Photo by Damir Samatkulov

“. . . by the late 1980s . . . the chemical imbalance theory of depression . . . should have been dead in the water. Yet, it managed to survive long enough to be revitalized by the pharmaceutical industry a few years later in the interests of marketing the new generation of blockbuster drugs: the SSRIs. In the process, the theory was transformed from an unsubstantiated supposition into what was perceived as a scientific truth, and this was what persuaded subsequent generations to flock to their doctors to get pills for depression.”

—Joanna Moncrieff, Chemically Imbalanced, 2025.

While it is debatable as to exactly which of the many war-mongering lies told by politicians has resulted in the most disastrous outcome, when it comes to falsehoods declared by the psychiatry establishment and their Big Pharma partners, it would be difficult to find one that has created more damage than the chemical imbalance theory of depression—harming not only individual patients but society. This is the subject of psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff’s recently published Chemically Imbalanced: The Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth.

Moncrieff is a consultant psychiatrist for the National Health Services (NHS) in England, Professor of Critical and Social Psychiatry at University College London, and co-chairperson of the Critical Psychiatry Network.

In 2022, Moncrieff was the lead author of a landmark review of research studies that showed that there is no evidence that depression is caused by a serotonin imbalance. This systematic analysis of the research became one of the most widely read and influential papers in recent times (ranked by the online influence tracker Altmetric in the top 5% of all scientific papers ever written). While Moncrieff’s conclusion was no surprise to those in the scientific community familiar with some of these studies, it was a shock to much of the public, which for decades had repeatedly heard the opposite message—that serotonin deficiency caused depression—from establishment psychiatry and antidepressant commercials. This made Moncrieff’s review “newsworthy” for the mainstream media (for example, CBS’s 2022 story “Depression is Not Caused by Low Levels of Serotonin, New Study Suggests”).

The huge reaction to her review made it clear to Moncrieff that the public had an interest in the entire story behind the serotonin myth. Chemically Imbalanced is a hugely important book in which Moncrieff provides a comprehensive account of the origin and a history of the chemical imbalance theory of mental illness; the lack of evidence for a serotonin theory of depression; the primary reason for its persistence despite lack of evidence (an irresistible tool of drug companies for the marketing of antidepressants); the ineffectiveness and adverse effects of antidepressants; andthe bizarre manner in which establishment psychiatry has defended itself and attacked Moncrieff for her truth telling.

While psychiatry has had other major debacles—for example, the inflated results of antidepressant effectiveness reported by the STAR*D study, replete with scientific misconduct—its dishonesty about the serotonin imbalance theory of depression has resulted in something even more insidious: a distorted view of the nature of our humanity that not only has had major negative treatment consequences but harmful cultural and political consequences as well.

Moncrieff and her co-researchers were not the first to bring to light studies showing that depression was unrelated to a serotonin deficiency, but what they achieved in their 2022 paper was to definitively reject this chemical imbalance theory of depression. In the 1998 book Blaming the Brain, psychologist Elliot Valenstein had provided a handful of studies showing this lack of a relationship between serotonin and depression, concluding, “Furthermore, there is no convincing evidence that depressed people have a serotonin or norepinephrine deficiency.” However, Moncrieff and her co-researchers, by analyzing all relevant studies since this theory was proposed, put the final nails in the serotonin-imbalance coffin.

The relationship between depression and serotonin has long been studied through various means. The most direct method is to measure the breakdown product of serotonin (serotonin’s metabolites) of depressed and nondepressed subjects. Moncrieff and her co-researchers identified two systematic reviews of such research that included 19 separate studies, and she reported, “Neither of these reviews found any overall difference in the level of the breakdown product in people with depression compared to people without depression. So, the most direct method we currently have of assessing brain levels of serotonin suggests there is no difference between people with depression and people without depression.”

A less direct area of research consists of depleting the supply of serotonin’s precursor (its parent molecule) called tryptophan, and examining whether this depletion creates depression. Moncrieff reports, “None of the ten more recent studies we sampled detected any effect of the tryptophan-depletion technique on mood in healthy volunteers, either. Hence, the evidence does not suggest that reducing brain serotonin by tryptophan depletion induces depression in people who are not depressed. . . So, tryptophan-depletion studies do not support the serotonin theory of depression.”

So, if Moncrieff and her co-researchers only confirmed what researchers in the scientific community had already suspected—that depression was unrelated to serotonin levels or any such so-called chemical imbalance—why did she get attacked, sometimes viciously so, by establishment psychiatry? Chemically Imbalanced answers this question.

Establishment psychiatry and Big Pharma have long used this chemical imbalance/serotonin-deficiency theory to convince depressed patients to take drugs that increase serotonin levels; these are called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), with the well-known SSRI brand names including Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa, and Lexapro, all of which have been blockbuster, multi-billion dollar grossing drugs. Even though Moncrieff and her co-researchers in their 2022 paper didn’t deal with antidepressant issues of scientific ineffectiveness and adverse effects, given how hugely important this serotonin imbalance theory is to patient antidepressant compliance, establishment psychiatry and Big Pharma were upset that Moncrieff’s exposure of the falseness of the serotonin imbalance theory became widely reported.

Establishment psychiatry’s attacks on Moncrieff were bizarrely inconsistent. She notes: “They played down the significance of the paper, and when that didn’t work, they tried to discredit it. Some insisted no one believes the serotonin theory of depression in any case, while others claimed serotonin does play a role in depression but couldn’t specify what that might be.”

Some key figures in establishment psychiatry attempted to convince the general public that Moncrieff was merely saying what psychiatry has long been saying. David Hellerstein, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center and director of Columbia’s Depression Evaluation Service, claimed Moncrieff’s review “was largely met with yawns from the psychiatric community,” and he then sarcastically mocked her, “Wow, next she’ll tackle the discrediting of the black bile theory of depression.” This type of attack made little sense to the mainstream media and much of the general public who had not heard anything about this theory having been discarded. And the belittling of Moncrieff as saying nothing new appeared even more bizarre a year after her paper’s 2022 publication when in April 2023, the then president of the America Psychiatric Association (the guild of American psychiatrists) repeated a version of the serotonin imbalance theory, telling a podcaster, “We know that serotonin has been strongly associated with depression” and antidepressants “work on neurotransmitters, the chemicals in our brain, to rebalance the relative levels.”

While some key members of establishment psychiatry said that Moncrieff’s disproof of the serotonin imbalance theory of depression was nothing new, and others continued to espouse this theory, still others said that serotonin’s relationship with depression is “more complicated” than a simple imbalance. The only consistent response to Moncrieff’s review from establishment psychiatry has been that it doesn’t matter what Moncrieff reported because antidepressants “work”; and establishment psychiatry has been successful getting much of the mainstream media to buy this (for example, on November 8, 2022, the New York Times published “Antidepressants Don’t Work the Way Many People Think”).

There is a parallel to how establishment psychiatry has handled the invalidation of the serotonin-imbalance theory.Neoconservative enthusiasts for the 2003 U.S. war in Iraq had offered several false justifications for invading Iraq, the most compelling one for much of the U.S. public was their certainty that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Even after it was clear that this WMD claim was false, an American Enterprise Institute article, “Why Neoconservatism Was and Is Right” (2010) was unapologetic: “Critics attack Operation Iraqi Freedom because intelligence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction proved wrong. . . . Post-war inspectors found no nuclear and few chemical and biological weapons, but they did find documents and presidency minutes which show with absolute certitude that Saddam Hussein was determined to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction program as soon as sanctions collapsed.” So no WMDs found, but we were told it’s more complicated; and no serotonin imbalance found, but are now told it’s more complicated.

Moncrieff, in response to psychiatry’s attacks on her, invokes a more playful comparison than neoconservative war mongers—Sigmund Freud’s story of the borrowed kettle. A man is accused by his neighbor of returning a kettle in a damaged condition, and the man offers three conflicting excuses: that the kettle wasn’t really damaged, that it was already damaged when he borrowed it, and that he never borrowed it in the first place!

A handful of research psychiatrists have viewed the serotonin imbalance theory of depression as essentially a “noble lie” that enabled people to feel better about their depression and take their antidepressants. While establishment psychiatry did not use the “noble lie” defense following Moncrieff’s exposure of the lack of evidence for the serotonin imbalance theory, some have previously used it (“Psychiatry’s Manufacture of Consent”). Alan Frazer, professor of pharmacology and psychiatry at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center, told NPR in 2012 that by framing depression as a deficiency—something that needed to be returned to normal—patients felt more comfortable taking antidepressants, “If there was this biological reason for them being depressed, some deficiency that the drug was correcting, then taking a drug was OK.”

The noble lie rationale begs two questions. First, is it ever ethical to tell patients falsehoods? Second, even if you accept the idea that some lies to patients can be ethical, has the serotonin imbalance theory of depression falsehood been a “noble lie”? In other words, has it resulted in more or less individual and societal misery and suffering? In Chemically Imbalanced, Moncrieff thoroughly answers the question of whether it has been a good or bad thing to convince people to believe that their depression was a biological-chemical event, which persuaded them to use SSRIs and other so-called antidepressants.

One argument for biological-chemical and other brain-disease theories of depression is these reduce stigma. “However,” Moncrieff points out, “there is a considerable volume of research showing that regarding mental health problems as brain diseases leads to more, not less stigma. Numerous attitude surveys have shown that when people are presented with biological explanations for mental illness, as compared to psychological or social explanations, they are more likely to think of the sufferer as being dangerous, as having no chance of recovery and are less likely to want to get acquainted with them.”

To be clear, Moncrieff is not anti-drug, but rather anti-bullshitting patients about psychiatric drugs. While antidepressants don’t work by correcting any mythical chemical imbalance, it is true that studies show that from 25 to 35 percent of depressed patients report short-term benefits; however, those receiving a placebo do just as well. And in the long term, more depressed people remit from depression without antidepressants than by using them.

When taking antidepressants, as is the case with any psychotropic drug, there is going to be a placebo effect, and because of the noticeable side effects of antidepressants, this placebo effect is what scientists call an “amplified” one. Moncrieff notes, “Alongside placebo and amplified placebo effects, there is the possibility that antidepressants improve people’s depression scores by numbing their emotions . . . . People frequently described a numbing or blunting of emotions . . . . They reported being less in touch with their feelings, being unable to cry, feeling uncaring or unmotivated, and some felt they were no longer themselves.”

Some people, at least for a time, might prefer this emotional blunting, but this is not curing depression. Moreover, antidepressants create all types of adverse effects, including sexual dysfunction and severe withdrawal problems, especially with long-term use.

Beyond the individual patient consequences of antidepressants, there are societal and political ones. Moncrieff notes: “Not only does it expose people to the unpleasant and sometimes dangerous and incapacitating effects that arise when the body has to deal with an alien substance, it lets society off the hook.”

Faux-left liberals have supported establishment psychiatry’s biochemical-medicalization of depression and attacked Moncrieff (see my 2022 CounterPunch article “Behind Rolling Stone’s Hatchet Job on a Psychiatrist Critical of Neoliberal Capitalism”). In contrast to the faux-left, the anti-authoritarian left, including Moncrieff, has long recognized that such medicalization serves to maintain a societal status quo that is causing much of our suffering.

“Whether it is neoliberal capitalism or some other economic system,” Moncrieff points out, “the transformation of social, political and personal problems into the medical domain is profoundly conservative (with a small ‘c’). It buffers whatever political philosophy and economic regime currently exists—whether that be of the Left or Right—against legitimate criticism.”

The falsehood of the serotonin imbalance theory is disempowering on both an individual and societal level. “The medical approach doesn’t help people find solutions to their problems,” Moncrieff notes, as “it substitutes a careful understanding of each individual’s predicament with a diagnostic label. And rather than providing the social support and community that most people need, it discourages people from understanding the social implications of their feelings and hinders them from reaching out to others to find collective solutions. . . . ultimately, mental health problems like depression and anxiety are social and political problems. If we wish to tackle them, we need as a society to prioritise addressing the circumstances that give rise to them.”

