivisible</a>, a nationwide campaigning group of liberal and progressive Democrats, the outpouring of protests at Tesla showrooms is much greater than one organisation.
Musk is despised by millions of people around the globe. The world’s richest man and best-known Nazi, Musk personifies everything that is wrong with the world today. <a href="https://www.teslatakedown.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Tesla takedown</a> is a positive development in the struggle against the Trump regime and fascism in the United States. <a href="https://www.americanjewisharchives.org/snapshots/henry-ford-and-antisemitism-the-notorious-dearborn-independent/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Henry Ford</a> comes to mind as the last major auto industrialist who was identified closely with fascism. In many ways, Ford thrusted political antisemitism into the mainstream of US society through his newspaper the Dearborn Independent. But Ford was on the wrong side of the New Deal and preparations for WWII.
Today, <a href="https://prospect.org/power/2025-01-06-ford-musk-made-cars-backed-fascists/">according to Harold Meyerson</a>:
“Fast-forward now to Elon Musk, who today has no qualms about neo-Nazis ruling Germany. Quite unsolicited, Musk has tweeted (X-ed?) his way into Germany’s parliamentary election, which will be held next month, beginning by arguing that ‘only the AfD can save Germany’. 
“The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Alternative for Germany</a> is a far-right, vehemently anti-immigrant and racist party that has grown in strength, particularly in the economically depressed states that were formerly part of East Germany, since it was founded a dozen years ago. Musk has argued that it’s not a neo-Nazi party, but a number of self-professed neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers have been in the party’s leadership, while the German government views it as a potentially violent threat to German security.”
Yet, unlike Ford, Musk had attained political power that a few years ago would have been unimaginable. Musk is, however, vulnerable. His interventions in European politics have led to plummeting Tesla sales. Tesla’s stock has declined significantly. Major pension funds have dropped their ownership of Tesla stock, and prominent people have sold their cars. The various Tesla models have gone from being seen as saving the environment to being viewed as Nazi vehicles, like the <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/hitler-and-his-volkswagen-tracing-the-80-year-history-of-the-beetle/a-43942998" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Volkswagen</a> in the 1930s.
Like Henry Ford, Musk is a fanatical opponent of unions in his workplaces from California to Sweden to Berlin. We see Tesla workers as our allies. Ford was the last of the Big Three US automakers to be unionised by the United Auto Workers (UAW) in 1941, following a bitter strike on the eve of US entry into the Second World War. Musk’s political power can ultimately only be curtailed if the workers in his car and battery plants are organised.
There is still much to do in the United States to combat Elon Musk, but more needs to be done internationally. Tesla takedown is a rare opportunity for anti-fascists, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0XLGvH8h7U" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">climate change activists</a>, and supporters of trade unions and democratic rights across the globe to come together with one target. We should make the most of this opportunity now. Organise or join protests at Tesla outlets in your country. Our international unity will make a difference.
Joe Allen is the author of The Package King: A Rank and File History of United Parcel Service.
Bill V. Mullen is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Purdue. He is co-author, with Jeanelle K. Hope, of The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back From Anti-Lynching to Abolition, and, with Christopher Vials, of The US Antifascism Reader.

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Why is the far right on the rise in Germany?

Trump 2.0 is reviving America’s worst traditions. How far can it go?

An appeal for an international anti-fascist campaign against Tesla

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