Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Note: The authors and contributors to this statement had initially envisioned that it would be published as an official statement from the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence — Division 48 of the American Psychological Association (APA). However, APA’s policies and concerns over IRS regulations prohibited its publication in that form, and it does not represent the official positions or policies of Division 48 or the APA. We thank CounterPunch for providing us with the opportunity to share our analysis and call to action here.

Contributors to this statement include Rehman Adbulrehman, Elliot Benjamin, Alaina Brenick, Sara Buckingham, Sarah Constantine, Donna Demanarig, Judy Iwens Eidelson, Judith Gulko, Ian Hansen, Monica Indart, Emily Lutringer, Sodah Minty, Tiffany O’Shaughnessy, Michele Ribeiro, Stephen Soldz, Karen Suyemoto, and several others who prefer to remain anonymous.

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Psychology as a discipline, and the American Psychological Association as the world’s largest organization of psychologists, has a core commitment to advancing human welfare through scientific rigor and ethical practice. APA’s mission is to promote “psychological science and knowledge to benefit society and improve lives.”[1] Similarly, APA’s ethics code states:

Psychologists are committed to increasing scientific and professional knowledge of behavior and people’s understanding of themselves and others and to the use of such knowledge to improve the condition of individuals, organizations, and society. Psychologists respect and protect civil and human rights and the central importance of freedom of inquiry and expression in research, teaching, and publication. They strive to help the public in developing informed judgments and choices concerning human behavior.[2]

While acknowledging the profession’s past shortcomings in achieving these goals, today we bring this sense of responsibility and resolve to a moment of profound political and moral consequence here in the United States. We write to share our professional knowledge, so that our colleagues and the public gain a better understanding of the deeply disturbing psychological dimensions of authoritarianism. Its dangerous and destructive repercussions are now unfolding daily throughout this country, threatening the well-being — and the very survival — of individuals, communities, and the foundations of our democratic form of governance.

We are not writing in support of any political party or candidate. Indeed, we recognize that both major political parties have fallen woefully short in establishing and nurturing a society where prosperity, justice, and equal opportunity prevail for all. At the same time, it is clear to us that anti-democratic pressures have now escalated significantly under the Trump administration, and we worry that the gravity of the current situation is not receiving the attention it deserves — from the public or from our profession.

Guided by our ethical and scientific commitments and by our duty to oppose forces that dehumanize, divide, and destroy, we believe that we must not be silent at this time. Authoritarianism thrives on fear, disinformation, and the suppression of truth. Peace psychology compels us to name these threats and to work toward systems grounded in justice, empathy, and democratic participation.

What follows is an overview of what we know about authoritarianism, its psychological underpinnings, its current manifestations, and the urgent need to confront the harm that has already been done and to curtail the suffering that still lies ahead.[3] We are not claiming that the psychological phenomena we describe are unique to authoritarianism, nor are we suggesting that authoritarianism is distinguished only by its psychology. We are well aware that a full understanding of authoritarianism requires contributions from many disciplines, including political science, sociology, economics, and history, among others.

What Is Authoritarianism?

Authoritarianism describes a form of government where executive power is supreme; where independent civil society organizations are constrained and surveilled so as to reduce their willingness to challenge the state; where dissent is suppressed; where vulnerable communities are scapegoated; where elections, if held, are corrupted; where misinformation and disinformation are promoted; and where violence is often incited against opponents and “undesirable” communities.[4]

Beginning with the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany almost a century ago, psychologists have made crucial contributions to the study of authoritarianism.[5] They have found that authoritarian leaders often gain their power and influence by stoking and preying upon the public’s fears and insecurities, even devising newly-imagined threats and then confidently offering “solutions” that are promised to restore safety and order. Research by psychologists has also increased our understanding of authoritarian followers. They tend to see the world as a dangerous place and, as a result, they are strongly inclined to support and obey authority figures, to act aggressively against anyone who violates their group’s norms, and to deeply value what they see as tradition and convention. These dynamics stifle openness to difference and discourage the freedom of thought and expression that allow people and communities to thrive. Of greatest concern, psychologists have found that authoritarian leaders and followers tend to endorse anti-democratic policies; to support violence for achieving political aims; to hold prejudiced views toward minority groups and immigrants; and to support violations of human rights.[6]

We believe there is a range of psychological phenomena that become a source of significantly greater concern when authoritarian conditions prevail — as they increasingly do today.[7] Here, we briefly describe six of them, along with a partial list of current distressing examples. It is our hope that readers will appreciate the insights gained from psychological research and will take meaningful action to prevent and mitigate the risks that authoritarianism poses to us all.

Propaganda

Through decades of research, psychologists have learned that persuasion efforts often follow either of two paths.[8]One route encourages us to carefully look at the facts and think through the arguments presented before deciding what makes sense. But it is the other route that is most frequently used by authoritarian leaders. They intentionally tap into our strong emotions, aiming to make us fearful, angry, or optimistic. By arousing our emotions, they lead us to ignore the actual quality of the arguments or “evidence” they are presenting. Under these circumstances, we become more susceptible to believing false or inaccurate information, which may be designed to mislead us.[9] This is especially so when we are repeatedly exposed to that “information.” The use of propaganda has long been widespread, and it is certainly not new. However, it becomes potentially more dangerous when authoritarian leaders simultaneously suppress alternative sources of information.

In the current context, President Trump and members of his administration have routinely spread misinformation — on issues ranging from immigration to vaccines to climate change to election fraud and far beyond — triggering fear and outrage among ardent supporters and other members of the public.[10] Often, these statements have vilified political adversaries. For example, Trump himself has described opposition leaders as “crazed,” “cheatin’ dogs,” “the enemy from within,” and “kamikaze pilots,” and he has claimed “they hate our country.”[11] His press secretary has said that the Democratic Party is made up of “Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.”[12] And a deputy chief of staff has described the opposition party as a “domestic extremist organization” that is “devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gangbangers, and illegal alien killers and terrorists.”[13] These instances illustrate the purpose that often lies behind the use of propaganda by authoritarian leaders: to inflame emotion, distort reality, and erode the shared trust on which democracy depends. In short, they are not the type of pronouncements one sees from political leaders who are committed to principles of democratic governance.

Conformity and Obedience

Psychologists have intensively studied conformity and obedience since shortly after World War II and the horrors committed by Nazi Germany.[14] Their research findings have shown that we are often motivated to conform so as not to lose a sense of belonging to a group, and to avoid the insecurity that might follow. At the same time, we often choose to obey so as not to be disrespectful to those in positions of power and due to concerns about possible retribution. These everyday inclinations, driven in part by fear or the need for security, transcend specific political environments. But they are likely to carry heightened influence and consequence when the stakes of non-compliance and disobedience intensify and widen, as is the case under authoritarian regimes.

Consider several contemporary examples. With support from adherents to his “Make America Great Again” agenda, President Trump has regularly taken steps to instill fear in both his allies and his adversaries, warning followers not to step out of line and demonstrating to rivals that there is a heavy price to pay for defying him. For example, politicians in his party who fail to conform face the prospect of primary challengers more aligned with the president and the heightened risk of losing their seats in the next election cycle.[15] Far more extreme, during the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, Trump supporters called for then Vice President Mike Pence to be hanged for failing to obey and subvert the election results — with multiple insiders later reporting that the president seemingly approved.[16] Meanwhile, individuals with contrary views who have resisted the White House’s crackdown on free speech on college campuses have faced severe repercussions, particularly students who have been arrested and threatened with deportation for protesting against Israel’s assault on Gaza and in support of Palestinian rights.[17] At the same time, many major corporations made large financial contributions to Trump’s inauguration events and have now rolled back their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives to avoid running afoul of Trump’s good graces.[18] All of these actions illustrate how conformity and obedience can be used to instill fear, enforce loyalty, and weaken dissent. Expectations for unquestioning conformity and obedience are more characteristic of a dictatorship than a democracy.

Moral Disengagement

Psychologists have documented that people use a wide range of rationalizations, various forms of moral disengagement, to justify their own wrongful behavior and to escape feelings of remorse for the harm they have done.[19] Among the most common of these psychological mechanisms are moral justification, in which we claim that our actions serve a greater good; euphemistic labeling, in which we sanitize our language to disguise and minimize our wrongdoing; dehumanization, in which we portray those we treat cruelly as less than human and thereby distance ourselves from their hurt; misattribution of blame, in which we hold the victims of our actions responsible for their own suffering; advantageous comparison, in which we claim that the wrongful things we do are not as bad as what others do or have done; displacement of responsibility, in which we claim that we are only following orders or that it is someone else’s responsibility; and minimization of consequences, in which we downplay or even deny the adverse effects experienced by those we harm. These moral disengagement rationalizations are routinely used by authoritarian leaders to reduce resistance to their harmful agenda.

The Trump administration has adopted these tactics on multiple fronts and in doing so has heightened pre-existing injustices.[20] For instance, they have used moral justification to terminate DEI programs, claiming that their actions are “making America great” by correcting both “shameful discrimination” against White Americans and the waste of precious financial resources.[21] They have relied on euphemistic labeling, advancing “patriotic education” and ending “radical indoctrination” as the rationale for requiring that school curricula no longer include material related to the country’s fraught history of slavery and racial injustice, as well as banning contemporary positive representations of different minority groups, such as trans people.[22] In unleashing the U.S. military on American soil, they have turned to misattribution of blame, falsely insisting that these steps are necessary because the targeted cities have become overrun by crime, anarchy, and “insurrection.”[23] And through minimization of consequences, they have downplayed or denied the dangers associated with curtailing workplace health and safety standards, reducing environmental protections, and gutting scientific and regulatory enforcement agencies and staff.[24] These examples illustrate how moral disengagement can be used to excuse harm, to disguise injustice, and to make cruelty seem acceptable. Psychological rationalizations like these all serve to make an authoritarian agenda appear more morally palatable, despite the drastic and many times irrevocable harm that it causes.

Dehumanization

Psychologists have extensively studied the disturbing phenomenon of dehumanization, the process by which some people and groups are viewed and treated as less than fully human.[25] Prejudice and discrimination — based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and disability or other characteristics — often lie behind the dehumanization of others. Those perceived as less than human are considered less deserving of dignity, care, and respect and more deserving of exclusion, exploitation, and abuse.[26] Psychologically, it becomes easier to mistreat people — including portraying them through demeaning language and imagery — when they are viewed as inferior, subhuman and, in its most extreme form, nonhuman. In this way, dehumanization can remove moral taboos and thereby encourage horrific acts of humiliation, cruelty, brutality, and even genocide.[27] Among their followers, authoritarian leaders often successfully promote this degrading perception of those they consider adversaries, heightening the likelihood of violence.[28]

The Trump administration’s dehumanization of people of color and other communities it views as inferior and “other” is widespread.[29] Still, it is perhaps most consistently apparent in the harsh and often brutal treatment of immigrants. During last year’s presidential debate, Trump memorably and baselessly warned that Haitian immigrants were eating the pets of their neighbors.[30] At other times, he has described unauthorized immigrants with words and phrases such as “criminals,” “rapists,” “poisoning the blood of our country,” “from insane asylums,” “animals,” and “not human.”[31] Since returning to the White House, Trump has used this dehumanizing rhetoric to facilitate a violent crackdown on immigrant and racialized communities.[32] Masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have terrorized neighborhoods with large-scale immigration sweeps, engaging in racial profiling, grabbing and incarcerating people without due process, and assaulting onlookers who get in the way.[33] Trump has gone so far as to call in National Guard troops to California, Illinois, and Oregon — against the wishes of the governors of those states — falsely claiming they are necessary to quell “out-of-control protests” and to protect ICE agents and facilities.[34] At the same time, the treatment of detained immigrants further dehumanizes them and is sometimes deadly.[35] Inhumane conditions are commonplace at detention centers: overcrowding, extreme temperatures, neglect and abuse, indifference to medical needs, and disregard for distraught family members.[36] And many of these immigrants have been deported to countries known for heightened levels of poverty, violence, and instability, where previously they have been persecuted and continue to be at risk.[37] Such examples demonstrate how dehumanization strips people of dignity, normalizes cruelty, and erases the empathy on which our shared humanity and democracy depend. Dehumanization of this magnitude is not seen in stable democracies.

Systemic Racism

Psychologists have played an important role in illuminating the prevalence and dynamics of systemic racism.[38] These entrenched and often under-recognized policies and practices — in contexts ranging from criminal justice to education to housing and well beyond — bestow significant advantages on white people over people of color. They have been a disturbing reality in the United States ever since the country’s founding. Psychological research has shown that people tend to believe that significant differences in power between racial groups are the way things are supposed to be even when they themselves are the ones disadvantaged by these unjust disparities.[39] Similarly, mistakenly believing that longstanding inequalities are justified because otherwise they would not exist can lead us to think that unearned privileges are based on merit when in fact they are not.[40] Authoritarian leaders take advantage of these biases when they argue for a return to the “natural order” of things.[41]

Actions of the Trump administration deny and exacerbate the reality of systemic racism in the United States.[42] DEI initiatives have been shut down under the guise of promoting a “colorblind and merit-based” society — despite decades of psychological research demonstrating that colorblind racial ideology exacerbates inequality and meritocracy is a myth used to justify the status quo.[43] The work of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has been sharply curtailed, hampering voting rights protections for historically marginalized groups.[44] An executive order has undercut decades-old legislation aimed at preventing discrimination, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Fair Housing Act, and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.[45] Content highlighting the struggles and achievements of Black and Native Americans has been scrubbed from federal museums, landmarks, and websites.[46] The administration has abandoned civil rights investigations that had been established in order to hold law enforcement departments accountable for police violence against Black people.[47] And while on the campaign trail last year, Trump pledged to fight what he described as “a definite anti-white feeling in this country.”[48] Each example illustrates how systemic racism sustains inequality, distorts justice, and corrodes the very ideals of fairness and equity that democracy demands. These are simply not the actions of a government committed to ensuring equal opportunity for all.

Perceived Helplessness

Research by psychologists has found that feelings of helplessness — whether held by an individual or by a group — pose a significant obstacle to success in any undertaking.[49] Those who lack confidence in their capabilities are more likely to give up and abandon their goals, and they do not bounce back as resiliently when their efforts prove unproductive. In this way, believing that we cannot control important outcomes in our lives can lead to resignation, which can destroy our motivation to work toward crucial personal and collective objectives.[50] This belief that our actions are futile and that adversity cannot be overcome is something we fight hard to resist. But if we reach that demoralizing conclusion, the effects can be paralyzing and difficult to reverse. Knowing that feelings of helplessness have a major impact on the choices we make and the effort we are willing to expend, authoritarian leaders often manipulate our perceptions of what might be possible through collective action.[51] This is why perceived helplessness and lack of control — especially when widely shared — make it easier for a small minority to control a much larger group, readily maintaining an oppressive and unjust status quo because active resistance is absent and voices of opposition are silent.

Today, we see the Trump administration repeatedly taking steps to simultaneously demonstrate its own power and instill a sense of helplessness in those who oppose its agenda.[52] These actions have included disregard for legal orders blocking its unlawful initiatives; crackdowns on universities and non-profits that fail to abide by its demands, thus limiting free speech; retaliatory criminal complaints filed against political adversaries; threats to use U.S. cities as “training grounds for our military;” efforts to quell criticism from journalists and talk show hosts; and frequent social media posts that ridicule those who question or protest its authority.[53] In these ways and more, authoritarianism breeds helplessness and weakens resistance, saps hope, and erodes the collective power on which a free society depends. None of these tactics is characteristic of political leadership that has an abiding respect for the public’s legal and civil rights.

Meeting the Current Moment: Our Call to Action

In this statement, we have drawn upon decades of research by psychologists to demonstrate the role that psychological phenomena are playing in the distressing shift toward authoritarianism in the United States today.[54] We not only consider it our responsibility to illuminate these patterns of thought and behavior — and their dire consequences — for our colleagues and the general public. We are also convinced that our professional knowledge and moral outrage must be directed into concrete efforts aimed at preventing and resisting authoritarianism’s destructive repercussions.[55]Toward this end, below we describe a range of strategies and actions that we believe can generate and sustain positive social change.

Most directly relevant to our own professional communities, psychologists must collectively support and advocate for institutional courage.[56] This means demanding that leaders of our organizations uphold and defend — both publicly and internally — academic freedom, civil rights, and democratic values through public statements and through the development of binding resolutions that prevent and curtail the current administration’s attacks on the independence of our institutions.[57] Leadership accountability must also be guaranteed through mechanisms such as internal reviews and audits, and the implementation of task forces or working groups that can monitor and report potential failures to defend our communities.[58]

We encourage academic institutions to follow current legal recommendations and to develop and implement specifically tailored policies and programs aimed at protecting and supporting their own members.[59] They should pursue these same commitments in relation to the communities and individuals they serve, particularly the ones who are currently being targeted by the Trump administration.[60] We especially note the responsibility of institutional authorities and those who have more relative privilege and power to advocate, speak up, and support those currently at greatest risk of persecution.

More broadly, psychologists must also organize as a community to facilitate effective collective action that challenges social injustice and safeguards human rights.[61] Through a wide range of strategies and tactics, we must confront authoritarianism and prevent its damaging consequences.[62] For instance, through public and civic education psychologists can promote reflexive thought and critical consciousness, paving the path to diverse ways of countering authoritarian repression.[63]

We further believe that this shared effort must actively involve and engage the communities with whom we work and to which we belong. Mutual support and reciprocity can be strengthened through relational and network organizing and horizontal solidarity, thereby enabling communities to discover their own approaches for resisting oppression.[64]Examples may include participating in protests against the current administration, boycotting companies that promote or benefit from its authoritarian agenda, signing petitions and statements, and other types of collective actions to protect our democracy.[65] In addition, seemingly small and subtle acts of “everyday resistance,” which may pass unnoticed, can also undermine oppressive power structures.[66]

We are convinced that, together, we must meet this moment. Through the power of collective action, radical hope, and ethics of care, we can resist the Trump administration’s authoritarian agenda and forestall its harmful and dangerous consequences.[67] There is no time to delay.

Endnotes

[1] American Psychological Association. (n.d.).

[2] American Psychological Association. (2017). Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct.

[3] Editorial Board. (October 31, 2025). “Are we losing our democracy?” The New York Times.

[4] Ben-Ghiat, R. (2020). Strongmen: Mussolini to the present. W. W. Norton; Dresden, J., Baird, A., & Raderstorf, B. (2022). The authoritarian playbook. Protect Democracy; Langfitt, F. (2025, April 22). “Hundreds of scholars say U.S. is swiftly heading toward authoritarianism.” NPR. ; American Psychological Association. (February 2024). APA Resolution on Combating Misinformation and Promoting Psychological Science Literacy; American Psychological Association. (n.d.) “Misinformation and disinformation.”

[5] Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper & Row. ; Altemeyer, B. (1981). Right-wing authoritarianism. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press; Gøtzsche-Astrup, O., & Hogg, M. A. (2024). Psychology of authoritarianism. In A. Wolf (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Authoritarian Politics (1st ed.). Oxford University Press.

[6] Osborne, D., Costello, T. H., Duckitt, J., & Sibley, C. G. (2023). The psychological causes and societal consequences of authoritarianism. Nature Reviews Psychology, 2(4), 220–232.

[7] Levitsky, S., Way, L, & Ziblatt, D. (May 8, 2025). “How will we know when we have lost our democracy?” New York Times; Bright Line Watch. (2025). Accelerated transgressions in the second Trump presidency; The Steady State. (October 16, 2025). “Accelerating authoritarian dynamics: Assessment of democratic decline.” Substack newsletter. The Steady State.

[8] Bernays, E. L. (1928). Propaganda. Horace Liveright; Petty, R.E. & Cacioppo, J.T. (1986). The Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 123-205. ; Pratkanis, A. R., & Aronson, E. (1992). Age of propaganda: The everyday use and abuse of persuasion. W.H. Freeman; Cialdini, R. B. (2008). Influence (5th ed.). Pearson.

[9] American Psychological Association. (March 1, 2024). “What psychological factors make people susceptible to believe and act on misinformation?”; Martel, C., Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2020). Reliance on emotion promotes belief in fake news. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 5:47. 

[10] Baker, P. (November 3, 2024). “Trump’s wild claims, conspiracies and falsehoods redefine presidential bounds.” New York Times; Myers, S. L., & Thompson, S. A. (March 24, 2025). “In his second term, Trump fuels a ‘machinery’ of misinformation.” New York Times. ; Kessler, G. (April 30, 2025). “One hundred days of Trump 2.0: Falsehood after falsehood, again and again.” Washington Post. ; Qiu, L. (April 29, 2025). “In breakneck 2nd term, Trump turns to falsehoods to justify his agenda.” New York Times; Dale, D. (August 29, 2025). “Fact check: 10 debunked lies Donald Trump has repeated in the last week alone.” CNN Politics. ; Walling, M., & Borenstein, S. (September 25, 2025). “Trump called climate change a ‘con job’ at the United Nations. Here are the facts.” PBS. ; Gelfand, M. (January 2, 2020). “Authoritarian leaders thrive on fear. We need to help people feel safe.” The Guardian.

[11] Wise, L., Thomas, K., & Stech Ferek, K. (September 25, 2025). “Democrats dig in on shutdown stance after White House threatens to fire workers.” Wall Street Journal; Dale, D. (October 10, 2024). “Fact check: Trump, on lying spree, made at least 40 separate false claims in two Pennsylvania speeches.” CNN Politics. ; Marquez, A. (October 13, 2024). “‘The enemy from within’: Trump calls Democrats more dangerous than U.S. foreign adversaries.” NBC News. ; Colombo, M. (October 19, 2025). “Trump calls Democrats ‘kamikaze pilots’ as shutdown standoff hits third week with no end in sight.” Fox News. ; Timotija, F. (July 4, 2025). “Trump on Democrats who voted against GOP megabill: ‘I hate them.’” The Hill. 

[12] Parnes, A., & Samuels, B. (October 21, 2025). “Trump’s attacks on ‘No Kings’ underscore his second term’s unofficial mottoes.” The Hill.

[13] Izzo, J. (August 30, 2025). “Stephen Miller called Democratic Party a ‘domestic, extremist organization.’” Snopes.

[14] Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs, 70(9), 1-70. ; Cialdini, R. B., & Goldstein, N. J. (2004). Annual Review Of Psychology, 55, 591-621; Capuano, C., & Chekroun, P. (2024). A systematic review of research on conformity. International Review of Social Psychology, 37(1): 13, 1–23. ; Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view. Harper & Row; Crutchfield, R. S. (1955). Conformity and character. American Psychologist, 10, 191–198; Meeus, W. H. J., & Raajimakers, Q. A. W. (1995). Obedience in modern society: The Utrecht Studies. Journal of Social Issues, 51(3), 155-175. ; Burger, J. M. (2009). Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? American Psychologist, 64, 1–11.

[15] Ewing, G. R. (April 17, 2025). “‘We are all afraid: Murkowski says fear of retaliation from Trump is ‘real’.” Politico.

[16] Haberman, M., & Broadwater, L. (May 25, 2022). “Trump said to have reacted approvingly to Jan. 6 chants about hanging Pence.” New York Times. ; Bella, T. (June 10, 2022). Cheney states Trump said on Jan. 6 that Pence ‘deserves’ to be hanged. Washington Post. 

[17] Jayaretnam, M. (April 1, 2025). “These are the students targeted by Trump’s immigration enforcement over campus activism.” Time. ; O’Connor, M. (April 17, 2025). “Here’s where pro-Palestine protesters face the harshest charges.” The Appeal. 

[18] Fonrouge, G., Constantino, A. K., Josephs, L., Levy, A., Lucas, A., Repko, M., Son, H., & Wayland, M. (April 23, 2025).“Corporate America shelled out millions for Trump’s inauguration. Now he’s upending many of their businesses.” CNBC; Murray, C., & Bohannan, M. (April 11, 2025). “IBM reportedly walks back diversity policies, citing ‘inherent tensions’: Here are all the companies rolling back DEI programs.” Forbes.

[19] Opotow, S. (1990). Moral exclusion and injustice: An introduction. Journal of Social Issues, 46, 173-182.  Deutsch, M. (1990). Psychological roots of moral exclusion. Journal of Social Issues, 46(1), 21–25; Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3, 193-209; Bandura, A. (2016). Moral disengagement: How people do harm and live with themselves. Worth Publishers.

[20] Rasul, M. E., Halversen, A., & Smith, J. (2025). “When you’re a star, they let you do it”: Trump, Twitter, and moral disengagement. Communication and the Public, 20570473251314521.

[21] The White House. (January 21, 2025). Ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing; Legal Defense Fund, Lambda Legal, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, National Women’s Law Center, and National Center for Lesbian Rights (n.d.). “Trump’s executive orders on diversity, equity, and inclusion, explained.”

[22] The White House (January 29, 2025). Ending radical indoctrination in k-12 schooling.

[23] Jansen, B. (October 28, 2025). “‘More than the National Guard.’ Trump warns of more troops in US cities.” USA TODAY. ; Kamisar, B. (October 10, 2025). “Court rulings, anti-ICE protests, Democrats: What the Trump administration sees as ‘insurrection.’” NBC News.

[24] McNicholas, C., Poydock, M., & Sanders, S. (July 10, 2025). “Trump’s Department of Labor is dismantling key workplace protections.” Economic Policy Institute. ; Feldscher, K. (September 16, 2025). “Trump administration plans to roll back EPA regulations could harm health.” Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. ; Barbati-Dajches, J. (May 29, 2025). “Trump’s executive order puts science under the thumb of politics.” Union of Concerned Scientists: The Equation.

[25] Kteily, N. S., & Landry, A. P. (2022). Dehumanization: Trends, insights, and challenges. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 26(3), 222–240. h; Fiske S. T. (2009). From dehumanization and objectification to rehumanization: Neuroimaging studies on the building blocks of empathy. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1167, 31–34; Resnick, B. (March 7, 2017). “The dark psychology of dehumanization, explained.” Vox; Smith, D. L. (2011). Less than human: Why we demean, enslave, and exterminate others. St. Martin’s Press. 

[26] Opotow, S. (1990). Moral exclusion and injustice: An introduction. Journal of Social Issues, 46(1), 1–20.

[27] United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights. (September 16, 2025). “Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission finds.”

[28] Byman, D. (April 9, 2021). “How hateful rhetoric connects to real-world violence.” Brookings.

[29] Kanno-Youngs, Z. (August 21, 2025). “In Trump’s ideal picture of America, diversity is taboo.” New York Times; Jardina, A., & Piston, S. (2023). Trickle-down racism: Trump’s effect on whites’ racist dehumanizing attitudes. Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, 5. ; Shear, M. D., & Sullivan, E. (October 16, 2018). “‘Horseface,’ ‘Lowlife,’ ‘Fat, Ugly’: How the President Demeans Women.” New York Times. ; Nelson, L. (October 12, 2016). “Donald Trump’s history of misogyny, sexism, and harassment: a comprehensive review.” Vox. ; Flowers, B., & Trotta, D. (January 20, 2025). “Trump curtails protections around diversity, LGBT rights.” Reuters. ; Yurcaba, J. (June 19, 2025). “These trans service members are being forced out of the military due to Trump’s ban.” NBC News. ; Gross, J. (March 13, 2025). “Rights groups condemn Trump for using “Palestinian” as a slur against Schumer.” New York Times. ; Kelly, M. L. (February 12, 2019). “Why Trump’s attacks on Sen. Elizabeth Warren are dehumanizing to native people.” NPR. ; Becker, A. J. (March 12, 2025). “The Trump administration’s rhetoric about disability diminishes us all.” WBUR.

[30] Thomas, M., & Wendling, M. (September 15, 2024). “Trump repeats baseless claim about Haitian immigrants eating pets.”

[31] Terkel, A., & Lebowitz, M. (September 19, 2024). “From ‘rapists’ to ‘eating the pets’: Trump has long used degrading language toward immigrants.” NBC News.

[32] Tareen, S. (October 6, 2025). “Using helicopters and chemical agents, immigration agents become increasingly aggressive in Chicago.” AP News.

[33] Sanchez, G. R., & Vargas, E. D. (October 16, 2025). “Racial profiling by ICE will have a marked impact on Latino communities.” Brookings. ; Foy, N. (October 16, 2025). “We found that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been held by immigration agents. They’ve been kicked, dragged and detained for days.” ProPublica. ; Villagran, L. (September 30, 2025). “US citizens seek millions in damages after violent ICE arrests.” USA TODAY.

[34] Finkelstein, C., Fissell, B., & Regan, M. (September 10, 2025). “The law is clear: Trump can’t use the military to police America’s streets.” The Hill. 