One of the most damning indictments of establishment psychiatry is that it takes courage for psychiatrists to assert scientific truths about their profession because the psychiatry establishment resembles far less a scientific community than a fundamentalist organized religion. Retributions against psychiatrists critical of their profession have not been as violent as what Galileo experienced in 1633, when he was tried by the Roman Catholic Church for heresy and forced to recant under the threat of death; however, when the psychiatry establishment cannot simply ignore its critics, it will belittle and marginalize them. Among the handful of brave psychiatrists who have made establishment psychiatry uncomfortable with inconvenient truths—a short list that includes Thomas Szasz, Ron Leifer, Loren Mosher, Peter Breggin, David Healy, Grace Jackson, and a very few others—all have paid a price with the loss of academic and other professional positions or have been punished in some other manner by establishment psychiatry.

Observing establishment psychiatry’s attacks on its critics for several decades now, the only relatively “good news” I can offer to future brave psychiatrists is that establishment psychiatry’s style resembles much more the Donald Trump/Roy Cohn strategy—attack, never acknowledge guilt, and always claim victory—than it resembles the Inquisition strategy used on Giordano Bruno. So, if you are young psychiatrist who aspires to be a freethinking truth teller, you will get verbally abused and jeopardize your career, but you need not fear being burned at the stake.

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Photograph Source: salty_soul – CC BY 2.0

Now that Trump and, as some have termed it, the broligarchy, are firmly in power, it might make sense to look at what conditions made this possible and where it might all lead. It’s a bizarre and unsettling time for those of us who were screeching at the tops of our lungs about the misdeeds of the Democrats in power during the Biden administration. It’s jarring– like you were pissed off before about a psychotic family member who enjoyed gaslighting you, but now you have an honest-to-goodness monster trashing your house, and he also might be interested in eating you.

But on the road to this place we now find ourselves at, it was as if a flaming pile-up of cars could be seen on the horizon, ahead in that expanse of highway. There was ample time to pull over before reaching the steaming impassible knot of metal–to turn around, to take exits. These options were all in place before reaching the conflagration, but the car being driven by the corporate-controlled Democrats steamed forward. Biden had his lead foot on the accelerator, licking on that damn Aricept-flavored ice cream cone–all the crew in the backseat. Pelosi with her stock picks, Bernie with a very awkward reach around for his friend, AOC making mention of stopping at the billboard-advertised road-side attractions: “See THE THING…….a possible New Deal to make life a little better for the citizens.” But nothing more than a shrug from her as the billboards get passed by—she just wanted to make some noise. And, of course, Harris announcing, “I’m Speaking,” to nobody in particular; nobody is listening.

The liberal Democrats would have you believe that it was those who did not give unadulterated adoration to a genocider, to a man who couldn’t even give a quick and informal fundraising talk in private homes without a teleprompter—that somehow those individuals were the problem in their failed election, not the candidates or the entire rotten system. Once upon a time actual primaries were held that somewhat vetted candidates and in real-time advanced the individuals who might actually win. This is now a bridge too far for the Democrats, instead, they rely on bullying and obfuscation. Promises and hypocrisy. Decisions made privately and court-sanctioned that they are a private entity with every right to do so, never mind the consequences. They pick who will continue to do the corporate bidding, of course, nothing more, nothing less.

The Democrats campaign on the notion that the alternative will simply be the boogeyman, all the while, when said boogeyman wins, they sit with him and joke, showing just how much they believed that rhetoric they spewed. If they truly believed that Trump was the existential threat to democracy that they proclaimed, why on earth would you show up to normalize the royal ascension? A liberal Democrat would probably try to say, well this shows the inherent class of an Obama, of the Democrats, but does this make sense? Would one sit with any of the WW2 pantheon of fascist dictators and giggle and bond due to having “class”? This lack of backbone and palpable ethics reeks to voters and the result is evident.

I will admit for a micro-second when Harris lost, I felt the most disgusting feeling—that is, a feeling that made me embarrassed of my own pettiness. I had that very low-level, not enlightened lizard brain kick in…..it was like, “Well, there you go, you dumb fuckers—that’s what happens when you don’t listen to those of us on the left screaming about your shit candidates”. But that feeling is right up there with the kind of things you yell in an argument and immediately know you didn’t really mean them. Yes, you want consequences for the disgusting corporate Democratic class, but those consequences will only fall on your fellow working-class citizens, even the ones muddled enough in their heads to think MAGA will somehow work out for them. Obama can joke and schmooze because his life won’t change one bit with the onset of the broligarchy. It’s all the same when you reach a certain level of wealth.

I do not see an effective change, of course, coming from the Democrats. They did a Hillary 2.0 insulting voters, placing Zionists to go speak in places like Michigan. As I’ve said before, it almost makes you wonder if they wanted to lose. Is this the game? Good cop/bad cop, but all cops, all the way down, not turtles. You get a shock and (awful) administration, then you get an “oh, we are trying to make it better, but our hands are just plain tired” placeholder subsequent administration. But the unrelenting momentum is that of enshittification (look it up, it’s a word) and more difficult lives for all. The push-pull of the Democrat-Republican dynamic keeps almost everyone entranced and their eyes off the magician lifting the money, but this one won’t give you a coin back from behind your ear. He even keeps that. Most liberal Democrats believe that Trump is the cause, rather than a symptom, of this very corrupt, up-to-the-highest-bidder society. They don’t realize that toxic mold won’t grow unless the conditions are pretty squalid.

So what will all of this mean? I suspect a lot of experimentation and then backpedaling after colossal failures. Of course, the end goal is that of privatization of largely everything, a rollback or complete destruction of environmental protections, and a large dollop of economic pain. All of this coupled with techno-surveillance state tactics going after more resources.

What do I mean by said techno-surveillance tactics? I think a wonderful and easily understandable example would be the continuation of the gig economy/surge pricing effect. Cory Doctorow did a marvelous job illustrating this aspect in his short piece “Nurses Whose Shitty Boss is a Shitty App”. He describes “Shiftkey”–it’s an app that healthcare workers sign up on to take specific shifts from random healthcare entities needing staff but not wanting to pay full-time employees –you know the ones with all those pesky needs like health insurance and sick leave. The app offers shifts, and the healthcare workers are presented with a wage offer for the open slots. The thing is, the app taps into commercially available financial data that lets it know how much money the nurse has in the bank and how much they owe. Then a variable amount of money is offered for the shift. Of course, this enables a low-ball offer when it is evident that the person is in dire financial straits. I think this is one of the best examples of what this economy will try to get away with. A tax on poverty—it’s always existed but now it’s feeding on steroids and Chernobyl level radioactive waste.

So this is basically the utopia all the tech billionaires want. A series of city-states operating as separate entities of commerce with the workers operating in a similar manner, as a fluid collateral to be exploited as much as possible. The idea is for the worker to feel like they are in some sort of control in this Libertarian wet-dream economy, but in fact, these workers will be easily pushed into working in crummy situations and will be paid less if they are clearly desperate. This tech-bro dream system is not based on adequate reciprocity, but on aggressive “kick one when they are down” techniques. They would tell you this is just the natural course of things, but we all know how well this technique “works” as we watch our world go up in literal flames. The only reason humans have made it this long is because so many small groups over millennia have worked together and have come up with measures to control the worst impulses of their sociopathic members. But our world today celebrates these excesses and pathologies, making predatory apps like the one used by Shiftkey. Actual products built to screw over the healthcare workers taking care of sick and vulnerable people. It’s magnitudes of predation.

Another example of the tech crossover to worker and citizen exploitation that is in the works is that of facial recognition software. Monopolistic entities like Kroger’s plan to utilize these new toys. Though they deny they will use any sort of surge/individual pricing with this, the ability will most certainly be there to charge certain people extra using technology of this sort. It’s enough of a threat that one of the few members of Congress with a spine, Rashida Tlaib, has raised the alarm for just these sorts of possible practices. To say this isn’t possible or likely, one should re-read what entities like Shiftkey are doing and extrapolate. Of course, it’s possible–and it’s probable.

We are simply living through the Business Plot being enacted in the current day. Trump is the crowd-friendly (well, to the MAGA crowd, that is) symbol, but make no mistake that the real work of funneling the fruits of your labor is being hashed out in the form of these new apps and technologies. Workers will simply feel like they are in quicksand, that it just keeps getting harder and harder to keep up, but the clear reasons for such hardship won’t be immediately obvious. It will be algorithms behaving parasitically by design, draining us and sustaining them. We will all be Brian Johnson’s son. Blood bag Economies. I wouldn’t be shocked to know we are referred to in such a manner within those circles. If you haven’t heard about him, Brian Johnson is the tech-bro guy trying to live forever by, among other things, juicing his son for blood. So that’s fun, right? And I don’t have hope that the Democrats will become anything beyond a less overtly racist/less anti DEI version of corporate power. They will be the ones patrolling vocabulary and clutching pearls, funding genocide and not mounting any sort of effective counter to reactionary policies.

I do feel the need to address that the all-out assault on DEI and don’t forget A (accessibility) would not be going on in this same manner without the Trump administration pushing this cruel policy. This is one of the actual differences between the two parties. The Democrats definitely did not put in safeguards during times of super majorities however, most likely as a calculated risk for ongoing fundraising. But anyway, many individuals like disabled veterans voted in the very policymakers who will implement eugenics-type programs that simply try to shake off the non-productive (in their eyes) members of society– be it to more abject poverty or even death in terms of social murder by eliminating compassionate and supportive programs. It’s easy to mock those who voted against their own interests but it is so important not to—we have to keep our empathy intact and realize that not everyone is able to see a charlatan even in the bright light. And for many of those people the last time they felt that they had an extra bit of  extra money in their pockets was during the Trump Covid check era. I’ve heard that opinion voiced out loud in my red state often. It’s no wonde since they have seen their lives get harder in the last four years that they have reached out to the “strongman” persona. It is the most predictable outcome—we have seen it over and over in history.

There is a large portion of the population who haven’t advanced much beyond the dynamics of a dysfunctional parent-child relationship, and they see the whole world through that lens. Many of these people sidle up to movements like MAGA to try to feel powerful, to feel like they will make Daddy proud. It’s easy to feel anger at them, but probably sympathy is the higher road to take. It’s difficult though, because they are truly dangerous, being under the spell of a leader they don’t question. They feel the intoxicating mix of anger towards the “other” and belonging to what they perceive as a supportive in-group. Of course, the neo-liberals can be just as deprived of rationality in their decision making, but it’s more difficult to picture a NIMBY Democrat going all Hutu-Tutsi on your ass than the current crop in power.

But here we are, stuck living through these times; it’s what we all have in common. Whatever fate is to befall the United States, it will likely accelerate toward more difficulty and misery for the working class. The fuel for much of this despair will be in the form of these extractive tech advances. They will hope that our apathy and listlessness will carry the day for them as we fall into this new paradigm. But I mention all of this because I think an important initial aspect of dissent will be to understand what is truly going on. Does Kroger’s seem to be targeting you for higher prices with noxious tech? Go to your local Farmer’s Market, try to grow what you can, make alliances with those who already grow food. An app like Shiftkey is screwing you over? Refuse to work for them.

The only power we have right now is that of our pocketbooks and our labor. I suspect that events like ICE roundups will slow when our nation’s food supply drops precipitously. Much of this will come down to what is profitable for those in power to be doing. The chaos works to help them get privatization, but there’s a sweet spot I don’t expect them to purposely exceed in terms of disruption. They still want the spice to flow,right?

Overall, I expect it will resemble a Dumpster/Cybertruck fire much of the time. Just an aesthetically unappealing mess. Try to avoid being collateral damage and live to fight another day–work and be kind in your immediate vicinity. And as always, it comes down to a need for fostering local connections. We have to stay informed about which monster company is trying to harvest us (probably all of them, but avoid the most egregious). We need to focus on mutual aid, all of those things that we definitely already know about. And probably the most important takeaway, if you get nothing else out of this piece……. DO NOT let Brian Johnson have any of your blood. He needs to make his own like the rest of us. That man is walking symbolism for what we are going through and putting up with in this, the already trying year of 2025.

