Remarks on the transition of the United States to open fascistisation
Tomasz Konicz / November 1, 2025
“We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be, like, dead.”
Donald Trump1
The assassination of the fascist Charlie Kirk – his correct name – in September 2025 marks a tipping point in the process of the fascistisation of the United States, where efforts to establish a right-wing discursive hegemony are being replaced by open repression. The right-wing rhetoric of freedom of speech, which for years served to legitimise the barbarisation of public discourse, is giving way to a tendency towards the open suppression of dissident opinions. The Trump administration’s aim is not merely to silence individual critical voices; rather, it is about control over mass media, which are to be brought into line, as well as the soon-to-follow attacks on left-wing and left-liberal movements and organisations.
Link: https://wertkritikinenglish.wordpress.com/2025/11/02/horst-wessel-reimagined/
The impending repression builds on the largely successful right-wing struggle for hegemony in recent years. The extent of this right-wing hegemony is evident from the mere fact that the fascist Kirk – who amongst other things, literally lamented the end of slavery in the United States2 – is now consistently referred to in mainstream media as a “conservative activist”. The forgotten murders of Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota, killed by a right-wing anti-abortion fanatic, stand in stark contrast to the national mourning declared for the fascist Kirk. Not to mention Trump’s reactions to the murder of anti-fascist Heather Heyer during his first presidency in the summer of 2017, which consisted of presidential mockery and blame shifting,3 whereas now a system of denunciation is being established – one that effectively imposes employment bans on all those who refuse to show empathy for the right-wing man who, throughout his life, condemned any basic impulse towards empathy as the work of the devil in an evil fascist tradition.4
And of course, this must also be said: the mockery, the cheering, the schadenfreude with which the post-left accompanied the murder of Kirk – who was shot in the presence of his children – is itself a characteristic of pre-fascist brutalisation. It is reprehensible not only from the standpoint of basic human empathy, which one must not allow fascism to take away, but also for simple political reasons: the US right is fashioning a martyr here, a kind of Horst Wessel, whose violent death serves as the catalyst for the open fascistization of the United States. By designating the decentralised grassroots movement “Antifa” as a “terrorist organisation,” fascism aims not only to criminalise the anti-fascist movement; it also deliberately creates repressive tools that are as vague as possible, capable of being used against all kinds of oppositional groups and movements.
The racket alliance that is – well – still habitually referred to as the “Trump administration,” is fully aware of its lies and delusions about the alleged “left-wing terror” that is said to hold the United States in a stranglehold. Shortly after the attack on Kirk, the Department of Justice removed from its website its own study on extremist violence in the United States,5 according to which roughly three-quarters of all politically motivated violence in recent decades were attributable to the US right. The deployment of the National Guard in cities controlled by Democrats (Chicago, Portland) bears no rational connection to the protests and localised clashed into which desperate migrant communities are driven by the daily harassment of ICE raid squads.
The tightening of the screws is accompanied by purges within the state apparatus, which is being saturated with right-wing extremists or opportunists loyal to Trump.6 At the FBI – now headed by Trump’s “terror clown” Kash Patel – investigators who were investigating Trump’s 2021 coup attempt were dismissed in several waves.7The much-hated immigration agency ICE, which under the leadership of right-wing extremist Stephen Miller8 is being transformed into a de facto extralegal militia loyal to the president, underwent similar purges in numerous leadership positions alongside extensive new hiring in October 2025.9 The goal here is to remove all forces that might stand in the way of an escalation of fascist terror attacks10 on impoverished, immigrant-dominated neighbourhoods and population groups.
The justice apparatus – long dominated by the American right11 – now functions, in the form of Attorney General Pam Bondi, as a direct instrument of power for Trump, used to eliminate the president’s opponents through indictments. It is a campaign of revenge, characteristic of authoritarian oligarchies, in which the state’s function as an “ideal collective capitalist” increasingly erodes, and the state becomes the prey of rackets and oligarchic networks that instrumentalise it for their particular interests. The military, too, is being brought into line with fascist policies by the Trump administration, as its deployment against the “enemy within” is publicly promoted12 – the first resignations of senior military officials are already occurring, particularly in connection with the illegal actions of the US military in the escalation against Venezuela.13
Expansion of the repression zone
Repression is thus expanding in parallel with the consolidation of power within the state apparatus – first it targeted migrants and “illegals,” and now it is the opposition that comes into the crosshairs – not exclusively the left, but also simply liberal, non-right movements and groups, even solidly capitalist-democratic structures such as the Soros Foundation. The return of comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who had been ousted by the Disney corporation on the orders of the Trump administration and is now back on air after a boycott campaign, represents a symbolic Pyrrhic victory. His show, Himmel said upon returning, is not important; what matters is whether freedom of speech will survive.