[35] Bustillo, X. (October 23, 2025). “It’s the deadliest year for people in ICE custody in decades; next year could be worse.” NPR.

[36] Human Rights Watch. (July 21, 2025). “You Feel Like Your Life Is Over”: Abusive Practices at Three Florida Immigration Detention Centers Since January 2025. (December 4, 2025). Torture and Enforced Disappearances in the Sunshine State: Human Rights Violations at “Alligator Alcatraz” and Krome in Florida. 

[37] Roy, D. (July 1, 2025). “Here’s where Trump’s deportations are sending migrants.” Council on Foreign Relations.

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Introduction

The horrors of fascism have returned have returned, not as ghosts, but as a plague, fueled by racial hatred and historical amnesia, infiltrating schools, universities, and the public sphere through state violence, fear, censorship, and manufactured ignorance. Across the globe, fascist forces—emboldened by resurgent colonial logics, neoliberal cruelty, and virulent white nationalism—have transformed universities into battlegrounds for democracy’s future. Dissent against a genocidal war in Gaza is not merely discouraged but criminalized, while political intimidation and extortion directed at major institutions, especially higher education, are recast as the new language of governance. In this critical moment, the urgency of defending higher education has never been clearer. As both a site of knowledge production and democratic possibility, higher education must resist becoming a tool of fascist and neoliberal control. Its role in nurturing critical thought, social responsibility, and civic courage is central to the survival of democratic values in the face of rising authoritarianism

It is no longer enough to rehearse the familiar language of education’s democratic mission or nostalgically invoke its emancipatory promise. Those ideals must be rethought and radicalized; they must be expanded, sharpened, and reclaimed as ethical and political imperatives equal to the darkness of our times, especially the threat posed by neoliberal fascism. In this instance, what is needed is an argument for understanding higher education not as a refuge from politics but as one of its most decisive battlegrounds, a place where public consciousness is shaped, where the struggle over truth and power unfolds, and where the pedagogical conditions for resisting emerging fascism must be forged anew. Such recognition forces us to confront the deeper forces shaping this crisis, to ask what forms of power are waging war on education and what is truly at stake in this escalating assault.

What is at stake, however, is far more than a rejection of gangster capitalism and the global misery it produces. The deeper danger lies in recognizing that education has become the primary battlefield in the cultural and ideological wars waged by authoritarianism. Neoliberal capitalism, in its fascist mutation, does not simply impoverish; it seeks to colonize consciousness, to erode the capacity for critical thought, and to replace democratic imagination with the deadening certainties of hierarchy and fear. Universities now sit at a dangerous crossroad where truth is contested, civic memory is either erased or preserved, and the formative conditions for democratic life are nourished, or systematically destroyed. To defend higher education, then, is to reclaim its power to cultivate the forms of agency, solidarity, and critical awareness necessary to challenge the lies, brutalities, racism, corruption, and manufactured ignorance that sustain authoritarian rule. It is to insist that education remain a crucial site of critique and possibility—one capable of expanding the horizon of the future at a moment when fascism seeks to close it down.

Such a task demands thinking the unthinkable: not merely reforming neoliberal capitalism but abolishing it, and cultivating pedagogical spaces where new modes of agency, solidarity, value, and identity can be forged. Only through such radical reimagining can education become the ground from which democratic life is rebuilt and the struggle for a liberated future renewed.

The threat to American society is not merely external, evident in the lawlessness and militarization that now permeate almost every aspect of public life. It resides in the pedagogical terrain itself, in the ways authoritarian movements mobilize cultural institutions, digital ecosystems, and state power to produce a public consciousness increasingly habituated to cruelty, disposability, white nationalism, and historical amnesia. Trump’s educational politics, steeped in racial hatred, ultra-nationalism, and authoritarian contempt for reason, exemplify a broader global project: the transformation of education into a tool for consolidating hierarchy, manufacturing consent, and converting higher education into laboratories of indoctrination. To confront this project, it is not enough to criticize his corruption or his embrace of economic exploitation, staggering inequality, unadulterated cruelty, and racial hierarchies. We must expose the cultural fantasies and pedagogical practices that animate these policies, the false promises of belonging they extend, and the forms of political and ethical illiteracy they cultivate.

What is required, then, is the radical reimagining of pedagogy. Higher education must reclaim academic freedom, dissent, critical thought, and democratic governance not as abstract principles but as urgent practices of resistance. This means creating pedagogical conditions that nurture individual and collective agency, reconnect critique with social change, and transform private suffering into shared political consciousness. It means building classrooms and campuses where justice can be named, where inequality can be confronted, and where democratic forms of life can be rehearsed and renewed. It also means forging solidarities among faculty, students, unions, workers, and social movements, nationally and internationally, as part of a broader struggle for equality, justice, and freedom.

The task before us is clear: for higher education to endure as a democratic public good, it must take decisive action. It must recognize that democracy cannot exist without an informed public, that justice requires a language capable of confronting and narrating injustice, and that freedom depends on a pedagogy dedicated to nurturing the fragile yet vital work of civic courage—and the refusal of complicity with the mobilizing passions of fascist politics. Stephen Rohde, focusing on Northwestern University, warns that universities must resist succumbing to “Trump’s ongoing campaign, steeped in hypocrisy, self-delusion, bribery, and cowardice…to dismantle the independence of American colleges and universities,” for doing so would make them complicit in cementing the bigoted regime of MAGA. In the following, I will explore what this struggle demands and why the fight over higher education is, at its essence, a battle for the very meaning of radical democracy.

Higher Education Under Siege: The Rise of Neoliberal Fascism

Across the world, universities are under siege and democracy itself is approaching a terrifying threshold. From Hungary to India to Turkey, governments are hollowing out the university’s democratic mission, attacking intellectual freedom, weaponizing history, policing critical pedagogy, and stripping away the civic imagination that sustains democratic life. What’s at stake is not just the pursuit of truth but the moral and pedagogical fundamentals of democracy, a delicate balance between knowledge and responsibility, learning and the courage to bear witness. In these darkening times, it is not only knowledge that is being policed but agency itself, as the lifeblood of an informed, critical, and resistant citizenry.

When education is severed from its moral and civic grounding, democracy erodes. Truth becomes suspect, knowledge becomes dangerous, and educators are seen as enemies by those who fear the power of enlightened judgment and the task of holding power accountable. Once the classroom loses its capacity for moral witnessing, critical thinking, and civic courage, the conditions for domination are set. Ignorance becomes virtue, conscience is silenced, and democracy’s fragile bonds begin to fray from civil and legal rights to the institutions meant to protect them. In such a climate, the struggle for education is inseparable from the collective solidarities that make democratic life possible.

Theorists as diverse as Pierre Bourdieu and Thomas Pikety have noted in a number of books and essays  how neoliberalism, a predatory form of capitalism, has waged war on the welfare state, dismantled the public sphere, and hollowed out the very notion of the common good. Masked by the rhetoric of freedom and efficiency, it elevates market logic into a totalizing ideology, demanding that every domain of life bend to economic imperatives. In doing so, it separates economic practices from social costs, and in doing so disparages any viable notion of social responsibility. In practice, it concentrates wealth in the hands of a financial elite, celebrates ruthless individualism, and commodifies the most sacred dimensions of human existence. The social wreckage it leaves behind, systemic racism, militarism, mass precarity, and staggering inequality, is not an aberration but a defining feature of a politics built on dispossession, domination, and terminal exclusion. Paramjit Singh, wring in the Socialist Project, insightfully sums up neoliberalism bad-faith premises and the wreckage it produces. He is worth quoting at length:

Across the world, neoliberalism has exhausted the moral and material foundations of the liberal order that once began as a promise of equality, justice, prosperity, efficiency, and freedom. In practice, it has produced deep inequality, widespread dispossession, ecological devastation, and the disintegration of collective life. However, neoliberalism’s most enduring damage lies not only in its economic consequences but also in its epistemic effects. It has weakened the categories through which societies understand justice, equality, community, and reason…. In the neoliberal era, both dissent and reason have been profoundly degraded. Decades of globalization, financialization, and privatization have depoliticized everyday life, replacing collective struggle with individualized anxiety. The rhetoric of choice, empowerment, and personal fulfilment has displaced the language of class. Under such conditions, dissent risks becoming spectacle, and reason risks degenerating into strategy, emptying both of their transformative political content. We inhabit a world that protests incessantly, yet rarely challenges the structural roots of crisis.

As neoliberalism decays into an upgraded fascism, its machinery of repression intensifies. No longer able to legitimate itself, it blames its failures on immigrants, Black people, and all those deemed “other.” Dissent is criminalized, social life militarized, immigrants are abducted, and hate is normalized. Under Trump, this assault has crystallized into open warfare, rooted in the belief that critical education poses a direct threat to the authoritarian project.

The Role of Higher Education in Defending Intellectual Freedom

This hostility is echoed at the highest levels of the regime. J.D. Vance, the U.S. Vice President, has called higher education a “hostile institution.” Donald Trump rails against colleges as “dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics,” stating that student protesters as “radicals,” “savages” and “jihadists” have been brainwashed by faculty “communists and terrorists.” These poisonous declarations shape policies that transform education into a site of repression, censorship, and laboratories of indoctrination. Moreover, these comments play a powerful role in crushing the critical functions of higher education, which is central to consolidating authoritarian power.

Against this backdrop, as fascist politics surges across the globe, it is crucial for educators to confront a set of urgent and unsettling questions. What does the rise of illiberal regimes mean for higher education in an age of manufactured fear, state terrorism, and state-sponsored lies? What responsibilities fall to universities when the very idea of democracy is under siege? What happens to a society when education is disparaged for its claims on democracy, civic culture withers, and academics are told to look away? What happens when educators are pressured into refusing to speak the unspeakable? In Trump’s America, and in countries around the world drifting toward fascism, silence becomes a form of complicity and inaction, a profound moral failure. The university cannot retreat into neutrality when the stakes are this high; its task is to defend the public imagination, nurture democratic agency, and refuse the tyranny that seeks to extinguish both.

Domestic Terrorism and Authoritarian Rule

Donald Trump’s return to the presidency in 2025 marks not only a political crisis but a profound tragedy for democracy. Under Trump, we face a terrifying new era of state terrorism evident by the erosion of due process, mass abductions, vicious attacks on higher education, and the increasing presence of a police state. America is at war with itself at the same time as it threatens war in Venezuela. Racism and hatred have moved from the shadows to the seat of power, reshaping the political landscape with brutal clarity. ICE operates as a modern Gestapo, patrolling American cities with the explicit aim of terrorizing immigrants and people of color. State violence has become a public spectacle, disinformation has supplanted truth, and the democratic bonds of shared responsibility have withered into a corrosive politics of shared fear.

Trump is unhinged in his gleeful embrace of white supremacy, a malignant worldview that saturates every policy he advances and every cruelty he authorizes. His white nationalist rhetoric has grown so extreme that he publicly indulges in a fascist delirium of racial cleansing, declaring Somali immigrants “garbage,” insisting they “contribute nothing,” and claiming they come “from a country that stinks and we don’t want them in our country.” Such racist invective not only legitimizes cruelty and a politics of disposability as governance; it also fuels his broader assault on higher education. Institutions committed to critical inquiry, dangerous memories, academic freedom, equality, justice, and pluralist imaginaries are now treated as intolerable because they pose a direct threat to the racist hierarchies and exclusionary nationalism that anchor an authoritarian state. As The Guardian recently noted, Trump’s driving ideological conviction is that there is not enough racism in either the United States or Europe, a worldview that both fuels and legitimizes his most extreme authoritarian policies.

Trump represents the endpoint of gangster capitalism, the culmination of its violence, disposability, and moral rot. He is the twenty-first-century, hyper-charged incarnation of Patrick Bateman from the film, American Psycho, a figure fashioned through cruelty, unchecked violence, narcissism, and the celebration of domination. Every policy Trump advances radiates this criminogenic logic, from the killing of more than 80 people in small boats in the Caribbean to cutting off life-saving aid through USAID, condemning millions to misery and death. He is the living embodiment of a death-machine, a leader for whom state-sanctioned violence and ruthless governance become  not just a tool of control but a source of perverse pleasure.

The Assault on History: Erasing Memory and Shaping Power

Such hostility inevitably turns toward history, the most dangerous teacher of all. The subversive power of historical understanding, its capacity to illuminate suffering, expose injustice, and nurture democratic hope, is precisely why it has become a target for right-wing forces intent on erasing or sanitizing uncomfortable truths. This is not abstract: it shapes policy. Efforts to censor critical ideas, erase episodes like slavery, and eliminate depictions of systemic racism exemplify this dangerous turn. Donald Trump has openly stated that “he would punish schools that teach students accurate U.S. history, including about slavery and racism in the country.”

 Across the United States, an aggressive campaign is underway by right-wing groups to erase history and transform schools and universities into instruments of ideological control. Books are being banned, professors targeted, gender and ethnic studies eliminated, trans identity vilified, student protests criminalized, and honest historical narratives suppressed. This is not symbolic; it is the blueprint of fascist politics and governance, a state-sanctioned strategy to extinguish the democratic imagination.

If the emerging fascism in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere is to be confronted, critical education must again become a vital force in democratic life. Higher education has to be understood not as a problem to be tamed but as an indispensable resource for rebuilding democracies in crisis.  This begins with reclaiming a language capable of exposing lies, dismantling systems of oppression, and illuminating the corrupt relations of power that shape everyday life. Hannah Arendt understood that language reveals the hidden “crystallized elements” that make authoritarianism possible. The language of critical pedagogy, rooted in historical memory, justice, and ethical imagination, offers a powerful arsenal for truth-telling, resistance, and the refusal of untruths.

Under such circumstances, one crucial goal of critical pedagogy is to cultivate historical awareness, equipping students to use history as a vital lens for understanding the present. Through the critical act of remembrance, the history of fascism can be illuminated not as a relic of the past but as a persistent threat, its dormant traces capable of reawakening even in the most robust democracies. In this sense, history has to retain its subversive function, drawing on archives, historical sources, and suppressed narratives to challenge conventional wisdom and dominant ideologies.

Higher Education Complicity: Universities as Enablers of Authoritarianism

From Florida to Texas, far-right governors are transforming education into a vehicle for repression. Teachers are threatened with criminal charges for acknowledging gender diversity or reproductive rights. At the national level, student activists, particularly those protesting U.S. support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, are being surveilled, detained, and, in some cases, forcibly abducted and held in detention centers without transparency or due process. These actions mark a dangerous escalation in the use of state terrorism to crush dissent and stifle free speech.

Under Trump, the assault on higher education has taken on the character of political extortion. Universities are threatened with funding cuts, targeted investigations, and public humiliation unless they align with the regime’s ideological demands.  Faced with this mafia-like pressure, many institutions, such as Columbia University, Brown, Northwestern, and Harvard,  capitulate: some pay large financial ransoms to keep research programs afloat, submit to monitored or pre-approved syllabuses, push faculty into self-censorship, and watch as entire fields from gender studies to critical race scholarship are eliminated.

Once considered bastions of critical thought and academic freedom, these institutions have now aligned with the very political and ideological forces they should resist, transforming into silent collaborators in the rise of fascist politics. In capitulating, they have not only abandoned the integrity of higher education but become complicit in the creeping authoritarianism that seeks to control not only knowledge but the very language of dissent. These once-revered institutions are now incubators of conformity, breeding grounds for a new authoritarian oligarchy and class of billionaires that serves power rather than truth, injustice rather than justice, racial and class hierarchies rather than equality. In the face of this onslaught, they have traded their moral compass for the illusion of survival, surrendering their role as guardians of democracy to become facilitators of its destruction.

 Academic freedom becomes a privilege dispensed by administrators rather than a right grounded in democratic life, and universities shrink into obedient service providers, enablers of authoritarianism rather than spaces of critique and possibility. The result is a culture of fear in which marginalized students and critical scholars endure the deepest betrayals, their histories and identities recast as political liabilities. This is the university remade by coercion, subject to racial cleansing, drained of its civic responsibility, and stripped of its public purpose. In this punitive vision, neo-fascism on steroids, education is no longer a democratic necessity; it becomes an instrument for policing memory, enforcing obedience, and erasing those who fall outside the boundaries of white nationalist belonging.

Higher Education and the Militarization of Race: Confronting White Nationalism”

The assault on education, then, cannot be separated from the broader pedagogical struggle unfolding across the globe. The current fight against a growing fascist politics is not simply a struggle over state power, it is a fight over the production of historical memory, over who gets to speak, who gets erased, and who is allowed to imagine a future. The horrors of the past, from Nazi Germany to apartheid South Africa, make clear that the rewriting of history is always tied to the whitening of the nation, to the violent sorting of populations into those who belong and those who do not. Universities are central to this battle because they are the institutional guardians of historical memory and critical knowledge. When they are attacked, censored, or hollowed out, the very capacity of a society to learn from its past is imperiled.

These intertwined assaults on education and democracy become even more visible in the racialized militarization of public life. The deployment of troops into cities with large Black and brown populations is not merely a spectacle of state power; it is another expression of white nationalism and racial cleansing, a violent pedagogy that teaches citizens who counts and who is disposable. This narrowing of citizenship is not unique to the United States. Across the globe, from India to Hungary, the question of who belongs is being reshaped by religious zealotry and fantasies of racial purity. Viktor Orbán makes this logic unmistakable in his declaration that the aim of his illiberal democracy is to eliminate what he calls “mixed races.” As Nicola Bertoldi observes, any struggle for a radical democratic society requires that “the lessons from our dark past [be] learned and transformed into constructive resolutions” for building a post-capitalist future. That task is impossible without institutions, especially schools and universities, that nurture critical memory, cultivate democratic agency, and resist the machinery of erasure.

Confronting the Challenges of Authoritarianism in Education

One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators, students, and others is the need to address the question of what education should accomplish in a society at a historical moment when it is slipping into the dark night of an emerging fascism.  What work do educators have to do to create the economic, political, and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people and the general public with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable, and defend education as essential for inspiring and energizing the citizens necessary for the existence of a robust democracy?

What language must higher education reclaim to redefine its mission, to help faculty and students imagine futures beyond the present, see themselves as agents rather than victims or clients, and take responsibility for shaping democratic public life? In an age marked by the abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses, what will it take to educate young people, and the broader public, to challenge repressive forms of authority and hold power accountable?

In part, this suggests developing educational policies and practices that not only inspire and motivate people but are also capable of challenging the growing number of anti-democratic tendencies under a global tyranny of gangster capitalism. Such a vision suggests resurrecting a democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond a social order immersed in massive inequality, endless assaults on the environment, and elevates war and militarization to the highest and most sanctified national ideals.  In this view, education becomes something other than an obsession with accountability schemes, market values, imagination-crushing methodologies, or the crude empiricism of a data-driven society. Rather than function as an instrument of pedagogical terrorism and deadening conformity, it should open a space for thinking, translating, acting, and imagining otherwise.

In light of the current assaults on education, what might it mean for educators to take seriously the notion that democracy should be a way of thinking about education,  one that thrives on connecting equity to excellence and learning to modes of agency that embrace the demands of social and economic justice and the virtues of the common good. Any meaningful vision of critical pedagogy should have the power to provoke a radical shift in consciousness, a shift that helps us see the world through a lens that confronts the savage realities of geopolitical issues including genocidal violence, mass poverty, the destruction of the planet, and the threat of nuclear war, among other issues . Global capitalism thrives on staggering inequalities, settler colonialism, and the twisted anti-democratic ideologies that uphold it. A true shift in consciousness is not possible without pedagogical interventions that speak directly to people in ways that resonate with their lives, their struggles, and their experiences.

Education has to help individuals recognize themselves in the issues at hand, understand how their personal suffering is not an isolated event, but part of a broad, systemic crisis. In addition, activism, debate, and critical engagement should be central to a student’s education. Activism is a form of education, a way of guiding students to become both knowledgeable and engaged citizens. In this sense, critical pedagogy must cultivate conditions that empower students not only to think critically, but to act with purpose and conviction.”

There can be no authentic politics without a pedagogy of identification, an education that connects people to the broader forces shaping their lives, an education that not only helps them understand the roots of their oppression but also empowers them to imagine and fight for a world where they are no longer victims but active agents of change. Without this, we risk perpetuating a politics that is disconnected from the lived realities of those it seeks to empower. The poet Jorie Graham emphasizes the importance of engaging people through experiences that resonate deeply with their everyday lives. She states that “it takes a visceral connection to experience itself to permit us to even undergo an experience.” For language and appeals to truly matter, they must be anchored in the tangible realities and struggles that shape people’s existence. Only then can communication penetrate consciousness, forging connections between body, mind, and others beyond the poisoned solidarities that sustain hatred, war, and consumerist obsessions.

When teaching loses this visceral, grounded quality, pedagogy risks numbing the mind and body, a condition easily reinforced by a broader culture dominated by screens, virtual spectacles, disconnections, and reductive oversimplifications. To resist this drift into a culture of immediacy and regressive distraction which is never removed from the experiences students bring to the classroom, educators must reclaim their role as public intellectuals, embracing their responsibilities as both critical teachers and active citizens in ways that spark dialogue and mobilize action.

 This means speaking to wider publics about urgent social issues, developing a language that links everyday troubles to the systemic forces that produce them, and advancing a politics committed to economic and social justice. It also requires creating conditions in which educators have real agency over their labor and a meaningful voice in university governance. Yet this aspiration is continually undermined by the growing neoliberally produced precarity of academic life: without tenure or secure positions, many are cast into spaces marked by fear, repression, crushing workloads, powerlessness, isolation, and, for some, conditions approaching poverty.

Education should rise to meet these challenges, offering a vision capable of resisting what Mark Fisher called neoliberalism’s “slow cancellation of the future” and helping us imagine a life beyond massive inequality, environmental destruction, and the glorification of war and militarization as national ideals. In this context, education cannot surrender to academics who insist there is no room for politics in higher education or the classroom, nor to administrators who claim that universities have a responsibility to remain neutral. This position is not only deeply flawed but also complicit in its silence over the current far-right politicization of education or the utterly damaging transformation of higher education into an adjunct of corporations; it is also a script for depoliticizing schooling as an institution as well as both faculty and students.

Neutrality and the Erosion of Academic Freedom

The call for neutrality in many North American universities is a retreat from social and moral responsibility, masking the reality that these institutions are deeply embedded in power relations. As Heidi Matthews, Fatima Ahdash, and Priya Gupta aptly argue, neutrality “serves to flatten politics and silence scholarly debate,” obscuring the inherently political nature of university life.  From decisions about enrolment and research funding to event policies and poster placements, every administrative choice reflects a political stance. Neutrality, far from apolitical, is a tool that silences dissent and shields power from accountability.

It is essential for educators to recognize that learning unfolds across a multitude of sites, circulating not only through formal institutions but through the wider currents of everyday life. As Shea Howell warns, this truth carries immense weight in a moment when “controlling public culture is essential to the consolidation of fascist power.” And following Raymond Williams, we are reminded that education must do more than transmit knowledge,  it must be woven into the very fabric of social transformation, for “learning must be a crucial part of the process of social change.”

The most powerful forms of education now operate far beyond schools and universities. In an age of recent technologies, concentrated power, and ubiquitous social media, culture has become a dominant pedagogical force, shaping how people see, feel, and imagine the political world. Democracy is no longer toppled only by coups; it is hollowed out from within, eroded by the ghosts of past tyrannies revived through symbols, digital spectacles, and the relentless machinery of propaganda. What appears as entertainment, distraction, or common sense is increasingly the terrain where political identities are forged and the boundaries of the imaginable enforced.

Beyond Thresholds of Disappearance and the Colonization of the Mind

The current historical moment is defined by what Chandra Talpade Mohanty calls “thresholds of disappearance, the proliferation of depoliticized multiplicities,” those institutions and cultural spaces that domesticate power differences, transforming systemic projects of resistance into commodified, private acts of rebellion. In this landscape, neoliberal culture and pedagogy form one of the most consequential thresholds of disappearance, draining politics of substance while stripping education of its radical possibilities. At stake is the recognition that education, whether mediated through schools, digital platforms, or the wider culture, has become an urgent site of struggle, a decisive political terrain where agency is fashioned, desires are mobilized, oppression is normalized and hope itself becomes either militarized or rekindled.

This machinery of disappearance is amplified by cultural forces that speak through images laced with bigotry, saturated with violence, and driven by the logics of  cruelty, exclusion, and ethnic cleansing. Culture no longer reflects the past; it erases it, functioning as a pedagogical regime that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argues “colonizes the mind.” We inhabit a world saturated with disimagination machines, engines of civic stupidity and right-wing narcotization, designed to sever people not only from the material conditions that rob them of rights, agency, and hope, but also from the histories, knowledges, and modes of critical thought that make genuine freedom possible. These apparatuses do more than distort reality; they shrink political imagination, corrode critical thought, and render individuals increasingly susceptible to the authoritarian scripts that shape everyday life.

Fascism thrives in precisely these manufactured silences and curated amnesias. Once the public is habituated to disappearance, to the erasure of histories, the trivialization of suffering, the commodification of dissent, the ground is laid for more overt forms of authoritarian control. Fascist politics feed on this hollowing out of civic memory, replacing the complexities of historical truth with mythologized narratives of purity, grievance, and fear. Consider how right-wing movements sanitize the January 6 riot by recasting it as a patriotic uprising: the goal is not merely to distort an event but to reengineer the collective memory that anchors democratic life. What emerges is a political culture in which cruelty becomes a language of belonging, exclusion a measure of citizenship, and forgetting a civic duty. In this sense, the assault on history is never merely symbolic; it is a pedagogical strategy that shapes desires, identities, and the very possibility of democratic agency.

In the era of digital media, platforms like Fox News, Elon Musk’s X and corporate giants such as Facebook, Netflix, and Google have become powerful teaching/propaganda machines, amplifying far-right values and the predatory ethos of gangster capitalism. What we confront is not simply a political failure, it is an educational crisis. Fascism no longer announces itself merely through decrees or armed repression. It is a pedagogical project that shapes memory, desire, and the boundaries of the imaginable. Fascism also colonizes memory, determining what needs to be remembered, forgotten, mourned, and   celebrated. It wraps itself in spectacles of cruelty, in a language steeped in hate and terminal exclusion. It operates through laws, yes, but also through habits, images, and the daily language games that dull moral sensibility.

Trump’s most fervent acolytes, Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, and others, perform Nazi salutes as if rehearsing the dark future they are resolved to summon. Stephen Miller channels Hitlerian rhetoric under the banner of patriotism, insisting that “America is for Americans and Americans only.” Trump resurrects Confederate symbols and the mythology of white supremacy, elevating monuments to genocide as emblems of national pride. Under his rule, the culture of fascism is neither subtle nor hidden; it is staged, broadcast, and normalized as the new common sense.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the Trump administration’s decision to downgrade the swastika, a symbol of fascism, white supremacy, and mass murder, from a hate emblem to something merely “potentially divisive.” In a move that defies history and moral clarity, the U.S. Coast Guard will soon place the swastika, the noose, and the Confederate flag in the same sanitized category. This moral inversion is not an accident. It aligns seamlessly with Trump’s claim that Europe faces a “civilizational crisis,” a thinly veiled invocation of white replacement theory that casts non-Europeans as existential threats to Western civilization. Such rhetoric, and the policies that follow, reveal an administration committed to the normalization of hatred, the erasure of historical memory, and the legitimization of white supremacist fantasies.

The horror of fascist violence has returned, now draped in AI-guided bombs, ethnic cleansing, and white supremacists who revel in racial purification while dismantling every vestige of decency, human rights, and democratic life. What we are witnessing is not only the death of democracy but the erosion of moral and civic conscience itself.

Education, at its best, is never mere job training, nor should it serve as an indoctrinating machine for white Christian nationalism and its narrow vision of who belongs as a citizen. True education cultivates empowered spaces of grace, rigour and, engagement where students think rigorously and speak freely, where their experiences, aspirations, and dreams can be voiced without fear. It is a courageous and protective site in which students learn to act with agency and critical judgment, and where their voices are heard, valued, and challenged. In such spaces, education becomes a bridge linking school to society, self to other, and theory to practice, urging students to confront the urgent social and political realities of their time while embracing the practice and promise of a radical democratic society.

Furthermore, education should help students cultivate a deeper commitment to justice, equality, community, and freedom. Critical pedagogy, as a rupturing practice, must refuse to equate capitalism with democracy, making it clear that one cannot discuss fascism without addressing capitalism. To be truly transformative, any viable critical pedagogy should be inherently anti-capitalist, reviving the discourse of radical democracy, and creating new political formations beyond the conventional liberal and conservative paradigms.

