Strangely (very, very weird!), at the exact same time as the awful human destruction of Rump’s Project 2025 “Juan Crow” budget and policy legislation gradually reveals itself to more and more People, the bizarro Epstein file malpractice fetish exploded in the MAGAts faces, and the satirists of South Park exposed Rump, using Jesus Christ and an AI-generated presidential micro-penis. Yowza!
The context of moral crossroads marked by mass starvation genocide in Gaza pointing to an ethnically cleansed Trump Imperial Riviera of the Middle East is noted, but I don’t have any more words for that right now…
IMHO only 1 or 2 of our greatest theorists (M Gessen & Henry Giroux) and a relative handful of our best rhetoricians & writers sampled below (Shea Howell, Jamelle Bouie and Thomas B. Edsall come to mind, my apologies for those of you I omit there…) have been generally able to keep up with the ongoing neofascist coup. 99% of corporate media, and even a disturbing majority of independent progressive voices, seem unable to keep the real fight in focus, for all the noise, smoke, dysfunction & Rump regime bullshit! I think this critical deficit has been a major source of the sense of generalized helplessness many have noted, but I hope it is changing now.
Ten years since the golden escalator skit, the wannabe mafia state don dear leader says and does things that are absolutely stupid and insane every day. Yet too many citizens have (at least until now) been deprived of real world, fact-based critical insights into the neofascist bullshit driving all the media noise and con-man tricks. This utterly surreal moment of Epstein pedophilia hysteria, and South Park’s righteous AI-enabled rebuke of MAGA, coincides with more emerging (and really challenging, effective) critical voices.
I hope greater critical insight and intensified opposition not only slow down, but eventually help bring down the raging authoritarian beast. Here are some links and brief summaries of what I’m talking about:
Start with Gessen’s book, Surviving Autocracy , which should be required reading. This quote sums up our new regime as “mafia state”:
“Trump grasped the essence of the system, which turned money into power and power into money but, until Trump came along, did it politely, tastefully, and by group agreement. In mafia states like Hungary and Russia the word ‘corruption’ describes the people in charge using the instruments of government to amass wealth, but also using their wealth to perpetuate power. This corruption is integral to the system.” – M Gessen, Surviving Autocracy
Giroux’s essays fiercely and unfailingly advocate for the crucial political role of education and the power of culture in fighting back. Ten days before the 2025 inauguration, his Beyond the Illusion: The Dark Dream of a Totalitarian Empire , named both the neofascist essence of MAGA and the anti-capitalist spine of fightbacks:
“Historical consciousness is now deemed dangerous, and dissent is branded as treason. The impending horrors of Trump’s presidency are starkly evident in his escalating rhetoric of vengeance, labeling critics and political opponents as “the enemy within.” This is not governance—it is a declaration of war on democracy itself.
What we are witnessing today is the rise of a reengineered “totalitarian subject,” forged in the wreckage of institutions that once upheld the common good, basic rights and civil liberties, replaced by machinery designed to sustain authoritarian rule. This subject is governed by fear, surrendering their agency to the grip of cult-like devotion and the iron hand of strongman figures. They are ensnared in a culture of ignorance, enveloped by the fog of anti-intellectualism, and animated by a disdain for difference and the Other.
Our fight is a generational one, waged for young people who are being systematically sacrificed at the altar of greed and authoritarianism. They are slaughtered by wars that enrich the few, brutalized as mere consumer pawns, shackled by oppressive debt, robbed of historical memory, and rendered disposable by a society that treats them as surplus. These are not isolated injustices but part of a broader assault on democracy itself, now hollowed out by gangster capitalism and reduced to a mere swindle of fulfillment.
Oligarchic gangster capitalism, with its brazen consolidation of power and wealth, has overtaken neoliberalism as the dominant force masquerading as democracy. This ideological and economic rot will persist until the public rejects the false equation of capitalism with democracy. When money drives politics, and human rights are subordinated to capital accumulation, democracy crumbles—along with morality, justice, and the rule of law.
Yet, even in the face of such devastation, hope endures. Hope and resistance, though wounded, remain the flames that keep the possibility of a better world alive. Without hope, there is only fear, complicity, and the stench of death. We must nurture this hope, transforming it into a collective will for justice, a vision for a multi-racial working class rising like a phoenix from the ashes of despair. This is not a struggle for the faint of heart—it is a ferocious battle requiring courage, vision, and mass action.”
