The Elephant in the Room

If it looks like fascism, sounds like fascism, acts like fascism, dresses like fascism, talks like fascism, kills like fascism and lies like fascism, brothers and sisters, it’s fucking fascism. It’s here, it’s now. It’s in my city. It’s in your city, and it must be resisted, protested, defended against, stood up to, exposed, denounced, ousted, overthrown, and driven out!

—Tom Morello, benefit concert in Minneapolis, January 30, 2026

The most important aspect of [a recent anti-ICE] protest was the “elephant in the room.” An endless line of speakers went on for close to 2 hours in the freezing cold. They came from different points of view and had different particular focuses. But the one thing they shared in common was that none of them ever mentioned the need to drive out the fascist Trump regime… Speakers from different trends/organizations called out things that people hate …But not a word about driving out Trump before it is too late. Yet a huge percentage of the people there knew that is what it will take…

—Refuse Fascism activist, January 31, 2026

Remove the Dictator Now!

—Statement on a protest sign at an Alex Pretti vigil, February 1, 2026

Refuse Fascism has been ready for years to meet this moment — but have its ties to a former 1960s radical become an albatross hampering its ambitious agenda?

—Rolling Stone, January 26, 2026

Two Slogans Richly Borne Out

There’s more than a little dark irony in Rolling Stone’s recent, largely negative, Bob Avakian-bashing piece on Refuse Fascism (RF), the organization that has stood out for nine-plus years for its dead-on understanding of and militant opposition to Donald Trump, Trumpism, and the Trump regime(s).¹ Titled “The Antifascist Group Fighting Trump—and Some Critics on the Left,” the article was published just as terrible events in Minnesota including the extra-judicial execution of two peaceful protesters by Trump’s masked “immigration enforcement” gendarmes made it yet more undeniably clear that RF’s core slogans are well-matched to the current American and world historical moment:

• “In the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America!”

• “The Trump fascist regime must go now!”

Nobody serious at this point can honestly deny that Trump, Trumpism, and the Trump47 regime fit RF’s definition of fascism:

“Fascism is a qualitative change in how society is governed. Fascism foments and relies on xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny, and the aggressive re-institution of oppressive ‘traditional values.’ Fascist mobs and threats of violence are unleashed to build the movement and consolidate power. Fascism has direction and momentum. Dissent is piece by piece criminalized. The truth is bludgeoned. Group after group is demonized and targeted along a trajectory that leads to real horrors. All of this has taken dramatic leaps under the Trump MAGA regimes. What is crucial to understand is that once in power fascism essentially eliminates traditional democratic rights. No matter how it comes to power, fascism is never legitimate. History has shown that fascism must be stopped before it becomes too late.”

Trump’s first horrific year back in power demonstrates the correctness of two key points RF has been making since the orange-brushed ogre returned to power:

• Nothing remotely like decency and fairness from the US government can arise without the removal of the fascist Trump regime.

• Trying to wait out the Trump47 fascist regime and defeat it through coming rigged elections amounts to morally irresponsible advance capitulation to horrors inflicted at an ever-accelerating pace. (Even assuming — perhaps I should say imagining — non-rigged elections in 2026 and 2028, the very notion of letting the supremely destructive eco-fascist Trump-Miller-Vance-Hegseth-Rubio regime hold power until January 20, 2029, or even for another year is sheer madness.)

Do you want “ICE [Mein Trumpf’s national Gestapo and/or SS] Out of Everywhere” (a welcome slogan I have seen on protest signs across the country in recent weeks), not just out of your own community? Do you stand against white supremacy? Do you oppose criminal attacks on other countries and support the international rule of law? Do you want to save livable ecology? Defend LGBT folks’ humanity? Want free and fair elections, basic constitutional rights, an independent media, respect for science, education, critical thinking, cultural freedom, truth, and basic human decency? Recognize and support women’s humanity and equality? Support the rights of asylum and flight from desperate poverty and violence across borders? Want a future worth living in?