 Neoliberal capitalism strips education of its utopian possibilities and insists that capitalism and democracy are indistinguishable, that to imagine anything beyond its rule is to invite disaster. In an age of resurgent fascism, education must do more than defend reason and critical judgment; it also needs to mobilize organized collective resistance to neoliberal fascism. Critical pedagogy in this context is not a naïve ideal but a radical necessity, a defiant force that urges us to envision possibilities beyond the suffocating confines of the present. It requires confronting the forces that seek to extinguish the radical imagination before it can inspire broader change. This struggle, though daunting, demands relentless urgency and unyielding conviction from educators and the public alike.

Conclusion: Reclaiming Education for Collective Resistance

 Effective resistance to the rise of fascist politics in the United States and beyond cannot occur without making education central to political struggle. This begins with recognizing that the transformation of consciousness and the transformation of institutions are deeply interrelated. We must heed Pierre Bourdieu’s warning that the most insidious forms of domination are not only economic; they are also intellectual and pedagogical, rooted in belief and persuasion. This insight calls on academics to recognize that the current battle against emerging fascist politics and white nationalism is not only a contest over economic structures or corporate power. It is equally a battle for ideas, for the very consciousness of society, and for the power to reshape culture itself.

Education is the crucible where agency is forged, where the foundations of subjectivity are laid, and where the very essence of politics takes shape. It is here, in the spaces of learning and dialogue, that the seeds of democracy can either take root or wither away. The struggle to fulfill the promises of democracy cannot thrive in the shadows of deceit, where lies eclipse reason, ignorance erodes critical understanding, and truth is drowned by the seductive chorus of unchecked power. In this battleground of ideas, education should stand as both shield and sword, a force that defends reason and nurtures the capacities of individuals to question, to resist, and to act with the integrity democracy demands.

Amid the current assault on public and higher education, educators must reclaim their role as architects of imagined futures, fostering a language of possibility that aligns education with the broader struggle for democracy. They should consider taking control of the labor process in order to engage in academic freedom and set the conditions for teaching, learning, and policy.   Such a vision of education must reject the neoliberal paradigm of education as a private investment in “human capital” and instead cultivate a critical pedagogy that disturbs complacency, inspires critical thinking, and energizes students to confront the societal forces shaping their lives.

Education’s critical function lies in its power to create informed, engaged citizens who possess the civic courage to challenge injustice. This necessitates teaching students to think intersectionally, historically, and relationally. In a world dominated by fragmented knowledge, staggering levels of inequality, and the tyranny of metrics, students must be educated to become border crossers, fluent in multiple literacies, print, visual, and digital, capable not only of consuming culture but producing it as cultural critics and creators.

Critical pedagogy should be defended as the search for truth. It is a pedagogy that empowers students to act from a position of agency, equipping them to unsettle power, challenge common sense, and take risks in pursuit of justice and mutual respect. Educators must inspire students to think dangerously, imagining futures where democracy, equality, and freedom are not only values but achievable goals. This involves confronting injustice as an ongoing struggle and recognizing that the fight for justice is never fully complete.

In a society where democracy is under siege and fascism casts a growing shadow, educators should recognize that alternative futures are not only possible but that acting on this belief is essential to achieving social change. This urgent political and pedagogical mission demands both a language of critique and a language of possibility. Critique exposes abuses of power, unmasks deceit, and holds authority accountable, while a vision of educated hope dares us to imagine new horizons, empowering us to think and act beyond the confines of the present. It calls on us to reject the inevitability of injustice, to defy the predatory forces shaping our future, and to summon the courage to envision a world grounded in justice, equity, and freedom, a world we must actively strive to build.

At stake is the courage to confront the world we want to build, the world we owe to future generations. The great novelist and critic James Baldwin understood with unmatched clarity that a society’s fate is sealed the moment it abandons its responsibility to those who have not yet arrived. In Nothing Personal, he warned that when we break faith with one another, we forfeit the very possibility of a shared world. Today, that warning is no longer metaphor, it is the condition of our times.

As authoritarianism weaponizes ignorance, as cruelty becomes a governing principle, and as whole populations are written out of the category of the human, the struggle for the future falls squarely on the shoulders of educators and cultural workers. Our task is nothing less than to disrupt the pedagogy of fascism: to nurture forms of critical memory that cannot be erased, solidarities that cannot be bought off, imaginations that refuse to be colonized. If we fail, the future will be engineered by those who thrive on amnesia and revel in disposability. But if we rise to the challenge, insisting on truth, defending the vulnerable, and widening the moral vocabulary of democracy, we create the conditions under which new generations can breathe, speak, and begin again. Resistance, then, is not an option; it is the only means by which the future survives.

In these dark times, hope may be wounded, but it is not lost. Resistance and the promise of collective struggle endure, for power is never absolute, and domination cannot extinguish the will to fight back. The global rise of fascism casts a long shadow, marked by state violence, silenced dissent, and the assault on critical thought. Yet history is not a closed book; it is a call to action, a space for possibility. Now, more than ever, we must dare to think boldly, act courageously, and forge the democratic futures that justice demands and humanity deserves.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

What should be done about Donald Trump and the U.S. strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific Oceans? Should we really be quibbling about who ordered the second strike on the survivors of the boat off the coast of Venezuela? By quibbling, “there’s a risk … of losing sight of the forest for the tree, because the broader campaign is really problematic,” an International Crisis Group expert told Robert Tait in The Guardian. Beyond the questions of who ordered the second strike or whether the drone strikes violated guidelines in U.S. military manuals, the larger issue is whether international law was violated.

How is “the broader campaign…problematic”? November 25, 2025, marked the 80^th anniversary of the start of the 1945-46 Nuremberg trials against major Nazi leaders. The trials marked a turning point in trying individual heads of states and was a seminal moment for human rights and international criminal law. Today, by contrast, President Trump has welcomed International Criminal Court (ICC) indicted leaders Vladimir Putin in Alaska and Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House in Washington.

Where is international law today?

Arguments about whether the bombings of the boats – including strikes on survivors – violate U.S. military law miss the larger issue of violating international law. As Professor Gabor Rona correctly pointed out in a letter to the New York Times: “No responsible expert in international law could conclude that these attacks are part of a war, despite the Trump administration’s claims to the contrary. The use of epithets like terrorist and narcoterrorist to describe alleged drug traffickers changes nothing. These killings are simply murder — extrajudicial killings in violation of United States and international human rights law because the boats’ occupants are not attacking the United States, nor do they pose an imminent threat of attack…While it is true that killing an incapacitated person is an especially heinous human rights violation, the initial use of lethal force against these boats is just as unlawful.”

Looking beyond the illegality of the boat bombings to events in Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, Sudan, and elsewhere, it is worth asking the broader question about the role of international law today. An eminent legal expert tried to be positive: “[W]hile some rules are undoubtedly being flouted, and gravely so, the vast majority of the rules of international law continue to be respected and to operate and apply in a manner that is fully effective,” Professor Philippe Sands of University College, London, is quoted in The Guardian. As evidence, Sands points to a “host of international treaties” that made his recent train journey from London to Paris possible. He also notes that international courts and tribunals are busier than ever.

Is the glass half full or half empty? Is international law relevant in getting trains from London to Paris but ineffective in stopping Russian aggression in Ukraine, Israeli genocide in Palestine, famine in Sudan, Putin and Netanyahu visiting the U.S., and American extrajudicial bombings of small boats?

International law is a misleading title. International is simple; it means between countries. Law suggests obligations states and individuals must follow. International law has its own courts and tribunals, but they cannot enforce their rulings like domestic courts. The United Nations has no regular police force or army. After issuing indictments, the ICC has been unable to bring Putin and Netanyahu to trial, and probably never will.

Trump 2.0 and international law

The problem with all Trump’s actions, like the boat bombings, is one of threshold. Everything with Trump is XXL – extra-large. “To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America, please be warned that we will blow you out of existence,” he declared, undiplomatically, at the United Nations General Assembly. Like the size of Trump’s East Wing ballroom, the size of his ego is ever-expanding.

There are several reasons why Trump is against multilateralism and the United Nations. According to the latest National Security Strategy (NSS 2025), the U.S. [Trump] “will chart our own course in the world and determine our own destiny, free of outside interference.” Rather than worrying about Trump’s physical age and his naps during Cabinet meetings, people should be concerned about his outsized ego.

The new U.S. National Security Strategy reflects egocentrism and the Administration’s disdain for international law and institutions. It answers the question “What do we want?” with: “First and foremost, we want the continued survival and safety of the United States as an independent, sovereign republic whose government secures the God-given natural rights of its citizens and prioritizes their well-being and interests.” In the section on “Sovereignty and Respect,” 2025 NSS says, “the U.S. will unapologetically protect our own sovereignty” as part of a national effort that “includes preventing its erosion by transnational and international organizations.” In very clear terms, the strategy declares; the U.S. will stand “against the sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organizations, and for reforming those institutions so that they assist rather than hinder individual sovereignty and further American interests.”

Compare 2025 NSS U.S. national power, sovereignty-centric, transactional vision – “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order…are over” –  with the 2022 NSS referring to a “free and rules-based international order.” That NSS presented international law, and multilateral institutions as central to U.S. foreign policy. At the time, the U.S. was committed to working with “any country, including competitors,” as long as that country “is willing to constructively address shared challenges within the rules-based international order.” NSS 2022 took other countries’ interests into account.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth confirmed Trump’s/U.S. egocentrism last week in California when he said; “President Trump can and will take decisive military action as he sees fit to defend our nation’s interests. Let no country on earth doubt that for a moment.” (italics added) As “he sees fit,” excludes any consideration of others, and certainly of international law.

When I received my first evaluation in elementary school, my mother pointed to the two sides of the report card. The first side had “academic” notations – reading, writing etc. The second side included grades and comments on behavior. My mother said;” The first side will be easy for you. The second side – which includes ‘works and plays well with others’ – is the difficult one.”

What about the United States, Trump and international law? Respecting international law and multilateral institutions requires countries working and playing well with other countries; it is the second side of the global report card. Two years into Trump 2.0, he and his administration have failed miserably.

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Federal agents on the roof of the ICE facility in Portland, OR. Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Gabriel Garcia-Aviles was a 56-year-old grandfather with a work permit who’d been living in the U.S. for over 30 years. He was a beloved member of his Southern California community.

This fall, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained Garcia-Aviles and sent him to the Adelanto immigration detention center. He died around a week later, with ICE only informing his family that he was in critical condition once he was on his deathbed.

At the hospital, his daughter Mariel found him “unconscious, intubated,” and with “dried blood on his forehead.” He had “a cut on his tongue and blood on his lips” and “broken teeth and bruising on his body,” according to reporting from L.A. Taco. No clear cause of death was given, leaving his family shattered and still searching for answers.

That’s the second death this year at Adelanto.

Ismael Ayala-Uribe, a 39-year-old former DACA recipient from Orange County, lived in the U.S. for nearly 35 years. ICE apprehended him while he was working at a car wash and sent him to Adelanto on August 22. He died a month later of an abscess after reportedly being denied lifesaving medical treatment.

ICE didn’t inform his family that he’d been hospitalized. They only learned of Ayala-Uribe’s death the following day after a police visit.

At least 25 people have died in ICE custody since President Trump returned to office, making 2025 the deadliest year for people in ICE custody since 2004. Over 65,000 others remain detained, also the highest number in years. Immigrants with no criminal record remain the largest group in immigration detention. According to ProPublica, ICE has also detained over 170 U.S. citizens this year.

Adelanto, owned and operated by the GEO Group, is among ICE’s sprawling network of mostly private, for-profit detention facilities notorious for human rights abuses. But it’s hardly alone.

From the Krome Detention Center in Florida to the Karnes County detention facility in Texas, people in ICE custody are routinely subjected to abysmal conditions and medical neglect. The detention population has increased by 50 percent this year, which experts have warned could lead to more deaths.

Rights groups have been issuing warnings like these for years.

In 2024, the ACLU and Physicians for Human Rights examined the deaths of 52 people who died in ICE custody between 2017 to 2021 and concluded that 95 percent of those deaths would have been “preventable or possibly preventable” with appropriate medical care. The researchers also found ICE’s oversight and accountability mechanisms “critically flawed.”

These problems have only worsened as immigration arrests have escalated as part of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda. Recent U.S. Senate investigations uncovered dozens of cases of medical neglect, insufficient or rotten food, foul water, and pregnant women forced to sleep on the floor in ICE detention facilities this year.

Watchdog groups and lawmakers have found that ICE has repeatedly failed to comply with its own protocols, ignored congressional inquiries, and denied members of Congress entry to facilities, even though they have the authority to conduct unannounced oversight visits.

ICE acts increasingly like a rogue agency, refusing to follow U.S. and international law. Yet the “Big Beautiful Bill” Trump signed this year includes $45 billion for ICE to build new prisons housing adults and children, which all but ensures more abuses and preventable deaths. Meanwhile, private prison companies continue to profit.

It doesn’t have to be this way. More oversight would help safeguard civil and human rights. But ultimately Congress must defund and dismantle ICE, end the unnecessary and inhumane system of immigration detention, and create more legal pathways to citizenship, among other reforms.

Legislation recently introduced by U.S. Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Adam Smith would be a step forward. If passed, it would repeal mandatory detention and phase out privatized detention.

As more families are ripped apart, our nation of immigrants stands at a crossroads. It can continue on this path of extreme cruelty and systemic abuse, or it can uphold human rights and dignity for all people.

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Cover art for the book Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? by Gabriel Rockhill

In agreement with the highly respected recent work of Daniel Immerwahr and David Vine and other contemporary radical scholars, Garbriel Rockhill’s new book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism, The Intellectual World War. reinforces the by now quite widely-held notion that there is a US empire. Following World War II and the establishment of cold war and the US national security state, a global intellectual contest was underway between those promoting and those opposing the political/philosophical hegemony of US imperial interests. A key element in the political economy of the US knowledge production system was (and is) a CIA partnership with elite universities and Cold War scholars, key corporate foundations, federal research projects, and the top leaders of the corporate mass media. Utilizing wide-ranging archival documentation, Rockhill’s book establishes these interconnections anew (previously adumbrated by Parenti, Mills, Domhoff, etc), and he does so in admirable depth. There was a concerted endeavor to draw critical social commentary into the “compatible” (150) Western Marxist camp and away from what Rockhill sees as the incompatible revolutionary Marxism practiced by Che (whom he lionizes in his first several pages and sees as emblematic of a Marxist fighter and leader in Cuba and Bolivia, in the end assassinated by CIA-linked operatives. Rockhill views Che’s legacy as consistent with other leading lights, such as Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro (338), who were at the helm of real socio-economic alternatives to capitalism in practice.

Given the accompanying context of ideological contestation, Rockhill investigates the systems of US knowledge production and counterrevolution for what they were [and continue to be]. This is a worthy project, and Rockhill’s skepticism is warranted with regard to radical intellectuals (like Marcuse, Neumann and many others) serving with the intelligence services of the US government during and after WW II, especially in connection with certain New Left criticisms of Old Left policies. He sees himself as defending anti-imperialist Marxism against the “imperial theory industry.” This industry is considered to be part of the US imperial project, and his mission is unveiling the intellectual “pipers” it paid and those who paid them.

Postmoderists and posthumanists like Foucault and Derrida figure prominently in Rockhill’s generally perceptive critique. The most pernicious “franchise” (157) of this industry is taken to be the critical theory of Frankfurt School, however. Rockhill makes a strong case against Horkheimer and Adorno as anticommunists caught up in various ways in CIA front groups like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, with Adorno publishing in the CIA-funded journal, Der Monat (183); this, in spite of being under surveillance for over a decade by the FBI while in exile in the US! A telling sign of their intellectual compliance was their realigned focus on the empirical methods of American sociology and psychology upon their return to Frankfurt after the war to lead the reconstituted Institute for Social Research. The Institute was funded in large measure through US government support, as well as from UNESCO, and German government sources. Rockhill’s research in this regard rewards the critical reader, who may already have some intimation of the politically conservative side of Adorno and Horkheimer’s perspective on Marxism. There are many discouraging revelations, too numerous to enter into here, and Rockhill’s criticisms are perfectly cogent and unobjectionable.

Rockhill is careful enough to state that his book’s purpose is not to argue that we should completely disregard the work of the Frankfurt School and other Western Marxists: “we should learn anything that we can from them” (331).  Still, his work on Herbert Marcuse in particular carries forward the rather inflammatory articles from Progressive Labor Magazine, “Herbert Marcuse’s Philosophy of Cop Out” (Israel and Russell, 1968) and “Marcuse: Cop-Out or Cop” (N.A. 1969). These pieces articulated the fundamentals of Rockhill’s  Marcuse critique more than fifty years before his latest book.

In 1996 I visited the Frankfurt Marcuse archive, where I acquired copies of the studies Marcuse  produced while he was undertaking research for the Office of Strategic Services. Separately from my investigations, these archival materials were published by Douglas Kellner in War, Technology, and Fascism: The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse Volume 1 (1998) and Peter-Erwin Jansen in Feindanalysen (1998). Rolf Wiggershaus tells us that in 1941 Horkheimer had lowered Marcuse’s Institute salary as a means of pressuring him into finding other sources of income and ultimately into separating himself monetarily from the Institute and its foundation, while continuing to identify intellectually with it (Wiggershaus 1988, 295, 331–332, 338). Thus, Marcuse found employment during World War II doing research on German fascism with the research branch of the OSS. I acquired copies of the archived projects from this period like “The New German Mentality,” “State and Individual Under National Socialism,” “German Social Stratification.” One of the most radical pieces, written immediately after his government service in 1947 has uncanny currency given the rise of neofascism in the US today. This study was titled “33 Theses toward the Military Defeat of Hitler-Fascism” ([1947] 1998, 215). It theorizes neofascism as the emergent political expression of totalitarian governance in the advanced industrial countries of the anti-Soviet post-war West. “[T]he world is dividing into a neofascist and a Soviet camp. … [T]here is only one alternative for revolutionary theory: to ruthlessly and openly criticize both systems and to uphold without compromise orthodox Marxist theory against both” ([1947] 1998, 217). I discussed all of these materials in my Art, Alienation and the Humanities: A Critical Engagement with Herbert Marcuse(SUNY Press 2000). I found that Marcuse was doing assiduous work against fascism at a time when the US and USSR were allies against Hitler. “33 Theses,” in contrast to Rockhill’s main criterion of Marxist revisionism, does notdraw social theory into a camp compatible with US imperialism, quite the contrary. Marcuse did not hesitate to see the US as itself tending towards a neofascist future.  Marcuse’s most militant and lengthy critique of fascism/neofascism is in a 1972 piece, “The Historical Fate of Bourgeois Democracy”—never published until Kellner’s 2001 volume 2 of Marcuse’s archival papers. In the context of the Vietnam war and the Nixon presidency, Marcuse concluded that “bourgeois democracy no longer presents an effective barrier to fascism ([1972] 2001, 176). It is a “regressive development of bourgeois democracy, its self transformation into a police and warfare state” ([1972] 2001, 165) supported by the sadomasochistic tolerance of a “free” people—“tolerance of the crooks and maniacs who govern them” ([1972] 2001, 171).

Marcuse’s Soviet Marxism (1958) was written while working at the Russian Institute of Columbia University and the Russian Research Center at Harvard. It depicted Soviet philosophy and politics as expressions of a technological rationality, promoting bureaucracy, and reducing art to aesthetic realism, etc., all of which were regarded as untenable (one-dimensional) in his critical Marxist terms. Marcuse’s book did something unique and unexpected distinguishing his Soviet Marxism from Cold War-fueled political writing: he fearlessly risked censure in the US by comparing US and Soviet culture, finding them both wanting. He saw the US and Soviet systems as equally worthy of fundamental social critique. “It has been noted … how much the present ‘communist spirit’ resembles the ‘capitalist spirit’ which Max Weber attributed to the rising capitalist civilization” (Marcuse [1958] 1961, 169). Marcuse in 1958 did not back away from profound criticisms of US culture in Soviet Marxism that led him also to be branded as “anti-American.” This was a major departure from the much more cautious politics of the Horkheimer inner circle as well as from the conventional wisdom in the US academic sphere. Marcuse utilized a clearly dialectical perspective in Soviet Marxism, and this was crucial in the development of critical theory.

Subsequently, Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization specifically criticized American schooling as single dimensional, opposing “… the overpowering machine of education and entertainment … [which unites us all] … in a state of anesthesia …” ([1955] 1966, 104). One-Dimensional Man (1964) would consolidate his incisive new type of Marxist criticism of US culture. According to its famous first sentence: “A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress” (Marcuse 1964, 1, emphasis added). ODM argues that there is a tendency for the wholesale integration of the individual into mass society. His expanded theory of alienation emphasizes the trend toward the total absorption of the personality into the processes and systems of capitalist commodity production. This gives rise to a new kind of totalitarianism, unlike that formerly characteristic of fascist societies. With this work, Marcuse established his key and characteristic argument that US culture is politically and economically coordinated, “totally administered” (1964, 85) with conventional discourse “fixed, doctored, loaded” (1964, 94).  His next works, An Essay on Liberation (1969) and Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972) promote an explicitly activist politics against US war-making and imperialism.

As a makeshift Marxist and critical theorist myself, who–full disclosure–has published four monographs on the life and work of Herbert Marcuse in the past twenty-five years (with no funding other than a single semester-long research sabbatical from my community college), I do find Rockhill’s “deep dive” (61) into Marcuse’s work to be astonishingly faulty  in depicting his work as that of an archetypal pied piper paid to use Marxism in a defanged manner that also somehow defends the imperial world project of the US. Nothing in Marcuse is a defense of Western society in Marxist or any other terms. Marcuse had the civic courage and also the philosophical means—due to his association with the traditions of classical German philosophy, Marxism, and the Frankfurt School—to break through what he explicitly criticized in ODM as the “pre-established harmony between scholarship and the national purpose” (19) and the paralysis of critique characteristic of our mid-century US triumphalism and parochialism.

Rockhill condemns a person as anticommunist for criticizing the Soviet Union—much as right wing Israelis condemn a person as antisemitic for criticizing Israel today.

Speaking of Israel, Rockhill accuses Marcuse of supporting Israel’s settler colonial project. Quite the contrary is the case. Marcuse remarked on Israeli/Palestinian relations in 1972— “The national aspirations of the Palestinian people could be met by the establishment of a national Palestinian state alongside Israel. [This] would be left to the self-determination of the Palestinian people in a referendum under supervision by the United Nations. The optimal solution would be the coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs as equal members of a socialist federation of Middle Eastern states. This is still a utopian prospect” (Marcuse 2005a, 182). Of course, “prerequisite to anything must be the idea of the continuation of an Israeli state” (2005a, 181) able to defend itself and “capable of preventing the repetition of the holocaust” (2005a, 180). To be serious as social critics, Marcuse admonishes us, we must understand clearly that we live in a world where another “Auschwitz is still possible” (2019, 49). He never knew how darkly ironic that realization would become.

Marcuse addressed the Israeli/Palestinian conflicts of the ’60s and ’70s in four disparate yet direct statements—“Thoughts on Judaism, Israel, etc.” ([1977] 2005a); “Israel is Strong Enough to Concede” ([1972] 2005b); his conversation with Israeli Defense Minister Mosha Dayan ([1971] 2012); and in the “Interview with Street Journal” ([1970] 2014). We owe it to Israeli scholar Zvi Tauber (2013; 2012), who has studied these and other Marcuse materials closely, such that we have a conclusive account of Marcuse’s critique of Israeli policies vis à vis Palestine well prior to the Israel-Gaza War of 2023–2025: “Marcuse’s view regarding the State of Israel stands in contrast to the prevalent Zionist ideology on a crucial matter: he does not recognize the historical-mythical rights of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, rights ostensibly originating in the Bible or in some belief in the Land’s primordial belonging to this people, ostensibly valid throughout history to this day … [T]he very establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and its conquests in the Six-Day War were for Marcuse also unjust to the Palestinians … ” (Tauber 2013, 129). “Marcuse was surprised to hear an explicit admission from then Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan … that the State of Israel was in fact established on Palestinian land” (Tauber 2013, 129–130).

Tauber makes it clear that Dayan, in sharp contrast to Marcuse, thought that Israel had a right to the land. Marcuse was struck by how this admission undergirded the case one could make that Israel’s history is in fact that of a colonial settler state. After having been a defender of Israel’s policies earlier in his life, by 1970 Marcuse had had a radical change of heart after an Amnesty International report of the Israeli torture of Arab prisoners and learning that 32 children had been killed in a bombing near Cairo: “Now if these reports are correct, it seems to me that precisely as a Jew and as a member of the New Left, I can no longer defend Israeli policies, and that I have to agree with those who are radically critical of Israel” (Marcuse [1970] 2014, 354).

I recognize much that is worthwhile in the philosophy of Herbert Marcuse and also much that is worthy of criticism from the point of view of a classical dialectical and historical materialism. It is true that One-Dimensional Man has been often misunderstood as an anti-manifesto of the paralysis of the critical mind, oppositional politics, and a deep philosophical pessimism. There are reasons for this in Marcuse’s text: one clear example is the heading to his Introduction, “The Paralysis of Criticism: Society Without Opposition.” It is also true that Marcuse is noted for his contention there that that labor, narcotized and anaesthetized by consumerism and in collusion with business priorities, lacks a critical appreciation of the potential of its own politics to transform the established order. Marcuse’s 1966 conference presentation to the Prague Hegel Symposium seemingly also rejected a central tenet of Marxist philosophy: internal contradiction as the essence of dialectics. Marcuse’s philosophy has, at key junctures, displaced the paradigm of historical materialism with a dialectics of love and death encapsulated within tragic paradox and an aesthetic ontology (Reitz 2000). Today, viewing Marcuse’s life’s work as a whole, however, I recognize that there is a double line of interpretation that emerges in his philosophizing in which two robust paradigms are dialectically intertwined, yet both have distinctive criteria for critical insight (Reitz, 2019, 2023. 2025). The ontological/hermeneutic paradigm is subjectively self-contained and considers meaning in self-referential (i.e. human) terms. That is, in terms of the internal turmoil and distress supposedly inherent in the depth dimension of the human condition (with Eros and Thanatos as the core sensual forces). This conflict is theorized as revealed, enclosed, and preserved by the aesthetic form, and its truth is untethered to societal and historical particulars. In my view, the historical materialist side of Marcuse’s critical social theory ultimately gains greater explanatory power and retains a malleability and freedom from apriori categorization because it remains externally referential. Because it continually implicates art and knowledge in a structural and historical analysis of social life, it possesses a capacity to construct and engage that context. It can also raise the problems and prospects of intervention against the material structure of oppression in ways the ontological / hermeneutical approach brackets out.

Classical Marxist continuities are present throughout Marcuse’s writings. Marcuse maintained that the most important duty of the intellectual was to investigate destructive social circumstances — and be engaged in activities of transformation toward justice and peace. “The fact that the vast majority of the population accepts, and is made to accept, this society does not render it less irrational and less reprehensible” (1964 xiii).

Marcuse’s collected works directly address what concerns us most today: neofascism, genocide and ecocide in Gaza; ecological destruction of the planet, as well as the crisis of the university. In Marcuse one encounters what is lacking in other members of the Frankfurt School: an analysis of advanced industrial society and a view of labor as resource with strategic power ([1974] 2015). “The working class still is the ‘ontological’ antagonist of capital ….” ([1979] 2014). He is the singular member of the Frankfurt School to occupy himself with wide-ranging ecological issues (Reitz 2019). He also stands out as having declared that Marxism needs feminism ([1974] 2005c). It is distressing and sad that Rockhill excludes Marcuse categorically, grouping him with the others he has quite rightly criticized. It’s bittersweet to note that Marcuse wrote approvingly of Che in 1969 (as does Rockhill today) as the symbol of the Cuban revolution, who was “very far from the Stalinist bureaucrats, very near the socialist man” (1969). Marcuse was not an antagonist to revolutionary Marxism, but a critical ally to anyone struggling against US imperialism and its knowledge production system.

Works Cited

Jansen, Peter-Erwin, ed. 1998. Herbert Marcuse, Feindanalysen, Über die Deutschen. Lüneburg, Germany: zu Klampen Verlag.

Israel, Jared and William Russell. 1968. “Herbert Marcuse and his Philosophy of Cop Out” Progressive Labor, V. 6, N. 5.