Howell’s March 30, 2025 weekly column Thinking for Ourselves – Human Rights , like many of her absolutely critical interventions, mapped what must be done, backward and forward, 2 months into the coup:
“Over the last two weeks we have seen cruelty directed at some of the most vulnerable people in our communities. Somewhere in the future people will look back at the pictures of men shackled in chain gangs, doubled over with heads shaved, and rank it with those of the early days of the holocaust, where elder Jewish men and women were forced to clean streets, while being publicly humiliated. Such images capture the depravity of power, the powerlessness of onlookers. They are the early warning signs of brutalities to come.
These images have been joined by those of young students abducted illegally, without any sense of due process or care for their dignity. They are imprisoned, cut off from family and legal counsel. They have been targeted because they have spoken out against war, against violence, against the dehumanization of people. At this writing at least eight international students and professors have been identified for deportation. The State Department acknowledges that it has revoked the visa of at least 300 people who are studying at universities across the country. These abductions and the harsh treatment of individuals by the Trump minions should come as no surprise. Trump vilifies people who have immigrated here, fueling fear that is the basis of all such humiliation. And he was abundantly clear during his campaign that he intended to crush student demonstrations that are pro-Palestinian. He was explicit in pledging he would deport all those who speak up and organize for a just peace.
Legal challenges are being raised by civil rights groups, constitutional lawyers, families, and supporters. These challenges raise fundamental questions of human society: the right to think and speak freely, the right of all human beings to dignity and to be safe in their body and personal integrity, and the right to join with others to advance ideas in opposition to those in power and authority. The Trump administration has shown no respect for any of these fundamental rights, nor does it seem inclined to respect the orders of judges and courts. The resistance sparked by these actions will grow. Along with demonstrations and gatherings on campuses, individuals and organizations are coming forward to demand that people be restored to their families and their work here in the US. We all need to contribute what we can, where we are to this resistance. Whether it is text messaging about dropping bombs, forcing young men into handcuffs and chains, or grabbing students off the streets, the disregard for human dignity is essential to fascist functioning.
In these times we can draw strength from how most of the people on earth reacted to earlier fascist devastation. At the end of World War II, appalled by the brutality of fascism, the United Nations crafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Preamble sets out values to guide us:
‘Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,
Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,
Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom…’
Defending freedom of conscience, the right to lives of freedom and to governments of laws, this document reminds us we can do better collectively. It helps us think beyond narrow questions of citizenship to larger issues of the fundamental dignity of all people. Fear and force are not the values that frame our futures. We have the power to organize ourselves on values that express our best and deepest aspirations.”
Bouie’s New York Times op ed pieces since the January 20, 2025 inauguration of Rump 2 have been exemplary. His June 28 revelations on the “Birthright Citizenship/Nationwide Inunction” case of Trump v CASA, focused on Justice Ketanji Jackson’s dissent and displayed her passion (as well as Howell’s strategic direction) on his elite corporate media forum:
“…[I]t is difficult to escape the conclusion that a Republican-appointed majority with an expansive view of executive power is working, again, to give as much freedom of action to a Republican president, in this case, the Republican president who secured their supermajority. To return to Justice Jackson’s dissent, she notes that by ending the practice of nationwide injunctions in this particular circumstance, the majority has empowered a lawless president to violate the rights of American citizens, who then have no particular relief other than what they can get in a slow-moving judicial process. The majority, Jackson argues, is missing the forest for the trees. The nature of the Constitution, from the original document to its amendments, is that it is a brief against the exercise of arbitrary power. And here is the Supreme Court blessing a president’s exercise of arbitrary power as if the executive were the sovereign lord of the nation and not a mere servant of the Constitution.
It’s worth quoting at length from Jackson’s dissent: ‘
The majority’s ruling thus not only diverges from first principles, it is also profoundly dangerous, since it gives the executive the go-ahead to sometimes wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate.’
‘The founders of the United States of America,’ she continues, ‘squarely rejected a governing system in which the King ruled all and all others, including the courts, were his subordinates. In our Constitution-centered system, the people are the rulers and we have rule of law.’ The majority, Jackson argues, has created a law-free zone of arbitrary power…
It is hard to know for certain whether the Republican majority understands the legal world it’s building and the power it has given to the president. My view, like Jackson’s, is that it is laying the groundwork for the exercise of arbitrary power, unaccountable save for the next election — an American-style presidential dictatorship.”