If you align with decent humanity by answering in the affirmative to these questions then you need to understand that the Trump regime must go and it must go NOW, before it’s too late. This is a fascist regime atop the American ship of state bidding to remake American government and society along fascist — meaning genocidally racist + militantly patriarchal + xenophobic nationalist + Christian fundamentalist + arch authoritarian and indeed dictatorial — lines. As Tom Morello said during his benefit concert in Minneapolis six days ago:

“My friends, if it looks like fascism, sounds like fascism, acts like fascism, dresses like fascism, talks like fascism, kills like fascism and lies like fascism, brothers and sisters, it’s fucking fascism. It’s here, it’s now. It’s in my city. It’s in your city, and it must be resisted, protested, defended against, stood up to, exposed, denounced, ousted, overthrown, and driven out!”

Bad Counsel to a Heart Attack Victim

It’s negligent and even reckless to tell people to wait for future elections the Trump fascist regime has no intention of letting take place in a free and fair fashion, or of honoring if Trump doesn’t like the outcomes. It’s like instructing someone in the middle of a heart attack to take two aspirin and make sure to go to their regular scheduled check up with a really bad doctor – the dismal Democratic “inauthentic opposition” Party of Hollow Resistance in this analogy – who is himself very ill and who may well be dead nine and thirty three months out. Only a mass, determined, and sustained popular front movement determined to “unite all who can be united from many different viewpoints and perspectives” (the language of RF’s March 2025 Call to Conscience, Call to Action) around the demand that the Trump fascist regime be removed from power immediately can meet the moment. This is what RF has consistently called for and worked to being into being.

“The Elephant in the Room”

That – the Trump regime OUT NOW – is precisely the essential core demand that is missing in the righteous and inspiring anti-ICE protests that have sprung up across the country in response to the extrajudicial executions of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. It’s the “elephant in the room” at these protests, this even as many who attend these welcome events know very

The following brilliant report on one of these protests from an RF activist in a major US city resonates perfectly with what I have seen and heard across the US Midwest since Trump came back to power:

“In reflecting on our experience there, our team generally agreed that the most important (but not necessarily self-evident) aspect of this event was the huge ‘elephant in the room.’ There was an endless line of speakers who went on for close to 2 hours in the freezing cold. They came from different points of view and had different particular focuses. But the one thing they shared in common was that none of them ever mentioned the need to drive out the fascist Trump regime. To a large degree this got over with the crowd (which was loudly supportive) because the speakers spoke to them in a variety of ways. They were very angry and militant – ‘Fuck Ice,’ ‘Drive Out Ice,’ ‘Shut Shit Down,’ ‘We need a General Strike.’ Many also spoke with a lot of heart about the solidarity they felt with immigrants. Speakers from different trends/organizations also called out things that people hate – racism, the genocide in Gaza, the attacks of people’s living standards, the insane amount spent on ‘defense’ as comparted to education…But not a word about driving out Trump before it is too late. Yet a huge percentage of the people there knew that is what it will take to get rid of ICE and seriously challenge all the other horrors that were being spoken to. The reason we know this was in people’s minds is because that was the message we took to them with our banner, our materials and our interactions with them. IF you want to get rid of ICE, Trump Must Go Now! And we got nothing but agreement, often very strong agreement.”

Essential Contributions from a Demonized “Cult Leader”

How and why has RF been able to get it right from the start, unlike any other “Left” organization in the country except for the Revolutionary Communist Party (the RCP)? A big part of the answer is that RF’s leadership has prominently included RCP (“Revcom”) leaders who have long followed the talks and writings of the brilliant revolutionary communist theorist and strategist Bob Avakian. Avakian is a prolific historical and dialectical materialist who has been arguing for three decades that American capitalism (capitalism-imperialism in RCP language) and its attendant oppression structures and ideologies of bourgeois class rule, white supremacism, patriarchy, xenophobic nationalism and Christian fundamentalism were interacting with each other and with changes in the world capitalist system in such a way as to breed a US-American version of fascism – no small problem atop the most lethal imperial superpower in history in a time of climate catastrophe and a world chock full of nuclear weapons! By Avakian’s “scientific” analysis, with which I agree, this US Amerikaner fascism poses a grave existential menace not just to previously normative US bourgeois electoral and rule of law “democracy” and to social and political gains won by past American people’s movements, but to humanity itself.

Avakian’s warnings and the analysis behind them have been thoroughly born out during the first and second Trump presidencies and during the pathetic, fascism-enabling Biden interregnum. Like the Obama presidencies, the Biden White House was a perfect match for Avakian and the Revcoms’ understanding (and my own understanding developed well before I ever read a word by Avakian) of the Democratic Party as hopelessly captive to US capitalism and imperialism in ways that make it incapable of fighting fascism the way it needs to be fought.