And in a sense, he is right. Control over the media apparatus, over the late-capitalist culture industry, is crucial – and here, the authoritarian transformation is proceeding at a breakneck pace. Trump’s man at the FCC, Brendan Carr, made the new rules of the game clear when he threatened to revoke the licenses of broadcasters airing Trump-critical programs. Trump himself expressed similar views, explicitly calling for negative reporting to be punished through the revocation of media licenses.14
This threat will continue to have its effects – media corporations will take care to minimise behaviour that could harm their business, behaviour increasingly associated with criticism of Trump. Journalists will simply cease career-damaging behaviour, which will extend the usual reflexes of self-censorship – which, for example, stifle any criticism of the system within the media – to the person of the “president”. Censorship thrives on the threat against members of the middle class who have something to lose, not on the constant application of coercive measures.
What is decisive, however, are the upheavals facing the late-capitalist culture industry in the United States. In the background, gigantic consolidation processes are underway in the US media market, which could almost entirely place it under the control of the American right. An oligarchic ownership and power structure, similar to those seen in Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, or state-capitalist China, is clearly taking shape. The far-right Fox News empire of the reactionary billionaire Rupert Murdoch15 is likely soon to face competition from Trump’s crony and tech billionaire Larry Ellison,16 who, thanks to a direct line to the White House, is being given excellent prospects of expanding his corporate conglomerate (including CBS, Paramount, and Skydance) to include CNN, HBO/Warner Bros., and stakes in TikTok. Ellison is already moving CBS to the right17 and ending the Trump-critical The Late Show with Stephen Colbert18 – not unlike the ideological taboos (no criticism of the “free markets”) imposed by the owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, on the flagship newspaper when Trump took office.19 Meanwhile, the Washington Post is legitimising in its commentaries Trump’s demolition work on the East Wing of the White House, which is being financed in part by Amazon.20
Oligarchic state capitalism?
Right-wing discursive hegemony in the United States is thus largely complete, as key demands of the right – such as sealing off borders to refugees – have become mainstream, shared even by post-left icons like Bernie Sanders.21 A significant portion of political debate in the United States has long been taking place within the increasingly differentiated right, which also explains the speculation that the fascist Charlie Kirk was killed by rival right-wing extremist rackets, such as the openly antisemitic and fascist22 Groypers.23 Antisemitism, as the ideological manifestation of the crisis-driven societal fetishism – from the Israel complex to the Epstein complex – constitutes the decisive ideological frontline within the American right, as well as the bridge to the regressive post-left in the United States, personified by figures such as Marjorie Taylor Greene.24
In manifest phases of crisis, tendencies towards state capitalism generally gain the upper hand, as the state must deploy its resources and power to support and maintain a stagnating process of valorisation. This occurs independently of the political orientation of the functional elites, which explains, for example, the parallels in economic policy between Nazi Germany and Roosevelt’s United States in the 1930s. In the United States, this crisis tendency in the 21st century appears to be unfolding in the form of oligarchic state capitalism. A complex intertwining of oligarchy and state is taking place, in which personal contacts, political allegiance and bribes become decisive for setting the course of economic policy.
The state is increasingly coming to the forefront, yet at the same time it is losing its function as the “ideal collective capitalist,” whose legislative role is to optimise the valorisation process for society as a whole, and is instead becoming the prey of rackets, cliques, etc. Authoritarian formation and state erosion are merely two sides of the same coin. The racket also protects its own people – Trump not only has his personal opponents persecuted by the state apparatus, but he has also pardoned a record number of loyalists and has halted proceedings against corrupt allies, such as former ICE director Tom Homan.25
It is not only the state-driven efforts to “reindustrialise” the United States and the sometimes direct government stakes in struggling economic giants like Intel26 – the White House is also assuming political control over previously intentionally neutral regulatory bodies. In addition to the media regulatory agency FCC, which now exerts political pressure through the threat of license revocations, it is above all the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, whose powers of intervention and oversight are likely to be politically instrumentalised in the future.27 The FTC, whose responsibilities include consumer and competition protection, particularly the approval of mergers, had been run in a bipartisan manner. Trump recently terminated this established bipartisan leadership structure, in which both Republicans and Democrats were always represented, and replaced it with his own people.
The White House can now intervene directly in the processes of capital concentration in the United States – a fact that explains the many generous donations from titans of U.S. industry towards Trump’s ridiculous, neo-Stalinist, wedding-cake style construction projects,28 as well as the generous settlements in all the lawsuits the U.S. president filed against CBS or Google. A well-funded direct line to the White House has now become essential for economic success in the United States – which is not coincidentally reminiscent of state-oligarchic power structures that prevail in places like Russia or China.