Edsall is Bouie’s NYT colleague, whose social science research has been a repeated go-to source of Rump’s naked imperial madness parading and exposure. His recent itemized indictment of Trump’s cryptocurrency scams is one example of exploding scandalous discourse in the long shadows of Epstein and South Park, which I hope portends much, much deeper and damaging attacks on the MAGAts’ neofascist leadership:
“President Trump is methodically restructuring the federal regulatory and legislative apparatus. That much is known. What is less well understood is how that will pave the way for the Trump family to make potentially hundreds of millions of dollars from its multiple cryptocurrency ventures. On March 20, Trump told the Blockworks Digital Assets Summit that his goal was to make America ‘the undisputed Bitcoin superpower and the crypto capital of the world.’ So far, Trump, his family and his investment partners are major beneficiaries. In case anyone forgot, the Constitution prohibits the president from accepting ‘any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.’
After GD Culture Group Limited, a Nevada-based firm with ties to China, announced on May 12 that it planned to buy as much as $300 million of $TRUMP, a memecoin marketed by Trump, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, Charles Dent, who was the chairman of the House Ethics Committee, told The Times: ‘Make no mistake. These foreign entities and governments obviously want to curry favor with the president. ‘This is completely out of bounds, Dent added, and raises all sorts of ethical, legal and constitutional issues that must be addressed.’
Back on Jan. 23, Trump issued an executive order, ‘Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology,’ the first in a series of orders asserting his power over federal agencies overseeing the ‘use of digital assets, blockchain technology, and related technologies across all sectors of the economy.’ One of Trump’s next steps, on July 18, was to sign into law the Genius Act establishing federal rules for the issuance of so-called stablecoins, a digital asset with fixed values backed by dollars or other liquid assets. The Act bars members of congress and most federal employees from entering the “stablecoin” business, but exempts the president.
Fred Wertheimer, founder and president of Democracy 21, a federal ethics watchdog group, wrote me by email to express his indignation: ‘The Trump exemption for stablecoins that are prohibited for members of Congress highlights the fact that Trump is obsessed with using the presidency to vacuum up every dollar he can get his hands on. Since the purchasers of stablecoin are not made public, the stablecoin business provides Trump with the potential to engage in secret influence selling and to do so in violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause. The stablecoin business provides Trump with the potential for secret opportunities to abuse his office to greatly increase his private wealth and to secretly provide benefits to foreign countries at the expense of our country.’
Trump is in undisputed presidential first place when it comes to misuse of his public office to rake in enormous personal gain. … The Democratic staff of the Senate Banking Committee issued an analysis that argued that ‘The latest GENIUS Act draft circulating online does not include any provision to prevent Trump and the Trump family from raking in enormous amounts of money from their corrupt cryptocurrency schemes. Instead, it would grow the stablecoin market and fuel Trump’s crypto profits. President Trump’s stablecoin, USD1, has become the 5th largest in the world in just the last month and is now available to the broader public for trading. This means more and more anonymous buyers, big companies, and foreign governments can be expected to start using the President’s stablecoin as both a shadowy bank account and a way to pay off the President personally. Foreign countries will be able to curry favor with President Trump by using his stablecoin. The draft bill would impose no new restrictions on government officials or prevent President Trump from accepting fees from foreign adversaries or other foreign entities with business interests in the United States seeking favorable treatment. It would give President Trump more opportunities to reward buyers of his coins with favors like tariff exemptions, pardons, and government appointments. President Trump will functionally regulate his own stablecoin.’
Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, speaking on the Senate floor, asked his colleagues: ‘Is it a good idea to have foreign entities making $2 billion investments in currency that is issued by American politicians? We could have fixed that in this legislation. Not only did we not fix it, we didn’t even have a debate on it. We didn’t even have a single amendment come to the floor.’
Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, described one purchase of Trump stablecoin, also from the Senate floor: ‘A U.A.E. state-backed investment firm used Trump’s USD1 to finance a $2 billion investment in a crypto exchange whose owner is reportedly lobbying President Trump for a pardon, essentially giving Trump a cut of this $2 billion deal. This is the model: Deposit your money in the “Bank of Trump” and use his stablecoin to make payments. He earns money by investing those deposits in other assets, like a bank, and also earns money on every transaction that occurs whenever the stablecoin is used as a means of payment.’
‘It was a money grab and a conflict of interest. The potential for conflicts of interest will also continue over time. Companies and countries looking to curry favor with the administration or seeking government action may believe it is in their interest to purchase the coins to show their support. That risk is heightened by the structuring of the issuance, because additional tokens will be released over the next four years which will presumably generate additional revenue to the Trump Organization, which creates incentives.’