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Flowers on the Nogales border wall as a memorial to José Antonio Elena Rodríguez who was killed by the U.S.. Border Patrol in 2012. (Photo by Todd Miller)

I approached Mirabel Cruz to ask her what she thought of the national emergency declaration for the U.S.-Mexico border, announced by President Donald Trump during his inauguration. She was at her house on International Street in Nogales, Arizona, where she lives in front of the 20-foot rust-colored wall, the very place that, according to Trump, is suffering a “dangerous invasion.”When he declared the national emergency, there was a rousing standing ovation. I found the enthusiasm startling. Did the attendees at his inauguration know something I don’t? So I came down to walk alongside the wall and take a look. Along the way, I’d talk to residents like Mirabel to hear their thoughts.

“Since you live right here,” I asked her in Spanish, “right on the border, do you think there is a national emergency?” She paused. She looked at me as if the question were ludicrous. It certainly felt ludicrous coming out of my mouth. I wondered if, in that moment, the expression on her face represented the feelings of most people from the borderlands after hearing Trump’s declaration. In the official statement from the White House, Trump declared that U.S. sovereignty is under attack. He claimed that the “invasion” has caused “chaos and suffering over the last four years.” He declared that the “assault on the American people and the integrity of America’s sovereign borders represents a grave threat to our nation.”

“It is very calm here,” Mirabel told me, “There is nothing happening here.” When I asked her if they should send soldiers, she immediately said no. She is from Mexico originally but has been living in her house for 16 years. “Besides,” she said, pointing to a green-striped vehicle leaving a cloud of dust on the dirt road, “Border Patrol is all over the place.”

I thanked her and returned to the border wall to walk. Maybe here I would see something. But it looked the same as it has for years. The area has already been hypermilitarized, and Trump’s declaration would only heap onto it. Through the thick steel bars of the wall, I could see Mexico going on as usual: passing city buses, people walking on the sidewalk, even the sound of children playing at a nearby elementary school. I brought with me Robin Wall Kimmerer’s new book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. I wanted to bring the book because Kimmerer wrote it especially because of the election. Regardless of the outcome, she said, “we would need a vision of a different way forward.” She focuses on the serviceberry, which, she writes, is a gift from the land that shows us how “sharing, respect, reciprocity, and gratitude” are integral parts. When I pulled the book out before my walk, I couldn’t keep my eyes off one quote: “All flourishing is mutual.”

Vines overtaking razor wire at the Nogales border wall. (Photo by Todd Miller)

Perhaps it was thanks to this book that I noticed the vegetation growing under and around the border wall, particularly what looked to be vines crawling up through the coils of razor wire, the same sharp wire that was installed during Trump’s last presidency. Indeed, this was Trump’s addition to the wall, a bipartisan creation, starting with Clinton in 1994. As I walked, I came to a place where the vines were so heavy and thick that they weighed the coils down, in some cases to the ground, like a wrestler taking the border apparatus down on a mat. Here, the barbed wire was contorted into odd shapes. Along with shreds of clothing and vegetation, and the wall itself, it looked like an odd sculpture of the mangled 21st century. In this there was even a battle, a supreme drama, between plant life and humans’ most authoritarian elements. Further on, a ripped pair of pants clung to the barbs, hanging and fluttering in the breeze like a shredded flag. A solitary sneaker lay in front of another mound of viny wire, as if someone had lost it while crossing. I wondered where the other one was. Each item had its own profound story. Later, I saw a stuffed animal entrapped in the center of a coil. I stared at it for a long moment because it reminded me of the stuffed toy fox that my six-year-old daughter hugs as she sleeps at night.

Stuffed animal in razor wire at Nogales border wall. (Photo by Todd Miller)

Still further down, a paloverde tree’s branches jutted through the bollards, like large old fingers coming through the thick bars. It was a binational plant, flouting the laws of nation-states. All this reminded me of a chunk of steel border barrier I saw several years ago a quarter mile into Mexico after it had been swept in by a vicious flood during the summer rains. I saw it about a year after this happened, and I swear the earth was eating this border wall alive. It was covered with spiderwebs and purple flowers. It was embedded deep into the soil. Will it be gone soon, I wondered, transformed into something else entirely? Even with the national emergency and Trump’s overhyped bravado, there was an aspect of fragility to this border infrastructure. Left alone, it would be overrun by vegetation, unable to survive. Maybe “mutual flourishing” can be an aggressive power, transforming anything in its way.

Vines, coat, and razor wire on the Nogales border wall. (Photo by Todd Miller)

Meanwhile, as I walked, I noticed that the Border Patrol kept cruising by me, sometimes slowing down. I kept walking, taking pictures, keeping my head down, and jotting in my notebook, looking for the reason behind the national emergency. A Nogales city police car circled back and forth; was I going to be questioned? But no. Even still, the omnipresent cameras didn’t assuage my sense of being in the full heat of the border panopticon. I kept walking. The national emergency declaration was serious. Not only did it call for the deployment of the U.S. military “to support the activities of the Secretary of Homeland Security in obtaining complete operational control of the southern border of the United States,” but it also opened the door for constructing more walls and barriers and more technology, adding another layer to one of the most fortified borders on earth. There was no visible military presence yet, but would it be on the way?

A mural near Morley Avenue and close to the border wall in Nogales. (Photo by Todd Miller)

Nogales resident David Sanner, who I talked to near the wall on Morley Avenue—home to many stores and a burgeoning arts district—called the whole wave of Trump executive orders, especially those about the border, “ludicrous and frightening.” He worried about the president going after people with naturalized citizenship, since there were so many people in that situation here. Nogales, he said, is a “sleepy little border town, a lovely town, a lovely community, and now we are the focus of the nation as described by people not from here. They describe it as a war zone. It’s frustrating.”

At the end of my walk, I sat on a bench in a nearby park near the wall and pulled out The Serviceberry. In the passage I read, Kimmerer asks, “When an economic system destroys what we love, isn’t it time for a different system?” She then proposes a new, dare I say, counter-border wall economy, one that includes “the flow of gratitude, the flow of love, literally in support of life.” In that moment, I felt that those subversive plants and humans I had seen and met along the way were a part of that. They might be more important than any executive order.

This first appeared on Border Chronicles.

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Susie Wiles and Trump in the White House, November 2024. Photo: White House.

Two days after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the New York Times ran a guest essay by Chris Whipple titled “Susie Wiles is Trump’s Best Hope” that couldn’t be more obtuse.  Whipple argues that Wiles has demonstrated an “uncanny ability to impose discipline” on Donald Trump and may “well be Trump’s best hope of having an effective presidency.”  Whipple concluded that Wiles may “well represent the thin line between the president and disaster.”  He offers no evidence for any of this other than the fact that Wiles told House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries that she has heard stories about Trump’s tumultuous first term but that “he’s a new man.”

Whipple credits Wiles with adopting the approach of the legendary Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes, who would “grind out victories one down at a time with three yards and a cloud of dust.”  But I remember the Woody Hayes who had a well-earned reputation for losing his temper, and eventually lost his job for punching players—his own as well as opposition players.

In the wake of  Whipple’s essay, we have witnessed one political disaster after another, and we’re not even two weeks into Trump’s second term.  Trump has pardoned or commuted the sentence of 1,600 rioters who assaulted the Capitol in the name of Donald Trump.  Trump has not only eliminated the offices and removed the officers who were associated with various initiatives dealing with diversity, equity and inclusion, but he has ordered public servants to report civil servants who were not carrying out his orders.  On January 29th, the Department of Justice fired more than a dozen prosecutors who work on special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutions of Donald Trump.

Over the weekend, Trump removed 17 or 18 inspectors general, including a few he had appointed in his first term.  (I will write about this issue in my next essay for CounterPunch.)  This act was a violation of a 1978 law passed in the wake of the Watergate scandal, which requires presidents to provide Congress the “reasons for any such removal” at least 30 days beforehand.  Trump claimed that his actions were a “very common thing to do,” but the removal of independent inspectors general of nearly every Cabinet-level agency was unprecedented and opens the door to an expansion of fraud, abuse, waste, and lawlessness at these agencies.

Trump not only has shown himself able to break the laws of this country, but he also has pursued actions that would violate the Constitution.  He has trashed the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees automatic or birthright citizenship to all children born in the United States.  It took a federal judge several days to temporarily block the executive order dismissing birthright citizenship, which he called a “blatantly unconstitutional order.”  The Supreme Court will have to resolve this issue, but the order was one more example of Chief of Staff Wiles being unable to monitor the thin line between the president and a political disaster.

Wiles is not only unable or unwilling to tell the president “No,” but there are too many influential voices around Trump who appear successful in encouraging the president to challenge U.S. law and the Constitution itself, favor the seizure of the Panama Canal or Greenland or renaming the Gulf of Mexico or making Canada the 51st state.  Susie Wiles is clearly not “Trump’s best hope” after all.  She may be an effective administrative officer, but she has given no indication she disagrees with or seeks to temper Trump’s wildest intentions.

It isn’t certain that Wiles is even interested in moderating Donald Trump, but in any event there are too many Trump cronies who are encouraging and supporting his worst instincts.  This list starts with Wiles’ deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who is the most dangerous holdover from the first Trump term.  Miller is the strongest supporter of Trump’s brutal immigration policies, and according to The Nation, the “vindictive face of MAGA’s xenophobia and grievance politics.”  Miller is central to the Trump effort to gain a measure of revenge in his second term.

Trump’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, is dedicated to ending civil service job protections for tens of thousands of federal employees, replacing them with political appointees who would be Trump loyalists.  With Vought’s encouragement, Trump has withdrawn the security clearances of more than 50 former national security officials. Even before Trump had completed his oath of office at the inauguration, Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz ordered his national security staff to leave the National Security Council, return home, and wait for further orders.  Trump also removed the security protection for several former officials in the Trump and Biden administrations, including the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci, even though Trump’s accusations in most cases had led to the threat to their lives and the lives of their families.

Finally, there is Boris Epshteyn, Trump’s longtime legal fixer who followed in the footsteps of Michael Cohen.  Like Vought and Miller, Epshteyn is a devoted Trump loyalist who organized the appointment of Scott Bessent to be the Secretary of the Treasury; the nomination of Pam Bondi as Attorney General; and the effort to make Kash Patel the director of the FBI.  Like Vought and Miller, Epshteyn tells Trump “what he wants to hear,” according to Politico.

Susie Wiles couldn’t control any of these individuals, let alone Donald Trump.  It is possible that she may be one of the powers behind the throne; those who know her contend that she has a Machiavellian streak.  Like the others in the Trump camp, Wiles is far more concerned with carrying out Trump’s commitment to vengeance and domination than with assuring that there will be a smooth political operation in the White House.  Wiles surely would like to be Trump’s only chief of staff, but presumably she remembers that he had four chiefs in his first term.

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Gaza’s return, Youtube screenshot.

The problem with political analysis is that it often lacks historical perspective and is mostly limited to recent events.

The current analysis of the Israeli war on Gaza falls victim to this narrow thinking. The ceasefire agreement, signed between Palestinian groups and Israel under Egyptian, Qatari, and US mediation in Doha on January 15, is one example.

Some analysts, including many from the region, insist on framing the outcome of the war as a direct result of Israel’s political dynamics. They argue that Israel’s political crisis is the main reason the country failed to achieve its declared and undeclared war objectives—namely, gaining total “security control” over Gaza and ethnically cleansing its population.

However, this analysis assumes that the decision to go to war or not is entirely in Israel’s hands. It continues to elevate Israel’s role as the only entity capable of shaping political outcomes in the region, even when those outcomes do not favor Israel.

Another group of analysts focuses entirely on the American factor, claiming that the decision to end the war ultimately rested with the White House. Shortly after the ceasefire was officially declared in Gaza, a pan-Arab TV channel asked a group of experts whether it was the Biden or Trump administration that deserved credit for supposedly “pressuring Israel” to agree to a ceasefire.

Some argue that it was Trump’s envoy to Israel, Steve Witkoff, who denied Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu any room to maneuver, thus forcing him, albeit reluctantly, to accept the ceasefire terms.

Others counter by saying that the agreement was initially presented by the Biden administration. They argue that Biden’s supposedly active diplomacy ultimately led to the ceasefire.

