What is going on with Marcetic and JACOBIN now?
Trump Is Planning a Third Red Scare
By Branko Marcetic
Donald Trump and his allies aren’t making a secret of it: if they win, they’re going to launch a campaign of repression to destroy the pro-Palestinian movement and the organized left.
https://jacobin.com/2024/11/trump-red-scare-palestine-blm
Walter Kirn is totally correct they are writing witing witing about things being said. That´s all.
Where was this outcry of ALL left media when Socialist groups opposed the US involvement in Ukraine?
Any protest of this massive scale?
So far nobody was imprisoned by the GOP.
How many have been shut out and shut down by the current administration.
“(…) This election season has been a tumultuous and widely debated one for the Left, on both moral and strategic terms. But strangely absent from these discussions have been the explicit promises and detailed plans from Donald Trump and his team to kick off a third Red Scare and destroy the organized left if they win.
Just this month, on the anniversary of October 7, the same Heritage Foundation that brought us Trump’s Project 2025 released “Project Esther,” their “blueprint to counter antisemitism in the United States.” On the basis that the American pro-Palestinian movement is “part of a global Hamas Support Network” that is “supported by activists and funders dedicated to destroying capitalism and democracy” and gets the “the support and training of America’s overseas enemies,” Project Esther lays out a strategy to “dismantle” this movement within one to two years and “level a decisive blow against both antisemitism and anti-Americanism.”
That strategy envisions a whole-of-government campaign of intimidation, slander, and “lawfare,” at both the federal and state levels and working with private organizations, to crush pro-Palestinian activists’ First Amendment rights and carry out a wave of repression. The stated end goal is to make it impossible for activists to organize while turning the public against the movement.
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As per the document, the hoped-for goals and outcomes of this campaign are the same ones that came out of that shameful historical episode, as well as the earlier Red Scare of the 1920s
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Trumpworld’s plan is, in other words, an unholy cocktail of the “war on terror” of this century and the Red Scare of the last one; and it is, quite openly, one targeting the entire Left, not just antiwar campaigners.
(…)
Project Esther singles out what it calls the “Hamas Caucus” — which it specifies as Bernie Sanders, the Squad, and a number of other progressive lawmakers — as part of this “cabal” serving in Washington, who must be “marginalized” as one of the nineteen core goals that will lead to the project’s success.
(…)”
There is this quote from the WaPo (an article however 1 year old now)
““We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Trump said last Veterans Day.”
see:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/12/trump-rally-vermin-political-opponents/
https://archive.is/BbRJX
There is at least this (but I have never seen JACOBIN call Schumer a fascist for scanting “ISRAEL-ISRAEL-ISRAEL!” as Aaron Maté reported vividly):
“(…)
Trump’s planned assault on the pro-Palestinian movement and leftists will likely get crucial support from right-wing Democrats in Congress who have an antagonistic relationship with the Left and have sided with Republicans over the past year in support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer is already promising to pass a speech-chilling “antisemitism” bill in the lame duck period after the election, which would be a boon to Trump’s McCarthyite plans. Corporate-funded groups that hold sway within the Democratic Party like Third Way have long been looking for the opportunity to purge the party of its progressive and socialist wing.
It’s not clear if the liberal establishment press, which has played a key role in demonizing pro-Palestinian protesters and legitimizing police violence against them, will step up either. Look at the recent exchange between Vance and CNN’s Jake Tapper over Trump’s threat to sic the military on what he called “the enemy within”: when Vance protested that Trump was simply talking about “far-left lunatics” and “people rioting” — meaning, in the language that elites in both parties now use, George Floyd protesters and other demonstrators — Tapper ignored this flagrantly alarming statement and instead repeatedly pressed Vance on whether Trump was actually talking about Democratic members of Congress like Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff. The question raised is whether Tapper would be comfortable with Trump training the military “only” on powerless protesters instead of powerful Democratic officials.
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Eventually he gives some examples of actions not just words:
“(…)
If you’re still not convinced of Trump and his allies’ seriousness, then consider the fact that we’ve already seen Republicans put this agenda into motion on a smaller scale.
There was, for instance, last year’s campaign by ultraconservative state-level Republican officials to undermine the American Library Association (ALA) over its election of self-described “Marxist lesbian” Emily Drabinski to its presidency. One part age-old Red Scare hysteria, and one part Biden-era right-wing “groomer” gay panic, the controversy saw state Freedom Caucuses work, one after another, to withdraw their state libraries from the ALA over Drabinski’s political beliefs and sexual orientation.
The episode is one illustration of the way that Trumpworld’s planned crackdown would work in practice. The aim here wasn’t necessarily to destroy the ALA, but, as with Scalise’s threats against universities, to intimidate and incentivize it to cut ties with and carry out its own repression of left-wing and other undesirable voices. And unfortunately, Drabinski’s constitutional rights did not always get a full-throated defense from liberals, who responded more with a defensive crouch.
Indiana, meanwhile, has seen several bills passed through its GOP-controlled state legislature and signed into law this year that read like a state-level forerunner of Project Esther.(…)”
The entire piece is a bit longer than the usual so I have to leave you with this much quoted.
p.s. unfortunately I believe most of this to be hot air. On the other hand the situation is already bad enough and won´t change much to the better regardless who wins. But Marcetic couldn´t admit that. Why? Does he really buy his own scaremongering?
