Montclair, NJ: Taking Action Against Suburban Fascism

The following report was sent anonymously to It’s Going Down, which we repost below.

On Thursday, February 22nd at 7pm, in so-called Montclair, New Jersey (colonized Lenni-Lenape land), the Montclair Republican Club hosted Murray Bessette from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation to speak about “putting an end to political correctness” at a restaurant called Greek Taverna, known to disrespect and steal wages from their mostly immigrant, mostly POC workforce (according to a former employee).

The Montclair Republicans are known to have been meeting since at least 2012; you can find their names, where they meet, dues paid, and other such unsecured information here and here. Part of the reason they feel so safe making this information public is that they, among all white upper/middle-class suburban dads, have largely evaded the spotlight for supporting Trump and neo-Nazis. They hide behind legitimated political positions, and do real damage to communities. They’ve hosted various other figures working from within local to national politics to advance the ongoing death-bringing neoliberal colonial project.

In response to this, we put up posters outside their meeting to remind them and everyone patronizing the restaurant exactly where these people’s allegiances lie, and that while previously undetected they now know we have eyes on their bullshit. It is, and has always been, crucial to present opposition to oppressors where they live and operate.

While the Montclair Republicans are one small group, they represent a rarely discussed power base for fascism and its normalization. This commitment to proliferating reactionary politics is revealed in their programming. In this instance, their guests, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, are part of an ongoing project to criminalize “Communism” and further remove it from popular political discourse as a viable framework. They attempt this by raising funds for a museum in DC to, ironically enough, celebrate the lives of Nazis among an inflated and false account of the people killed by communist regimes.

The VOCMF is an extension of the National Captive Nations Committee, an anti-Communist advocacy group established by Eisenhower post-McCarthyist persecution of Communists. They have ties to the genocidal Ukrainian Nationalist group OUN-B. Tracing the group’s affiliations back to its roots is important in understanding where fascists build their power base, and where they can be confronted.

Amerikkkan conservatives are notorious for supporting and participating in (along with liberals at many, many junctures) the most oppressive of colonial, white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal policies and practices. This specific brand of conservativism attempts to legitimate them by subsuming them into viable political positions. They create the discourse that sees gentrification as “beautification,” policing bodily autonomy as “pro-life,” confinement and deportation as “making the streets safer while getting our jobs back,” and the list goes on.

These are the lawyers that represent racists on hypocritical free speech grounds, the developers that take advantage of zoning regulations, the investors that seek to profit off of the degradation of human life, your not-so-friendly local pig that targets black and brown drivers to fund his department. They are the ones who hold the banners advocating “first-amendment rights.” These are the people providing the platform, who seek to cut “unnecessary spending” in the pursuit of a white utopia their psyches are wired to imagine at the expense of a world without free community gardens and house shows. These are the white fathers who teach their white kids not to play with the Black children who live on Pine street. (For context: Montclair is considered a ‘progressive’ town, and has been since the 70s when they implemented the ‘magnet’ system to desegregate schools. However, this community-imposed segregation is not uncommon, and the effects are especially damaging to children who can’t wait for summer to be over so they can see their friends.)

Remember, you don’t necessarily need to take the train into the city or drive down to the rural South to oppose and destabilize fascist organizing. The reason that there’s never anything antifascist going down in your hometown is because you’re not doing it.