The latter group fails to acknowledge that it was Biden’s unconditional support for Israel that sustained the war. His UN envoy’s constant rejection of ceasefire calls at the Security Council made international efforts to stop the war irrelevant.

The former group, however, ignores the fact that Israeli society was already at a breaking point. The war on Gaza had proven unwinnable. This means that, whether Trump pressured Netanyahu or not, the outcome of the war was already sealed. Continuing the war would have meant the implosion of Israeli society.

On the Palestinian side, some analyses—affiliated with one faction or another—exploit the war’s outcome for political gain. This type of thinking is extremely insensitive and must be wholly rejected.

There are also those hoping to play a role in Gaza’s reconstruction to gain political and financial leverage and increase their influence. This is a shameful stance, given the total destruction of Gaza and the urgent need to recover the thousands of bodies trapped under rubble, as well as to heal the wounded and the population as a whole.

One thing all these analyses overlook is that Israel failed in Gaza because the population of Gaza proved unbreakable. Such notions are often neglected in mainstream political discussions, which tend to commit to an elitist line. This line is entirely removed from the daily struggles and collective choices of ordinary people, even when they achieve extraordinary feats.

Gaza’s history is one of both pain and pride. It stretches back to ancient civilizations and includes great resistance against invasion, such as the three-month siege by Alexander the Great and his Macedonian army in 332 BCE.

Back then, Gazans resisted and endured for months before their leader, Batis, was captured, tortured to death, and the city was sacked.

This legendary resilience and sumoud (steadfastness) proved crucial in numerous other fights against foreign invaders, including resistance to Napoleon Bonaparte’s army in 1799.

Even if some of Gaza’s current population is unaware of that history, they are a direct product of it. From this perspective, neither Israeli political dynamics, the change of the US administration, nor any other factor is relevant.

This is known as “long history” or longue durée. Far from being merely an academic concept, the long legacy of resistance against injustice has shaped the collective mindset of the Palestinian population in Gaza over the years. How else can we explain how a small, isolated, and impoverished population, living in such a tiny piece of land, managed to withstand firepower equivalent to many nuclear bombs?

The war ended because Gaza withstood it—not because of the kindness of an American president. It is crucial that we emphasize this point repeatedly, rather than seeking inconclusive and irrational answers.

It matters little how we define victory and defeat for a nation still suffering the consequences of a war of annihilation. However, it is important to recognize that Palestinians in Gaza stood their ground, despite immense losses, and prevailed. This can only be credited to them—a nation that has historically proven unbreakable. This truth, rooted in “long history,” remains valid today.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The dominant self-conception of the Jewish story is innocence, repeated persecutions, and then redemption by creation of the Jewish nationalist State of Israel.

This narrative is critically examined in Peter Beinart’s new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning.

Beinart’s book says the maudlin story we Jews tell ourselves of our virtue and heroic endurance inoculates Jews from seeing Israel’s agency in creating the resistance it faces:

“We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated… We are not history’s permanent virtuous victims.”

Beinart, former editor of The New Republic, is now an editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, and a New York Times contributor.

He has been in a 20-year progression of seeing, more and more sharply, the “Jewish and democratic” state of Israel as anti-democratic and incompatible with Jewish tradition.

He writes that support for a Jewish state has become “idolatry,” permitting endless killing, torture and oppression of Palestinians:

“There is no limit. No matter how many Palestinians die, they do not tip the scales, because the value of a Palestinian is finite and the value of a Jewish state is infinite.”

Contemporary Jewish life is filled with that idolatry, he observes. “In most of the Jewish world today, rejecting Jewish statehood is a greater heresy than rejecting Judaism itself.”

The book attributes the horrors imposed on two million human beings in Gaza not only to Israel Defense Forces (IDF) but to Jews:

“Worshipping a country that elevates Jews over Palestinians replaces Judaism’s universal God – who makes special demands on Jews but cherishes all people – with a tribal deity that considers Jewish life precious and Palestinian life cheap.”

Beinart is not playing the peekaboo game of saying Jews are not responsible for Israel, and the other half of the time saying Israel is the Jewish State.

He’s not saying “all Jews,” but fairly saying “representative,” “mainstream” Jewish organizations world-wide are now Zionist. Anti-Zionist organizations are dissident.

He observes that many synagogues have an Israeli flag on the bima (platform where the Torah is read) “and a prayer for Israel in the liturgy.”

It was predicted and warned about, as the Zionist movement grew, that the effect of creating a Jewish nation-state would be Jews being seen in the light of that state’s actions.

The predicted consequence of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine to Jews in “diaspora” is happening. Jews feel they are being scrutinized and called to account for Israel’s actions, on campuses and in the streets world-wide.

Beinart places the Hamas violence of October 7, 2023, in context, as consistent with the history of suppressed peoples without peaceful means to contest their status, as is seen in slave revolts and anti-colonial guerilla wars.

I note that Beinart’s thoughts are resonant with what, almost 100 years ago, historian and then-Zionist Hans Kohn, wrote of 1929 anti-Jewish riots after 12 years of Zionist colonization in Palestine under British authority:

“We pretend to be innocent victims. Of course the Arabs attacked us in August. …They perpetrated all the barbaric acts that are characteristic of a colonial revolt. …We have been in Palestine for 12 years [since the Balfour declaration] without having even once made a serious attempt at seeking through negotiations the consent of the indigenous people.”

Israeli retribution since October 7, 2023, on the two-million-plus population of Gaza and their means of life – homes, utilities, schools, universities, hospitals – has officially resulted in over 46,000 deaths and innumerable injuries directly from IDF attacks.

The medical journal Lancet estimates deaths as likely much higher, counting “deaths from starvation, disease or cold.”

Most of the population of Gaza was made homeless, huddled in improvised shelters, pushed by IDF warnings from one “safe zone” to another, often then bombed.

Beinart’s book is an analysis of Zionist apologetics that are necessary to both regard oneself as moral and defend what Israel has done, from the 1947-49 Nakba – terroristic expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their communities within present-day Israel – to Gaza in 2025.

He denounces dehumanizing, demonizing, Zionist lies about Palestinian resistance:

“These claims don’t withstand even modest scrutiny. They’re less arguments than talismans. They ward off dangerous emotions like grief and shame.”

Using the model of the dismantling of apartheid South Africa, he tries to envision what principles could heal Palestine:

“The details matter, but they matter less than the underlying principles. Wherever they live together, Jews and Palestinians should live under the same law. And they should work to repair the injustices of the past. The Israelis who were made refugees on October 7 should be allowed to go home. And the Palestinians who were made refugees in 1948 should be allowed to go home. Historical wrongs can never be fully undone. But the more sincere the effort, the greater the reconciliation that ensues.”

This would be a radical re-conception of Jewish life in Palestine, that in abandoning the role of conquerors, Jews may live as Jewish Palestinians. He makes the point that whites relinquishing apartheid was a more peaceful process for South Africa than having it overthrown.

In the summary chapter of the book, Beinart says Israel’s conduct is from a heretical Jewish tendency to believe Jewish people are sacred, rather than people with extra obligations.

“So what if a few dreamers in Moorish Spain or the Silesian shtetl [Eastern European Jewish village] consoled themselves with the idea that deep within us lies a special spark of the divine? They didn’t have the power to do anything about it.”

This self-deification, first proposed by an Israelite named Korach, who challenged Moses’ leadership, hadn’t mattered as much until the creation of “Jewish” national power.

“All that changed with the creation of Israel. Only once Jews control a state with life-and-death power over millions of non-Jews does Korach’s claim of intrinsic Jewish sanctity become truly dangerous.”

Beinart calls for liberation for Jews from the Zionist doctrine that Jews are only victims, never victimizers:

“We can lift the weight that oppressing Palestinians imposes on Jewish Israelis, and indirectly, on Jews around the world. …We can lay down the burden of seeing ourselves as the perennial victims of a Jew-hating world.”

More than level of observance or denomination, the question of Zionism is going to be a fault line in Jewish fellowship, Beinart believes.

“Remove Jewish statehood from Jewish identity and, for many Jews around the world, it’s not clear what is left.

“But the benefit of recognizing that Jews are not fundamentally different from other people is that it allows us to learn from their experience. Jewish exceptionalism is less exceptional than we think. We are not the only people to use a story of victimhood to justify supremacy.”

Israel’s perpetual peril is the Arab population it has displaced but not exterminated. They are determined to redeem their birthright to live as freely in Palestine as Jews do.

Instead of conquest, Beinart proposes a model of restraint, cooperation, and respect – along a line of Jewish thinkers from Ahad Ha’am to Judah Magnes to Albert Einstein.

Many of the visions for Jewish settlement in Palestine were universalist and pacific.

In 1927, Zionist writer (and Chaim Weizmann protegé) Maurice Samuel mused, in his book I, The Jew, that Jewish civilization “for sixty generations” demonstrated “that neither conquest or oppression was necessary to its survival. …a group can survive without mass murder.”

Whether trauma or hubris allows Zionists in Israel and elsewhere to trust that model — finding the image of God even in their “enemies” — is the question.

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Photograph Source: Office of Speaker Mike Johnson – Public Domain

Our concern with the politics, policies, and propaganda of Donald Trump underplays the central question of his presidency: Is Donald Trump psychologically fit to be president of the United States?  In Trump’s first term, psychiatrists and psychologists warned that our dangerously disordered president was a threat to domestic and international security.  The erratic behavior of Trump as a candidate in 2015-2016 and as a president in 2017-2021 led to the ethical principle known as the “duty to warn” of the danger he represented.

Trump’s malignant narcissism was well established in his first term as he claimed that he knew more than anyone else and that only he could fix our problems.  Trump’s demonization of the press and his opponents as well as his treatment of minorities and his handling of immigration issues pointed to paranoia.  His separation of immigrant families demonstrated the lack of empathy that accompanies narcissism.  His lack of impulse control was particularly worrisome in a nuclear age that presents no real checks and balances on a commander-in-chief’s role regarding the use of nuclear weapons.  It is the combination of paranoia and impulse control that is most worrisome because it can lead to destructive acts.

As a result of his performance as president, Trump faced an unusual level of public criticism from his own appointees, including chief of staff John Kelly, secretary of state Rex Tillerson, national security adviser H.R McMaster, and even director of national intelligence Dan Coats.  The criticism by Tillerson, McMaster, and Coats cost them their jobs, and they were replaced by loyalists at the time, such as Mike Pompeo at the Department of State, John Bolton at the National Security Council, and John Ratcliffe as director of national intelligence.  Most of his first term appointees refused to support his efforts to gain a second term.  Trump will not be facing questions of loyalty in his second term because—without exception—his current appointees have paid fealty to him.

In his first term, Trump declared war on governance, intelligence, jurisprudence, diplomacy, law enforcement, public service, and fact-finding, particularly in the scientific community.  But there were “adults in the room” who were able to challenge and even moderate his worst impulses.  There will be no “adults in the room” this time as Trump has appointed individuals who are also impetuous and authoritarian.  The vision of “America First” animated Trump’s first and second inaugural addresses.  This time around Trump also has claimed that divine intervention saved him from an assassin’s bullet so that he could “make America great again.”

Trump stated that he would be a dictator on Day 1 and he was true to his word.  In addition to pardoning 1,600 criminals from the January 6th riots, Trump issued an unconstitutional immigration order denying birthright citizenship, a violation of the 14th amendment of the Constitution that guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the United States.  Trump also restored the order from his first term that created a new classification for federal civil servants—Schedule F—that would end civil service protections and allow him to remove tens of thousands from the federal payroll.

High-level officials at the Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency are particularly vulnerable.  On Day 1, Trump replaced the leaders of three of the most important U.S. attorneys’ offices in addition to removing key career officers at the most important divisions of the Department of Justice.  This marked the beginning of the weaponization of the DoJ.  These steps point to the democratic crisis that the nation is facing from a new director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (Kash Patel) with an enemies list and a new director of national intelligence (Tulsi Gabbard) anxious to prove her loyalty to Donald Trump.  Patel and Gabbard still face confirmation.

