The violent assault Tuesday on Representative Ilhan Omar, the Democratic congresswoman from Minneapolis, is an ominous development. A fascist Trump supporter ran towards her as she was reading a statement against the mass repression unleashed by the White House in her congressional district, spraying her with a pungent liquid that was later determined to be vinegar but could easily have been acid or a neurotoxin.
If the attacker, 55-year-old Anthony Kazmierczak, had used a gun, he could have killed Omar. Her personal security guards were too late to prevent him from reaching the congresswoman, although they eventually overpowered him and turned him over to police. While little has been made public of Kazmierczak’s political background, online reports indicate that he was a follower of numerous fascist social media accounts, including Benny Johnson, Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, Elon Musk and Tim Pool.
The attack came just after Omar spoke the words, “We must abolish ICE for good. And DHS Secretary Kristi Noem must resign or face impeachment.” While she was clearly shocked by the attack, Omar was uninjured and insisted on continuing her remarks after a brief pause to recover, asking her staff and audience not to let “people like this ugly man” prevail.
Even more ominous than the attack itself is the response of Donald Trump, who has been inciting his fascist followers against Omar for years. When ABC News asked him about the attack, he said, “I think she’s a fraud. She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her.” As for watching the video of the attack, he said, “I hope I don’t have to bother.”
In the hours before the Tuesday attack, Trump announced a Justice Department probe into Omar, claiming that she had gotten rich from corrupt practices allegedly involving the Somali community in Minneapolis and vilified her before a rally of several thousand supporters in the suburbs of Des Moines, Iowa.
Trump has made use of phony allegations of massive fraud by childcare centers in Minneapolis involving federal subsidies during the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The supposed scandal was concocted by Nick Shirley, a fascist social media “journalist,” whose propaganda videos were heavily promoted by Fox News and other pro-Trump media outlets.
The Department of Justice promptly opened a criminal investigation into the fraud charges, and this became the initial pretext for mobilizing federal agents for the ongoing invasion of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area.
Trump’s obsessive hate campaign against a black, female, Muslim, immigrant member of Congress is not just a product of his personal bigotry. The fascist president is whipping up his most frenzied followers for violent attacks on his political opponents and critics.
Omar is the second black Democratic member of Congress to be attacked by a fascist Trump supporter in five days. Representative Maxwell Frost of Florida, who is Afro-Latino, was attending the Sundance Film Festival in Utah when he was punched by an attacker who said Trump would have Frost deported and yelled racial slurs as he ran away. The attacker, 28-year-old Christian Joel Young of Centerville, Utah, was arrested and faces assault charges.
At the Iowa rally, despite suggestions that he might “deescalate” the federal onslaught on Minnesota, Trump declared that immigrants arrested by ICE in that state were “hardened, vicious, horrible criminals” and that anti-ICE demonstrators were “paid insurrectionists.”
FBI Director Kash Patel announced Monday that the FBI was opening an investigation into the Signal group chat through which Minneapolis residents have been coordinating the “rapid response” campaign against the ICE violence and kidnappings. He made the announcement, not at a press briefing, but in an interview with fascist podcaster Benny Johnson. “You cannot create a scenario that illegally entraps and puts law enforcement in harm’s way,” he said in the interview, although he did not explain how reporting illegal activities by the immigration Gestapo constituted entrapment.
This was Patel’s response to a provocation by Cam Higby, a right-wing activist who claimed to have “infiltrated” the Signal group chat being used to coordinate protest activity in the Twin Cities area. Patel told Johnson, “As soon as Higby put that post out, I opened an investigation on it,” he said. “We immediately opened up that investigation, because that sort of Signal chat—being coordinated with individuals not just locally in Minnesota, but maybe even around the country—if that leads to a break in the federal statute or a violation of some law, then we are going to arrest people.”
He also claimed “substantial progress” in an FBI investigation into groups and people allegedly responsible for funding resistance to immigration enforcement. Without citing any evidence, he claimed that the protests and ICE monitoring campaign were “not happening organically.”
The FBI director made the announcement only hours after the publication by Fox News of a lengthy article—clearly based on government intelligence sources—which witch-hunted a half dozen left-wing groups, claiming they were in control behind the scenes of the protests in Minneapolis.
The language of the Fox report is typical of McCarthyite witch-hunting, claiming that after Alex Pretti was killed, “a national network of socialist, communist and Marxist-Leninist cells in the United States leveraged the tragic fatality into a nationwide protest operation.”
The report goes on to claim: “The Minneapolis activation marked the beginning of an almost instantaneous weekend surge by far-left organizations, including hardened socialist and communist groups operating in an ecosystem that national security experts describe as an insurgent-style operation designed to exploit tragedy to wage a domestic political war.”
Among the organizations portrayed as the evil geniuses behind the outpouring of mass resistance to ICE in Minneapolis-St. Paul are the Party of Socialism and Liberation, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, Socialist Alternative, BreakThrough News, People’s Forum, the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee, the local chapter of Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Regardless of the fundamental political differences that the Socialist Equality Party has with these organizations, we oppose and denounce this witch-hunting campaign as a threat to the democratic rights of the entire working class and all those politically opposed to the Trump administration. Every one of these groups has the democratic right to conduct political activity.
Similarly, we oppose any effort by the Trump administration to criminalize its bourgeois political opponents within the Democratic Party. Even as its own members come under attack, the Democratic Party seeks to downplay the danger posed by Trump and the developing conspiracy for dictatorship, seeking continuously an arrangement with the fascist president.