By Monica Moorehead and Lamont Lilly
June 12, 2016

Workers World Party’s election campaign, with Monica Moorehead and Lamont Lilly as presidential and vice presidential candidates respectively, sends our solidarity, condolences, and fight-back spirit to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer communities and all those impacted by the anti-LGBTQ mass shooting that occurred June 12 at the Pulse club in Orlando, Fla., which has taken the lives of at least 50 people. Over 50 more have been wounded.

The shooting happened as many communities across the country and globe kick off Pride month. Pride came out of the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969, in which queer and trans people — predominantly people of color, homeless people and youth — fought back against unending police raids.

While the media hesitates to name the mass shooting as an incident fueled by anti-LGBTQ bigotry, our campaign calls it a direct attack on LGBTQ people. Its violence should not be taken lightly or viewed in isolation within a U.S. society in which Black lives don’t matter when it comes to police violence and mass incarceration; in which Mexicans and other immigrants of color are detained and deported in record numbers; and in which women are sexually assaulted on college campuses and in the U.S. military in epidemic numbers.

In the middle of the political circus called the presidential elections, we are reminded that workers and oppressed people will always bear the brunt of the violence so long as capitalism and its bourgeois democracy are in place. Millions of people are excluded from the existing political process — prisoners, youth, the undocumented and many others who cannot access the polls because of disability, gender identity and/or race. Yet when the crisis of capitalism is exposed in the form of massive layoffs, tuition hikes, police brutality — and even mass shootings — it is those who are excluded from the bourgeois political process who are blamed.

Blame the system and fight back!

We cannot expect any of these conditions to change just because there is another presidential election. Trump’s unapologetic anti-migrant, anti-Mexican, anti-Muslim and misogynistic rhetoric has mobilized and effectively misled millions of workers to believe that a billionaire has the best interest of the working class in mind. Trump’s rhetoric cannot be separated from the events in Orlando, nor from any attacks on oppressed peoples. Clinton is no better, as the political dynasty she has been a part of for decades — the Democratic establishment — has approved wars, mass deportations, and austerity measures taken in the form of mass incarceration, cuts to social services and much more.

U.S. democracy only serves the ruling class in its efforts to consolidate wealth and profit by waging war against Black and Brown people at home, at the borders, in the Global South and in every corner of the earth that imperialism can latch its claws.

The capitalist crisis becomes more intense day by day. This system is no longer able to pull itself out of crisis. It relies on tragedies like the mass shooting in Orlando to stir up panic and pull allegiance from the masses, who are tricked into believing that the greatest threat to their safety exists anywhere but inside the U.S., the belly of the beast.

We stand shoulder to shoulder with LGBTQ people, Muslims, migrants, immigrants, Black and Brown youth, women, workers, and all oppressed people who refuse to be used in imperialist wars and divide-and-conquer strategies. In the spirit of the Stonewall Rebellion, the Compton Cafeteria Riots and the resistance LGBTQ people display everyday, we say: Unite the Working Class! LGBTQ Liberation Now! Smash Racism and Islamophobia! Abolish Capitalism! Fight for Socialism!