Meanwhile, Trump’s appointees have already taken steps that range from counterproductive to just plain petty.  The incoming national security adviser, Michael Waltz, who does not require congressional confirmation, ordered all hands out of the White House situation room by noon on January 20th before Trump had even completed his oath of office.  The situation room is occupied by more than one hundred personnel who are not political appointees.  Many of them are on loan from the intelligence community to deal with sensitive international crisis points.  As a result of Waltz’ order, they won’t be in position to brief the incoming staff.  Presumably, this was Waltz’s way of demonstrating fealty to the new president.

A particularly petty act was the removal of General Mark Milley’s portrait from the Pentagon’s prestigious E-ring hallway that features portraits of all former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  This was done only several hours after former president Joe Biden pardoned Milley.  Trump has suggested that Milley could be executed for treason because of his call to his Chinese counterpart to reassure him that the United States was “100 percent steady” in the wake of the January 6th insurrection.  The Pentagon refuses to say who ordered the removal of Milley’s portrait, which has contributed to fears among high-level generals and admirals that a massive shake-up will soon be underway.  Pete Hegseth, still awaiting confirmation, has stated on numerous occasions that there are too many four-star generals and admirals and that nobody is above review.  Like Waltz and Patel, Hegseth will be anxious to prove his loyalty to Trump.

The fact that Trump’s disturbing inaugural address was given on the holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King adds to the anxiety that so many of us feel.  The rule of law means nothing to Donald Trump, who seems committed to breaking long-standing traditions and institutions. Trump’s idea of law and order is to pardon insurrectionists who threatened to kill Vice President Mike Trump.

The fact that he has a loyal MAGA following, a Republican Party that supports his every move, and a pliant Supreme Court point to the emergence of a far less democratic United States of America.  One of the basic questions in the study of history is whether individual leaders shape history or whether historic forces shape individual leaders.  I believe that we will soon get an answer to that dilemma, and it will not be reassuring.

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Bertrand Russell – Public Domain

Within days of his return to office, President Donald Trump unleashed a chilling display of authoritarianism, providing a stark reminder of the specter haunting the United States: the specter of fascism. As reported in the New York Times, his actions underscored a vision of governance steeped in cruelty and unchecked power.  With the stroke of a pen, Trump pardoned 1,500 individuals involved in the January 6th insurrection, dismantled environmental protections, opened Alaska’s wilderness to expanded oil and gas drilling, terminated Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs across federal agencies, and signed an executive order ending birthright citizenship. He erased recognition of gender diversity on official documents, escalated attacks on transgender Americans, withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization, declared a national emergency at the southern border, dispatched thousands of troops, and initiated mass deportation orders targeting immigrants. Each action exemplified not only the brutalities of gangster capitalism but also a profound disregard for human rights, social justice, and the preservation of the public good.

What makes these assaults even more alarming is their widespread support. Trump’s war on civil rights, immigrants, the rule of law, the environment, and gender equity is endorsed by the MAGA Party, a significant portion of the American public, billionaires seeking deregulation, and a chorus of complicit pundits and politicians. This is more than a moral collapse or a democracy on life support—it reflects the deliberate cultivation of civic ignorance and the institutional erosion that allowed fascism’s seeds to take root, with Trump’s presidency representing its most visible end point.

At the core of this culture of gangster capitalism lies an interconnected web of anti-public intellectuals, media personalities, cultural influencers, and powerful apparatuses—including the legacy press and online platforms—that actively promote or tacitly enable an authoritarian agenda. Their complicity contrasts sharply with historical figures who resisted tyranny with unflinching courage. Bertrand Russell, for instance, serves as a reminder of intellectual bravery in dark times. Today, such moral clarity is rare but not extinct. Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, who led the National Prayer Service at Washington National Cathedral, embodies a bold and energized resistance, challenging the silence and submission that so often accompany the rise of authoritarianism.

During the service, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde addressed President Trump directly, urging him to embrace justice, compassion, and care in his policies, particularly toward immigrants and those most vulnerable under his administration. With a solemn yet hopeful tone, she declared:

“Millions have placed their trust in you. As you said yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of that God, I implore you: have mercy on the people of this nation who now live in fear. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in families across the political spectrum—Democrat, Republican, and Independent—some who fear for their very lives. Have mercy upon them.”

As her sermon neared its conclusion, she continued, her words both a plea and a moral indictment:

“I ask you, Mr. President, to have mercy on the children who fear that their parents will be taken away. I ask you to extend compassion and welcome to those fleeing war zones and persecution, seeking refuge on our shores. Our God commands us to be merciful to the stranger, for we too were once strangers in this land.”

Trump’s response was as predictable as it was venomous. He dismissed the service as “boring and uninspiring,” deriding Budde as a “radical left hardline Trump hater.” His words, steeped in scorn and his trademark disdain for critique, encapsulated the spirit of his administration—a politics of division, cruelty, and vindictiveness.

This spirit found an echo in Republican U.S. Representative Mike Collins of Georgia, who weaponized Budde’s sermon on social media. Posting a video clip of her heartfelt appeal, he coldly remarked: “The person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list.”

In these exchanges, the chasm between Budde’s call for mercy and Trump’s politics of malice became starkly evident—a collision of two opposing visions for the nation. One rooted in compassion, the other in the unrelenting embrace of cruelty.

The spirit, boldness, and courage embodied in Budde’s speech echo a long and vital history of resistance. Under every regime of domination, there have always been voices that refuse to be silenced—public intellectuals and everyday citizens who, together, stand against the tides of bigotry, hatred, war, and state violence. These voices remind us that even in the darkest times, resistance is not only possible but necessary.

One such voice, whose life and work illuminate the enduring power of civic courage, moral responsibility, and the willingness to risk everything for justice, equality, and freedom, is Bertrand Russell. His legacy offers us profound lessons for navigating our current moment, where the stakes of resistance feel as urgent as ever. My connection to Russell’s work feels especially personal, as my own writings are housed in McMaster University’s Mills Library, alongside a significant archive of Russell’s papers. In reflecting on his life, we are reminded that the struggle for justice is a continuum—one that demands not only bold ideas but also the bravery to act upon them.

One of the most unexpected and meaningful moments of my personal and scholarly life was standing beside a towering image of Bertrand Russell during the ceremony marking the donation of my personal archives to McMaster University Library’s William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections. It felt like a quiet dialogue across time—a convergence of lives committed to ideas, justice, and the unyielding pursuit of truth. Libraries and archives hold a special kind of magic, especially in an age when historical memory is eroded by an avalanche of information, the unceasing churn of emotional overload, and a culture entrapped by what Byung-Chul Han calls “the immediate presence.”

In stark contrast to this frenzy of hyper-communication and ephemeral data, the archive stands as a sanctuary for depth and reflection. It safeguards not just the fragments of the past but the larger arc of its story, providing a sense of wholeness and continuity. Here, time stretches beyond the fleeting moment, offering a context that embraces the works, personal artifacts, and relationships that shape the lives of artists, intellectuals, and cultural workers. The archive resists the tyranny of the present, reminding us that the threads of history weave a fabric far richer and more enduring than the fleeting snapshots and soundbites of our digital age.

Having my work archived along with Russell’s was particularly moving since he was a model for me as a public intellectual as I began teaching and writing in the 1960s. I came of age when intellectual, political, and cultural paradigms were shifting. Protests were advancing on university campuses and in the streets against the Vietnam War, systemic racism, the military-industrial complex, the corporatization of the university, and the ongoing assaults waged on women, the poor, and the vulnerable. Intellectuals and artists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Ellen Willis, Susan Sontag, Paul Goodman, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, and Martin Luther King, Jr. were translating their ideas into actions and exhibiting a moral courage that both held power accountable and refused to be seduced by it. This was an age of visionary change, civic courage, and democratic inclusiveness; it was a time in which language translated into actions that enabled people to understand how power operated on their daily lives and how their daily existences and relationships to the world could be more engaging in critical and radically imaginative ways.

For me, Bertrand Russell stood out among these intellectuals in a way that was both iconic and personal. Russell was not only a rigorous scholar but also a public intellectual who moved with astonishing ease through a range of disciplines, ideas, and social problems. He embodied a new kind of public intellectual, one who functioned as a border crosser and traveler who, like another great public intellectual, Edward Said, refused to hold on to scholarly territory or a disciplinary realm in order to protect or bolster his fame or ego. Careerism was anathema to Russell and it was obvious in his willingness to push against conceits and transgressions of power—whether it was contesting World War I as a conscientious objector, dissenting against the authoritarian populism consuming much of Europe in the 1930s, protesting against the threat of nuclear weapons, or criticizing the horrors and political depravity that marked the United States’ war against the Vietnamese people.

In pushing the boundaries of civic courage and the moral imagination, Russell took risks, put his body on the line, and made visible the crimes of his time, even if it meant going to jail, which he did as late in his life as the age of 89 after protesting against nuclear weapons. Russell lived in what can be called dangerous times and he responded by placing morality, critical analysis, collective struggle, and a profound belief in democratic socialism at the center of his politics.

I was always moved by his courage, and his belief in the political capacities of everyday people and the notion that education was central to politics itself. Russell believed that people had to be informed in order to act in the name of justice. He believed that politics could be measured by how much it improved people’s lives, gave them a sense of hope, and pointed to a future that was decidedly better than the present. Russell, like Václav Havel, another towering public intellectual, believed that politics followed culture and that there was no possibility of social change unless there was a change in people’s attitudes, consciousness, and how they live their lives. Russell believed that a critical education could teach young people not to look away and to take risks in the name of a future of hope and possibility. Russell’s radical investment in the power of education was more than simply a strong conviction. Not only did he start his own progressive school in the 1920s, but he believed that one demand of the public intellectual was to be rigorous and accessible and to make one’s work meaningful in order for it to be critical and transformative. Russell connected education to social change and believed that matters of identity, desire, power, and values were never removed from political struggles.

Not only did he write incessantly as a public intellectual, but he was always willing to throw his body and mind into the thick and fray of the social problems he addressed. As a writer and political activist, he was overtly derided and even condemned by other intellectuals. One episode that moved me immensely when I learned of it was that he was denied a position at the College of the City of New York. At the time, powerful conservatives both in and out of the Catholic Church saw his ideas as dangerous, going so far as to claim if he took up the job at CCNY, he would be occupying a “Chair of Indecency.” I read about this period in Russell’s life soon after I was denied tenure for political reasons at Boston University by the notorious right-wing president, John Silber.

Russell’s willingness to keep going in the face of such attacks nurtured in me both energy and faith in my convictions. As a radical educator, Russell inspired me and gave me the courage to address issues animated by a fierce sense of justice and the political and moral imperative to fight against “the texture of social oppression and the harm that it does.” Like Russell, I learned that thinking can be dangerous and that it demands a certain daring of mind and willingness to intervene in the world. Russell convinced me that to be an educator, you had to be willing to cause trouble in times of war and upheaval and just as willing to disturb the peace in moments of quiet acquiescence. At a time when public intellectuals seem to be in retreat, Russell’s legacy and work are even more important given the darkness now engulfing much of the globe.

Russell is more important to me today than he was when I first read his works in the 1960s. He is a reminder of a type of engaged intellectual that crossed boundaries far removed from the university with its sometimes deadly specialisms, corporatism, conformism, and separation from the problems of the day. While public intellectuals still exist today, too many of them speak from narrow specializations, narrate themselves in soundbites appropriate for the digital age, and often refrain from speaking to the broad audiences and tangled issues of the day. Too many of them advocate for single issues and lack the knowledge or willingness to speak in terms that are comprehensive, willing to do the hard work of connecting a vast array of issues and common concerns. Russell’s claim that his three passions were “the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind” seem quaint in today’s fast-paced culture of consumerism, unchecked individualism, and a crippling obsession with self-interest.