Kellner, Douglas, ed. 1998. War, Technology, and Fascism: The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. Volume 1.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1947] 1998a. “33 Theses toward the Military Defeat of Hitler Fascism,” in Douglas Kellner (Ed.), Herbert Marcuse, Technology, War, and Fascism: Volume 1, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. New York: Routledge.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1955] 1966. Eros and Civilization. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1958] 1961. Soviet Marxism, A Critical Analysis. New York: Vintage.

Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1969] 2014. “Interview with Pierre Viansson-Ponte” in Marxism, Revolution and Utopia, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. Volume 6. Edited by Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1970] 2014. “Interview with Street Journal,” in Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (Eds.), Herbert Marcuse, Marxism, Revolution, and Utopia: Volume 6, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. New York and London: Routledge.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1971] 2012. “Protocol of the Conversation between Philosopher Herbert Marcuse and Israel’s Minister of Defense, Moshe Dayan (December 29, 1971),” Telos, Number 158.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1972] 2001. “The Historical Fate of Bourgeois Democracy,” in Douglas Kellner (ed.), Herbert Marcuse, Towards a Critical Theory of Society: Volume 2, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. New York: Routledge.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1972, 1977] 2005a. “Thoughts on Judaism, Israel, etc.,” in Douglas Kellner (ed.), Herbert Marcuse, The New Left and the 1960s: Volume 3, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. New York and London: Routledge. The 1977 material repeats many of Marcuse’s 1972 statements from: “Isreal is Strong Enough to Concede,” same volume.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1972, 1977] 2005b. “Isreal is Strong Enough to Concede,” in Douglas Kellner (ed.), Herbert Marcuse, The New Left and the 1960s: Volume 3, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. New York and London: Routledge.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1974] 2015. Paris Lectures at Vincennes University, 1974. Edited by Peter-Erwin Jansen and Charles Reitz. Philadelphia, PA: International Herbert Marcuse Society.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1974] 2005c. “Marxism and Feminism” in Douglas Kellner (ed.), Herbert Marcuse, The New Left and the 1960s: Volume 3, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. New York and London: Routledge.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1979] 2014. “The Reification of the Proletariat,” in Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (eds.) Herbert Marcuse, Marxism, Revolution, and Utopia, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. Volume 6. New York and London: Routledge.

Marcuse, Herbert. 2019. Ecology and the Critique of Society Today: Five Selected Papers for the Current Context. Philadelphia, PA: The International Herbert Marcuse Society.

N.A. 1969. “Marcuse: Cop-Out or Cop?” Progressive Labor, V. 6.

Reitz, Charles. 2025. Herbert Marcuse as Social Justice Educator. New York and London: Routledge.

Reitz, Charles. 2023. The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse: Ecosocialism and the EarthCommonWealth Project. Cantley, Quebec: Daraja Press.

Reitz, Charles. 2019. Ecology and Revolution. Herbert Marcuse and the Challenge of a New World System. New York and London: Routledge.

Reitz, Charles. 2000. Art, Alienation, and the Humanities:  A Critical Engagement with Herbert Marcuse. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Tauber, Zvi. 2013. “Herbert Marcuse on Jewish Identity, the Holocaust, and Israel,” Telos, Number 165.

Tauber, Zvi. 2012. “Herbert Marcuse on the Arab-Israeli Conflict: His Conversation with Moshe Dayan,” Telos, Number 158.

Wiggershaus, Rolf. 1988. Die Frankfurter Schule. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag.

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Silicon Valley and other high tech billionaires are investing millions in start-ups dedicated to creating genetically engineered (GE) babies, according to a recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report. AI mogul Sam Altman, cryptocurrency entrepreneur Brian Armstrong, venture capitalist Peter Theil and Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian are supplying lavish funds to explore human embryo gene editing and to market “polygenic” (i.e., multi-gene) screening of embryos for quality control.

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Photo by Luke Jones

It is safe to say that since OpenAI first released ChatGPT in October 2022, AI has been the most widely covered and discussed topic in the U.S. By January 2023, ChatGPT had become the fastest-growing consumer software app in history, gaining over 100 million users in its first two months. Currently, its website has over 800 million weekly users. Since ChatGPT’s emergence, the question of AI and its potential and pitfalls has dominated discourse. 

Indeed, daily, one is bound to run into numerous headlines in both the business and tech press. Just to take a quick example, on September 18^th, Time magazine put forward two stories. One was titled ‘AI is Learning to Predict the Future- and Beating Humans at It’ (that story dealt with an AI system finishing in the top 10 of the Summer Cup, a forecasting contest); the other read ‘AI is Scheming and Stopping It Won’t Be Easy, OpenAI Study Finds’ (this one touched on the fact that all of today’s best AI systems- Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude Opus, can engage in scheming- meaning they can pretend to do what their human developers want, while actually pursuing different objectives). 

One can do this all day. In August, Wired featured a headline, ‘Nuclear Experts Say Mixing AI and Nuclear Weapons is Inevitable.’ More recently, Wired featured a story that Anthropic recently partnered with the U.S. government to ensure that Claude wouldn’t spill nuclear secrets and help another entity build a nuke. Explicit in this is the geopolitical sphere. This past July, the New York Times Business page declared ‘The Global AI Divide’ that has wealthier regions building out robust data centers while poorer regions are left behind. And there have been U.S. efforts to freeze China out of the cutting-edge chip market, not to mention the apprehension about open-source models from Chinese companies such as DeepSeek. Then there have been countless stories featuring the coming revolutionary effect AI will have on everything from drug development to medical diagnosis (‘a doctor in every pocket’) to food production to films to love lives to weather forecasting to, well, everything. 

Go a bit deeper and, depending on who one talks to, AI will usher everything from a global dystopia where almost nobody will be able to earn a living since AI and robots will make people unnecessary to employers to global socialism- since we can’t allow the former scenario to come to pass, we’ll need to usher in the latter and AI can be a better agent for a planned economy than human bureaucrats. In that case, AI would indeed have a major role in ushering in universal abundance and perhaps very long lifespans. 

There is also the infamous idea, featured in The Terminator movies, that superintelligent AI will replace us mere Homo Sapiens, for one reason or another, with higher forms of life. Not surprising perhaps one can find some who are actively cheering for that prospect. 

For a harrowing primer on that, there is Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Scoares’ book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us. The main point here is that no one knows exactly how AI works and therefore no one can completely predict its perceived interest. Known as the alignment problem, we can’t be sure superintelligence will have its interests completely aligned with ours. Yudkowski and Scoares write: 

“The most fundamental fact about current AIs is that they

are grown, not crafted. It is not like how other software gets

made- indeed it is closer to how a human gets made, at least in 

important ways. Namely, engineers understand the process that

results in an AI, but do not much understand what goes on inside

the AI minds they manage to create.”

It may not be that an AI system comes to want to annihilate us out of maliciousness, either. The authors cite the example of building a skyscraper on a patch of land that has an ant hill. We’re not trying to deliberately kill ants; we’re just trying to build a skyscraper and preserving the ants in that location isn’t important enough to be considered. Such could be our relationship with superintelligence and, as the authors note, such intelligence once built can’t be simply unplugged once it exists. 

None of that appears to be having any effect on capital pouring into AI, but on that note a different narrative has crept up in the discourse. In August, the Financial Times asked, ‘Is AI hitting a wall.’ Given the general disappointment with OpenAI’s GPT-5, FT wrote: ‘Following hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in generative AI and the computing infrastructure that powers it, the question suddenly sweeping Silicon Valley is: what if this is as good as it gets?’ The piece then added the magic word: bubble.

It was right around that time when an MIT study came out showing that 95 percent of the generative AI implementations in enterprises have had zero return on their investment (that investment equals $30 to $40 billion). A month earlier, the think tank Model Evaluation & Threat put out a study involving a randomly selected group of experienced software developers to perform coding tasks with or without AI tools. Giving that coding is a task that current AI models are supposed to have mastered, all involved in the study expected productivity gains for those using the AI. Instead, the study found that those in the AI group completed their tasks 20 percent slower than those working without it. A McKinsey & Company report from March found that 71 percent of companies reported using generative AI, and more than 80 percent of them reported the AI had no ‘tangible impact’ on earnings. 

Amara’s Law, named for American futurist Roy Amara, states that we tend to overstate the effect of technology in the short term and underestimate the effect in the long run. The idea being that there is a period of time between the development of new technologies and enterprises adjusting their operations to incorporate their use. 

Economist Eric Brynjolsson, co-author of The Second Machine Age and Race Against the Machine, posits that every new technology experiences a ‘productivity J-curve’, meaning at first, enterprises struggle to deploy it, causing productivity to fall. Eventually, when they learn how to integrate it, productivity booms. Indeed, it took decades for technologies such as tractors and computers to have a significant impact on productivity. Even electricity itself, which became available in 1880s, didn’t begin to produce big productivity gains until the 1910s in Henry Ford’s factories.

Just to throw around some numbers, this year, large tech firms in the U.S. will spend nearly $400 billion on AI infrastructure. By the end of 2028, analysts reckon the amount spent on data centers worldwide will be more than $3 trillion. According to recent data from Pitchbook, AI startups received 53 percent of all global venture capital dollars invested- in the U.S., that percentage jumps to 64 percent. 

With other sectors of the economy showing signs of sluggishness, likely in part due to Trump’s tariffs, for instance, roughly 78,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost this year, AI is holding the fort. In a column for the Financial Times titled ‘America is now one big bet on AI’, Ruchir Sharma writes that AI companies account for 80 percent of the gains in U.S. stocks so far in 2025. In fact, more than a fifth of the entire S&P 500 market cap is now just three companies- Microsoft, Apple, and Nvidia- two of which are largely bets on AI. Nvidia recently became the first company to reach a $5 trillion market cap, while Microsoft recently hit $4 trillion.  

Another word from past bubbles that has been creeping into the ether is debt. On September 30^th, the Wall Street Journal wrote: ‘In the initial years of the artificial-intelligence boom, comparisons to the dot-com bubble didn’t make much sense. Three years in, growing levels of debt are making them ring a little truer…a crop of highly leveraged companies is ushering an era that could change the complexion of the boom.’     

Oracle, for example, which pledged a $300 billion investment in AI infrastructure with OpenAI now owes over $111 billion in debt. Quick FactSet reports that interest-bearing debt of the 1300 largest tech companies in the world has quadrupled over the past decade and now stands at roughly $1.35 trillion. According to analysts at Morgan Stanley, debt used to fund data centers could exceed $1 trillion by 2028. 

Much of this capital is flowing in something of a circle. In other words, one company pays money to another company as part of a transaction, then the other company turns around and buys the first company’s products and services (and without the first transaction, that other company may not be able to make the purchase). Nvidia agrees to invest $100 billion in OpenAI to fund data centers and Open AI commits to filling said centers with purchased Nvidia chips; Oracle has a $300 billion deal with OpenAI for a data center buildout and is spending billions on Nvidia chips; Nvidia is planning on investing $2 billion in Elon Musk’s xAI and has agreed to buy $6.3 billion worth of cloud serving from CoreWeave, the leading independent operator of AI data centers in the U.S.; Meta agreed to buy $14.3 billion from CoreWeave in September (CoreWeave has told financial analysts for every billion in computing power it plans to sell it must borrow $2.85 billion); CoreWeave put $350 million in OpenAI…etc. 

Needless to say, companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are nowhere near profitable. By one estimate, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Tesla will by the end of the year have spent $560 billion on AI-related capital expenditures since the beginning of 2024 and brought back just $35 billion in AI-related revenue. It is tempting to say that AI is too big to fail. But what is the damage if the bubble does pop? In an essay titled What Kind of Bubble is AI, tech writer Corey Doctorow writes ‘Tech bubbles come in two varieties: The ones that leave something behind, and the ones that leave nothing behind. Sometimes, it can be hard to guess what kind of bubble you’re living through until it pops and you find out the hard way.’ Past manias, such as the 19^th-century British railroad bubble at least left useful infrastructure. It is hard to see what other uses there can be for all these data centers. 

And this leads to another narrative that’s floating in the ether. In their book The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want, Emily Benner and Alex Hanna argue that we’re essentially being sold a bill of goods. What is being labeled ‘AI’ is in fact a marketing term for a bundle of different technologies. The Large-Language Models (LLMs) so in vogue are just ‘synthetic text-extruding machines’ that ‘out and out plagiarize their inputs’ and site nonexistent sources. And plagiarism seems like quite a fair charge. It is true that all art and technology build on what came before, but Van Gogh didn’t copy and paste the Japanese prints that influenced him into his paintings. LLMs aren’t adding any new inputs, they just directly synthesize the creative inputs of others.  Much of the media, under the thrall of tech CEOs and boosters, are reporting every small success but nothing about AI’s many failures. In this case, both the boosters and the doomers miss the point. AI may not take your job away, but it may well make it shittier. Making some people redundant, allowing greater exploitation of others, AI is simply another move for greater profits squeezed out of the masses.  

Tech boosters and corporate henchmen will often shout ‘Luddite’ at this kind of talk. This actually ends up not making the intended point. If the contemporary idea of a Luddite is someone slamming their new gadget against a wall in frustration or proudly grinding their own coffee beans while jamming to a vinyl record, the original Luddites should not be understood as an anti-tech movement, but as a social protest rooted in early nineteenth-century England. The machines they smashed in protest, the stocking frame, were not new pieces of technology. By the time the Luddites burst onto the scene in 1811, the stocking frame had existed for more than two centuries. In fact, the Luddites can’t even claim originality since machine-breaking had a long history in English protests. 

The Luddites’ problem was not with technology per se, but how it was applied- the way it was used to create unemployment, impoverish skilled workers, increase production while stagnating wages. One can see the shadow of this in such actions as the 2023 strike by the Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild against the Hollywood studios. It seems a safe bet we’ll be seeing more such resistance in the coming years. Journalists from the news site Politico recently won an arbitration ruling regarding AI against the company. The arbitrator ruled that Politico officially violated the collective bargaining agreement by failing to provide notice, human oversight, or an opportunity for the workers to bargain over the use of AI in the newsroom. 

Finally, one shouldn’t overlook the anti-democratic ethos behind AI boosting. Offshoring problem-solving to AI, even if it can be done, means just concentrating power into the hands of a select few who own the AI. That appears to be precisely the point: no more messy democratic planning and consensus building. For example, take former Alphabet CEO Eric Schmitt regarding climate change and AI: ‘My own opinion is that we’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we are not organized to do it and, yes, the needs in this area [AI] will be a problem. But I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem than constraining it.’  OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been proclaiming that we need AI to solve the big problems facing us, such as global warming to colonizing space. 

Data centers are the reason the big tech companies have openly blown past their previously stated green targets, not to mention a key factor in increased electricity use in the U.S. (after being flat for decades) and rising electric bills.

But AI won’t relieve us from the hard work of democratic politics and there is no reason why AI development should be exempt from such work. Yudkowsky and Scoares call for full-on public mobilization to keep the worst from happening. Even if the ultimate doomer vision doesn’t convince many, there is still plenty to discuss. Few would dispute the positive, specific contribution AI can make, like helping to solve part of the protein-folding problem (that AlphaFold, developed by Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind, in 2023) and assisting in developing needed antibiotics and other medical advances like improved diagnosis. But anything can be subject to debate and regulation, even public ownership. Demands for transparency in how systems are designed and for whose benefit should be spewing from elected officials. And there are those CO2 emissions to consider. 

Corey Doctorow recently called AI ‘the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations…AI isn’t going to wake up, become superintelligent and turn you into paperclips- but rich people with AI investor psychosis are almost certainly going to make you much, much poorer.’ Obviously, only democratic engagement and collective responsibility could avoid that bleak vision. Such calls always seem like long shots but, really, is there anything else?

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White House media enemies page.

Doxing, swatting, bogus FBI calls, stalkers live-streaming outside their homes — it used to be marginal maniacs who saw journalists as targets to be neutralized. Now it’s the President. A government that pardons violent insurrectionists, guts research on far‑right terror, and redirects agents from tracking neo‑Nazis to hunting immigrants is turning its full weight on the people who dare to report any of it.

The anti-hate beat has never been for the faint of heart. Amanda Moore, who embedded with the far Right in 2020, has faced backlash for her reporting for The Nation, Politico, and The Intercept ever since. She’s seen her address, phone, gym schedule, and family details splashed across extremist sites for half a decade — leading to her sister getting swatted at 4 a.m. over a fake suicide call.

Likewise, in North Carolina, Raw Story reporter Jordan Green saw a young neo-Nazi soldier, whom his reporting had tied to the group Patriot Front, show up at his door during a fake pizza delivery. The soldier snapped Green’s photo, then returned weeks later to film a flash rally of extremists right outside the home where Green lives with his wife and children.

Steven Monacelli in Dallas knows this story too. His work tracking extremism, disinformation, and the influence of dark money in politics has won awards — but it’s also cost him. Last year, someone impersonating the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center sent cops to his door with a bogus wife-beating tip on Thanksgiving.

The work of journalists like these was never easy, but as Moore puts it, the people she met praising “a friendlier Nazi Germany” at those conferences years back, are now embedded in the administration:

“The people who are backlashing against me have changed. It’s no longer a live streamer like Nick Fuentes ranting about me for five minutes straight. It’s the former campaign manager for Trump 2024 calling me and threatening me with a lawsuit.”

And that was before the president launched his own doxxing and swatting operation.

Journalists as “offenders”

Last week, the White House launched a new page on its website calling out “biased” journalists by name. This week’s “offender of the week” is a Washington Post writer’s story on Pete Hegseth’s double-tap boat strike in the Caribbean. What used to be a neo-Nazi kill list on Telegram is now a taxpayer-funded enemies list.

At the same time, having quietly removed Biden-era research documenting the outsized threat posed by the extreme Right, and not-so quietly diverting funds and agents away from tracking domestic terror threats to ICE intimidation and abduction duty, Attorney General Pam Bondi is now apparently ordering law enforcement to build a list of “domestic terrorism” groups defined not by violent acts, but by ideas: opposition to immigration enforcement, “radical gender ideology,” anti‑capitalism, “anti‑Christianity,” and so‑called “anti‑American sentiments.”

That is a dragnet for every journalist exposing border abuses, white nationalist infiltration of the Pentagon, or dark money in Dallas politics — and for the communities they cover: immigrants, LGBTQ people, anti‑fascists, pro‑democracy organizers. When the Attorney General tells the FBI to treat domestic dissent as terrorism, every FOIA request, every protest, every byline becomes probable cause. The pizza-fakers and swatters become state enforcers — and earn rewards. According to Ken Klippenstein, who published her leaked memo, Bondi also directs the FBI to establish “a cash reward system” for information.

Corporate media’s deadly quiet

Monied media have ignored the extremism beat for years. They did it again this week. As Klippenstein writes:

“The Justice Department memo I published has elicited outrage across the political spectrum, but hardly any major news outlet can bother to even write about it and how law enforcement is now targeting speech and the basic activities that constitute American civic life. This is an object lesson in everything that’s wrong with corporate media.”

In an atmosphere in which the most powerful man in the world calls reporters who challenge him names, it’s no surprise that some prefer to keep out of the fray. In just the last month, Donald Trump has called half a dozen reporters — all of them women — ugly, stupid, terrible, outrageous and “piggy.” And that’s in public, where he knows his mighty megaphone sends a clear message out to where the violence behind his rhetoric becomes real, fast.

But silence from big media isn’t neutrality; it’s letting impunity spread.

Jordan Green covered a story we’ve reported on extensively on Laura Flanders & Friends: the December 2022 attack on two power stations in Moore County, North Carolina. That sabotage cut off power to tens of thousands of residents for days, in winter, and led to the death of one 87-year-old grandmother who relied on an oxygen machine to breathe. That death was ruled a homicide. Attorney general, now governor, Josh Stein assured us then that the investigation was a top priority — his words — but three years on, no one has been charged and the crime is unsolved.

“It’s a real concern that when FBI agents are diverted to immigration support, or politicized investigations against Trump’s enemies, Right-wing terrorist groups who are planning violence have a sense of impunity,” says Green.

There’s just one problem: impunity requires wrongdoing. In politics and human rights, the word is used when powerful people or institutions break the law or violate rights. In the White House’s “Hall of Shame” era, right-wing terrorists are effectively state agents, and while independent journalists toil on at their own peril, the most powerful media corporations in the country seem to be just fine with that.

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Photograph Source: Marc Nozell from Merrimack, New Hampshire, USA – CC BY 2.0

We all know the story. Someone gets furious at the behavior of a health insurance company. Perhaps they are exceptionally irate at the words and actions that have come from the CEO and other leaders in the company. And then the moment of truth occurs and they take action.

By this I mean, a group of shareholders of United Healthcare filed suit in May of this year against the company. This action was in response to a drop in shareholder value of around 22% after the death of their CEO. The shareholders were angry and felt they’d been misled when the company indicated that there would be no change in their profit forecast after this event. However, the suing shareholders distinctly believe that UHC started approving a tiny bit more care in response to their CEO’s death. This harmed their finances, they say, and in a fit that can only be solved through litigation, they went after the company. In this case, the bottom line and health of those shareholders’ finances is inversely proportional to the health of the bag holders who dismally have UHC insurance. You see, the rules are that you pay through the nose for high premiums and just wither away if you get sick. It’s a poor tax. You don’t get to ask them to fulfill their end of the bargain.

United Healthcare was always a stand-out in the world of profiteering through misery, number one in denials and at the forefront of clanker denied care (by that I mean utilizing AI to deny physician recommended services as a first response). The fact that those shareholders were angry when there was a lessening of the denials is amazing because it’s not like they started approving all care that the physicians indicated was necessary. No, it appears it was simply a slight lessening of the unreasonableness. Kind of like Howard Hughes only sprays you with a 25% solution of bleach rather than the 28% solution when you enter his elevator to come visit him.

Now what kind of profits are we talking about in this world of corporate misery mining? Well in the year 2023 the US healthcare system expenditures tallied a grotesque 4.9 trillion (or $14, 570 per person). I say grotesque because that number does not really indicate “care”. It provides parasitic income to a vast number of middlemen, shareholders and general network of slime-ball ne’er do wells. It’s a system incredible in its cruelty, literally making money off the ill and infirm of society and the US is alone in seeing this human condition as “a profit-making opportunity”.

Many in the US are misguided and kept in the dark, of course. They think that this situation and lack of care are due to scarcity, when in fact this couldn’t be further from the truth. From 1979 to 2019 worker productivity in the US soared from 85-112%. Care was relatively accessible in 1979, while today it has become a luxury. Resources are there; the imposed scarcity is due to the ever-increasing greed we see at the top. Resources exist, but they are tied up by hoarders who need to have bridges dismantled for their yachts to fit through. People are working harder and harder for less and less. This is, of course, not a revelation to anyone paying attention, but millions of Americans do believe that we find ourselves in such straits due to anything but the root cause (oligarchs and unfettered greed). They believe immigrants are taking the healthcare or any other number of mass media/politician produces hoaxes that they swallow up.

The drive to privatize everything, at best, leads to less quality and more expense for the individual, and at its worst, leads to outright fraud and criminal behavior. This was the case in the privatized prison system when judges would take kickbacks to supply the youth prisons with bodies. Some aspects of human life–say liberty, health and safety should never have become a realm for the greedy to leech off of. But here we are.

I have worked in the healthcare arena for many years. It’s difficult to describe certain things due to privacy laws, but I have a story, though that’s always haunted me. It isn’t personally identifiable so we should be good. I think her story is important and I believe it clearly illustrates some of the misery being peddled out there.

There was a woman working in one of the chain restaurants–you would all recognize the name. She was not old, not young. She was in that middle-aged era that can give way to drudgery in a poor economy. The gloss of the world has lost its shine and life’s difficulties pile up. All of this in the setting of manual labor starting to take its toll. Joints ache–it’s harder not to feel tired all the time. She worked as a server at this mega-chain restaurant, on her feet all manner of the day, scraping for enough to get by. She did not have health insurance as they made sure her hours were such that they could claim to provide insurance, but kept most employees a microsecond below that level. They used this trick or made the hours so erratic that the person never quite hit the “benefit requirements”. So, not having insurance, she did not investigate the gnawing pain in her abdomen. She just kept taking aspirin for it. More and more aspirin to mask the pain and to be able to keep working. This went on for a couple of years and the massive aspirin consumption did what it usually does. It caused a gastrointestinal bleed, and for that, she had no choice but to go the avenue of last resort for the uninsured, the local Emergency Department. The bleed was investigated and in so doing, massive metastatic disease was found. The cancer was at the point that nothing really could be done; it was so far gone. She became another casualty of the profit system. But that chain restaurant continues to make lovely profits well in excess of what it would have taken to provide some insurance for her. Now take this anecdote and multiply it times…what? Thousands and thousands?

It’s hard to know how much misery is out there from this institutional cruelty. The system chugs along, making a handful of people so wealthy that they wouldn’t run out of money if they literally set hundreds of dollars on fire every moment for the rest of their lives.

The fact that insurance is even tied to employment in the US is in itself a method to stifle worker autonomy. Of course, it should be an expectation of being a citizen of your nation. You never hear right-wingers complain about a socialist military they pay taxes to fund, but allocating dollars for the care of your fellow citizens is considered off the table. They’ve been brainwashed, and they can’t even afford to schedule a healthcare visit to get an MRI to show the washed and smooth areas.

But these victims have families; they have friends, those who love them. Their life is worth every bit as much as the Peter Thiels and Elon Musks out there. The loss of life of one of their own such as the UHC CEO is treated like the end of civilized society while the countless lives lost in the manner above……. well, they are simply statistics.

It opens up enormous questions, that of what is the inherent worth of a human being and don’t we have the duty to assist each other in a civilized society? I think most people down deep know that we do have that responsibility. Having that reciprocity actually benefits us all. It’s not healthy to carry such deep disdain for others. Look to our oligarchs and their mental health challenges on display daily to see that accumulating wealth and denying others does not make one ever feel settled and calm. Deep down, they probably know that the hatred they have for others is laser-focused back at them and instead of working on decency, they double down on their sickness, that of greed and resource gluttony.

The “Happiness Report” looks to a myriad of details in citizens’ lives to find those who are actually enjoying their time here on earth. And not the least bit shocking, the nations that are at the top prioritize the well-being of their fellow citizens. Six of the seven top nations are all from Northern Europe, where it simply isn’t tolerable to implement a winner-take-all all, no safety-net society.

Why would Americans be so arrogant as to believe their system is inherently better when it can’t even produce a basic product, that of happy people? It’s absurd to keep listening to those who continue to pitch misery as their selling point, while even they are miserable.

Through all of this, we find ourselves at a time when greed has become completely unsustainable. The misery is as exponential as the oligarch’s wealth. But in the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley, “ye are many, they are few”. It’s time we acted like it.

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Photograph Source: Andrea Womack – Public Domain

“A man of stupendous brilliance.”
– Norman Finkelstein

“A gargantuan influence.”
– Chris Hedges

“ . . . brilliant . . . unswerving . . . relentless . . . heroic.”
– Arundhati Roy

“Preposterously thorough.”
– Edward Said

“[A] fierce talent.”
– Eduardo Galeano

“An intellectual cannon.”
– Israel Shamir

“A lighthouse over a sea of hogwash.”
– Kathleen Cleaver

He had a disarming frankness, a toothy grin, a dazzling mind that never rested.

He always felt completely out of tune with the world. At ten, he published his first article (in the school paper) – a lament on the fall of Barcelona to Franco. At thirteen, he was haunting anarchist bookstores in New York City and working a newsstand with his uncle, eagerly soaking up everything a brilliant mix of immigrant minds had to offer, by far the richest intellectual environment he was ever to encounter. At sixteen, he went off by himself at the news of Hiroshima, unable to comprehend anyone else’s reaction to the horror. At twenty-four, he abandoned a Harvard fellowship to live on a kibbutz, returning only by chance to fulfill an academic career. At twenty-eight, he revolutionized the field of linguistics with his book, Syntactic Structures. At twenty-nine, he became associate professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (and full professor three years later), though his competence with technology was limited to the tape recorder. At thirty-five, he threw himself into anti-war protest, giving talks, writing letters and articles, promoting teach-ins, and helping to organize student demonstrations and draft resistance against the Vietnam War. At thirty-eight, he risked a five-year jail term protesting at the Pentagon, spending the night in jail alongside Norman Mailer, who described him in Armies of the Night as “a slim sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity.”[1]At forty, he was the only white face in the crowd at Fred Hampton’s funeral, after the young Black Panther leader was gunned down by the FBI in a Gestapo-style raid.[2]

Such was the early life of America’s greatest dissident intellectual, raised in a deeply anti-Semitic German-Irish neighborhood in Quaker Philadelphia, later awarded an elite linguistics professorship at the center of the Pentagon system at MIT.