– Timothy Massad, director of the Digital Assets Policy Project at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School and former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (from 2014 to 2017) (quoted in Edsall)
‘Trump has made hundreds of millions of dollars from hawking a memecoin — that is, a crypto token that doesn’t even try to pretend to have some underlying value or purpose — to his followers and to those hoping to buy influence with the president. There is really no comparison in American history to the blatant corruption of Trump’s pay-for-access memecoin dinner, where hundreds of primarily foreign nationals spent anywhere from $55,000 to more than $37 million for a ticket to the event.’
– Molly White (quoted in Edsall)
Another very recent example of how the Epstein mania seems unaccountably to have broadened and deepened public discourse is a brilliant takedown by Soraya Nadia McDonald of Rump abuses of Latinx People as “Juan Crow” . If, as she suggests, America can come to see the many cosplayed neofascist abuse videos vomited out by Rump and his sycophants as the modern equivalent of the infamous racist “Birth of a Nation” cinema, then Rump’s midlife dalliances with Epstein’s Lolita Express may be the least of his backlash worries! McDonald’s piece (like Edsall’s deconstruction of Rump’s crypto corruption) seems to foreshadow a broader fightback that may be looming:
“In its merciless pursuit of people without papers — most of them Latino — and its demonization of asylum seekers, refugees, holders of temporary protected status, Muslims and Palestinian rights activists, the Trump administration is accelerating toward a new, modern nadir of Juan Crow, just downstream of Jim and Jane.
When a sitting U.S. senator refers to New York immigrants as “inner-city rats,” when a Florida governor waxes rapturously about the “Alligator Alcatraz” immigrant detention center, when a presidential administration takes two months to dismantle decades of civil rights law, we must admit that these are acts in a feature presentation of neo-Confederate revanchism targeting brown and Black people. The targeting of the undocumented has a name, after all, based in ugly history and shameful tradition: Juan Crow. The phrase was popularized by the journalist Roberto Lovato to describe the “matrix of laws, social customs, economic institutions and symbolic systems” that isolate and control undocumented immigrants. The domestic policies of the Trump administration have taken this legacy to a more dangerous place.
The policies of this administration reinstate an era in which the rights conferred to all people in the United States by the Constitution are subject to a sliding scale of extralegal violability depending on one’s race, ethnicity or assumed immigration status. Tom Homan, the so-called border czar, has said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents don’t ‘need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them and question them.’ The administration has created a hostile, systematic stripping of basic dignities that works in concert with stymying official methods people are meant to use to seek relief and redress for governmental abuse.
A familiar, if not altogether new, dawn of racialized mistreatment is being enacted by imposing daily ICE arrest quotas. The claims in a Human Rights Watch report on three Florida detention facilities read like a nightmare mash-up of Guantánamo Bay and American mass incarceration: freezing, overcrowded facilities; routine denial of medical treatment; shackling the hands and wrists of detainees; feeding detainees meager amounts of rotting food or forcing them to eat it ‘like dogs,’ with their hands behind their backs; forcing detainees to sleep on concrete floors. The White House is attempting to rewrite the constitutional order via executive fiat, spreading terror through immigrant communities by reportedly subjecting detainees to callous, inhumane and even deadly treatment. The senior adviser Stephen Miller routinely conflates immigrants with criminality even though the majority of those detained by ICE have no criminal convictions or have committed no violent offenses.
Birtherism, the conspiracy theory born out of Donald Trump’s baseless questions about Barack Obama’s U.S. citizenship, was a mere curtain raiser for today’s campaign of racialized delegitimization aimed both at nonwhite elected officials and journalists as well as nonwhite immigrants, regardless of status, along with U.S. citizens and U.S. military service members. This was not a hidden campaign, but one formalized into policy and execution within Project 2025, spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, ahead of Mr. Trump’s second election victory. While the courts continue to block Mr. Trump’s attempt to withhold U.S. birthright citizenship to children in 28 states, that is just one effort by his administration to redefine U.S. citizenship along racial lines.