Russell is a crucial reminder of the value of historical consciousness and memory because his life, writing, actions, and moral courage remind us of the work that public intellectuals can do and how they can make a difference. Russell provides a model of what it means to talk back, scorn easy popularity, and refuse to wallow in the discourse of comfortable platitudes. Russell was not merely a witness and, like Martin Luther King, Jr. and other notable figures of his generation, refused to keep silent and was equally appalled by the “silence of good people.” He made clear that there had to be a crucial element of love and solidarity in the ability to feel passionate about freedom and justice. Erich Fromm, one of the great Frankfurt School theorists, called Russell a prophet because his “capacity to disobey is rooted, not in some abstract principle, but in the most real experience there is—in the love of life.” In an age of “fake news,” emergent fascism, systemic racism, and engineered destruction of the planet, militarism, and genocide, Russell is an extraordinary and insightful reminder of the power of informed rationality, critical education, and evidence. At a time when the threat of a nuclear disaster looms larger than ever, Russell offers both in words and deeds the recognition that security cannot be gained through a culture of fear, fraud, armaments, and armed struggle.

At a time when democracy teeters under siege, authoritarian populism surges, public values are eroded, and trust in democratic institutions falters, Bertrand Russell’s writings, actions, and struggles offer an enduring reminder of what is necessary to confront the present darkness. He calls us to civic courage, moral outrage, and the critical thinking required to bridge private troubles with broader social transformations. His life and work stand as a testament to the unyielding pursuit of justice and the recognition that no society, no matter how idealized, is ever just enough.

For Russell, politics was not just about economic structures; it was a battle for the meaning and dignity of humanity itself —over agency, identity, values, and the ways we see ourselves in relation to others. These concerns resonate profoundly today, as unbridled individualism, the fetishization of privatization, and a narrow devotion to self-interest have been elevated to virtues in many Western societies. These forces have paved the way for a moral void, a nihilism that fuels the resurgence of authoritarianism across the globe. Against this collapse into despair, Russell’s vision remains a vital antidote—expansive, hopeful, and profoundly life-affirming.

Russell’s legacy is not just a lesson in intellectual brilliance or political acumen, but in the audacity of hope paired with the courage to act. He reminds us that history bends not by passive observation, but by collective struggles, solidarity, and the refusal to accept injustice as inevitable. To remember Russell is to embrace a moral clarity that resists indifference and cynicism, and to imagine a world where dignity, equity, and joy are not luxuries but foundational principles.

Standing beside his archives was, for me, an extraordinary honor. It was not merely an encounter with history but an invitation to carry forward the weight of its lessons. In that moment, I felt the enduring shadow of a life devoted to justice and civic responsibility, a shadow that challenges us to live with greater purpose.

To remember Russell is to remember the indispensable role of hope in the face of despair, the necessity of resistance when the specter of fascism is with us once again, and the moral obligation to imagine and fight for a world yet to be born. His legacy is a call to action—a reminder that even in the darkest of times, the power of ideas, the courage of individuals, and the collective force of mass movements can light the way forward.

Note.

This essay draws from an earlier essay on Russel that appeared in Hamilton and Arts Letters 11:1 (2018).

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Editorial cartoon in the NYT, 1903.

Donald Trump and his cohorts want to take back the Panama Canal.  According to Trump and those who support this desire, this is because China controls the canal.  To begin, the second sentence is a bald-faced lie used to justify a narrative that is rampant with lies.  According to NBC News, dated January 23, 2025, and other sources, China doesn’t control the canal or its operations.  Two private corporations based in Hong Kong operate ports on each end of the canal.  The ports are used to dock ships and to load and unload cargo.  Several corporations from different nations lease and operate similar ports on the canal.  The canal is operated by Panama, just as it has been since 1999, when it was returned to Panama after years of negotiations with the United States.  The return of the canal was strongly opposed by the rightwing in the US.  In fact, Ronald Reagan had made it an issue during his reign in the White House, donning his best Teddy Roosevelt makeup and riding rough through the nation of Colombia, killing natives to create the country of Panama.

That’s right.  Washington created Panama.  It had been part of Colombia—a nation created by another invader, Spain.  After other attempts to build a canal that would shorten trade routes for the US and other ships had failed, including one across Nicaragua, a scheme was hatched to build one across the isthmus that became Panama.  The first problem faced by the schemers in DC was to get the land.  Colombia did not want to give it up.  Now, according to most US history books, there were some Colombians who didn’t want to be part of Colombia anymore and wanted secession and independence.  Coincidentally, the land they wanted for their new nation was where the schemers to the north wanted to build their canal.  Let me make it clear.  The secessionists were not indigenous people; they, too, were colonizers.  So, like most of the history of the Americas after Columbus landed, the colonial settlers were dealing with other colonial settlers in stolen land.

 Like many real estate hucksters, Donald Trump seems to think the world is all land that can be bought and sold.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a suburban tract in New Jersey that’s going for a million dollars or a sovereign nation with part of it on the Arctic Circle.  Or homes in occupied Palestine stolen at gunpoint from their living owners—often a family who has lived on the land for generations.  Every piece of property is up for sale.  It’s just a matter of finding the right price.  That is a generous take on what the Trumpists in DC talk about doing in regard to Greenland and Panama.  I think another analogy is more apt.  Hitler called it der Anschluss.  This event is how the takeover of Austria by the Nazi Wehrmacht is described.  It’s a German word meaning “the joining or the connection.”  Briefly, this took place when German troops entered the territory of Austria in March 1938 and took power.  Resistance was mooted; it came from certain elements of the Catholic Church (as in the film “The Sound of Music”), the Austrian left, Jewish citizens and a few others.  Austria was part of the Third Reich within a couple of days.  A more modern version is playing out in the occupied West Bank in Palestine.  Whichever analogy the reader might choose, the fact is that the current regime in DC seems intent on reclaiming what was never truly theirs on the Isthmus of Panama.

Let me return to the history of Panama’s “creation.”  As noted above, the common story in US history textbooks is that Panama gained independence in 1904 “with US support.” If one digs deeper and goes beyond US-friendly sources, you will discover that Panama was actually part of Colombia.  The French, under the direction of the capitalist who built the Suez Canal in Egypt and with the cooperation of the Colombian government, had started a canal project on the Isthmus.  However, his company ran out of money and abandoned the project. Washington, under the direction of Teddy Roosevelt, the man some historians consider to be the first modern imperialist in US history, made an offer to the Colombian government to finish the project.  This resulted in the Hay-Herrán Treaty, which would have granted the United States a lease in perpetuity over the land on which the canal was built.  The US offer was unanimously rejected by the Colombian parliament.  Their reasons included the amount of compensation and, more importantly, a loss of sovereignty over the Colombian land being discussed.  Once the treaty was rejected,  businessmen led by José Agustín Arango and Manuel Amador Guerrero and supported by various US capitalists, began organizing a movement to secede from Colombia.  After obtaining support from the United States, the secessionists began their moves.  The Colombian military responded, sending five hundred conscripts on a merchant ship to the Isthmus.  Teddy Roosevelt sent the USS Nashville in response, using the cover of a treaty that provided for US intervention if the Panamanian Railroad was threatened.  After a couple days of minimal combat, a fair amount of duplicity, a threat of bombardment from the USS Nashville and one casualty (a Chinese man), the nation of Panama was proclaimed.  It was then turned into a US protectorate (or colony.)  Roosevelt bragged, “I took the Isthmus, started the canal and then left Congress not to debate the canal, but to debate me.”  The New York Times called it a “sordid act of conquest,” which it was.

Washington removed Panama’s status as a protectorate in 1939, making it an independent and sovereign nation.  However, treaties put in place between 1903 and 1939 established a region along the canal as a US zone.  This area, known as the Panama Canal Zone, was an occupied zone under the control of the US military.  US troops and civilians living in the zone answered to US laws and were immune from prosecution by Panama’s legal system.  Those Panamanians who worked for the US were poorly paid and subject to the whims and requirements of the Pentagon.  The workers who actually built the canal were mostly imported, first from southern Europe and then from the islands in the Caribbean.  These workers were allowed very few, if any, freedoms.

Following World War Two, Panamanians began to actively oppose  US control of the canal and the Canal Zone.  Protests, often led by students calling for Panamanian control of the Zone and canal, erupted.  By the 1970s, many in the US government agreed with the idea of giving the Panamanians control of these lands.  In 1977, Jimmy Carter signed the Torrijos-Carter Treaty, which took effect in October 1979 and return the Canal and the Zone to Panama over the course of twenty years.  Despite virulent opposition from the US right, the treaty was confirmed by a two-thirds vote in the Senate.  Over the next twenty years, the rightwing would bring up the treaty as proof of the Democrats “treachery.”  Ronald Reagan made it an issue during his 1980 and 1984 presidential campaigns.  George HW Bush invaded Panama in 1989, using the lie that the Panamanian president (and CIA asset) Manuel Noriega was a cocaine trafficker. (Bush himself was at least tangentially involved in cocaine smuggling himself in the Iran-Contra affair). In a comedic sidenote to the invasion, the US mainstream media sent photographs of what Washington claimed was a pile of cocaine around the world.  It turned out that the powder was cornmeal.  Noriega was kidnapped and held in US prisons for years.  This episode is useful when examining the current narcotics trafficking charges brought by Washington against Venezuelan President Maduro.

That brings us to 2025, when Donald Trump is vowing to take back the Canal and recently sent his Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Panama to assess the situation.  Perhaps someone told Trump about Teddy Roosevelt’s braggadocio: “I took the Isthmus, started the canal and then left Congress not to debate the canal, but to debate me.”

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Image by Khashayar Kouchpeydeh.

The release of three Israeli women held captive in Gaza on Sunday attracted significant global media attention. However, there was comparatively limited coverage of the freed Palestinian women, who had been kidnapped and detained by Israel without charge. This disparity reflects the normalization of the dehumanization of Palestinians, perpetuating a narrative that enables Israel to murder more than 46,000 Palestinians with impunity.

Initial medical assessments by the Red Cross and Israeli doctors indicated that the women were in good health, suggesting they had been treated well during their captivity. Their accounts speak of humane conditions with access to food, water, and shelter. Israel captives were afforded medical care and sustenance when Israel starved Palestinian children, murdered doctors and burned down hospitals.

The Israeli women were treated with dignity during their captivity. In contrast, a United Nations report highlights the mistreatment of Palestinian women in Israeli jails, and how they are “subjected to sexual assault, stripped naked, and searched by male Israeli army officers,” and threatened with sexual violence. The same report also noted that Israeli soldiers took photos of female Palestinian detainees “in degrading circumstances” and threatened to post the images online to further humiliate and exert control over them.

The wellbeing of the released Israeli captives—despite the devastation in Gaza at the hand of Israel⎯bespeaks of the humane values of their captors. Without a doubt, their visible appearance reveals that they had enjoyed what the majority of Gazans did not have access to, under the malevolent Israeli siege, such as food, fuel to keep warm, or safe shelter to protect them
from Israeli bombs and the elements.

Meanwhile, a video of the released Khalida Jarrar, a Palestinian woman prisoner leader, shows her struggling to walk—a contrast to the image of her before she was kidnapped by Israeli occupation forces in December 2023.

The care shown to Israeli prisoners is the polar opposite of the treatment Palestinian prisoners received in Israeli custody. Among them, detained Palestinian doctors tortured to death not for carrying a gun, but rather for holding a scalpel in the operating room to treat the injured, possibly including Israeli captives.

Palestinians who survived Israeli torture, like bodybuilder Moazaz Obaiyat, tell a different story. Obaiyat was detained following a pre-dawn raid on his West Bank home in October 2023. Unlike the healthy Israeli women who sprinted into the Red Cross vehicles upon their release, the once strong and muscular Obaiyat was unable to walk unaided after being held without charge for eleven months.

For Palestinians held in Israeli jails, the reality could not be more different since 1948. The maltreatment of Palestinian prisoners, torture, abuse, and even death in custody have been well-documented by human rights organizations. According to U.N. sources, 56 Palestinians have lost their lives in Israeli prisons due to torture since October 7 2023.

Male Palestinian detainees have also been victims of sexual assault as a means of humiliation and coercion. These crimes are not isolated incidents but part of a racist Israeli policy designed to break their will. Not only have the Israeli perpetrators gone unpunished, but their actions have often been justified or defended by Israeli leaders. For Palestinian prisoners—many held without charge or trial—captivity is an experience of unimaginable torment.