Fulfilling a brilliant academic career at the pinnacle of the Ivory Tower, Chomsky railed against his fellow intellectuals’ subservience to power, dismissing pious declarations of Washington’s alleged commitment to freedom, equality, and democracy with abundant demonstrations of its actual values – greed, domination, and deceit. He forensically examined the claim that the establishment media operate as an objective check on the excesses of the powerful, marshalling overwhelming evidence showing that in fact they are a propaganda service working on their behalf. Laboriously debunking the flood of lies and distortions targeting mass audiences, he transformed dangerous misperceptions of U.S. benevolence into insightful comprehension of imperial reality.

Thus we learned that the Vietnam War was not a noble quest to defend freedom, but a quasi-genocidal assault on a former French colony designed to subjugate a defenseless peasantry; that Israel was not a glorious example of uniquely decent democratic socialism, but a modern Sparta on a path to self-destruction; that the Cold War was not a contest between freedom and slavery, but a shared opposition to independent nationalism, in which a galaxy of neo-Nazi U.S. client states masqueraded as the “Free World.”[3]

Such insights were anathema in academia, and Chomsky quickly earned a reputation as a political crank among his more subservient colleagues (the vast majority), even as he gained considerable stature as a public intellectual in American society at large and internationally. These contrasting perceptions of his credibility made for a striking schizophrenia in how he was evaluated: dismissed as a lunatic by pundits and professors, Chomsky’s political lectures were sold out years in advance to overflow general audiences throughout the world.

Elite commentators who wrote him off as a novice for his lack of credentials in political science contradicted themselves by recognizing him as a genius for his linguistics work, though he had no formal credentials in that field either. Nevertheless, they were right about his genius. When Chomsky first entered linguistics the prevailing model of language acquisition was behaviorist, the assumption being that children acquire language by imitation and “reinforcement” (gratifying responses from others for the correct use of language), which Chomsky immediately realized couldn’t begin to account for the richness of even the simplest language use – obvious from an early age in all healthy children – who routinely manifest patterns of use they’ve never heard before.

When Chomsky subjected the behaviorist paradigm to rational scrutiny it promptly collapsed, replaced by recognition that language capacity is actually innate and a product of maturation, emerging at an appropriate stage of biological development in the same way that secondary sex characteristics not evident in childhood emerge during puberty. Like so many other Chomsky insights, the idea that language capacity is part of the unfolding of a genetic program seems rather obvious in retrospect, but in the 1950s it was a revolutionary thought, vaulting the young MIT professor to international academic stardom as the most penetrating thinker in a field his un-credentialed insights utterly transformed.[4]

At the time, Chomsky appeared to be living the perfect life from a purely personal standpoint. He had fascinating work, professional acclaim, lifetime economic security, and a loving marriage with young children growing up in a beautiful suburb of Boston, an ideal balance of personal and professional fulfillment. But just then a dark cloud called Vietnam appeared on the horizon, and Chomsky – with supreme reluctance – launched himself into a major activist career, sacrificing nearly all of his personal life along the way.[5]

In the Eisenhower years the U.S. had relied on mercenaries and client groups to attack the Vietminh, a communist-led nationalist force that had fought the French and was seeking South Vietnamese independence with the ultimate goal of a re-unification of South and North Vietnam through national elections. Though the U.S. was systematically murdering its leaders, the Vietminh did not respond to the violence directed against them for many years. Finally, in 1959, came an authorization allowing the Vietminh to use force in self-defense, at which point the South Vietnamese government (U.S. client state) collapsed, as its monopoly of force was all it had had to sustain itself in power.

Plans for de-colonization proceeded. The National Liberation Front was formed, and in its founding program it called for South Vietnamese independence and the formation of a neutral bloc consisting of Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam, with the ultimate goal of peacefully unifying all of Vietnam. At that point there were no North Vietnamese forces in the South, and no North-South military conflict.[6] That would emerge later, as a direct result of U.S. insistence on subjugating the South.

To head off the political threat of South Vietnamese independence, President Kennedy sent the U.S. Air Force to bomb rural South Vietnam in October 1962 and drive the villagers into “strategic hamlets” (concentration camps), in order to separate them from the nationalist guerrilla movement Pentagon documents conceded they were willingly supporting. This overt act of U.S. aggression was noted in the press, but without a flicker of public protest, which would only come years later.[7]

When Chomsky first began speaking out on Vietnam, venues were scarce and public support for the effort virtually nil. He was actually grateful for the customary police presence, which prevented him from getting beaten up. “In those days, protests against the war meant speaking several nights a week at a church to an audience of half a dozen people,” Chomsky remembered years later, “mostly bored or hostile, or at someone’s home where a few people might be gathered, or at a meeting at a college that included the topics of Vietnam, Iran, Central America, and nuclear arms, in the hope that maybe participants would outnumber the organizers.”[8] The quality of his analysis was extraordinary and Chomsky placed himself “in the very first rank” of war critics (Christopher Hitchens) from the start, helping to spark a mass anti-war movement over the next several years.[9] Unlike “pragmatic” opponents of the war, who justified U.S. imperialism in principle but feared it would not bring military victory in Vietnam, Chomsky called out U.S. aggression by name, sided with its victims, and urged the war be terminated without pre-conditions.

Though a radical departure from establishment orthodoxy, Chomsky’s positions on the war were always carefully thought out, never blindly oppositional. For example, though he opposed the drafting of young men to fight in a criminal war, he was not opposed to a draft per se. In fact, he emphasized that a draft meant that soldiers could not be kept insulated from the civilian society of which they were a part, leading to what he regarded as an admirable collapse of soldier morale when the anti-war movement exposed U.S. intervention in Vietnam as naked aggression. When the draft was terminated in 1973, the Pentagon shifted to a “volunteer” army, that is, a mercenary army of the poor and low-income, which Chomsky regarded as one much less likely to be affected by popular anti-war agitation, even aside from the more serious issue of unjustly assigning responsibility for “national defense” to the most economically exploited sector of the population. For these reasons he felt that a universal draft was to be preferred to a “volunteer” army brought into being by strongly coercive economic forces.[10]

Unlike his establishment critics, Chomsky did not consider class analysis a conspiracy theory, but rather, an indispensable tool in properly accounting for known facts. For example, while there was no national interest in attacking South Vietnam, there very much was an elite interest in suppressing the contagious example of a successful national independence movement in Southeast Asia, as the failure to do so might encourage other countries in the Pacific to “go communist” (i.e., seek independence), which could ultimately have reversed the outcome of WWII in the Pacific had Japan ended up accommodating the officially socialist world instead of Washington.[11]

Given the unanswerable nature of this type of (anti-capitalist) analysis, Chomsky was kept well away from mass audiences. On the rare occasions he did appear in the corporate media, his overwhelming command of relevant fact meant that he couldn’t be distracted or derailed. When interviewers attempted to get him off track, they were quickly confronted by the soft query – “Do the facts matter?” – followed by an informational tsunami leading inexorably to a heretical conclusion.

Given his mastery of evidence and logic, it was frankly suicidal for Chomsky’s establishment critics to confront him directly, which probably accounts for why so few of them ever did. The handful that tried were promptly obliterated by a massive bombardment of inconvenient fact. Since “facts don’t care about your feelings,” all of the latter group were obligated to examine which irrational emotions had encouraged them to adopt the erroneous conclusions Chomsky showed them they held, but none of them did.

William F. Buckley had his error-riddled version of the post-WWII Greek civil war exposed on his own show – Firing Line. “Your history is quite confused there,” commented Chomsky to Buckley’s face, after the celebrated reactionary referred to an imaginary Communist insurgency prior to the Nazis’ Greek intervention.[12]

Neo-con Richard Perle tried to divert his discussion with Chomsky from U.S. intervention and denial of national independence around the world to an analysis of competing development models, an entirely different topic. With no answer for fact and reason he was reduced to rhetorically asking the audience if it really didn’t find establishment mythology more plausible than what he called Chomsky’s “deeply cynical” arguments revealing the shameful truth.[13]

Boston University president John Silber complained that Chomsky hadn’t provided proper context when mentioning that the U.S. had assassinated Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, blown up the church radio station, and cut the editor of the independent newspaper to pieces with machetes. Silber neglected to disclose what context could possibly redeem such atrocities.[14]

Dutch Minister of Defense Frederick Bolkestein dismissed Chomsky and Edward Herman’s thesis on capitalist media as a conspiracy theory and Chomsky’s anarchist convictions as a “boy’s dream.” In the course of their debate, however, Chomsky refuted every one of Bolkestein’s charges, while pointing out their complete irrelevance to evaluating the thesis advanced in Chomsky and Herman’s book, “Manufacturing Consent,” which was the purpose of the debate.

The term “Manufacturing Consent” derives from the public relations industry, the practices of which more than amply confirm Chomsky and Herman’s thesis that under capitalism the broad tendency of the mass media is to function as a propaganda service for the national security state and the private interests that dominate it. In any case, Bolkestein himself confirmed Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model in his very attempt to refute it, objecting to Chomsky’s allegedly undercounting of killings attributable to Pol Pot (an official enemy of the U.S.) while completely ignoring U.S. client Indonesia’s massacres in East Timor, to which Chomsky had compared the killings in Cambodia. This is exactly what the propaganda model predicts: crimes of state committed by one’s own side will be ignored or downplayed while those of official enemies will be exaggerated or invented, while occasioning great moral indignation, which is never in evidence when one’s own crimes are under discussion.[15]

These four intellectual knockouts by Chomsky appear to have deterred the rest of the establishment pack from even entertaining debating with him.[16] A story told by the late Alexander Cockburn suggests they were actually afraid to do so. “One prominent member of the British intellectual elite,” related Cockburn, warned him not to get into a dispute with Chomsky on the grounds that he was “a terrible and relentless opponent” who confronted central issues head-on and never ceded ground as part of a more complicated maneuver. That was why, explained Cockburn, the guardians of official ideology so often targeted Chomsky with gratuitous vilification and childish abuse: “They shirk the real argument they fear they will lose, and substitute insult and distortion.”[17] (emphasis added)

So unprepared were these establishment mouthpieces to engage in substantive discussion that they actually refused Chomsky the customary right to defend himself even against their repeated personal attacks. After demonstrating that elite assertions about him were no more than vulgar smears, Chomsky found his letters to the editor went unprinted or were mangled beyond recognition by hostile editing.

Rather than take offense, Chomsky shrugged off such treatment as only to be expected. If he hadn’t received it, he often said, he would have had to suspect that he was doing something wrong.

As unperturbed as he was by personal attacks, the same cannot be said of his reaction to propaganda passed off as news. Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Cockburn both told the story of how Chomsky once went to the dentist and was informed that he was grinding his teeth in his sleep. Consultation with Mrs. Chomsky determined that this was not the case. Further investigation found that Chomsky was indeed grinding his teeth, but in the daytime – every morning when he read the New York Times.[18]

The explanation for these disparate reactions is straightforward. Chomsky could see that vilification was infantile and inconsequential and therefore easily dismissed it. But the deadly impact of mass brainwashing made him react with the whole of his being, unconsciously gnashing his teeth at elite hypocrisy.

This fury fed his boundless reading appetite, equipping him with the insurmountable advantage of a lifetime of determined preparation. An avid reader from early childhood, he devoured hundreds, if not thousands, of books growing up, checking out up to a dozen volumes at a time from the Philadelphia public library, steadily working his way through the realist classics – Austen, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Eliot, Hardy, Hugo, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Twain, and Zola – as well as Hebrew literature, including the Bible, and Marxist and anarchist texts.[19]

This insatiable appetite for books continued throughout his life, supplemented by countless other print sources. At home or at work he was always surrounded by enormous stacks of books, more than anyone could read in several lifetimes. The practical results of such a studious life could be amusing. Chomsky himself told the story of how he and his first wife Carol once heard a loud crash at 4:30 a.m., thinking it was an earthquake. In fact, it turned out to be a mountain of books cascading to the floor in an adjoining room.[20]

Though Chomsky could only read a portion of all that he would liked to have read, that portion was of staggering dimensions for any ordinary reader. Aside from the mountain of books he read growing up, according to his wife Carol he read six daily newspapers and eighty journals of opinion, in addition to thousands of personal letters he received from the general public, an important part of his reading load.[21] Before 911, Chomsky spent an average of twenty hours a week on personal correspondence, a figure that probably increased after 911 when interest in Chomsky’s work surged.[22] His longtime personal assistant Bev Stohl confirms that he answered e-mails every night until 3:00 a.m.,[23] while Chomsky himself used to say he wrote 15,000 words a week responding to personal letters, which he drily claimed was “a C.I.A. estimate.” Even subtracting out the writing time for private correspondence, one can see that Chomsky’s reading was beyond enormous, and not at all recreational, a preference that manifested itself early in life when he read a draft of his father’s dissertation on David Kimhi (1160-1236) a Hebrew grammarian,[24] which turned out to be the first step on a complicated path to intellectual stardom sixteen years later with the publication of Syntactic Structures.

Chomsky’s boundless reading appetite appears to have been matched by the public’s appetite to hear him speak. He probably spoke to more Americans in person than anyone else in history, giving political lectures and talks at a staggering rate for nearly sixty years. In the pre-zoom era that meant considerable travel, the demands of which he embraced without complaint, whether driving, flying, or taking the train. In addition to destinations all over the U.S. he also went to Colombia, Palestine, Nicaragua, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, India, Mexico, Britain, Spain, France, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, Japan, Italy, Turkey, and South Africa, among other places activists invited him to visit.

The talks were brilliant, and standing ovations routinely followed them. But the question and answer periods were where Chomsky’s unparalleled mastery stood out. Hour after hour questions were put to him on dozens of different topics, from labor history to union organizing to guerrilla tactics to drone warfare to economic theory to counter-insurgency and popular resistance, and hour after hour he patiently answered with illuminating precision and fascinating detail, at the same time providing an astonishing array of book titles, article summaries, history lessons, revealing quotes, and clarifying context about a seemingly limitless number of political conflicts past and present. His prodigious power of recall was vastly superior to any merely photographic memory, which overwhelms with irrelevant detail, whereas Chomsky always selected from a vast trove of information just what was immediately and historically relevant to a single person’s inquiry, before moving on to the next, and the next, and the next, and the next, in city after city, decade after decade after decade.

The size of his audiences mattered little to him, whether he spoke on a tiny college radio station or in front of thousands at a prestigious university. If anything, the larger audiences – though routine for Chomsky – were less desirable, as they highlighted the discouraging fact that too few intellectuals were willing to take up the challenge of political education and popular organization, a conformist constriction of supply in relation to strong public demand. In short, libertarian socialist Chomsky had no interest in being a “hot commodity,” and the fact that he could be regarded as such represented a failure of the intellectual class to politically engage with the public more than it did any personal merit on his part. Furthermore, as far as merit to his speaking ability goes, Chomsky deliberately refused to cultivate it, shunning oratory and rhetorical flourish in preference for what he called his “proudly boring” style of relying solely on logic and fact. Swaying audiences with emotion, he thought, was better left to propagandists.

This preference for the analytical over the emotionally gratifying was always in evidence with Chomsky. For example, in the early eighties a massive build-up of first-strike nuclear weapons sparked the emergence of the Nuclear Freeze movement, which mobilized enormous popular support for a bilateral freeze (U.S.-U.S.S.R.) in the production of new nuclear weapons by relentlessly focusing public attention on apocalyptic visions of nuclear annihilation.

From the moment the incineration of Hiroshima was publicly announced, of course, Chomsky, too, had recognized the danger of a world wired-up to explode in atomic fury, but he dissented from the view that paralyzing visions of utter destruction were an effective way of achieving nuclear disarmament. On the contrary, Chomsky felt that public attention needed to be focused on imperial policy, not military hardware, as it was policy that produced outcomes.[25] When the Nuclear Freeze movement attracted more than a million people to New York City in 1982 to protest the accelerating nuclear arms race, Chomsky withdrew from the event when no mention was made of Israel’s ongoing invasion and devastation of Lebanon, including the killing of Soviet advisers, a direct incitement to potentially terminal superpower confrontation.[26]

While the Freeze continued to focus laser-like on the awesome destructiveness of nuclear bombs, Chomsky found the approach insultingly simplistic, and expressed no surprise when its efforts were ultimately absorbed into the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, then headed by Kenneth Adelman, who was given the position after saying in his confirmation hearings that he had never given any consideration to the idea of disarmament.

In spite of dissenting in such ways even from the views of popular movements he sought to encourage, Chomsky’s public stature continued to grow. While subject to an almost complete blackout in the corporate media (for years after the end of the Vietnam War his writings could most reliably be found in the pages of the right-wing magazine Inquiry and the worker-owned and managed South End Press), Chomsky nevertheless won widespread acclaim for his analytical brilliance, tireless activism, and unflagging commitment to exposing the truth. Though he himself downplayed personal accolades, he won praise from a dazzling array of admirers, from learned professors and radical journalists to students, activists, authors, spiritual leaders, political hopefuls, movie directors, musicians, comedians, world champion boxers, political prisoners, international leaders, and awestruck fans throughout the world. With their constant compliments  ringing in his ears, it’s doubly remarkable that he never lost his humility.

Physicist Lawrence Krauss remembered being deeply impressed by Chomsky’s consistent willingness to spend an hour of his time talking to him whenever Krauss dropped by his office as a young student at MIT, though Chomsky had no professional obligation to students outside of linguistics. “He showed me a kind of respect I wasn’t anticipating,” said an appreciative Krauss years later, while pronouncing Chomsky’s work “incisive, informative, provocative, and brilliant.”[27]

Activist and journalist Fred Branfman was impressed by Chomsky’s apparent ability to X-Ray vast reams of print and extract the essence for immediate practical use. When Chomsky visited Laos in 1970 to learn about refugees of U.S. saturation bombing of the region, Branfman gave him a 500-page book on the war in Laos at 10:00 one night, and was amazed to see him refute a propaganda point in a talk with a U.S. Embassy official the next day by citing a footnote buried hundreds of pages into the text. Branfman was also struck by the fact that, unlike many intellectuals, Chomsky retained access to his deepest emotions. While witnessing Laotian peasants describing the horrific effects of U.S. bombing, he openly wept.[28]Overall, Branfman found Chomsky to be intense, driven, and unrelenting in combating injustice, but also warm, caring, wise, and gentle.

A documentary about Chomsky released in 2003 saluted his amazing productivity, calling him “[a] rebel without a pause,” which was the title of the film. After four decades of public intellectual work featuring eighteen-hour workdays, the MIT professor was well-known for working through the night drinking oceans of coffee, yet somehow still making himself available for morning interviews.[29]

Journalist and friend Alexander Cockburn emphasized Chomsky’s provision of a coherent “big picture” about politics, “buttressed by the data of a thousand smaller pictures and discrete theaters of conflict, struggle and oppression,” all the product of his extraordinary responsiveness to injustice. “Chomsky feels the abuses, cruelty and hypocrisies of power more than anyone,” wrote Cockburn. “It’s a state of continual alertness.”[30]

Famed American author and wilderness defender Edward Abbey wrote that Chomsky deserved the Nobel Prize for Truth, if only one had existed.[31]

British philosophy professor Nick Griffin declared Chomsky “extraordinarily well-informed,” and found the experience of simply talking to him “astonishing.” “He’s read everything and remembered what he’s read,” he marveled.[32]

Referring to the dissident classic, “American Power and the New Mandarins,” historian and gay rights activist Martin Duberman hailed Chomsky’s seemingly Olympian detachment, his tone so “free of exaggeration or misrepresentation,” his avoidance of “self-righteousness,” and his rare ability “to admit when a conclusion is uncertain or when the evidence allows for several possible conclusions.” Perhaps most remarkably, Chomsky was able, said Duberman, “to see inadequacies in the views or tactics of those who share his position – and even some occasional merit in those who do not,” a rare talent in the best of times and virtually non-existent in the frenzied tribalism so prevalent today.[33]

The brilliant Palestinian scholar Edward Said expressed admiration for Chomsky’s tireless willingness to confront injustice and for the awesome extent of his knowledge. “There is something deeply moving about a mind of such noble ideals repeatedly stirred on behalf of human suffering and injustice. One thinks here of Voltaire, of Benda, or Russell, although more than any of them Chomsky commands what he calls ‘reality’” – facts – over a breathtaking range.”[34]

Pantheon editor James Peck noted a kind of intellectual vertigo in reading Chomsky, finding his critiques “deeply unsettling” and impossible to categorize, as “no intellectual tradition quite captures his voice” and “no party claims him.” Always fresh and original, “his position [was] not a liberalism become radical, or a conservatism in revolt against the betrayal of claimed principles.” He was “a spokesman for no ideology.” His uniqueness, said Peck, “fits nowhere,” which was in itself “an indication of the radical nature of his dissent.”[35]

People’s historian Howard Zinn resorted to leg-pulling irony to describe the Chomsky phenomenon: “I found myself on a plane going south sitting next to a guy who introduced himself as Noam Chomsky. . . . It occurred to me, talking to him, that he was very smart.” Zinn, a popular speaker himself, was sometimes asked for the latest count of the learned professor’s staggering output of books. He would begin his reply with the qualification, “As of this morning,” and then pause for dramatic effect, drolly suggesting that any number he might offer stood a good chance of being abruptly rendered obsolete by Chomsky’s latest salvo.[36] Daniel Ellsberg was of similar mind, once saying that keeping up with Chomsky’s political work was a considerable challenge, as “he publishes faster than I can read.”[37]

Establishment liberal Bill Moyers was impressed by Chomsky’s apparently greater admiration for the intelligence of ordinary people than for the specialized talents of his elite colleagues. In an interview at the end of the Reagan years he told Chomsky: “[It] seems a little incongruous to hear a man from the Ivory Tower of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a scholar, a distinguished linguistics scholar, talk about common people with such appreciation.” Chomsky found no paradox at all in this, replying that his appreciation flowed naturally from the evidence provided by language study itself, which demonstrated overwhelmingly that ordinary people have deep-seated creative intelligence that separates humans from every other known species.[38]

Where paradox does exist is in elite intellectuals’ apparently boundless capacity to pervert natural human intelligence into specialized cleverness at serving the ends of power. However, this makes them not the most intelligent part of the population, as they believe themselves to be, but, on the contrary, the most gullible and easily deceived, a point Chomsky made often.

In Chomsky’s final public years the fruit of using our species intelligence to serve institutional stupidity manifested itself in growing threats of climate collapse, nuclear war, and ideological fanaticism displacing all prospect of democracy, calling into question the very survival value of such intelligence.

Helpfully, Chomsky has left us with sage advice about which direction our intelligence should take and also avoid, in order to escape looming catastrophe. As to the first, he said, “You should stick with the underdog.”[39] About the second, he said, “We should not succumb to irrational belief.”[40]

In June 2023, Chomsky suffered a massive stroke, leaving him paralyzed down the right side of his body, and with limited capacity to speak.

His appetite for news and sensitivity to injustice, however, remain intact. When he sees the news from Palestine, his wife reports, he raises his remaining good arm in a mute gesture of sorrow and anger.[41]

Still compassionate and defiant at 97.

Incredibly well done, Professor Chomsky.

Happy Birthday.[42]

Notes.

[1]Mailer quoted in Robert F. Barksy, “Chomsky – A Life of Dissent,” (MIT, 1997) p. 129.

[2] Chomsky’s childhood, see Mark Achbar, ed. “Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (Black Rose, 1994) pps. 44-50. Also, Robert F. Barsky, “Noam Chomsky – A Life of Dissent,” MIT Press, 1997) Chapter 1. Chomsky at Fred Hampton’s funeral see Christopher Hitchens, Covert Action Information Bulletin event at the University of the District of Colombia, C-SPAN 1995 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODfic8Z818

[3]On U.S. neo-Nazi client states, see Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, “The Washington Connection And Third World Fascism,” (South End, 1979), and many subsequent works. On Vietnam, see Noam Chomsky, “American Power and the New Mandarins – Historical and Political Essays; (Vintage, 1969); Noam Chomsky; “At War With Asia – Essays on Indochina,” (Pantheon, 1970); and Noam Chomsky; “For Reasons of State,” (The New Press, 2003). On the Middle East, see Noam Chomsky, “The Fateful Triangle – The United States, Israel & The Palestinians,” (South End, 1983); Noam Chomsky & Gilbert Achcar, “Perilous Power – The Middle East And U.S. Foreign Policy,” (Paradigm, 2007); Noam Chomsky, “Middle East Illusions,” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). On the Cold War, see Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New, (Columbia, 1994).

[4]Chomsky appears to never have confused symbols of knowledge (credentials) with knowledge itself, and he had early evidence that the brightest minds were often without credentials. The uncle whose newsstand he helped work was extremely intelligent and well-read, even had a lay practice in psychoanalysis, but never went beyond fourth grade. Similarly, though his mother never went to college, Noam agreed that she was “much smarter” than his father and his friends, who he said “were all Ph.Ds, big professors and rabbis,” but “talking nonsense mostly.” On Chomsky’s uncle, see Mark Achbar ed.,“Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (Black Rose, 1994), p. 50. On Chomsky’s mother, see Noam Chomsky (with David Barsamian), “Imperial Ambitions – Conversations On The Post-9/11 World,” (Metropolitan Books, 2005), p. 158.

[5]Chomsky found political activism distasteful, and hated giving up his rich personal life. See Mark Achbar ed., “Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (Black Rose, 1994) pps. 65-6.

[6]Noam Chomsky interviewed by Paul Shannon, “The Legacy of the Vietnam War” –Indochina Newsletter, Issue 18, November-December, 1982, pps. 1-5, available at www.chomsky.info.net

[7]Noam Chomsky, “The Chomsky Reader,” (Pantheon, 1987) pps. 224-5.

[8]Chomsky quoted in Milan Rai, “Chomsky’s Politics,” (Verso, 1995), p. 14.

[9]Christopher Hitchens, Covert Action Information Bulletin event at the University of the District of Colombia, C-SPAN, 1995, available on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODficd8Z818

[10]Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel, eds. “Understanding Power – The Indispensable Chomsky,” (New Press, 2002) pps. 35-6

[11]See Noam Chomsky, “Vietnam and United States Global Strategy,” The Chomsky Reader, (Pantheon, 1987) pps. 232-5.

[12]“Firing Line with William F. Buckley: Vietnam and the Intellectuals,” Episode 143, April 3, 1969.

[13]“The Perle-Chomsky Debate – Noam Chomsky Debates with Richard Perle,” Ohio State University, 1988, transcript available at www.chomsky.info.net.

[14]“On the Contras – Noam Chomsky Debates with John Silber,” The Ten O’clock News, 1986, transcript available at www.chomsky.info.net

[15]Mark Achbar, “Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (Black Rose, 1994) pps. 128-31

[16]There was also a “debate” between Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz in 2005 on the future of Israel/Palestine, although Dershowitz’s performance was not much more than intellectual clowning, with repeated “I” declarations demonstrating his inability to move beyond narcissistic fantasy (“I believe,” “I think,” “I call for,” “I propose,” “I support,” “I have written,” “I can tell you,” “I favor,” “I see,” “I hope,” etc.). He irrelevantly quoted Ecclesiastes, called for a “Chekhovian” as opposed to “Shakespearean” peace, and ignored decades of total U.S.-Israeli opposition to anything remotely like national liberation for Palestinians. Chomsky wryly congratulated him for the one truthful statement he made, i.e., that Chomsky had been a youth counselor at Camp Massad in the Pocono Mountains in the 1940s. See “Noam Chomsky v. Alan Dershowitz: A Debate on the Israel-Palestinian Conflict,” Democracy Now, December 23, 2005

[17]Alexander Cockburn in David Barsamian, “Chronicles of Dissent – Interviews with Noam Chomsky,” (Common Courage, 1992) p. xii

[18]An understandable reaction given the “Newspaper of Record’s” grotesque distortions. On Chomsky’s teeth-grinding, see Alexander Cockburn in David Barsamian, “Chronicles of Dissent – Interviews with Noam Chomsky,” (Common Courage, 1992) p. ix; Christopher Hitchens, Covert Action Information Bulletin event at the University of the District of Colombia, C_SPAN, 1995, available on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODficd8Z818

[19]Robert Barsky, “Chomsky – A Life of Dissent,” (MIT, 1997) pps. 13, 19; Mark Achbar ed., “Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (Black Rose, 1994) p. 44

[20]Noam Chomsky in David Barsamian, “Class Warfare – Interviews With David Barsamian,” (Common Courage, 1996) p. 26

[21] “Noam Chomsky: Rebel Without a Pause,” 2003 Documentary

[22] Robert Barsky, “Noam Chomsky – A Life of Dissent,” (MIT, 1997) p. 45

[23] Bev Bousseau Stohl, “Chomsky And Me – A Memoir,” (OR Books, 2023) p. 53

[24] Robert F. Barsky, “Noam Chomsky – A Life of Dissent,” (MIT, 1997,) p. 10

[25]“A narrow focus on strategic weapons tends to reinforce the basic principle of the ideological system . . . that the superpower conflict is the central element of world affairs, to which all else is subordinated.” Noam Chomsky, “Priorities For Averting The Holocaust,” in “Radical Priorities,” (Black Rose, 1984) p. 283

[26]“The conclusion is that if we hope to avert nuclear war, the size and character of nuclear arsenals is a secondary consideration.” Noam Chomsky, “The Danger of Nuclear War and What We Can Do About It,”  “Radical Priorities,” (Black Rose, 1984) p. 272.