It’s instructive to look at a previous moment when white supremacy was welcome at the White House. In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson hosted a special screening of D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation.” Less than 50 years after the ratification of the 15th Amendment (prohibiting the denial of the vote based on race, color or having been enslaved), Griffith’s blockbuster cinematic argument for the necessity of Jim Crow was released. The film (based on the 1905 novel “The Clansman,” written by Thomas Dixon Jr., a classmate and friend of Wilson) is chiefly notorious for promulgating a fiction of Black men as marauding rapists obsessed with gorging themselves upon the carnal altars of white virginity. In the film, a white victim, Flora Cameron (played by Mae Marsh), jumps off a cliff to her death to avoid marrying, and thus consummating with, a freedman and veteran Union captain named Gus (portrayed by Walter Long, in blackface). That is only one of the film’s expressions of displeasure with the changes Reconstruction brought about. Griffith’s film spoke to the reactionary, bristling rage of white people witnessing Black men serving in state legislatures and the U.S. Congress, exercising the right to vote and holding positions of local authority. Newly enfranchised Black men throughout the South voted in the 1868 election, helping make Ulysses S. Grant president. For those who needed the false supremacy of whiteness to be real, this was unconscionable. Offscreen, that rage famously resulted in the only successful coup d’état on American soil: the Wilmington Race Massacre of 1898.
For Mr. Trump, returning the country to greatness involves stopping an invasion that is about as real as Griffith’s projections. When Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, visited the Salvadoran prison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, over which the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, presides, she shared images seemingly engineered to alight the same synapses that brought Griffith so much fame and praise. The policy works hand in hand with the spectacle, much like lynchings, which followed trials in Jim Crow kangaroo courts. The Trump administration’s elastic incursion into habeas corpus and due process rights wouldn’t be complete without intimidating images burnishing its will and ability to abuse with impunity. Griffith’s order-restoring Ku Klux Klan night riders bring to mind some aspects of today’s professionalized “immigration enforcement.” ICE officers are permitted to mask their faces, to engage in profiling…
Perhaps because frequency and repetition confer dulling effects, Americans seem to have become numb to the dangers of the ongoing shameless, targeted, personal and bigoted diminution of the capabilities, achievements and authority of women and people of color who occupy government. As the transgressions grow bigger and bolder, the effects become normalized, entrenched. We are passively becoming witnesses to near-daily insults, the cumulative effect of which is to make them appear as if they are deserved. Left unchecked, the currents of autocratic abuse can swell in a flash, allowing the floodwaters of white supremacy to sweep away democracy in America — again.”
I also detect a dramatic broadening and deepening of critique in a recent column by Columbia Professor Suresh Naidu, exchanging the previous discourse of debating superficial legalistic issues for a realistic description of what we are actually up against, not a normal litigant but a quasi-sovereign paramilitary neofascist coup running amok:
“Trade negotiators from longtime partner countries, government contractors, law firms, federal employees, permanent residents, the Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, even the Transportation Security Administration labor union are all experiencing contractual vertigo, finding out that the administration will not honor previous agreements. The first Trump administration renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement to get the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, but Mr. Trump has imposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada in violation of even that agreement. Parties thinking they can wheedle their way into a bargain with a capricious administration are bringing intuitions from the world of private deals, backstopped by the rule of law, into the very different realm of political bargains with absolutism-adjacent executive branches.
The federal government, and this administration, is simply too powerful and too arbitrary to be credibly bargained with. Do we really think this [recent Columbia University] arrangement, however destructive of academic autonomy it is, will prevent the Trump administration from stopping the money again? Anyone who thinks the administration will mutely walk away after the ink is dry needs to look at both the past behavior of autocratic regimes in general and this administration’s in particular. This deal won’t end Columbia’s torture. Whatever onerous terms the school has agreed to will be deemed to have been broken in the face of a campus protest, an edgy syllabus, a leaked classroom discussion or even an acerbic student opinion piece. New civil rights violations will be imagined, new vistas of anti-Americanism on campus will be discovered, and the attacks will continue.
It is unsurprising that a coalition of election deniers, Christian nationalists and supplement- and crypto-hawkers would have little regard for academic freedom, scientific progress and learning. It was always a stretch for Columbia to think a good-faith agreement was in the cards, but when the government is too often behaving unchecked by the law, the idea of a binding contract is a fantasy. …I doubt the demands will stop at mandatory antisemitism trainings or requiring “balanced” educational offerings or immediate expulsions of student protesters, whatever you think of those things.”
If you have thoughts, links or suggestions for expanding a bank of emerging, hopefully empowering critical theory following such sources, hit me up at: thomasstephens2043@sbcglobal.net
And enjoy our encore presentation Relax, Guy….
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