It’s not too much to say that RF has stood in the moral and intellectual vanguard of the struggle against Trumpism-fascism largely because of Avakian’s intellectual work. The person Peisner calls “an albatross” around RF, Avakian, is the main reason that RF has, through the influence of its openly RCP-affiliated co-founders and leaders, “been ready for years to meet this moment” – far more ready than any other group in the US other than the RCP itself.

It’s not just that Avakian’s distinctive understanding of how the underlying oppression systems that shape America and the world have produced the monstrous Trump fascist regime. It’s also about Avakian’s consistent and penetrating critique of what passes for a Left in the US and indeed around the world – a “Left” that has failed to “meet this moment” because of its many decidedly un- and anti-revolutionary afflictions, including deadly over-attachments to: crippling subjectivist identity politics, the deadly “quicksand” of ballot-fetishizing electoral politics, reductionist and imperially parasitic economism, outworn prole fetishism, ubiquitous incremental reformism, excessive localism, mutual-aid-ism, anti-statism, anti-vanguardism, individualism, spontaneitism, anti-intellectualism, academic careerism, and more. These disorders, to which the Revcoms are more inoculated than any other radical group thanks to Avakian’s long intellectual toil, have produced a “radical left” that has often been shockingly incapable of grasping:

• The fascist essence of Trumpism and the core historical and material ingredients of the Amerikaner fascist mix concentrated in the Trump movement and party.

• The Trump47 administration as a fascist regime imminently threatening to impose a new form of dictatorial governance.

• The urgent need for a mass and sustained peoples’ uprising to force the removal of the Trump regime before it cements fascist rule atop world history’s most dangerous and lethal superpower — and before the damage it inflicts on the world is irreversible.

I have for years been struck by the remarkable inability and dogged refusal of even certain avowedly Marxist organizations of the sort that one regularly sees at protests to acknowledge the very basic fact, now more obvious than ever, that the Trump regime is fascist. Activists from two of these groups (both of which I will leave unnamed in the interest of popular front unity) have absurdly told me that peoples’ ability to stand together at a protest without being slaughtered en masse by the government was proof that it is not yet appropriate to use the F-word! They argue that you shouldn’t say fascism until fascism has fully consolidated lethal state power to the point where all protest is drowned in blood. This absurd head-in-the-sand position informs their creepy insistence on opposing “the Trump agenda” without calling for the end of the Trump regime itself.

Which brings to mind another medical analogy. Anyone who tells you we aren’t really dealing with fascism because the regime isn’t mowing us all down in the streets is like someone telling you that you don’t have throat cancer until a malignant tumor in your neck prevents you from swallowing and speaking.

And, oh, by the way, 40-plus people have died in ICE detention since Trump came back to power and the last year, and the Trump regime just carried out two public extrajudicial executions of protesters in Minneapolis. Like Morello says: “if it kills like fascism…”

After Trump

It’s not just about how to understand and fight the Trump regime, it’s also about what comes after the removal of that regime. If Avakian is right, and all the intellectual and political work I’ve done over the last three decades tells me he is, fascism cannot be swept into the dustbin of history unless and until humanity rises up to carry out an actual socialist revolution designed to create a world beyond all oppression and exploitation – towards a communist future in which the reigning maxim is “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”

RF’s “Ambitious Agenda”

“Refuse Fascism,” the opening blurb atop Rolling Stone’s article reads, “has been ready for years to meet this moment — but have its ties to a former 1960s radical become an albatross hampering its ambitious agenda?” (emphasis added)

Beneath the faint if deserved praise, this is an odd statement. The 1960s ended 56 years ago, on January 1, 1970, meaning that anyone who was a radical during the 1960s is “a former 1960s radical.” Avakian is still alive, thinking and writing at a good pace, making him an ongoing 2020s radical, not a wax museum character from another century (though I’m sure his many haters/“critics…on the left” would embrace that image).

RF’s “ambitious agenda?” Try instead “Refuse Fascism’s urgent and selfless call for masses and organizations to rise up before it’s too late against a fascist regime that threatens all prospects for a decent human future?”

Rolling Stone fails here to ask why this hasn’t become the “ambitious agenda” of other liberal, progressive, and left organizations, as is urgently required?