[27]“Chomsky and Krauss: An Origins Project Dialogue,” You Tube, March 31, 2013

[28] Fred Branfman, “When Chomsky Wept,” Salon, June 17, 2012

[29]Bev Boisseau Stohl, “Chomsky And Me – A Memoir,” (OR Books, 2023) p. 92

[30]Alexander Cockburn in David Barsamian, “Chronicles of Dissent – Interviews with Noam Chomsky,” (Common Courage, 1992) pps. x – xi

[31]Edward Abbey, ed., “The Best of Edward Abbey,” (Counterpoint, 2005), preface.

[32]Quoted in the documentary Rebel Without a Pause, 2003.

[33]Martin Duberman quoted on the back cover of “American Power and the New Mandarins,” 1969 (first Vintage Books edition).

[34]Edward Said, “The Politics of Dispossession,” (Chatto and Windus, 1994) p. 263

[35]James Peck, introduction to The Chomsky Reader, (Pantheon, 1987) pps. vii – xix

[36]Howard Zinn, “The Future of History – Interviews With David Barsamian,” (Common Courage, 1999), pps. 39-40. Though Chomsky’s total book count has ended up around 150 (with collaborations with activist friends still coming out), it’s possible nobody knows the exact figure with certainty. Lifelong activist and friend Michael Albert tells the story of how Chomsky’s immense body of work once convinced a group of activists in Eastern Europe that there were two different Chomskys, one a linguist, and the other a political activist. Given Chomsky’s preposterous output and far from unusual surname in that part of the world, it was perhaps an understandable error. See Michael Albert, “Noam Chomsky at 95. No Strings on Him,” Counterpunch, December 8, 2023.

[37]Paul Jay, “Rising Fascism and the Elections – Chomsky and Ellsberg,” The Analysis News, You Tube November 2, 2024

[38]Bill Moyers, “A World of Ideas – Conversations With Thoughtful Men and Women,” (Doubleday, 1989). The interview is also available online on You Tube. See “Noam Chomsky interview on Dissent (1988),” <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEYJMCydFNI>

[39]Milan Rai, “Chomsky’s Politics,” (Verso, 1995) p. 6

[40] Chomsky in “Chronicles of Dissent – Interviews With David Barsamian,” (Common Courage, 1992) p. 159

[41] “Noam Chomsky, hospitalizado en Brasil,” La Jornada, June 12, 2024 (Spanish)

[42]Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928.

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Image by Leon Overweel.

In recent months, the Trump administration has escalated a decades-long campaign against the Venezuelan government and people. The renewed, intensifying threats of regime change, justified through false or inflated claims that Nicolás Maduro, its president, is directing narco-terrorism against the United States, serve as a convenient pretext for deeper and more direct intervention.

A recent wave of extrajudicial killings at sea, the directing of the CIA to launch covert ops inside Venezuela, the surge of U.S. troops into the Caribbean, the reopening of a long-shuttered naval base in Puerto Rico, and the deployment of the aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Gerald Ford in the region represent striking but not surprising developments. These are little more than the latest expression of an ideological project through which Washington has long sought to shape the hemisphere in ways that would entrench U.S. power further and protect the profits of Western multinationals.

That formal project dates back to at least the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, when the U.S. unilaterally claimed Latin America as its exclusive sphere of influence. Its revival today is unmistakable and distinctly dangerous. As Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared, echoing the language of that two-century-old policy, “The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood, and we will protect it.”

The results of that doctrine have long been clear: immense profits for the few and violence, political upheaval, social dislocation, and economic devastation for the many. While Washington’s imperial desires in the hemisphere have long been met by movements challenging U.S. dominance, these have repeatedly been forced back into the subordinate position assigned them in a global capitalist order designed to benefit their not so “good neighbor.”

It’s no accident that, by the mid-1970s, Latin America had been transformed into a hemisphere dominated by U.S.-backed right-wing authoritarian regimes. Entire regions like the Southern Cone became laboratories for repression, as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay formed a coordinated bloc of military juntas. With direct support from Washington, those regimes oversaw what came to be known as Operation Condor, establishing a transnational network of state terror. Its consequences were catastrophic: 50,000 killed, tens of thousands “disappeared,” and hundreds of thousands tortured and imprisoned for the so-called crime of harboring real or perceived leftist sympathies.

During that earlier period, Venezuela had been largely spared the brutal excesses of direct U.S. interventionism in the region (due in part to the repressive rule of successive U.S.-supported strongmen Juan Vicente Gómez and Marcos Pérez Jiménez). That changed in 1998, when Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s far more popular predecessor, became president and pursued policies of popular sovereignty and resource nationalism aimed at ensuring the nation’s vast oil reserves (the largest in the world) served Venezuelans rather than being siphoned off to enrich foreign corporations. From then on, Venezuela became the latest target of Washington’s efforts to undermine, discipline, and ultimately neutralize “troublesome” progressive governments across Latin America.

To fully understand Washington’s current warpath in the region, it’s necessary to revisit earlier episodes in which the U.S. intervened, violently and anti-democratically, to shape the political destinies of countries in the hemisphere. Three cases are especially instructive: Cuba, Guatemala, and Chile. Together, they illuminate the long arc of U.S. imperialism in Latin America and clarify the dangers of the present confrontation.

The Rise of Plattismo in Cuba

Cuba had long been a crown jewel in Washington’s imperial imagination. By 1823, American political elites were already casting the island as essential to the future of the United States. President John Quincy Adams, for instance, described Cuba, then a Spanish colony, as “indispensable” to the country’s “political and commercial interests.” He noted ominously that, should the island be “forcibly disjointed from its own unnatural connection with Spain and incapable of self-support,” it could “gravitate only towards the North American Union.” Thomas Jefferson similarly maintained that the possession of Cuba was “exactly what is wanting to round out our power as a nation.” In that spirit, during the 1840s and 1850s, Presidents Polk and Pierce sought to purchase Cuba from Spain, overtures that were repeatedly rejected.

Those efforts unfolded during a period of rapid U.S. territorial expansionism, marking a time when Washington regarded continental conquest as both a “providential destiny” and a political and economic imperative. When ostensibly legal mechanisms like land purchases could be invoked, they were embraced. When military force offered a more expedient path to territorial acquisition, as with the war of aggression that stripped Mexico of half its territory and delivered what became the American Southwest to U.S. control in 1848, it was undertaken with little hesitation.

The opportunity to pursue longstanding ambitions in Cuba and inaugurate the U.S. as an overseas empire arrived with the Spanish-American War of 1898. In that conflict, Washington intervened in anti-colonial uprisings from Puerto Rico to the Philippines, not to champion genuine liberation but to ensure that any subsequent “independence” would be subordinated to U.S. strategic and economic interests. What emerged was a political order deliberately engineered to keep Cuba firmly tethered to the priorities and power of the United States.

That would be codified in the 1901 Platt Amendment, which effectively nullified Washington’s earlier assurances of Cuban sovereignty and granted Washington the right to establish military bases (including Guantánamo), substantial control over the Cuban treasury, and the ability to intervene whenever the U.S. deemed it necessary to safeguard its arbitrarily defined notion of what constituted “Cuban independence” or to defend “life, property, and individual liberty.”

In practice, Cuba emerged from the war as a dependent protectorate, not a sovereign nation. That model was soon codified for the entire hemisphere with the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine issued in 1904, which granted the United States a self-appointed mandate to police the region to maintain “order.”

In Cuba, that arrangement would serve Washington’s interests for decades. By 1959, on the eve of the Cuban Revolution, U.S. corporations controlled 90% of the island’s trade, 90% of its public services, 75% of its arable land, and 40% of its sugar industry. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Cubans remained landless, disenfranchised, and mired in poverty.

By breeding staggering inequality, Washington’s imperialism rendered Cuba ripe for revolution. In 1959, following years in exile, Fidel Castro returned to the island to overwhelmingly popular support, having launched an armed struggle after attempting to run in the 1952 elections that the Washington-backed Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista cancelled. Rather than confront the policies that had produced the revolution, U.S. officials moved to make an example of Castro, waging an obsessive campaign to undermine his revolutionary government and punish the population whose support had made his ascent possible.

Washington pursued everything from ill-fated invasions to assassinations, plots that, in October 1962, brought the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust. It also imposed a punishing economic blockade designed to choke the island’s economy, render socialism a stillbirth, and deter other nations from challenging U.S. hegemony. Those efforts foreclosed the possibility of constructive engagement, which Castro had initially signaled he was open to, pushing Cuba decisively into the Soviet orbit, and creating the very outcome Washington claimed it had sought to avoid.

The Fall of Guatemala

Castro did not return to Cuba alone. He arrived alongside the Argentinian Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who would become a key ideologue of the revolution, bringing with him a commitment to constructing a global, anti-imperialist movement. The two first met in 1955 in Mexico City, where Castro was organizing in exile and Guevara had resettled after working as a doctor in Guatemala, a country he had entered to support the democratic spring of President Jacobo Árbenz.

The democratic experiment in Guatemala was abruptly and violently extinguished in 1954, when a U.S.-backed coup toppled Árbenz. From that experience, Guevara carried with him an indelible lesson about the reach of U.S. power and Washington’s willingness to deploy force in defense of corporate interests, along with the profoundly antidemocratic and destabilizing consequences of U.S. intervention across the hemisphere.

That coup in Guatemala was carried out in service to that country’s real center of authority, the Boston-based United Fruit Company. Founded in 1899, United Fruit consolidated its foothold there through a series of preferential corporate arrangements, as successive strongmen ceded vast tracts of land and critical infrastructure to the company in exchange for personal enrichment. In the process, Guatemala was transformed into the archetypal “banana republic.”

United Fruit came to dominate Guatemala’s agricultural and industrial sectors, transforming itself into one of the most profitable corporations in the world. It secured extraordinary returns through its monopoly power, wage suppression, and the criminalization of labor organizing. Its influence extended into the highest levels of Washington. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had represented United Fruit as a senior partner at the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, and his brother, CIA director Allen Dulles, had previously served on that company’s board.

Árbenz regarded United Fruit not just as a threat to Guatemala’s sovereignty but also as an engine of injustice. In a country where 2% of the landholders controlled 72% of all arable land (more than half controlled by United Fruit), much of it left deliberately fallow, he sought to challenge a system that denied millions of peasants access to the land on which their survival depended. His land reform program applied only to uncultivated land. The government proposed purchasing idle tracts at their declared tax value (based on the company’s own assessments). Yet because United Fruit had systematically undervalued its vast land holdings to evade taxes, the company refused.

Árbenz’s policies, driven by the fact that he was a nationalist (not a communist), were committed to dismantling Guatemala’s imperial dependency. His objective was to transform, as he put it, “Guatemala from a country bound by a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state, and to make this transformation in a way that will raise the standard of living of the great mass of our people to the highest level.” Yet, in the ideologically charged climate of the early Cold War years, such New Deal-style reforms were recast by Washington as incontrovertible proof that a “Soviet beachhead” was taking root in Central America.

By 1954, U.S. officials insisted that they had “no choice” but to intervene to prevent the country from “falling” to communism. The subsequent coup relied on an orchestrated propaganda campaign, the financing of a mercenary army, and the aerial bombardment of Guatemala City. The combined pressure of all of that coerced Árbenz into resigning. In his final address, he condemned the attacks “as an act of vengeance by the United Fruit Company” and stepped down in the hope, quickly dashed, that his departure might preserve his reforms.

Power would soon be transferred to the military regime of Carlos Castillo Armas, while U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower triumphantly proclaimed that “the people of Guatemala, in a magnificent effort, have liberated themselves from the shackles of international Communist direction.” In reality, United Fruit had expanded its influence, while the country descended into decades of state terror. The civil war that followed claimed more than 200,000 lives, including a genocidal campaign against the indigenous Ixil Maya people, carried out with direct U.S. support.

The Crushing of Chilean Socialism

If Guatemala exposed Washington’s readiness to destroy a modest social democracy in the name of communism and in defense of corporate power, Chile demonstrated the full, violent maturation of unrepentant Cold War interventionism. When the socialist physician Salvador Allende won the presidency in 1970 in a democratic election, Washington immediately went on the warpath, launching a covert, sustained campaign to strangle his government before it could succeed.

Allende sought to expand social welfare and democratize the economy. His program called for the nationalization of strategic industries, the expansion of healthcare and education, the strengthening of organized labor, and the dismantling of entrenched monopolistic landholdings. Those initiatives drew support from a broad, multiparty alliance rooted in Chile’s peasants as well as its working and middle classes. Above all, Allende’s agenda aimed to reclaim the nation’s mineral wealth from foreign capital, especially the U.S.-based copper giant Anaconda, whose staggering profits bore few meaningful returns for the Chilean population.

President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger found that intolerable and quickly came to regard Allende not just as a symbolic but a real threat to U.S. power in the region. After all, a successful socialist state achieved through the ballot box risked demonstrating that another political and economic path was indeed possible.

What followed was a coordinated campaign of economic, social, and political destabilization. The CIA funneled millions to Chile’s opposition parties, business associations, and media outlets. It financed strikes and disruptions designed to create and weaponize scarcity, to (in Nixon’s words) “make the economy scream” and erode confidence in Allende’s Popular Unity government. U.S. officials also cultivated ties with reactionary factions in the Chilean military, encouraging coup plots and ultimately directly supporting the overthrow of Allende on September 11, 1973.

What emerged was one of the bloodiest dictatorships in the hemisphere in the twentieth century. General Augusto Pinochet’s regime would carry out widespread torture, disappearances, and extrajudicial killings, while U.S.-trained economists imposed radical neoliberal policies (similar to the failed ones now being implemented by Javier Milei in Argentina with the help of a Donald Trump bailout) that dismantled social protections and opened Chile’s economy to foreign capital.

Hands Off Venezuela

In every instance where the United States intervened in Latin America, leaving tens of thousands dead and entire societies destabilized, it was never really communism that Washington feared. What alarmed policymakers and the corporate interests they served was the prospect that nations in the hemisphere might escape the economic architecture of U.S. dominance.

When Hugo Chávez completed the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil sector in 2007, he followed a long and perilous trajectory established by regional leaders who dared to confront U.S. power. In doing so, they committed what Washington considered the “cardinal sin” of asserting sovereign control over national resources within a hemisphere it had long treated as its strategic preserve. These leaders demonstrated, however briefly, that it was possible to stand up to the United States, but that such defiance would ultimately be met with overwhelming force.

Independent powers in this hemisphere going their own way were the threat that Washington and Wall Street could never tolerate. It’s the same reason the United States is once again maneuvering toward open conflict in Venezuela. To proceed down such a path will, of course, mean reenacting some of the most catastrophic chapters of U.S. foreign policy. The lesson of such imperial adventurism in Latin America is unmistakable. When Washington interferes in other nations, the outcome is never stability or democracy but their absolute negation.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

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Photograph Source: Debra Sweet – CC BY 2.0

The Trump administration’s killings of scores of Venezuelans are provoking outrage across the Western Hemisphere. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently proclaimed, “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”  President Trump and Hegseth are cashing a blank check for carnage that was written years earlier by President Barack Obama.

In his 2017 farewell address, Obama boasted, “We have taken out tens of thousands of terrorists.” Drone strikes increased tenfold under Obama, helping fuel anti–U.S. backlashes in several nations.

As he campaigned for the presidency in 2007, Sen. Barack Obama declared, “We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers.” Many Americans who voted for Obama in 2008 expected a seachange in Washington.  However, from his first weeks in office, Obama authorized widespread secret attacks against foreign suspects, some of which spurred headlines when drones slaughtered wedding parties or other innocents.

On February 3, 2010, Dennis Blair Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, stunned Washington by announcing that the administration was also targeting Americans for killing.  Blair revealed to a congressional committee the new standard for extrajudicial killings: “Whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us, whether that American has — is a threat to other Americans. We don’t target people for free speech. We target them for taking action that threatens Americans.”   But “involved” is a vague standard – as is “action that threatens Americans.” Blair stated that “if we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.” Permission from who?

Obama’s first high-profile American target was  Anwar Awlaki, a cleric born in New Mexico.  After the 9/11 attacks, Awlaki was showcased as a model moderate Muslim. The New York Times noted that Awlaki “gave interviews to the national news media, preached at the Capitol in Washington and attended a breakfast with Pentagon officials.”  He became more radical after he concluded that the Bush administration’s war on terror was actually a war on Islam. After the FBI sought to squeeze him into becoming an informant against other Muslims, Awlaki fled the country.  He arrived in Yemen and was arrested and reportedly tortured at the behest of the U.S. government. After he was released from prison 18 months later, his attitude had worsened and his sermons became more bloodthirsty.

After the Obama administration announced plans to kill Awlaki, his father hired a lawyer to file a challenge in federal court. The ACLU joined the lawsuit, seeking to compel the government “to disclose the legal standard it uses to place U.S. citizens on government kill lists.”  The Obama administration labeled the entire case a “State Secret.”  This meant that the administration did not even have to explain why federal law no longer constrained its killings. The administration could have indicted Awlaki on numerous charges, but it did not want to provide him any traction in federal court.

In September 2010, the New York Times reported that “there is widespread agreement among the administration’s legal team that it is lawful for President Obama to authorize the killing of someone like Mr. Awlaki.” It was comforting to know that top political appointees concurred that Obama could justifiably kill Americans.  But that was the same “legal standard” the Bush team used to justify torture.

The Obama administration asserted a right to kill U.S. citizens without trial, without notice, and without any chance for the marked men to legally object. In November 2010,  Justice Department attorney Douglas Letter announced in federal court that no judge had legal authority to be “looking over the shoulder” of Obama’s targeted killing.  Letter declared that the program involves “the very core powers of the president as commander in chief.”

The following month, federal judge John Bates dismissed the ACLU’s  lawsuit because “there are circumstances in which the Executive’s unilateral decision to kill a U.S. citizen overseas” is “judicially unreviewable.” Bates declared that targeted killing was a “political question” outside the court’s jurisdiction.  His deference was stunning: no judge had ever presumed that killing Americans was simply another “political question.” The Obama administration’s position “would allow the executive unreviewable authority to target and kill any U.S. citizen it deems a suspect of terrorism anywhere,” according to Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Pardiss Kebriae.

On September 30, 2011, a U.S. drone attack killed Awlaki along with another American citizen,  Samir Khan, who was editing an online Al Qaeda magazine.   Obama  bragged about the lethal operation at a military base later that day. A few days later, administration officials gave a New York Times reporter extracts a peek at the 50-page  secret Justice Department memo. The Times noted, “The secret document provided the justification for [killing Awlaki] despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war, according to people familiar with the analysis.” The legal case for killing Awlaki was so airtight that it did not even need to be disclosed to the American public.

Two weeks after killing Awlaki, Obama authorized a drone attack that killed his son and six other people as they sat at an outdoor café in Yemen.  Anonymous administration officials quickly assured the media that Abdulrahman Awlaki was a 21-year-old Al Qaeda fighter and thus fair game. Four days later, the Washington Post published a birth certificate proving that Awlaki’s son was only 16 years old and had been born in Denver.  Nor did the boy have any connection with Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group.  Robert Gibbs, Obama’s former White House press secretary and a top advisor for Obama’s reelection campaign, later shrugged that the 16-year-old should have had “a far more responsible father.”

Regardless of that boy’s killing, the media often portrayed Obama and his drones as infallible. A Washington Post poll a few months later revealed that  83% of Americans approved of Obama’s drone killing policy. It made almost no difference whether the suspected terrorists were American citizens; 79% of respondents approved of preemptively killing their fellow countrymen, no judicial niceties required. The Post noted that “77 percent of liberal Democrats endorse the use of drones, meaning that Obama is unlikely to suffer any political consequences as a result of his policy in this election year.” The poll results were largely an echo of official propaganda.  Most folks “knew” only what the government wanted them to hear regarding drones. Thanks to pervasive secrecy, top government officials could kill who they chose and say what they pleased. The fact that the federal government had failed to substantiate more than 90% of its terrorist accusations since 9/11 was irrelevant since the president was omniscient.

On March 6, 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder, in a speech on targeted killings to a college audience, declared: “Due process and judicial process are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, it does not guarantee judicial process.” TV comedian Stephen Colbert mocked  Holder: “Trial by jury, trial by fire, rock, paper scissors, who cares? Due process just means that there is a process that you do.” One purpose of due process is to allow evidence to be critically examined.  But there was no opportunity to debunk statements from anonymous White House officials. For the Obama administration, “due process” meant little more than reciting certain phrases in secret memos prior to executions.

Holder declared that the drone attacks “are not [assassinations], and the use of that loaded term is misplaced; assassinations are unlawful killings. Here, for the reasons I have given, the U.S. government’s use of lethal force in self-defense.”  Any termination secretly approved by the president or his top advisers was automatically a “lawful killing.” Holder reassured Americans that Congress was overseeing  the targeted killing program.  But no one on Capitol Hill demanded a hearing or investigation after U.S. drones killed American citizens in Yemen. The prevailing attitude was exemplified by House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King (R-NY):  “Drones aren’t evil, people are evil. We are a force of good and we are using those drones to carry out the policy of righteousness and goodness.”

Obama told White House aides  that it “turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”   In April 2012, the New York Times was granted access for a laudatory inside look at “Terror Tuesday” meetings in the White House: “Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.” It was a PowerPoint death parade. The Times stressed that Obama personally selected who to kill next: “The control he exercises also appears to reflect Mr. Obama’s striking self-confidence: he believes, according to several people who have worked closely with him, that his own judgment should be brought to bear on strikes.” Commenting on the Times’ revelations, author Tom Engelhardt observed,  “We are surely at a new stage in the history of the imperial presidency when a president (or his election team) assembles his aides, advisors and associates to foster a story that’s meant to broadcast the group’s collective pride in the new position of assassin-in-chief.”

On May 23, 2013, Obama, in a speech on his targeted killing program at the National Defense University in Washington, told his fellow Americans that “we know a price must be paid for freedom” – such as permitting the president to kill anyone he labels a threat to freedom.  The president declared that “before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured  – the highest standard we can set.”

Since almost all the data on victims was confidential, it was tricky to prove otherwise. But NBC News acquired classified documents revealing that the CIA was often clueless about who it was killing.  NBC noted, “Even while admitting that the identities of many killed by drones were not known, the CIA documents asserted that all those dead were enemy combatants. The logic is twisted: If we kill you, then you were an enemy combatant.”  Killings are also exonerated by counting “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants… unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”  And U.S. bureaucrats have no incentive to track down evidence exposing their fatal errors. The New York Times revealed that U.S. “counterterrorism officials insist…  people in an area of known terrorist activity… are probably up to no good.”  The “probably up to no good” standard absolved almost any drone killing within thousands of square miles in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Daniel Hale, a former Air Force intelligence analyst, leaked information revealing that nearly 90 percent of people who were killed in drone strikes were not the intended targets. Biden’s Justice Department responded by coercing Hale into pleading guilty to “retention and transmission of national security information,” and he was sent to prison in 2021.

Sovereign immunity entitles presidents to kill with impunity. Or at least that is what presidents have presumed for most of the past century. If the Trump administration can establish a prerogative to preemptively kill anyone suspected of transporting illicit narcotics, millions of Americans could be in the federal cross-hairs. But the Trump administration is already having trouble preserving total secrecy thanks to controversies over who ordered alleged war crimes. Will Trump’s anti-drug carnage end up torpedoing his beloved Secretary of War Hegseth and his own credibility with Congress, the judiciary, and hundreds of millions of Americans who do not view White House statements as divine revelations handed down from Mt. Sinai?

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Philosophers from Immanuel Kant to George Santayana warned that history repeats itself because we fail to heed its lessons. So it is with the Trump administration and its plan for regime change in Venezuela. Even if it succeeds in ousting Nicolás Maduro, the result will almost certainly mirror the failures of Afghanistan and Iraq under the Bush and Biden administrations.

The road to forced democratization is littered with failed U.S. initiatives. While some point to post-World War Two Japan and Germany as success stories, those cases were extreme exceptions that required vast resources, long occupations, and geopolitical conditions that do not exist today. The more common outcome is failure. Intervention rarely produces the stability or democracy that policymakers promise.

Even when regime change succeeds militarily, democratization often fails. History provides a long list of examples. The Johnson administration’s intervention in the Dominican Republic produced turmoil instead of stability. The United States failed to dislodge Ho Chi Minh, failed to topple Fidel Castro, and achieved only short term victories in Afghanistan and Iraq that collapsed into prolonged instability and regional upheaval.

Ousting a dictator, no matter how brutal, does not guarantee that what follows will be democratic or legitimate. The United States, after nearly 250 years, still struggles with its own democratic norms and rule of law. Those struggles are being tested right now by the administration that criticizes Venezuela for actions some argue it is emulating domestically. Maduro is without question a repressive dictator, and Chávez before him dismantled a functioning democracy and replaced it with authoritarian rule dressed in empty leftist rhetoric.

Maduro has rigged elections, jailed opposition figures, stacked the courts, and shredded constitutional restraints. No one should excuse this behavior. Yet the Trump administration has neither the capacity nor the vision to build a stable democratic system in Venezuela. Removing Maduro may be militarily achievable, but it could also ignite a civil war or justify even harsher repression by the regime.

Even if regime change occurs, the question remains: what comes next? Democracy is not built overnight, and the record in Iraq shows how long and costly such efforts become. Destabilizing Venezuela will only entangle the United States in another prolonged engagement. Trump may imagine himself an heir to the Monroe Doctrine, believing the United States can dictate outcomes across the hemisphere, or he may simply covet Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.

Another possibility is arrogance, which past administrations shared when they believed intervention could manufacture democracy through force. Yet these efforts fail far more often than they succeed. History does not bend simply because a president wills it to. In pursuing this course, the Trump administration is preparing once again to repeat the failures of the past.

The first time a tragedy unfolds, it is heartbreaking. The second time, it becomes a farce. If Trump follows this path, Venezuela will become his farce, his albatross, and the inevitable result of refusing to learn the lessons history has already taught.

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Photograph Source: Daniel Torok – Public Domain

Last month, some House members publicly acknowledged that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza. It’s a judgment that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch unequivocally proclaimed a year ago. Israeli human-rights organizations have reached the same conclusion. But such clarity is sparse in Congress.

And no wonder. Genocide denial is needed for continuing to appropriate billions of dollars in weapons to Israel, as most legislators have kept doing. Congress members would find it very difficult to admit that Israeli forces are committing genocide while voting to send them more weaponry.

Three weeks ago, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) introduced a resolution titled “Recognizing the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza.” Twenty-one House colleagues, all of them Democrats, signed on as co-sponsors. They account for 10 percent of the Democrats in Congress.

In sharp contrast, a national Quinnipiac Poll found that 77 percent of Democrats “think Israel is committing genocide.” That means there is a 67 percent gap between what the elected Democrats are willing to say and what the people who elected them believe. The huge gap has big implications for the party’s primaries in the midterm elections next year, and then in the race for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination.

One of the likely candidates in that race, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), is speaking out in ways that fit with the overwhelming views of Democratic voters. “I agree with the UN commission’s heartbreaking finding that there is a genocide in Gaza,” he tweeted as autumn began. “What matters is what we do about it – stop military sales that are being used to kill civilians and recognize a Palestinian state.” Consistent with that position, the California congressman was one of the score of Democrats who signed on as co-sponsors of Tlaib’s resolution the day it was introduced.

In the past, signers of such a resolution would have reason to fear the wrath – and the electoral muscle – of AIPAC, the Israel-can-do-no-wrong lobby. But its intimidation power is waning. AIPAC’s support for Israel does not represent the views of the public, a reality that has begun to dawn on more Democratic officeholders.