Torture and the humiliation of Palestinians in Israeli jails is backed by Israeli officials, such as Israeli lawmaker Hanoch Milwidsky. When asked if it was acceptable “to insert a stick into a person’s rectum,” Milwidsky responded, “Yes, if he is a Nukhba (Hamas militant) everything is legitimate to do! Everything!”

According to Israeli accounts, this qualification of being a Hamas militant effectively applies to every Palestinian in Gaza, as per Israeli government, “there are no innocent civilians.” This sentiment was echoed earlier by the self-proclaimed moderate Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who declared, “An entire nation out there is responsible.”

In defending the abusive actions by reservist jailers, the racist Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir wrote in a post on social media: “Take your hands off the reservists,” referring to Israeli soldiers charged with sodomizing Palestinian prisoners.

Torture, detention without charge, and other punitive measures remains a persistent feature of Israeli policy discourse. This institutional backing not only perpetuates abuse but also normalizes this behavior in the Israeli culture, against the Palestinian “goyim.”

When abuses are exposed, Israeli officials often deny or downplay them as isolated incidents. They refuse to allow independent investigations or hold anyone accountable. Israeli prison officials and political leaders consistently defend their actions, framing any criticism as an attack on Israel’s security apparatus. Some Israeli lawmakers and public figures argue that the humanization of Palestinian prisoners undermines the morale of security forces.

The disparity in the treatment of prisoners serves as a microcosm of the broader power and ethical divide between Israelis and Palestinians. While Israeli captives are humanized, Palestinians in Israeli jails endure systemic abuse that reflects the dehumanization of an entire people. This double standard is not only a moral failing but also a reflection of the deep-seated Zionist ideology that dismisses the humanity of Palestinians.

The international community’s silence on the plight of Palestinian prisoners stands in stark contrast to the overwhelming outpouring of concern for Israeli captives. This selective outrage only enables the Israeli policies of dehumanization, injustice and oppression. The contrasting reality between Israeli and Palestinian captives exposes not just the dehumanization inherent in the Israeli culture toward non-Jews, but also strips naked the selective morality of the West.

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Photograph Source: Kirsty O’Connor / No 10 Downing Street – OGL 3

The UK’s decrepit first-past-the-post electoral system virtually guarantees a two-party grip on parliamentary power. Since WW2 the two parties in question have been the Conservatives and Labour, with the Conservatives enjoying 3 long spells in power,1950-64, 1979-1997, and 2010-2024, countered only by Labour’s Blair/Brown ascendency in 1997-2010.

Labour’s single term in power from 1945-1950, however, saw the momentous creation of the UK’s welfare state, which started to erode as a policy choice when Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979– a phase that was also coterminous with the onset of the neoliberalism of which she was a devotee.

The UK has been in a long-term polycrisis: a chronically weak economy since the 1970s; increased inequality while the crippling outcomes of Tory austerity and Brexit remain overlooked and unaddressed; lip-service in dealing with climate breakdown; catastrophic underfunding of the NHS; a corrupt and chumocratic Establishment (massive Tory Covid contracts handed out without oversight to cronies and pals; as well as Starmer’s Freebiegate, where he and several ministerial colleagues accepted significant donations for vacations and clothing); crumbling schools and teacher shortages; systemic racial injustice; police and prisons at barely-functioning levels; lies and distortion ingrained by a media largely owned by rightwing billionaires domiciled overseas; and an imperial-level Ruritanian monarchy, replete with gold carriages and multiple palaces and castles, all glaringly at odds with Ukania’s post-imperial decline; and so forth.

Since it came to power in July 2024 Starmer’s Labour has lurched from one misstep to another.

Two ministers, unsurprisingly from the party’s right wing, who should never have been appointed by Starmer, have been forced to resign.

Louise Haigh was transport minister until she quit this position when it emerged that she was made a minister by Starmer despite having a criminal conviction Haigh said she had revealed to him before he appointed her. In 2014, the year before she entered parliament, Haigh had pleaded guilty to fraud by false representation when she reported to police that her work phone had been stolen while it was still in her possession. Allegedly she thought her insurance would pay for an upgraded replacement phone.

Tulip Siddiq, the niece of Bangladesh’s deposed despot Sheikh Hasina, resigned as Labour’s anti-corruption minister after she was named in 2 corruption probes linked to a plot of land her family received from Hasina’s government.

Starmer had pledged repeatedly that Labour would restore trust in government after 14 years of Conservative sleaze and corruption, and his swift reneging on this undertaking has propelled Labour downwards in the opinion polls.

Labour’s first few months in office have been a catalogue of missteps, exposing a lot more than a taste for gorging at troughs filled with the finer things of life.

An inheritance tax that had hitherto excluded farms will now include them, and is projected to raise £520m/$632m annually, a relatively small amount in the bigger economic scheme of things. This will have a severe impact on hard-pressed rural families, even as continuing unclosed tax loopholes allow the super-wealthy to multiply their riches.

The much-criticized chancellor of the exchequer/finance minister, Rachel Reeves (who delights in the sobriquet “the iron chancellor”), abandoned the policy of granting all pensioners a fuel payment every winter—under her new rules, only those in receipt of a pension credit will be eligible for the winter fuel payment. Many pensioners, who have contributed to the exchequer for decades during their working lives, now face a possibly crippling financial burden, as they have to choose invidiously between having enough to eat or not dying from hypothermia.

Labour also refused to repeal the Tory policy that limited the child tax credit to 2 children, thereby acknowledging implicitly that only the relatively well-off are “entitled” to have more than a couple of offspring, which looks suspiciously like eugenics through the back door.

These and other policy decisions are not the products of a cast-iron necessity, but are political choices pure and simple. Labour pledged repeatedly to address the needs of the less well-off who suffered from 14 years of Tory austerity and misrule, but has done little of this so far.

The latest Labour stumble is its panicked response to a 10-day turbulence in the UK bond market which raised the price of government borrowing. Historically bond markets worldwide have tracked their US counterpart, and this is exactly what happened here—if the US is up, other bond markets go up, and if the US is down other markets follow suit. A potential cause for real concern occurs when there is more to bond market turbulence than the mirroring of US price patterns.

Reeves and Starmer should have said they would be vigilant with regard to this market instability while not adopting any hasty measures as a response. Instead, they’ve promised a March mini-budget with spending cuts targetted primarily at the civil service and sickness benefits.

To deal with the UK’s sagging economy, Reeves offers a “plan for growth” with 2 pillars: a focus on private-public partnerships in dealing with the NHS crisis and climate breakdown, as well as investment in AI. Reeves has probably not read Brett Christophers, The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet, who argues that transitioning to renewable energy is simply not sufficiently profitable for the private sector for it to have a significant enough impact on this transition.

Likewise AI will almost certainly be a key part of the “state capture” projects that are already being mounted by the rightwing Silicon Valley tech billionaires Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg. Notions of the common good play no part in these rightwing projects. AI will likely result in a considerable restructuring of labour markets, and the tech billionaires are no friends of organized labour. The faith placed by Starmer and Reeves in AI will certainly be tested if the just-mentioned scenarios materialize.

For now it is difficult to give much credence to the thought that managerialist technocrats like Starmer and Reeves have the wherewithal and strategic vision to deal with the UK’s polycrisis.

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The return of Trump. (Screengrab from ABCNews.)

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Screenshot from iPhone.

The impending ban on TikTok pushed many in that oh so American way to do the opposite of what those in charge wanted them to do. Americans are a strange breed– so docile in practice, but only if they think they are being “rebellious” –look to the MAGA movement. Ask any of those diehards and they will tell you they are mavericks, fighting the good fight, all the while not having a clue they are a useful cog in the machine that continues to funnel wealth to the very top. Americans want to be rebels that actually do no useful rebellion. Mainly they like to rebel against behaving in a socially responsible manner.

But sometimes that American irascibility ends up at a refreshing place. The threat of banning a social media platform so many used actually pushed many Gen Z members to download a Chinese social media app deliciously named Red Note. This is a magnificent fuck around and find out moment. Especially when a topic that made the rounds during early exchanges on that site involved cross-cultural discussions about the cost of taking an ambulance to get care in America. Chinese users on Red Note asked if it was true that in America one needs to pay huge amounts for an ambulance—they thought that perhaps this fact was part of their own government’s propaganda campaign about life in the US. The exchanges back and forth were telling, mainly telling in how difficult life in America has become for many, especially the young. Discussions like, how in many cases, two jobs are needed to simply afford rent, that groceries are beyond expensive, that the homeless are often criminalized and fined. Basically for those who remember the 90’s sitcom term…..it was “bad naked”.

It certainly wasn’t our finest hour having these topics aired out. There were instances of even right leaning young influencers voicing their disbelief and exasperation at how very little the average American gets from their government, while so many funds are sent elsewhere. The enrichment machine sends cash all over and those funds often can’t even be properly accounted for. This…… all for nations to continue corporate driven carnage when all many young Americans really want is college.

In the time our nation has funneled astronomic funds in the global war machine, other nations have been investing in infrastructure and improving the lives of their citizens. Obviously every government has its shortcomings, but here in America we are at a starting point of ask not what the government can do for you because it sure as hell isn’t going to do any of it. This includes basics in other nations like health care or modest livability. The brainwashing has been so complete that individuals think they are free, when in fact they are free to be poor, to toil to the point of madness to keep up, to be free to pay taxes to fund an aggressive war machine. So much freedom, it hurts. The question of what is the true purpose to have a nation comes up? If it isn’t as stated “to promote the general welfare” then what exactly is it? Simply a funneling up unethical enterprise?

The narrative has been successful in marking those who want basic decent services and the ability to live a healthier, less stressful life as those wanting some kind of handout. Yet, the same narrative is never given for billionaires who have companies surviving on the largesse of the federal government. We heard so much about the madness of forgiving student loan debt but almost nothing about forgiving all those PPP loans by businesses, often used in very shady manners with frivolous and traceable purchases. Any assistance to those not with means is deemed a handout in the US, yet truly massive gifts to the well off or obscenely rich are simply framed as a necessity to keep the system in motion. Look to Obama’s rectification of the housing crisis of 2008. No moral hazard for the banking system, only to those who were trying to stay in their homes.

The interaction with Chinese citizens has likely been massively eye-opening for the young taking part in all of this. There’s no doubt that the government of China has been outrageous in the past as far as having draconian policies against its citizens, but it would be blind to not realize that they have actively moved away from much of that in the last couple of decades. First-hand accounts from Americans living over there often discuss how they would not want to come back to the US due to things like the lack of affordable healthcare or simple quality of life issues like not needing to work such extreme hours for basic necessities. I’m sure the right-wing reactionaries in the country would tell me if you like it so much, then go. But the thing is I’m here and I just want to make it better in this nation for all of us. The answer isn’t a jingoist subservience that assists the powerful. It’s a clear-eyed assessment that we need to do better. Perhaps we have hit rock bottom and at this point, have to actively try and steer the car away from the sign on the interstate that says Shit-town. Much has been made of China’s one child policies of the past, but we have to be honest and realize that right now in the US we have created economic conditions so poor that many of the young want to have zero children. We don’t have a lot of room to judge their past policies. It’s comical to say we care so much for reproductive freedom (like that’s a thing of any kind in this country now). Again, no room to judge, I’d say. Reproductive freedom goes both ways, not having any choice and mandated forced birth is as bad as denying the ability to have a second child (and this isn’t even their current policy). Just something I’ve had to work out in my mind with previous all-American notions I used to have. I am not a fan of any of these large governments but simply trying to look at them all with clarity, unencumbered by the propaganda we’ve been steeped in.

Back to the topic at hand, though– instead of looking at the dissatisfaction brewing in the US and coming up with something of a New Deal to alleviate distress, our politicians look to…..ban TikTok. If there was truly such concern about American data going into the hands of the Chinese government, I think maybe Temu, Shein or other fast-fashion junk product companies might face a similar ban, but it just goes to show that the concern is only about narrative control.