Avakian Derangement Syndrome (ADS)

“There isn’t another organization [other than the RCP, that is],” the Revcom and RF leader Andy Zee told David Peisner, “that has the analysis that this is a fascist regime, it’s consolidating very rapidly, that you can’t count on the normal processes of how this country is governed to redress this. Avakian made that analysis. There wouldn’t have been a Refuse Fascism without that analysis.”

That’s an accurate and suggestive observation, worthy of follow-up, given Peisner’s acknowledgement that RF “has been ready for years to meet this moment” (unlike any left, liberal or progressive group, Peisner fails to note), no?

Not for Peisner. Instead of digging into Avakian’s writing and talks on these topics, something that seems required for a responsible report on his subject, Peisner spoke to marginal US lefties who told the journalist that the RCP is nothing more than a “cult of personality” around Avakian – and that RF should therefore be dismissed. And instead of engaging the troubling topic of why the non- and anti-Avakian US “Left” (few of whose adherents could tell you a single substantive and serious thing about Avakian’s writings and talks) has failed “to meet this [fascist] moment,” Peisner is content to quote failing and anonymous (except for an unknown “Marxist” named Max Elbaum) “Left” activists on why the RCP and therefore RF supposedly suck.

This raises a question for Rolling Stone: might it be that part of what is “hampering” the struggle against Trumpism-fascism is some of “the Left’s” curiously anti-intellectual posture² toward a leading communist thinker who has run — written and spoken — circles around any other radical thinker on what we are really up against and what it will take to defeat it? We might think of this as a form of anti-communist “Avakian Derangement Syndrome” (ADS), a condition that would have a less lethal impact if there was a single other radical thinker anywhere close to Avakian when it comes to breaking down the current historical moment and what is to be done to meet that moment. No such intellectual has shown their face to date, reflecting a great moral and intellectual vacuum on “the Left.”

Translation

Throughout most of his article, Peisner purports to stay neutral, seemingly content to let “Left critics” do the Revcom- and Avakian-, and RF-bashing. Here is an exception to that:

“Refuse Fascism has sometimes been portrayed as part of a bait-and-switch being pulled on Trump-hating progressives to lure them into the cult of Bob³. It’s not that. The Refuse Fascism organizers I meet are sincere in their desperation to oust Trump. Those who are RevComs mostly come off as smart, well-meaning, and sensible, as long as they’re not talking about Avakian.”

It was decent of Peisner to acknowledge the sincerity of RF activists’ desire to remove Trump, but here is a useful translation of the last sentence in that passage: “The Revcoms in RF don’t actually talk all that much about Avakian because they know that liberal anti-communist journalists like me and much of what passes for a US ‘Left’ have sticks up our asses about Bob Avakian even though we know next to nothing about his work. I pressed Revcom-affiliated RF activists with questions about Avakian and they responded by saying things that came off to me as dumb, ill-intentioned, and silly. This is because I have been programmed by ruling class ideology to think of revolutionary communism as foolish, bad, and senseless.”

That programming strikes me as an albatross wrapped around Peisner’s mind.

Curious and Creepy Timing

What is David Peisner’s “ambitious agenda”? At the risk of sounding conspiratorial, there’s something unnerving about the timing of the liberal and left attacks that have been launched against Revcom activists who have dared to play leadership roles in US social and political movements. Three and a half years ago, liberal and leftish abortion rights groups undertook a malevolent and slanderous neo-McCarthyite assault on Rise of 4 Abortion Rights (RU4AR) because one of RU4AR’s three founders was the brilliant revolutionary communist and open “follower of Bob Avakian” Sunsara Taylor The attack was launched right after the Supreme Court’s horrific female-enslaving Dobbs decision was handed down without facing serious and sustained mass resistance from the liberal Democratic women’s and pro-choice “movement.” It came just as the correctness and righteousness of RU4AR’s position, highly critical of the cringing surrender advanced by the Planned Parenthood establishment, was being demonstrated. The timing of this viscous, COINTELPRO-like campaign against RU4AR was certainly about more than coincidence.