Added to this is direct corruption, in which members of the Trump clan – true to the authoritarian motto “I am the state” – expand their economic and political power with the backing of billions from allied Gulf despotisms. Electronic Arts, one of the world’s largest and most controversial game producers, is now being acquired by a conglomerate of investment funds in which the Saudi regime, as well as Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, have a stake.29 Business, geopolitics, and the propagation of fascist ideology – to which the toxic gamer culture is particularly receptive – all converge in such deals.
Fascism or prison
The blatant corruption, which even takes on monetary forms in the form of a Trump meme currency,30 and the publicly propagated authoritarian dismantling of the remnants of late-capitalist democracy – the Trump-Krack Alliance, both inside and outside the White House, has definitively crossed the Rubicon into fascism; there is no turning back. This means that those in power in Washington cannot afford to lose the upcoming elections if they do not want to risk ending up in prison (only Trump enjoys extensive immunity thanks to the right-wing dominated U.S. Supreme Court). On the one hand, the existing efforts to manipulate election results are being intensified, implemented through the redrawing of electoral districts along Republican lines. With the legal backing of the reactionary Supreme Court,31 this restructuring – mainly taking place in Republican states, where Democratic districts are fragmented and absorbed into Republican districts – means that in the next election the Democrats would have to win by “two or three percent” (New York Times)32 to actually regain the majority in the House of Representatives.
In a sense, an authoritarian race against time is currently underway – initially until the 2026 midterm elections. Trump wants to keep all options open in case so-called gerrymandering33 proves insufficient to maintain a Republican majority in Washington. The public announcements of domestic military deployments, made by Trump before a gathering of military leaders in Virginia;34 the provocative attacks by largely far-right ICE militias in migrant districts;35 the legally controversial and contested deployment of the National Guard in Democratic cities – this militarisation and militantisation of domestic policy is paving the way for the distortion or even prevention of a free election in 2026. The crisis, the escalation, is to be provoked, if necessary, to violently prevent a loss of power during the election process, should the right-wing majorities fail to materialise due to the rapidly deteriorating social situation of the majority of the population.
The state of emergency would once again act as a midwife of fascism, as evidenced by the White House’s attacks on Democratic cities such as Chicago36 or Portland37; Trump’s talk of civil war and “burning cities” is, on the one hand, the usual projective terror fantasies of the extreme right, in which the will to maintain capital even in its existential crises is ideologically disguised. If necessary, a crisis or conflict will be deliberately provoked through violence in order to make these apparent delusions a reality. Besides escalation against the “enemy within,” there remains the tried-and-tested imperialist method of external military escalation, which Trump is pursuing as part of his pan-American strategy of dominance over Venezuela. Here too, fascism pushes the existing crisis-imperialist methods to the extreme, deliberately and openly operating in a lawless space. It makes little effort to disguise its imperialist goals behind the empty rhetoric of democracy and human rights, deliberately propagating brutality and dehumanisation.38
But even fascist ideology, as personified by Trump with his bizarre conspiracy theories, contains elements of distorted reality. The talk of a state of war and chaos in America’s cities, supposedly caused by Antifa and migrants, reflects the crisis process to which fascism offers its inherently terrorist response. Misery and crisis-induced marginalisation produce the corresponding violence, the formation of gangs in slums, which even in the U.S. give rise to a low-intensity, anomic civil war. Weekends in Chicago are murderous,39 and many impoverished neighbourhoods resemble the Third World. And it is this very real social erosion that fascist ideology reifies and personifies in its enemy images (migrants, leftists, liberals, etc.).
The socio-ecological crisis process in which capitalism finds itself is what truly explains the Trump phenomenon – it is literally written on the ridiculous red baseball caps of this fascist movement, which only wants to make America great again because, after decades of deindustrialisation and social disintegration,40 it is no longer great. Fascism is, at its core, the terrorist crisis-form of capitalist rule, which is why the term “fascism” aptly captures the character of the MAGA movement. It is not merely an oligarchy, not a new Bonapartism, or anything like that – the systemic crisis in which capital finds itself gives fascism, as a form of centrist extremism in the 21st century, the same momentum as it did in the 1930s after the 1929 crash.
And even Trump’s rhetoric of civil war is more than just a fascist projection – it reflects the inevitable transformational struggle into which the late-capitalist world system is entering in its agony. There is no going back to bourgeois democracy, to the social or welfare state, to the constitutional state, to globalisation, or to the liberal “open society,” since the crisis process is irreversible. The only remaining option is the emancipatory41 transformational struggle42 for what should come after the collapse of the subjectless rule of capital.
Translated from the original German
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