“With American support for the Israeli government’s management of the conflict in Gaza undergoing a seismic reversal, and Democratic voters’ support for the Jewish state dropping off steeply, AIPAC is becoming an increasingly toxic brand for some Democrats on Capitol Hill,” the New York Times reported this fall. Notably, “some Democrats who once counted AIPAC among their top donors have in recent weeks refused to take the group’s donations.”

Khanna has become more and more willing to tangle with AIPAC, which is now paying for attack ads against him. On Thanksgiving, he tweeted about Gaza and accused AIPAC of “asking people to disbelieve what they saw with their own eyes.” Khanna elaborated in a campaign email days ago, writing: “Any politician who caves to special interests on Gaza will never stand up to special interests on corruption, healthcare, housing, or the economy. If we can’t speak with moral clarity when thousands of children are dying, we won’t stand for working Americans when corporate power comes knocking.”

AIPAC isn’t the only well-heeled organization for Israel now struggling with diminished clout. Democratic Majority for Israel, an offshoot of AIPAC that calls itself “an American advocacy group that supports pro-Israel policies within the United States Democratic Party,” is now clearly misnamed. Every bit of recent polling shows that in the interests of accuracy, the organization should change its name to “Democratic Minority for Israel.”

Yet the party’s leadership remains stuck in a bygone era. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), the chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, typifies how disconnected so many party leaders are from the actual views of Democratic voters. Speaking in Brooklyn three months ago, she flatly claimed that “nine out of 10 Democrats are pro-Israel.” She did not attempt to explain how that could be true when more than seven out of 10 Democrats say Israel is guilty of genocide.

The political issue of complicity with genocide will not go away.

Last week, Amnesty International released a detailed statement documenting that “Israeli authorities are still committing genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, by continuing to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.” But in Congress, almost every Republican and a large majority of Democrats remain stuck in public denial about Israel’s genocidal policies.

Such denial will be put to the electoral test in Democratic primaries next year, when most incumbents will face an electorate far more morally attuned to Gaza than they are. What easily passes for reasoned judgment and political smarts in Congress will seem more like cluelessness to many Democratic activists and voters who can provide reality checks with their ballots.

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Image Source: Chicago Pennant Company – George Mason University Archives – CC BY-SA 4.0

In researching a story for FAIR last month, I was reminded of a fast-forgotten scandal. It didn’t make sense to include the scandal in that story, but it’s worth recounting, if only because it provides a tiny window into the cornucopia of corruption that defines 21^st-century America.

Not only has this scandal long since been forgotten, but the offender still has a prominent institute named after him, ensuring he’ll be remembered long after the rest of us. Here is how the game is played.

Quote someone else

I started reading the Washington Post two decades ago when I moved to DC. And among my earliest observations was that the Post must really like this fellow named Stephen Fuller, since he was constantly being quoted.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one who noticed — so had higher-ups at the Post, who quietly sought to curtail Fuller’s innumerable quotes. The Post mentioned this in passing in a 2015 story marking Fuller’s semi-retirement.

After noting that Fuller had been cited or quoted “in nearly every article about the DC-area economy over the past two decades,” the Post wrote: “At one point, his voice became so ubiquitous that Washington Post reporters were discouraged from quoting him, in hopes that they would find fresh analysts.”

Notwithstanding this guidance, Post reporters still found it hard to quit Fuller, as he always knew just the right thing to say. That Fuller’s views usually dovetailed neatly with the interests of developers only added to his appeal for the Post, a paper that has long sided with local elites.

Despite Fuller’s coziness with power, his quotes came cloaked in academic objectivity, owing to his dual titles as an economics professor at George Mason University and leader of the school’s Center for Regional Analysis. In 2017, the university bumped up his title, creating the Stephen S. Fuller Institute.

‘I didn’t sell out’

It took many years, but Fuller was finally dethroned in 2019 — by none other than the Post.

The Post’s reporting was all the more impressive in light of who Fuller’s secret dance partner was — Amazon, the company founded by Post owner Jeff Bezos.

Here are the opening lines of the Post’s 2019 story by Dalton Bennett and Robert McCartney:

A prominent Washington-area economist wrote an opinion piece welcoming the arrival of Amazon’s new headquarters in Northern Virginia at the suggestion of a company official who hoped to build public support for the project before a key Arlington County Board vote, emails show.

Stephen S. Fuller, a professor at George Mason University, also showed the article to Amazon public relations staff before publication and invited them to suggest changes — although he rejected their revisions.

To recap: At Amazon’s behest, yet under his own name, Fuller drafted an op-ed favorable to the company. Then he submitted it to Amazon for review.

Rather than simply thanking Fuller (for crossing bright ethical lines on its behalf), Amazon asked the professor to make his column even more flattering still. “The content is really good,” an Amazon PR official wrote in response to the draft Fuller emailed the company, but “it could be punched up a bit.”

But this was a bridge too far, even for Fuller. The suggested edits “did not read at all like I had written it,” he emailed Amazon. “To protect the objectivity of my message, I determined I would stay with the earlier version.”

We only know of this exchange thanks to a Freedom of Information Act filed by the Post. When the paper contacted Fuller for a response, he was caught off guard — which makes sense, as he’d grown accustomed to softball questions from solicitous reporters.

He’d only coordinated with Amazon “as a courtesy,” a flummoxed Fuller told the Post, adding, “I was being transparent with them.”

But “being transparent” is not commonly understood to mean secretly coordinating with a company to pull one over on the public.

“It’s very complicated,” Fuller said as he ended his interview with the Post, “but I didn’t sell out.”

Editor’s Notes

While Fuller initially offered his Amazon op-ed to the Post, the paper surprisingly turned him down (it’d be interesting to know why). Fuller then turned to the Washington Business Journal, which published his op-ed in March 2019 under the headline “Don’t underestimate Amazon HQ2’s importance.” (HQ2 is short for second headquarters.)

Five months later, the Post published its exposé on Fuller. Before doing so, the Post reached out to the Journal for comment, and Journal editor-in-chief Vandana Sinha said all the right things.

Had the Journal known that Fuller had coordinated with Amazon, “We may have disclosed it in an editor’s note or asked him to disclose that within the column itself,” Sinha told the Post. “We may have reached out to Amazon directly to ask if they wanted to write an op-ed themselves. We may not have run it at all… [We] want to be as transparent as possible with our readers.”

After reading Sinha’s response, I was certain the Journal, having learned of Fuller’s coordination with Amazon, would have gone back and affixed an editor’s note to his op-ed. But I just checked, and six years later Fuller’s column remains online, without any mention of Amazon’s hidden hand.

Meanwhile, the Post also hasn’t affixed editor’s notes to any of its stories quoting Fuller. At least not according to my quick sampling of stories, which included three stories in which Fuller was quoted or cited specifically on Amazon’s HQ2.

In one of those stories, Fuller scolded Montgomery County, Maryland for losing the HQ2 fight to northern Virginia. (Combined, Montgomery County and the state of Maryland offered Amazon a staggering sum of up to $8.5 billion.)

‘We wouldn’t take money from the Mafia’

I take no pleasure in beating up on a man in his eighties, and I’d like to give Fuller the benefit of the doubt that he “didn’t sell out” with his op-ed.

But I’d be surprised if it hadn’t at least crossed Fuller’s mind that he might one day hit Amazon up. Private donations were, after all, how Fuller long funded his work.

“His center, which receives almost no support from George Mason, depends heavily on the generosity of the industry he informs,” Washington City Paper noted in a 2011 profile of Fuller.

And, as it happens, he typically finds himself with data that bolster the need for building more housing and better highways to knit the region together—imperatives that tend to please the industry. His research is used not only to inform and guide decisionmaking, but also to advance agendas, in a symbiotic relationship without which neither party would survive.

When asked if there were any funders the university would turn away, Roger Stough, the George Mason vice president who recruited Fuller, told City Paper, “We wouldn’t take money from the Mafia.” Stough added that foreign donors and political radicals would also receive extra scrutiny.

Amazon is, of course, none of those things. And the company has both donated to and partnered with George Mason. But it’s unclear if Amazon has given directly to Fuller’s institute, which doesn’t publicly disclose all its donors. In some ways, this is beside the point.

Antonin Scalia Law School

We’ve come to a pretty pass when our public universities are forced to sell themselves off to private donors. And there’s no better example of this than George Mason — and not just because of the Stephen S. Fuller Institute.

For many years, the right-wing Koch network has both funded and influenced George Mason’s Mercatus Center. More recently, George Mason’s law school was renamed in honor of Antonin Scalia, the right-wing Supreme Court justice who died on a 2016 hunting trip. The swift name change came after an anonymous donor with ties to the Federalist Society gave $20 million to George Mason, while the Koch network threw in another $10 million, Washingtonian Magazine reported.

Meanwhile, housed within the Antonin Scalia Law School is something called the Global Antitrust Institute, which works to ensure that Big Tech isn’t broken apart like the monopolists of over a century ago.

The institute “is bankrolled in large part by tech companies — corporate donors like Google, Amazon and Qualcomm — that are facing antitrust scrutiny,” the New York Times reported in 2020.

While Big Tech has benefited from the institute, students have been hurt. In 2023, the institute’s leader, Joshua Wright, resigned amid a slew of allegations over inappropriate relationships with students and conflicts of interest, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Like Fuller and Scalia

I realize that Stephen Fuller’s penning an op-ed at Amazon’s behest six years ago isn’t exactly earth-shattering news. But I think it says something about 21st-century America that students at a public university are now studying under his moniker, and presumably will be for years to come.

Some of those students will yearn to be remembered long after the rest of us. And George Mason’s implicit lesson is that they can be — so long as they cozy up to power, like Fuller and Scalia.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Another city is readying itself to be the recipient of an immigration force “deployment”. This time, it’s the Crescent City that’s up to bat. The details on the New Orleans plan aren’t entirely clear yet, but indications are leaking out that the forces that were in Charlotte earlier this year may be coming to Southeast Louisiana in December–snowbirds of the very worst kind.

It does seem interesting that a city with a fabulous overall winter climate would become the new focus during the holidays, even conveniently into Mardi Gras season. It will be an enjoyable diversion for the jackboots to partake in the celebrations that wouldn’t exist without a myriad of cultures mingling in the city. The kinds of cultures they will arrive to eradicate, of course. Deploying after Nov. 30 means they will be able to avoid hurricane season as well, and any concern about being pressed to actually help if one hit. Not that they would offer any assistance. This coming crew is about destruction and displacement, really more in common with the actual hurricanes than not.

It’s with an additional layer of cruelty that it is a city that has much of its immigrant community hailing from Central America. You know, the nations that were made unstable and violent due to American backed mayhem, often at the behest of corporations like United Fruit. New Orleans has a long history of being involved with such things. In 1910 a group of gangster plotters, led by the ridiculously named Lee Christmas, joined together in the New Orleans red-light district of Storyville at the behest of ridiculously nicknamed Sam “The Banana Man” Zemurray (of United Fruit). From Storyville, they planned their assault on a nation not pleasing current corporate interests. Zemurray needed them to get rid of President Miguel Davila’s government in Honduras. That leader wanted to limit foreign ownership of the nation and to make these profiteering groups actually pay taxes. Unacceptable! Unacceptable! You may know Sam’s old house, it’s where the president of Tulane today lives. Sam’s been kinda whitewashed of many misdeeds because he gave away a few things. Like if a thief clears your house of its antiques and gives you back, well…… a banana in return. But anyway, yeah the leader of Honduras was ousted and another nation was made unstable by ridiculous and greedy hands.

Of course, that type of US led destruction in Central America didn’t end there. The Honduran exploits were done by mainly corporate interests who were given a wink-wink nudge-nudge from the US government, but a more overt US government-backed plot was taking place in 1954. Democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz, a proponent of land reform in Guatemala was becoming unacceptable to US interests as well. He wanted the land reform due to foreign plunderers owning and controlling 40% of the nation’s arable land. Poor Arbenz was not only battling the US government, but he also had to contend with Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays. This was the PR guy who convinced women that by smoking they were lighting up “torches of freedom”. He was able to convince women that the ability to develop a smoker’s hack, obstructive lung disease and possibly cancer was actually quite liberating. But I digress, we are talking about Guatemala here.

So Bernays made a propaganda film called “Journey to Banana Land” to scare Americans that these banana lands were simply outposts of Soviet power and anything on the table was acceptable to neutralize the threat. Some of the propaganda included showing massacre scenes and blaming them on Arbenz when in fact the scenes were from other conflicts. The term banana republic stems from this era, of course. New Orleans was heavily involved in the infrastructure that made wide-scale banana distribution possible, from jerks like Sam the Banana Man and the “Ice Kings” that enabled some of the transport. Bananas were a very big deal, as odd as it is to consider today. Think of the petro wars over the years; there’s nothing new under the sun and any time a resource becomes valuable enough, horrible deeds will be performed to keep the profits coming in.

Back to Guatemala in the 50’s…… the well-known perfectly sane man Howard Hunt was the CIA point man in that particular coup. He helped others create a massively destabilized region. Cruel and greedy men showed up and disrupted entire countries. They took from the citizens their autonomy and attempted to steal their dignity. It was a sick spectacle and the ramifications continue. It created places with raging civil wars and drug violence. The corporate interests wanted a compliant serf style worker population and would happily leave vacuums of increased instability when it suited their fiscal interests.

Individuals fled these troubled areas and often found backbreaking low paid work in the US. They worked in the places that birthed the instability of their own nations. In today’s narrative making machine that would make Bernays proud; these people are now considered the villains. Paradoxically, if you had Puritan weirdos in your family tree like I did, those who left Europe because people couldn’t stand them—well that’s truly a pedigree we can get behind. It’s a mark of honor, told by families to their children. That of “your ancestors left to build a life in a new world and for that we are so incredibly proud of them” If you fled for honest to God safety reasons from Central America or simply the ability to provide for your family through hard work, but were not white, this makes you the bogeyman du jour. Classic abuser rationale. It’s why they want to erase true history and create nothing but a contrived Bernays style narrative.

Another layer to all of this is that much of the current imperial directive to hate those here from Mexico and Central American nations is most likely just a contrived scapegoat attempt due to the prevalence of tech bros and their infiltration of the MAGA movement. Curtis Yarvin, the latest in a line of “I’m selfish and need a way to justify it” Ayn Rand sewage philosophers has taken another guy’s theory (Rene Gerard) and basically said that society has to have a scapegoat to channel an inherent ugly energy. Lord knows they don’t want it channeled their way, so they find another to blame. It’s a craven and calculated move to keep the masses distracted. Look over here as the magician moves his hand to the right while he shoves a rabbit up your ass from the left. It’s a calculated, cowardly plot. They found a scapegoat to blame, and they hope other Americans will be stupid enough to buy into it while they continue to profiteer in every manner possible.

The cold malice involved in targeting groups who have literally built much of this country is pretty breathtaking. After Katrina, the city of New Orleans relied on those very groups to rebuild after the massive damage. They say tents were pitched in City Park, full of laborers, their campfires lit as they grouped together to rest. They worked the daylight hours, simply to wake up and do it again the next day. The kind of work most of us would fail at miserably if we attempted it. A UC Berkeley study indicated that ½ of reconstruction after Katrina was performed by Latino workers and ¼ were said to be undocumented, primarily coming from Mexico and Honduras. Many in the famously blue city remember this and most citizens definitely aren’t behind any of the upcoming depraved sweeps. This is an outside occupation force planning to arrive.

The forgiveness that individuals from these locations have shown to the very nation that upended their home countries’ stability is noteworthy. Then they experience having that country come in to victimize them again….this is the time when people need to know the true history of what their nation has done and to atone. Not to be in that hole of hatred and greed and to keep digging because sooner or later that behavior will land you and yours in a well-deserved hell.

So here’s to hoping that the city comes together and protects those vulnerable individuals they are targeting. New Orleans needs to fight back with what comes readily to it. Portland used inflatable dinosaurs. New Orleans has eccentricity and some good old-fashioned street hustling at the ready. May every fake monk demanding money who walks the French Quarter put so many bracelets on the interlopers that they are completely weighted down by them. May every street hustler walking Bourbon Street say to ICE members: “I bet you $20 I know where you got your jackboots” and clog their paths, exasperating them to exhaustion until they give them all their money. Every city fights back in its own way, perhaps the New Orleans way forward needs to be expanding our already impressive pothole population. No tanks will pass! Of course, neither will our cars, but we can iron that out later. It can be a multi-pronged approach to bring about sheer capitulation and retreat from this beautiful and flawed city. The city that is beautiful due to the multicultural presence and flawed due to treating so many as “others” over the centuries, enslaving and taking, plotting the harm of our southern neighbors for the almighty dollar.

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Public Service Announcement for readers, but not for immigration guys…….. the correct answer to anyone in the French Quarter who comes up to you saying “I bet you $20 I can tell you where you got your shoes” is 1. “Go away, I live here” or 2. “On my feet.”

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Still from a video shot by Laura Flanders of a stand-off between protesters and ICE in NYC.

I was in the vicinity of two ICE operations this week. One I saw, the other I didn’t, and that’s a problem.

Like many resolute winter drivers, I drove hundreds of miles this Thanksgiving; thirteen hours from downtown New York City to rural Michigan, from concrete and crowds, to forests and frozen water and back again. (Thank you, Trisha, our terrific traveling maltipoo.)

Back home, before my bones had quite stopped rattling from the ride, the ICE alerts started bleeping on my phone. I live on bustling Canal Street where ICE raids are big and noisy. Last month, 50 federal agents stormed in, intent on swooping up immigrant street vendors, and the city that never sleeps sent them packing almost immediately. The video of a woman, possibly a shopper, in a polka-dot dress, chewing out a masked man in front of a menacing military truck went viral, and the vendors were back selling knock-off bags by tea time.

@lauraflanders

Laura Flanders on Instagram: “An alert went out Saturday mornin…

This Saturday, DHS apparently had another of their so-called “enforcement surges” planned, this time involving some 600 agents and an even bigger sweep of Canal Street. Once again, they were met with Manhattan mayhem. When word got out that ICE was using a local garage as a staging area, hundreds of people massed outside, whistles blowing, drums beating, livestreams livestreaming. The racket ricocheted off surrounding buildings and bounced down the narrow streets of Chinatown causing at least one dim sum seeker to join the action. For hours, pissed-off ICE men in silly ski masks were penned inside the grimy garage, while scores of city cops, with bullhorns, cattle pens, pepper spray and tasers, pushed, shoved and wrestled the crowd out of the roadway. After several arrests, the road partially cleared, unmarked white vans slipped out of the garage, their planned “enforcement surge” out-surged by counter-protestors. Slowly and ignominiously, the feds beat a retreat to New Jersey with the moving mob blocking their path every step of the way to the Holland Tunnel.

In Manhattan, ICE operations are about as subtle as Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. In the woods and worn roads of rural Lake County, Michigan, I drove through a completely different kind of enforcement scene without even knowing it — and that’s no accident.

Map of ICE detention facilities by Cronkite News.

Lake County, MI is a recreation spot in summer, with sparkling lakes and miles of woods, a historic Black arts community, and an annual “blessing of the bikes”. In winter, between the snow-battered summer cabins, behind the frosty jack pines, I never expected to find one of the nation’s largest ICE detention centers, and the truth is, I didn’t. I drove by, twice, without ever seeing it.

Lake County is officially the poorest county in Michigan. It’s entire population could fit in one tall city building. There’s a Dollar Store or two, and a few gas-station qwik-marts catering mostly to hunters, but no fresh groceries for more than twenty miles. In other words, it is exactly the kind of place where federal “economic development” arrives in the form of incarceration.

North Lake Processing Facility, Baldwin, Michigan. Photo: GEO Group

Sold as a boon to the local economy, the North Lake Corrections Facility was built in 1999 by the Wackenhut Corrections Corp (now GEO Group). Nicknamed the “punk prison” by then-Governor John Engler, it originally housed Michigan’s young offenders, then high security inmates imported from Vermont. But for years the place has cycled in and out of operation. A ten-year contract with the Federal Bureau of Prisons was canceled in 2022 when the Biden administration ended federal contracts with for-profit prison companies. Almost at once, local officials were pitching for the place to join the immigration detention economy.

This June, North Lake re-opened as the North Lake Processing Center, an ICE facility — the only one of its kind in the state, and the second largest in the nation. A sprawling concrete complex, just three-miles out of the tiny town of Baldwin, the facility, with capacity for around 1,800 beds, is now marketed as a vital “processing” hub for the region, whatever that means. It’s far from where family members, advocates, or lawyers can easily visit. On Google aerial view, it looks like every other prison placed where we’re not supposed to see it: low-slung buildings, tall fences, parking lots.

In Manhattan, ICE is a scandal. The day after the Canal St chaos, activists held a press conference and forced city officials to answer questions. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani called the federal operation “aggressive and reckless” and “authoritarian theatrics”. He has promised to review the NYPD’s role in coordinating with federal immigration enforcement, as he should, given that this is supposed to be a “sanctuary city.” Speaking at the scene, City Comptroller Brad Lander called the action “horrific” and emphasized that while street vendors are not a national security threat, the military-style response is actively endangering New Yorkers.

In rural Michigan, meanwhile, even people who live close-by have lost track of the comings-and-goings at North Lake. And that is just how it’s supposed to work. Our incarceration system has long relied on distance, desperation and euphemism. Now basic due process is intentionally being outsourced to far-flung ZIP codes like this one.

Civic duty today requires getting geographic. The truth is, I’d never paid much attention to that U.S. government-owned garage just two blocks from me. Now I’ll be taking an inventory. County GIS maps, zoning board agendas, sheriff’s contracts — they’re all publicly available. Which boxy brick buildings near you are federal jails, lockups, “processing centers,” or government property convenient for ICE staging areas? Which ones are run by private companies like GEO under state or federal contracts? Who approved those agreements, and what did they tell you they were buying — “jobs,” “economic development,” or “public safety”?

Surveillance-savvy city dwellers in well-connected places like New York and Chicago are doing well, keeping the heat on ICE and its militarized people-snatchers. But the bodies are being taken to quiet, no-notice, rural places that urban people have ignored for too long already. It’s time that changed, before America expands its carefully hidden gulag.

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Map of Southern Caribbean around Venezuelan coast showing La Orchila Island. Image Source: GilPe – © OpenStreetMap contributors – CC BY-SA 2.0

US President Donald Trump has authorised the USS Gerald R. Ford to enter the Caribbean. It now floats north of Puerto Rico, joining the USS Iwo Jimaand other US navy assets to threaten Venezuela with an attack. Tensions are high in the Caribbean, with various theories floating about regarding the possibility of what seems to be an inevitable assault by the US and regarding the social catastrophe that such an attack will occasion. CARICOM, the regional body of the Caribbean countries, released a statement affirming its view that the region must be a “zone of peace” and that disputes must be resolved peacefully. Ten former heads of government from Caribbean states published a letter demanding that “our region must never become a pawn in the rivalries of others”.

Former Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Stuart Young said on 21 August, “CARICOM and our region is a recognised zone of peace, and it is critical that this be maintained”. Trinidad and Tobago, he said, has “respected and upheld the principles of non-intervention and non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries and for good reason”. On the surface, it appears as if no one in the Caribbean wants the United States to attack Venezuela.

However, the current Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Kamla Persad-Bissessar (known by her initials as KPB), has openly said that she supports the US actions in the Caribbean. This includes the illegal murder of eighty-three people in twenty-one strikes since 2 September 2025. In fact, when CARICOM released its declaration on the region being a zone of peace, Trinidad and Tobago withdrew from the statement. Why has the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago gone against the entire CARICOM leadership and supported the Trump administration’s military adventure in the Caribbean?

Backyard

Since the Monroe Doctrine (1823), the United States has treated all Latin America and the Caribbean as its “backyard”. The United States has intervened in at least thirty of the thirty-three countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (90 percent of the countries, in other words) —from the US attack on Argentina’s Malvinas Islands (1831-32) to the current threats against Venezuela.

The idea of the “zone of peace” emerged in 1971 when the UN General Assembly voted for the Indian Ocean to be a “zone of peace”. In the next two decades, when CARICOM debated this concept for the Caribbean, the United States intervened in, at least, the Dominican Republic (after 1965), Jamaica (1972-1976), Guyana (1974-1976), Barbados (1976-1978), Grenada (1979-1983), Nicaragua (1981-1988), Suriname (1982-1988), and Haiti (1986).

In 1986, at the CARICOM summit in Guyana, the Prime Minister of Barbados, Errol Barrow, said “My position remains clear that the Caribbean must be recognised and respected as a zone of peace… I have said, and I repeat, that while I am prime minister of Barbados, our territory will not be used to intimidate any of our neighbours be that neighbour Cuba or the USA.” Since Barrow made that comment, Caribbean leaders have punctually affirmed, against the United States, that they are nobody’s backyard and that their waters are a zone of peace. In 2014, in Havana, all members of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) approved a “zone of peace” proclamation with the aim “of uprooting forever threat or use of force” in the region.

Persad-Bissessar or KPB has rejected this important consensus across political traditions in the Caribbean. Why is this so?

Betrayals

In 1989, trade union leader Basdeo Panday formed the United National Congress (UNC), a centre-left formation (whose former name was the Caucus for Love, Unity, and Brotherhood). KPB joined Panday’s party and has remained in the UNC since then. Throughout her career till recently, KPB stayed at the centre of the UNC, arguing for social democratic and pro-welfare policies whether as opposition leader or in her first term as Prime Minister (2010-2015). But even in her first term, KPB showed that she would not remain within the bounds of the centre-left but would tack Far-Right on one issue: crime.

In 2011, KPB declared a State of Emergency for a “war on crime”. At her home in Phillipine, San Fernando, KPB told the press, “The nation must not be held to ransom by groups of thugs bent on creating havoc in our society”, “We have to take very strong action”, she said, “very decisive action”. The government arrested seven thousand people, most of them released for lack of evidence against them, and the government’s Anti-Gang Law could not be passed: this was a policy that mimicked the anti-poor campaigns in the Global North. Already, in this State of Emergency, KPB betrayed the legacy of the UNC, which she dragged further to the Right.

When KPB returned to power in 2025, she began to mimic Trump with “Trinidad and Tobago First” rhetoric and with even harsher language against suspected drug dealers. After the first US strike on a small boat, KPB made a strong statement in support of it: “I have no sympathy for traffickers, the US military should kill them all violently”. Pennelope Beckles, who is the opposition leader in Trinidad and Tobago, said that while her party (the People’s National Movement) supports strong action against drug trafficking, such action must be “lawful” and that KPB’s “reckless statement” must be retracted. Instead, KPB has furthered her support of the US militarisation of the Caribbean.

Problems

Certainly, Trinidad and Tobago faces a tight knot of economic vulnerability (oil and gas dependence, foreign exchange shortages, slow diversification) and social crises (crime, inequality, migration, youth exclusion). All of this is compounded by the weakness of State institutions to help overcome these challenges. The weakness of regionalism further isolates small countries such as Trinidad and Tobago, which are vulnerable to pressure from powerful countries. But KPB is not only acting due to pressure from Trump; she has made a political decision to use US force to try and solve her country’s problems.

What could be her strategy? First, get the United States to bomb small boats that are perhaps involved in the centuries-old Caribbean smuggling operations. If the US bombs enough of these little boats, then the small smugglers would rethink their transit of drugs, weapons, and basic consumer commodities. Second, use the goodwill generated with Trump to encourage investment into Trinidad and Tobago’s essential but stagnant oil industry. There might be short-term gain for KPB. Trinidad and Tobago requires at least $300 million if not $700 million a year for maintenance and for upgrading its petrochemical and Liquified Natural Gas plants (and then it needs $5 billion for offshore field development and building new infrastructure). ExxonMobil’s massive investment in Guyana (rumoured to be over $10 billion) has attracted attention across the Caribbean, where other countries would like to bring in this kind of money. Would companies such as ExxonMobil invest in Trinidad and Tobago? If Trump wanted to reward KPB for her unctuousness, he would tell ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods to expand on the deepwater blocks investment his company has already made in Trinidad and Tobago. Perhaps KPB’s calculation to set aside the zone of peace ideas will get her some more money from the oil giants.

But what does this betrayal break? It certainly disrupts further any attempt to build Caribbean unity, and it isolates Trinidad and Tobago from the broader Caribbean sensibility against the use of the waters for US military confrontations. There are real problems in Trinidad and Tobago: rising gun-related violence, transnational trafficking, and irregular migration across the Gulf of Paria. These problems require real solutions, not the fantasies of US military intervention. US military interventions do not resolve problems, but deepen dependency, escalate tensions, and erode every country’s sovereignty. An attack on Venezuela is not going to solve Trinidad and Tobago’s problems but might indeed amplify them.