Last fall, the liberal-leftish “Veterans Against Fascism” leader and social media “influencer” Kristofer Goldsmith launched a malicious and mendacious neo-McCarthyite online (Substack and Instagram) attack on RF. Goldsmith accused RF of being nothing more than the tool of a nefarious Avakian “cult”³ seeking to take over the minds of decent anti-Trump activists, like something out of the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The timing of Goldsmith’s creepy online strike was less than random. It was launched as thousands converged in Washington DC on November 22^nd to call and lobby for Trump’s impeachment at a “Remove the [Trump] Regime” rally linked to a free anti-Trump concert featuring a popular progressive folk-rock group (the Dropkick Murphys). The rally came in the wake of RF’s success in bringing thousands to DC on November 5 demanding Trump Out Now. Like it’s June 14 rally in DC, RF’s November 5 action captured mainstream media attention, including a favorable reference on MSNBC’s influential Rachel Maddow Show.

Goldsmith’s unprincipled smear of RF reflected his determination to keep anti-Trump sentiments safely and dysfunctionally channeled into establishment institutions by inoculating masses arriving for “Remove the Regime” from RF’s essential understanding that the Trump regime must be brought down through mass action now, not after mid-term or presidential elections that:

• are too far in the future considering the incredible and potentially irreversible damage the Trump47 regime does every single day and hour.
• the Trump regime is ready, willing, able, and already moving to subvert.

• the Trump regime will not honor if they don’t go its way.

Peisner’s Rolling Stone article is based mainly on in-person research he undertook in Washington DC nearly three months ago. Why did it just appear now, just as the regime’s terror in Minnesota has masses of people there cheering Tom Morello after the rocker says, “it’s fucking fascism…here… now….in my city…in your city, and it must be resisted, protested, defended against, stood up to, exposed, denounced, ousted, overthrown, and driven out”? As my leftish friend “Bumps” Willard likes to say, “think about it.” Do such moments call for certain semi-influential liberals and progressives like Goldsmith and Peisner to do the work of the right by working to demean and marginalize those who would rally the people for a struggle commensurate to the fascist menace we face?

Are the Goldsmiths and Peisners of the world part of the controlled and inauthentic opposition, tasked with keeping peoples’ movements confined within the limited terms of the nation’s capitalist and imperialist masters, many of whom have now shifted from previously “normal” bourgeois democracy to fascism? I have no X-ray vision into the minds of Peisner and his Rolling Stone editors but it’s hard not to suspect that their article was saved for a moment when events again proved with special forces the correctness of RF’s Avakian-influenced diagnosis and prescription. Do such moments call for good American liberals and progressives to do the work of the right by working to demean and marginalize those who would rally the people for a struggle commensurate to the menace we face?

“Which Side Are You On?”

Which side are Peisner, Rolling Stone’s editors and publisher, and Peisner’s purported RF “critics on the Left” on? Here we are smack dab in the middle of a rolling advanced bid for the fascist takeover and makeover of American government and society along the lines of what Avakian has been warning about (and explaining) for many years, and these ADS purveyors/victims are devoting time and energy to taking down Avakian’s followers in the organization that has done more than any other to “meet the moment” — to struggle to alert the American people to the fascist menace that they and all of humanity face and how to defeat it — thanks in great part to Avakian’s work. Adding to the dark comedy, RF has consistently conducted itself in accord with Avakian’s call for popular front unity and selfless movement solidarity across political and ideological differences — the exact opposite of the snarky divisiveness reflected and advanced in Peisner’s curiously timed report.

Peisner and his editors are free to criticize and reject RF for whatever reasons they like, of course, but their not-so veiled anti-communist attack on RF and the Revcoms raises an interesting question: what other group or groups, if any, do they see as “ready to meet the moment” by addressing “the elephant in the room” — the need to drive out Trump before it is too late”?! RF would I’m sure like to hear from any such organizations. It has never maintained that it can carry out its “ambitious agenda” on its own! It has long called for everyone and anyone who hates what the Trump regime is doing to America and the world to rise up in a great and diverse movement to make America ungovernable by deranged and debased fascist monsters like Trump, Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Pete Hegseth, Sam Alito, Pam Bondi, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Mike Johnson, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Joe Lonsdale, Tom Homan, Clarence Thomas, John Thune, Steve Bannon, Josh Hawley, and Cory Lewandowski et al.

Peisner, Goldsmith, and other liberals and lefties can whine all they want about big bad Bob Avakian, but the raging fascist Trump regime will not be stopped any other way than what Avakian, the Revcoms, and RF say: “Humanity’s only hope is for the decent people of this country to rise in our millions. We cannot wait for future and rigged elections. We must drive the Trump Fascist Regime from power.”