The Caribbean has a choice between two futures. One path leads toward deeper militarisation, dependency, and incorporation into the US security apparatus. The other leads toward the revitalisation of regional autonomy, South-South cooperation, and the anti-imperialist traditions that have long sustained the Caribbean’s political imagination.

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Photo by Alex Beauchamp

It’s increasingly obvious that the US military threats against Venezuela have a wider agenda. Their game plan is regime change, but not only in Venezuela. This is the objective – on a longer timescale in some cases – across several of the countries in the Caribbean Basin, aiming to cleanse the region of governments deemed undesirable to Washington.

As international relations professor at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer reminds us, the US “does not tolerate left-leaning governments…and as soon as they see a government that is considered to be left-of-center they move to replace that government.”

In the Financial Times, Ryan Berg, head of the Americas programme at the Washington think-tank CSIS, which is heavily funded by Pentagon contractors, said that Trump’s vision is for the US to be the “undisputable, pre-eminent power in the western hemisphere.” The New York Times dubbed Trump’s ambitions the “Donroe Doctrine.”

After Venezuela, in the current US line of fire, is Honduras. This Central American country faces an election on November 30 which will determine whether the leftist Libre Party stays in power or whether the country reverts to neoliberalism.

The crisis in the Caribbean engineered by the Trump administration is being actively instrumentalized to distract Hondurans from domestic issues when deciding how to vote. Honduras’s mainstream media repeatedly draw attention to the likelihood that Washington will threaten Honduras militarily if it votes the “wrong way” on November 30.

Interviewed on television, opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla was asked what would happen if the Libre Party won. He replied: “Those ships that are soon going to take over Venezuela are going to come and target Honduras.” Amplifying the supposed threat, opposition candidates have posted street signs labelling themselves “anti-communist,” as if communism were actually on offer in the election.

In a bizarre article, the Wall Street Journal alleges that Venezuela aims to “gobble up Honduras.” Turning on its head recent alarming evidence of a plot by Libre’s opponents to steal the election, the article claims that Venezuela is schooling Libre in defrauding the Honduran people.

This argument is also being repeated enthusiastically in the US Congress by María Elvira Salazar and others. On November 12, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said the US government “will respond rapidly and firmly to any attack on the integrity of the electoral process in Honduras.” In fact, the US is working with the opposition to undermine the popular mandate.

There is acute irony here. Washington’s justification for its military build-up is supposedly to tackle “narcoterrorism,” yet a Libre defeat would risk returning Honduras to the “narcostate” it had become in the decade under US patronage before the previous election in 2021.

Also lined up for regime change is, inevitably, Cuba. The UK’s Daily Telegraph, not normally known for its Latin America coverage, argues that Cuba is the “real target” of Trump’s campaign in Venezuela.

Having failed to dislodge the Cuban revolution after more than six decades of blockade, driving its citizens into acute hardship and pushing a tenth of them to migrate, Secretary of State Marco Rubio evidently sees the “real prize” of the US military build-up as dealing the fatal blow to its revolution.

Installing a US-friendly government in Caracas would aid the counter-revolution by cutting off gasoline and other supplies it currently sends to Cuba.  Or supplies might be stopped by the US navy itself, further tightening the screws on Havana. In addition, if the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela collapsed, it would embolden the US-sponsored dissidents in Cuba, who feed on the discontent rained upon their country by US sanctions.

Yet even the gung-ho Telegraph doubts whether Rubio’s goal will be achieved, given Cuba’s remarkable resilience.

Another country in Washington’s crosshairs is Nicaragua. Here too, Rubio is leading the charge. But he has plenty of confederates on both sides of the congressional isles.

Although not directly threatened militarily (at least, so far) by the US, it has imposed new sanctions on Nicaraguan businesses, threatens to impose 100% tariffs on the country’s exports to the US, and may try to exclude it from the regional trade agreement, CAFTA.

At the same time, Nicaragua’s opposition figures enthusiastically identify with their peers in Venezuela, hoping that regime-change in Caracas would encourage Washington to further attack Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

Two other left-leaning administrations in the Caribbean Basin, Colombia and Mexico, have been subject to Trump’s threats of military strikes. Colombian President Gustavo Petro has been sanctioned by Washington as “a hostile foreign leader.” He has responded by condemning the US attacks on boats in the Caribbean as “murder.”

Trump has recently repeated earlier threats to attack Mexican drug cartels, saying he would be “proud” to do so. Asked whether he would only take military action in Mexico if he had the country’s permission, he refused to answer the question. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum had earlier dismissed Trump’s threat of military action against drug cartels inside her country, telling reporters: “It’s not going to happen.”

However, despite Sheinbaum’s ongoing popularity, on November 15 she faced so-called Gen Z demonstrations which erupted in over 50 cities. According to The Grayzone, these were not what they seemed: they were financed and coordinated by an international right-wing network and amplified by bot networks. Their timing in relation to the Caribbean military build-up may have been intentional.

In the context of these protests, Trump said: “I am not happy with Mexico. Would I launch strikes in Mexico to stop drugs? It’s OK with me.” Elements in the MAGA movement are urging him to go further, launching a US military incursion to ensure “a transitional government.”

Washington successfully interfered in recent elections in Argentina. US endorsement of the right-wing victory in Ecuador in April was critical after a disputed election. Next month is the second round of Chile’s elections. Trump hopes for a rightward shift – with a little help from the hegemon – in that election as well as those in Colombia next year and in 2030 in Mexico.

Former Bush and Trump official Marshall Billingslea says the ultimate target of a US regime change assault is the entire Latin American left, “from Cuba to Brazil to Mexico to Nicaragua.” Military intervention leading to the end of the Maduro government would halt what he alleges (without evidence) is the flow of money from Caracas that has led to the “socialist plague that has spread across Latin America.”

US-imposed regime-change in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua – where the “socialist plague” has taken deep root – is a bipartisan project. For other progressive and left-leaning Latin American states – Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, and even Chile – the pax americana prescription stops short of outright deep regime change; infiltration, intimidation and co-optation are employed to keep them subordinate.

For Democrats and Republicans alike, the US imperial projection on the region is a given. Trump and his comrade-in-arms Rubio are leading the charge. But the so-called US opposition party is offering weak constraints.

To these ends, the US empire, with Trump at its titular head, is weighing the opportunity costs of deploying the full force of the military might assembled in the Caribbean, one-fifth of its navy’s global firepower. But Trump’s neocon advisers appear to want to seize the moment and embark on hemispheric political change, bringing a Trumpian “Donroe Doctrine” to fulfilment.

Will caution prevail, or will the US continue to bring lawlessness and chaos – as it has to Haiti, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere – not just to Venezuela but possibly to other countries in the region?

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Frank Church holds a CIA poison dart gun at a committee hearing with Vice Chairman John Tower on September 17, 1975. Photo by Henry Griffin (Source: U.S. Capitol Archives.)

The CIA’s role in assassination is one of those topics handled gingerly by the press or Congress from time to time and then hastily put aside, with the habitual claim that the CIA may have dreamed of it, thought about it and maybe even dabbled in it, but had never actually gone successfully all the way. But in fact, the Agency has gone all the way many times.

There’s no dispute that the CIA has used assassination as a weapon lower down the political and social pecking order, as no one knew better than William Colby. He had, by his own admission, supervised the Phoenix Program and other so-called “counter-terror” operations in Vietnam. Phoenix was aimed at “neutralizing” NLF political leaders and organizers in rural South Vietnam. In congressional testimony, Colby boasted that 20,587 NLF activists had been killed between 1967 and 1971 alone.

The South Vietnamese published a much higher estimate, declaring that nearly 41,000 had been killed. Barton Osborn, an intelligence officer in the Phoenix Program, spelled out in chilling terms the bureaucratic attitude of many of the agents toward their murderous assignments. “Quite often it was a matter of expediency just to eliminate a person in the field rather than deal with the paperwork.”

Those killed outright in Phoenix operations may have been more fortunate than the 29,000 suspected NLF members arrested and interrogated with techniques that were horrible even by the standards of Pol Pot and Mobutu. In 1972 a parade of witnesses before Congress testified about the techniques of the Phoenix interrogators: how they interviewed suspects and then pushed them out of planes, how they cut off fingers, ears and testicles, how they used electro-shock, shoved wooden dowels into the brains of some prisoners, and rammed electric probes into the rectums of others.

For many of the Phoenix raids, the agency employed the services of bandit tribes and ethnic groups, such as the Khmer Kampuchean Kram, the KKK. The KKK was comprised of anti-communist Cambodians and drug smugglers who, as one Phoenix veteran put it, “would kill anyone as long as there was something in it for them.” The KKK even offered to knock off Prince Sihanouk for the Americans and frame the NLF for the killing.

These American death squads were a particular favorite of Richard Nixon. After the My Lai massacre, an operation with all the earmarks of a Phoenix-style extermination, there was a move to reduce the funding for these civilian killing programs. Nixon, according to an account by Seymour Hersh, objected vociferously. “No,” Nixon demanded. “We’ve got to have more of this. Assassinations. Killings.” The funds were promptly restored, and the death toll mounted.

Even at the senior level of executive action, Colby was being bashful about the CIA’s ambitions and achievements. In 1955 the CIA had very nearly managed to assassinate the Chinese Communist leader Chou En-lai. Bombs were put aboard Chou’s plane as he flew from Hong Kong to Indonesia for the Bandung conference. At the last moment Chou changed planes,

thus avoiding a terminal descent into the South China Sea, since the plane duly blew up. The role of the CIA was later described in detail by a British intelligence agent who defected to the Soviet Union, and evidence recovered by divers from portions of the plane, including the timing mechanisms for two bombs, confirmed his statements. The Hong Kong police called the crash a case of “carefully planned mass murder.”

By 1960 Rafael Trujillo, president of the Dominican Republic, had become irksome to US foreign policymakers. His blatant corruption looked as though it might prompt a revolt akin to the upsurge that had brought Fidel Castro to power. The best way to head off this unwelcome contingency was to ensure that Trujillo’s political career cease forthwith, which in early 1961 it did. Trujillo was gunned down in his car outside his own mansion in Ciudad Trujillo. It emerged that the CIA had provided guns and training to the assassins, though the Agency took care to point out that it was not absolutely 100 percent sure that these were the same weapons that ultimately deposed the tyrant (who had been originally installed in power by the CIA).

At about the same time, CIA director Allen Dulles decided that the leader of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, was an unacceptable threat to the Free World and his removal was “an urgent and prime objective.” For assistance in the task of banishing this threat, the CIA turned to its own Technical Services Division (TSD), headed by that man of darkness, Sidney Gottlieb “Gottlieb’s division housed a horror chamber of labs whose researches included brain-washing, chemical and biological warfare, the use of drugs and electro-shock as modes of interrogation, and the development of lethal toxins, along with the most efficient means of applying these to the victim, such as the notorious poison dart gun later displayed before the cameras by Senator Frank Church.

In Lumumba’s case, Gottlieb developed a bio-poison that would mime a disease endemic to the Congo. He personally delivered the deadly germs along with a special hypodermic syringe, gauze masks, and rubber gloves to Lawrence Devlin, the CIA chief of the station in the Congo. The lethal implements were carried into the country in a diplomatic pouch. Gottlieb instructed Devlin and his agents how to apply the toxin to Lumumba’s toothpaste and food. However, the CIA’s bio-assassins couldn’t get close enough to Lumumba, so the “executive action” proceeded by a more traditional route. Lumumba was seized, tortured, and murdered by soldiers of the CIA’s selected replacement, Mobutu Sese Seko and Lumumba’s body ended up in the trunk of a CIA officer who drove around Lumumbashi trying to decide how to dispose of it.

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Image by Alex Shuper.

The so-called Gaza ceasefire was not a genuine cessation of hostility, but a strategic, cynical shift in the Israeli genocide and ongoing campaign of destruction.

Starting on October 10, the first day of the announced ceasefire, Israel transitioned tactics: moving from indiscriminate aerial bombardment to the calculated, engineered demolishing of homes and vital infrastructure. Satellite images, corroborated by almost hourly media and ground reports, confirmed this methodical change.

As direct combat forces seemingly withdrew to the adjacent “Gaza envelope” region, a new vanguard of Israeli soldiers advanced into the area east of the so-called Yellow Line, to systematically dismantle whatever semblance of life, rootedness, and civilization remained standing following the Israeli genocide. Between October 10 and November 2, Israel demolished 1,500 buildings, utilizing its specialized military engineering units.

The ceasefire agreement divided Gaza into two halves: one west of the Yellow Line, where the survivors of the Israeli genocide were confined, and a larger one, east of the line, where the Israeli army maintained an active military presence and continued to operate with impunity.

If Israel truly harbored the intention of, indeed, evacuating the area following the agreed-upon second phase of the ceasefire, it would not be actively pursuing the systematic, structural destruction of this already devastated region. Clearly, Israel’s motives are far more insidious, centered on rendering the region perpetually uninhabitable.

Aside from leveling infrastructure, Israel is also carrying out a continuous campaign of airstrikes and naval attacks, relentlessly targeting Rafah and Khan Yunis in the south. Later, and with greater intensity, Israel also began carrying out attacks in areas that were, in theory, meant to be under the control of Gazans.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, 260 Palestinians have been killed and 632 wounded since the commencement of the so-called ceasefire.

In practice, this ceasefire amounts to a one-sided truce, where Israel can carry out a relentless, low-grade war on Gaza, while Palestinians are systematically denied the right to respond or defend themselves. Gaza is thus condemned to relive the same tragic cycle of violent history: a defenseless, impoverished region trapped under the boot of Israel’s military calculations, which consistently operate outside the periphery of international law.

Before the existence of Israel atop the ruins of historic Palestine in 1948, the demarcation of Gaza’s borders was not driven by military calculations. The Gaza region, one of the world’s most ancient civilizations, was always seamlessly incorporated into a larger geographical socio-economic space.

Before the British named it the Gaza District (1920-1948), the Ottomans considered it a sub-district (Kaza) within the larger Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem – the Jerusalem Independent District.

But even the British designation of Gaza did not isolate it from the rest of the Palestinian geography, as the borders of the new district reached Al-Majdal (today’s Ashkelon) in the north, Bir al-Saba’ (Beersheba) in the east, and the Rafah line at the Egyptian border.

Following the 1949 Armistice Agreements, which codified the post-Nakba lines, the collective torment of Gaza, as illustrated in its shrinking boundaries, began in earnest. The expansive Gaza District was brutally reduced to the Gaza Strip, a mere 1.3 percent of the overall size of historic Palestine. Its population, due to the Nakba, had explosively grown with over 200,000 desperate refugees who, along with several generations of their descendants, have been trapped and confined in this tiny strip of land for over 77 years.

When Israel permanently occupied Gaza in June 1967, the lines separating it from the rest of the Palestinian and Arab geography became an integral, permanent part of Gaza itself. Soon after its occupation of the Strip, Israel began restricting the movement of Palestinians further, sectionalizing Gaza into several regions. The size and location of these internal lines were largely determined by two paramount motives: to fragment Palestinian society to ensure its subjugation, and to create military ‘buffer zones’ around Israeli military encampments and illegal settlements.

Between 1967 and Israel’s so-called ‘disengagement’ from Gaza, Israel had built 21 illegal settlements and numerous military corridors and checkpoints, effectively bisecting the Strip and confiscating nearly 40 percent of its land mass.

Following the redeployment, Israel retained absolute, unilateral control over Gaza’s borders, sea access, airspace, and even the population registry. Additionally, Israel created another internal border within Gaza, a heavily fortified “buffer zone” snaking across the northern and eastern borders. This new area has witnessed the cold-blooded killing of hundreds of unarmed protesters and the wounding of thousands who dared to approach what was often referred to as the “kill zone.”

Even the Gaza sea was effectively outlawed. Fishermen were inhumanely confined to tiny spaces, at times less than three nautical miles, while simultaneously surrounded by the Israeli navy, which routinely shot fishermen, sank boats, and detained crews at will.

Gaza’s new Yellow Line is but the latest, most egregious military demarcation in a long, cruel history of lines intended to make the lives of the Palestinians impossible. The current line, however, is worse than any before it, as it completely suffocates the displaced population in a fully destroyed area, without functioning hospitals and with only trickles of life-saving aid.

For Palestinians, who have been battling confinements and fragmentation for generations, this new arrangement is the intolerable and inevitable culmination of their protracted, multi-generational dispossession.

If Israel believes it can impose the new demarcation of Gaza as a new status quo, the next few months will prove this conviction devastatingly wrong. Tel Aviv has simply recreated a much worse, inherently unstable version of the violent reality that existed before October 7 and the genocide. Even those not fully familiar with the deep, painful history of Gaza must realize that sustaining the Yellow Line of Gaza is nothing more than a dangerous, bloody illusion.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

When I was still shaped by my juvenile consciousness during the early Cold War and by the fact that my father was a wounded vet, I believed that he and all his fellows had saved us from the fangs of the venomous Japanese and Nazis. There was nothing in the “history” we were taught straight through high school that digressed from the official mantra.  There was a factor at play, however that almost no one recognized and that was the emotional and psychological effects of organized murder and death on a mass scale on the war’s returnees. Today we call it ‘post-traumatic stress disorder.” The syndrome is well known today, but that hasn’t altered the American public’s willingness to allow their government to perpetuate it.  I belong to Veterans For Peace and I have long experience with its heartrending consequences. When we protest at militarized parades, we seek to inform about the realities of war and militarism.

My father and I were not close or tender. He was a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, where he went mainly to drink in an effort to find some relief among others who had endured similar experiences. A few years after he returned home and married and began a family, the psychic wounds of his wartime experiences emerged unambiguously. One major result for me was that I became increasingly rebellious at puberty, acting out in defiant ways and that led to a judge’s choice- go to jail for some months or join the military at age seventeen.

Knowing nothing of the real military and still believing that the Marine Corps “builds men,” I joined what most of my fellow grunts would come to brand “the Crotch.” After boot camp, I was proud to have succeeded and survived. Any such self-esteem vanished long ago to be replaced by its opposite. Today, nausea sweeps me when I recall ever allowing myself to be hoodwinked into our nation’s centuries-long militarism in the service of empire.

This year, the emphasis on Veterans’ Day parades seemed much more than usual. Meanwhile, our government funds genocide in Gaza, orchestrates the self-destruction of Ukraine, and is readying for war in Venezuela, among many other campaigns around the globe. Do the celebrants not comprehend that the pageants celebrating veterans are also endorsing the wars in which veterans served, died and suffer lifelong anguish?

After World War II and 75 years of failure in armed invasions of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and countless smaller wars, too many Americans have learned nothing. Far too many still insist that our armed forces exist to protect “us” from those who will do us harm, but the facts confirm the opposite. American wars kill, injure and impair those who are deployed for the “rescue,” while those among the ruling elites who manufacture the nation’s wars are never put in harm’s way. If some of their offspring serve in uniform, it is always as officers and rarely are they in the line of fire. American warfare is a class-based tragedy.

Why so many of my fellow veterans continue to cling to the fabricated and fraudulent mythology encasing all our wars is beyond my comprehension because so many have faced the realities and suffered directly. Those who are trained and deployed for combat are mere pawns in a giant geo-strategic game. When did two tiny countries on the western Pacific outskirts ever threaten American military security? Whose genuine interests were being ministered? In Korea and Vietnam, at least 100,000 American lives were sacrificed. For what? And we all but dismiss the millions of Southeast Asian lives snuffed. Those who concocted these wars had interests. What were they? And why did, and do, citizens so supinely accept the rationales for these moves in the giant chess derby? How could Korea or Vietnam, as alleged Soviet agents, have possibly carried out the same class of destruction upon the American homeland? So, the question always remains, what are the real reasons for the wars?

For that matter, why do so many never doubt the pretexts for World Wars I and II, especially since both have set the stage much too possibly for a third and final war? In neither case did Germany want war with the United States, yet both President Wilson and Roosevelt and their collaborators at the time manipulated the nation into war.  Neither enemy had the remotest chance of invading, much less defeating the U.S. Washington even secretly attacked German vessels in the North Atlantic in order to draw fire, seeking to enflame a rationale to declare war. Many want to believe the U.S. embarked upon a crusade to rid the world of militarism and fascism. Yet both abound today.

To this day, the mythology that the attack at Pearl Harbor was a total “surprise” is embedded in all public observances of December 7, 1945, as well as Veterans Day. Yet secret Congressional hearings post-WWII (records now accessible) reveal the fact that American military intelligence had cracked Japan’s diplomatic and naval codes and were covertly listening to Tokyo’s transmissions and operational plans for war. By November 26, the U.S. knew the Japanese Fleet had embarked for Hawaii and while the naval commander at Pearl was ordered to dispatch the aircraft carriers to other Pacific Islands (where, as the vital weapon in the ensuing war, they remained safe). Neither the admiral nor the army commander was informed that the Japanese fleet was approaching Hawaii. Over 2400 American lives were sacrificed to overcome public opposition to going to war.  Why?

Until the attack in Hawaii, the Japanese were attempting to take Eastern and Southeastern Asia under their control, thereby severing Washington and Wall Street from their long-standing plans to access the same resources and riches Japan was steadily absorbing. At the height of the Great Depression, America’s rulers needed to expand their capitalism into a much wider world or face an uprising at home that could radically alter the system they had fostered and perhaps even cripple their power. At the same time, the Soviet Union was effectively closed; Germany was closing markets in much of the remaining Europe and even Latin America.  On Wall Street and the inner government in D.C., the consensus to confront this threat to American capitalism was war. But first, the widespread public opposition to waging such a war had to be surmounted.

Though few seem to remember the “Open Door Policy,” first announced at the turn of the 20^thCentury as Western powers and Japan sought to carve China up for their own profit, that agenda remains the bedrock of American foreign policy and it always shapes the motives for the American way of war. The world must be open to American economic penetration and profit. The access to raw materials and markets and the costs of labor must be protected for the benefit of American investors primarily and by whatever means necessary.

Fundamentally, Japan’s steady domination of Eastern and Southeastern Asia required access to American petroleum and steel so when Washington cut the Nipponese access to those, then enabled American pilots to attack Japanese targets in China, and then demanded Tokyo’s withdrawal from China and IndoChina, Japanese military elites understood that the U.S. was seeking war and that their only hope was to destroy the American fleet anchored in Hawaii and then seek a negotiated peace. American strategists well understood that Japan would not capitulate. Tokyo had no hope of defeating the U.S., as its top Admiral Yamamoto averred? Japan was pushed into war and Washington declared war on Germany because it was Tokyo’s ally. The U.S. was fully prepared to fight its war on three fronts across the globe. One significant factor in the decision was the resolution of the enormous unemployment problem. Sixteen million citizens soon found themselves in uniform.

The United States emerged from World War II as the most potent entity ever to wield power on our sorry planet. But it was not absolute. Defeat of Germany would have been impossible without the USSR as an ally and despite the loss of at least 25 million people, the Soviets now occupied much of Eastern Europe and much of Germany. Whatever one thinks of the communist system, its major jeopardy to the dominance the U.S. wished to achieve was that it was closed to Capitalism. So, as early as 1945, Washington began its so-called Cold War with Russia. Then, as the decade unfolded, communists in China prevailed in the civil war that emerged after Japanese withdrawal. Having fought Japan in an effort to manipulate China’s future development in partnership with itself, the U.S. had lost China to the Chinese- the wrong Chinese who today pose the greatest threat to the global ascendancy long desired in Washington and Wall Street.

After sacrificing over 400,000 American lives, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs. Our myth proclaims this hideous action was necessary to force Japan’s surrender, but we now know (or at least some do!) that Japan was already defeated and facing invasion and occupation by the Soviets. No American invasion could take place for months. The bombs were the means by which Japan surrendered ONLY to the U.S., which enabled Washington to avoid the same difficulties obtaining in Europe whereby the U.S. and Soviets were co-occupying Germany thus interfering with Washington’s after-war agenda. The Soviets interpreted the A-bombs as a clear-cut message to themselves and soon produced their own versions of the Satanic means by which we may yet commit self-extermination. During the Korean War, the US threatened China with nuclear attack, with the predictable result that today China has nukes capable of reaching the U.S.

World War II is not a bygone. Although the United Nations was crafted with the claim of ensuring a global order that would obviate a Third World War, that exalted goal has unambiguously failed. Take note that we have endured grave close calls such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and more. Should not our self-declared “intelligent” species learn the obvious? While the 20^th Century witnessed the murderous competition between American-style capitalism, fascism and communism, today Washington, China and Russia, wielding their own forms of capitalism, are arming up. Note the recent rhetoric exchanged between Trump and Putin over the testing of new nuclear weapons. The last treaty attempting to regulate the expansion of nukes expires in February. China makes clear it is increasing its atomic arsenal. The Third World War will be the final.

That we cannot learn the lessons of genuine history definitely disturbs my sleep.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.”

– Bertrand Russell, 1905.

The mainstream media have been concerned with the politics, policies, and propaganda of Donald Trump’s terms in office, but have virtually ignored the central question of his presidency: Is Trump psychologically fit to be president of the United States and commander in chief?  Various psychologists and psychiatrists have warned that our dangerously disordered president is a threat to domestic and international security.  The threat has become more dire in recent weeks.

The mental health experts who have discussed these issues have not been interviewed by the press.  They took some professional risk in ignoring the ethical principle of the American Psychiatric Association known as the “Goldwater Rule.” This rule prohibits diagnosing public figures they have not  personally interviewed. Trump’s recent public behavior and his outrageous remarks suggest that the “duty to warn” among psychologists and psychiatrists calls for greater scrutiny of Trump by the overall public, particularly members of the medical community and the media.

Trump’s signs of malignant narcissism are well known; he claims to know more than anyone else and that only he can fix our problems.  His demonization of the media and his perceived opponents as well as his treatment of minorities and the handling of immigration issues point to paranoia.  His misuse of the national guard and the professional military in our major cities, violating the Constitution and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, points to political paranoia.  Trump’s reference to himself as the “Boss of the Americas” points to personal paranoia.

In recent months, Trump has claimed that non-existent political groups justify his deployment of the U.S. military in American cities and in Caribbean waters. He ignored the lawyers from the intelligence agencies, who oppose the use of force against Venezuela.  Civilian lawyers from the Department of Defense were cut out of the discussion.  The legal staff of the National Security Council was sent packing months ago.

To justify his illegal use of the military and the national guard in American cities, Trump cites his opposition to “antifa,” a non-existent political group and merely a label for anti-fascist groups in Europe and the United States.  Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio has labeled groups in Germany, Italy, and Greece as “Specially Designated Global Terrorists.”  Without any evidence, Trump has referred to antifa as a “militarist, anarchist enterprise.”

To justify his illegal and unconstitutional use of military force in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean against small boats from Venezuela and Colombia, Trump assails a non-existent group, the “Cartel de los Soles,” which is a label created by Venezuelan journalists, but not an organization.  Secretary of State Rubio, who is one of the most bellicose actors on Trump’s national security team, describes Cartel de los Soles as a “criminal organization that happens to masquerade as a government.”  Trump himself refers to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro as a “fugitive head of the cartel” who has been indicted in the U.S. for trafficking drugs into the country.

Trump’s meltdown can also be seen in his ugly and aggressive attacks on two female journalists who dared to raise the issue of the Epstein files with the president.  Trump has a long history of hostility toward women, and this has been manifested over the years in his inability to deal with questions from female journalists, especially when it comes to the Epstein files or his recent glorification of Mohammed bin Salman during last week’s summit meeting.  Trump dismissed MbS’s role in the horrible killing of a Saudi journalist by stating that the journalist was a “controversial” man and “things happen.”

Two recent developments in the Congress have knocked Trump off his feed. The fact that three MAGA representatives in the Congress are leading the opposition to Trump on the failure of the White House to release the Epstein files must be particularly loathsome to Trump.  Then, last week, six Democratic congressmen—all military veterans—proclaimed that the military has a duty to ignore illegal orders.  Trump’s maniacal response was to brand the group as “seditious” and remind the U.S. public about what should be done with those who commit treason.  Trump’s conclusion to what is to be done: “Death.”

Trump is clearly losing his bearings, and there is no one in the White House who can calm him or get him to modify his actions or his provocative statements. Trump’s irrational and impulsive behavior is becoming particularly worrisome as the possible use of military force in Venezuela, or the CIA’s attempt to assassinate Venezuelan President Maduro, hang in the balance.  Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional orders are compromising the integrity of the military and possibly returning the CIA to the perilous times of regime change and attempted assassinations during the Cold War.

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