Many commented that on Red Note, it was obvious just how much Chinese users of that social media site love Luigi. This was a likely powers-that-be issue with TikTok as well. Many TikTok users (and others) felt similar sympathy to him and shared those thoughts. But instead of looking at that situation as a marker of how high the pressure valve reading is in the United States (if it was a cartoon, the thing would be pulsing and bright red, making woo-woo sounds)–again, the answer from the oligarchy has been to look towards censorship as the answer, not actual mitigation of conditions that bring about these feelings. The deer-in-the-headlights astonishment coming even from right-wing idiots like Ben Shapiro has been comical. He was caught off-guard by the rancor from his own followers when he disparaged Luigi. There is some pretty across-the-board disgust at the for-profit systems that control our lives, and it’s coming from every direction. Good luck with censoring all of that, Democrats and Republicans.

It was clear that many of the young who became horrified and disillusioned with US foreign policy got their footage and reports off of TikTok, not CNN or Fox. Those media sources have shown themselves to be little more than an antiquated US version of the USSR’s Pravda. So of course, continue to have access and funding. Obvious disinformation and a very narrow allowed window of discussion is their stock and trade. It’s like– here’s our panel to discuss homelessness. One panelist wants to use their bodies for live organ donation, one wants to sign them up for chain gang labor and our token bleeding heart on the panel wants to simply euthanize them. Don’t say we don’t have a vibrant culture of discourse.

The young in the United States are slowly coming out of their nationwide slumber to realize that the world has passed us by. And it’s by design, when “aid packages” are voted on, you can bet it is a recent $820 billion of aid to the war machine. People have great capacity for necessary sacrifice, but living in the world’s wealthiest nation, dodging potholes to your gig economy jobs, while you suffer from the toothache you can’t treat because there’s no dental coverage……and god forbid, the tooth gets abscessed and you end up in the hospital with sepsis and without health insurance (and yes, the average in 2020 for said ride was around $1300, you know it’s only ballooned with inflation). And perhaps as you sit in the hospital bed, bills accumulating and lost wages due to no sick leave– say you scroll some social media for diversion and see some maimed children with US bombs by the tents…….probably you are not so much in the mood for any more “required austerity” demanded of you by the plutocrats. The money is slated for use in Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, not the education or our young people or the health of our citizenry. How can that go on indefinitely? It can’t. This is late-stage looting by bad-faith actors as people suffer here and especially there.

At some point the expectations of society are just completely not met and that makes for a dangerous time. The anger can roll towards demanding equitability, or it can roll into large-scale jack-booted fascism. Anger is like water in a flash flood; it finds the path of least resistance. We have to make sure the narrative doesn’t allow for that least resistant path to be that of everyday accepted neighborhood fascism. We’ve all allowed the slide, taking in some of the cultural zeitgeist that has allowed things to get so far out of hand in terms of not having empathy or accountability to take care of others. That dripping selfishness of the Reagan era was not taken to be the harbinger of enormous tent cities in 2025, but it should have been. Perhaps if we had reacted more viscerally as a people this all wouldn’t have become so normalized.

So here’s to hoping that the organic cross-cultural exchange on places like Red Note will move us towards demanding a change in course. A change that includes actual responsive governance that includes the well-being of its citizens as a measure of success. If nothing else, this could plant seeds as to what will be accepted in the future from the populace. It may also allow real time experience through direct communication to realize we have so much more in common with each other in the working class than the oligarchs who view us basically as raw materials, not souls. We have more in common with the Chinese Red Note user, more in common with the working-class Ukrainian or Russian, the Palestinian…….we have to realize that and turn away from divisive nonsense that serves only the mentally deranged hoarders. The strife and killing is for the benefit of the top only, same as it ever was.

I guess what I’m saying is that hopefully these discussions on places like Red Note will open the world up for many and Americans can stop massaging mom’s feet and actually attend public school like the normal kids.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

There were many lies about immigrants spread during the 2024 presidential campaign. It is necessary to replace the misinformation with facts to think clearly about the economic impact of immigration and deportation on the US economy – especially since Donald Trump says he intends to move forward on mass deportation.

For all of the 21st century, there have been millions of unauthorized immigrants in the United States. The peak year on record was 2007, when there were 12.2 million unauthorized immigrants living here. In 2022, there were 11 million – 1.2 million fewer or about 10 percent less than in 2007. The provisional estimate for 2023 is 11.7 million, still below the 2007 peak.

In some cases, a sudden, rapid increase in immigrants – authorized and unauthorized – could put social and economic stress on the specific communities receiving the influx. There might be difficulties finding housing and finding space in schools, and social service organizations might find their capacity strained. At the same time, many anecdotal reports detail the economic benefits of increased immigration in particular communities.

At the US-Mexico border, migrant encounters – which refers to apprehensions and expulsions – dramatically increased from 2020 to 2023, but there was a sharp reversal in 2024. The foreign-born population, authorized and unauthorized, in the United States increased 1.6 million from 2022 to 2023. While this was the largest increase in 20 years, it was not large enough to have an impact on the day-to-day lives of most of the over 300 million people in the country.

In a population of nearly 12 million unauthorized immigrants, it would not be surprising to find that there are some number of them who commit serious crimes. The research clearly shows, however, that the rate of criminal offending among immigrants is lower than for the native-born. A study of data from the Texas Department of Public Safety, for example, found that “undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born US citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.” Further, research suggests that immigrant populations actually help to reduce crime ratesin communities.

In sum, the situation in the United States in relation to immigrants today is not much different than it was a decade ago. There is no new crisis.

Unauthorized Immigrants and the US Economy

How would Trump’s planned mass deportation impact the US economy? Recent history gives us some indications. From 2008 to 2014, about 400,000 people were deported from the United States. This mass deportation allowed scholars to study its economic effects. A recent analysis concluded that for each half million immigrants deported, the US-born population would actually lose 44,000 jobs. The work that the immigrants did was necessary to the jobs of US-born workers, so the loss of the immigrants caused the loss of jobs for the native-born. Also, the spending of immigrants (on food, clothing, etc.) paid the wages of US-born workers. Without that spending, jobs for US-born workers were lost. The deportation of millions of unauthorized immigrant workers will mean the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs for the US-born.

While the overall number of unauthorized immigrants is small in comparison to the entire US population, the fact that they are concentrated in particular sectors of the economy would make their rapid removal disruptive. Unauthorized immigrants are overrepresented as maids, housecleaners, cooks, grounds maintenance workers, janitors, agricultural workers, and construction workers. A large and rapid deportation program would increase the costs of the products and services connected to these industries. In Texas, the construction industry is expressing alarm about how Trump’s plans will devastate their ability to build homes and other infrastructure.

Because unauthorized immigrants are also a significant part of our caregiving economy, the deportation from 2008 to 2014 disrupted this sector. Economists have found that the loss of childcare workers led to a reduction in the number of college-educated mothers with young children in the paid labor force.

Legal Immigrants and the US Economy

Although the Trump campaign has spoken loudly about curtailing unauthorized immigration, there is reason to believe that the new administration will reduce authorized immigration to an equal or even greater degree than unauthorized immigration. As the libertarian Cato Institute has pointed out, the first Trump administration significantly reduced legal immigration but largely failed to reduce unauthorized immigration.

People may have a stereotype of immigrant workers as low-wage workers, but immigrant workers can be found throughout the economy. For example, many immigrants work as nurses, computer programmers, educators, and architects. There is also a higher rate of entrepreneurship among immigrants than among the US-born. Almost half of the 500 largest companies in the United States were founded by immigrants or their children. Losing these workers and entrepreneurs will have a negative effect on the U.S. economy.

The Immigration System is Broken – Politics Prevent Potential Solutions

Millions of people are waiting years to enter the United States legally. This gummed-up system is one of the factors causing people to pursue unauthorized immigration. There is bipartisan acknowledgement that the US immigration system is broken and needs to be fixed, but political gamesmanship continues to stymie reform. A 2007 bipartisan effort was blocked in the Senate. A 2013 bipartisan effort was blocked by Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner. In 2024, another bipartisan effort was killed by Donald Trump, who sought to campaign on the issue.

Donald Trump has assured his voters that he intends to carry out the xenophobic anti-immigrant policies he espoused as a candidate. He has not said that he will pursue the comprehensive immigration reform needed to fix the broken system and to strengthen the US economy.

This first appeared on CERP.

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Photograph Source: Tibs foxxo – CC BY-SA 4.0

Despite recent social changes in the Twenty-Six Counties of Ireland and the expectation of ‘change,’ last November’s election demonstrated that the political status quo will remain. The election’s outcome underscores that a meaningful shift in power is still out of reach.

A profound irony of the campaign was the sight of posters with the incumbent Taoiseach, Simon Harris, and his slogan ‘A New Energy’ adorning lampposts throughout the state. Harris’s party, Fine Gael, has been in power, in one form or other, for 14 consecutive years. This election’s result, however, confirmed more of the same.

A new coalition government is on the cusp of coming to office, composed of the two centre-right parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, and nine so-called ‘Regional Independents.’ The hysterical property owners of ‘Middle Ireland’ and their media mouthpieces can rest easy for now.

Gombeenism

In classic brazen gombeen style, the ‘Regional Independents’ want to ‘ride two horses with the one arse.’ No sooner had this group reached a deal with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to form a government, and no sooner had the ‘super junior’ ministries been doled out, did they demand the same speaking rights accorded to the opposition.

This bizarre demand stems from the ‘independents’ contradictory class and political positions. Some of the key figures in this group are landlords and business people, with a certified tax dodger also in the mix. Despite their substantial wealth, they play up an image of being downtrodden countrymen, oppressed by ‘them ones above in Dublin.’

There is, without doubt, an economic and infrastructural imbalance between Dublin and some sections of rural Ireland – some of which stems from the country’s colonial past. But rural gombeen types such as the ‘Regional Independents’ astutely foster an ‘us versus them’ mentality, pitting country people against ‘the Dubs.’

This conveniently occludes their own advantageous class position in their communities and disregards entrenched deprivation in parts of the capital. The gombeens can then speak out of both sides of their mouths on a range of issues.

For their supporters, it matters not whether the gombeen might be a landlord contributing to the housing crisis, as long as they bring in some investment to open a new road or community centre. Ultimately, this culture inhibits class solidarity between urban and rural workers.

The development of this rural-based clientelism mirrors similar patterns in Sicily and Southern Italy, identified by Eric Hobsbawm, Luigi Graziano and others. For instance, as Agostino Mantegna has noted, clientelism tends towards corruption, with ‘variations in the territorial distribution of public and infrastructural spending demonstrating that decreasing expenditures … led to an increase in preference voting (i.e. votes of exchange).’

While this gombeen culture is not confined to rural areas—one of the ‘Regional Independents’ was elected in Dublin Bay North on a platform highlighting the structurally underfunded Northside—it retains particular potency in the countryside for the reasons outlined.

We are set, then, for 4-5 more years of neoliberalism. In reality, the election never offered a choice about neoliberalism anyway, since the main party of opposition, Sinn Féin, does not propose to challenge it. What the next period means in practical terms is that instead of Greens attempting to prise cycle lanes from the majority coalition partners, we will have gombeens demanding roads and funding for sports pitches.

Voter Apathy

Why wasn’t this ‘two-and-a-half-party system’ (where Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael are propped up by an alternating choice of a subservient junior partner) effectively challenged this time? After nearly a decade of an ever-intensifying housing crisis, and constant scandals and failures in healthcare, surely ‘the Left’ should have made significant gains?

The pre-election predictions of no unexpected surge towards the professedly centre-left Sinn Féin proved correct. Their support, which peaked at 34% in 2022 opinion polls, appears to have fragmented across smaller centre-left parties, independents, and, worryingly, the far-right.

The real story, however, was voter apathy. Only 60% turned out to vote, the lowest in over a century. The last time such a low turnout was recorded was 1923, when the state was emerging from a vicious British-backed counter-revolution and thousands of Irish republican political activists were imprisoned.

Of the 60% who voted, 40% supported the two centre-right parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. In essence, 24% of eligible voters have re-elected a conservative government. The legitimacy of elected governments in liberal democracies, not just in Ireland but globally, is rapidly eroding.

Finger-wagging from some on ‘the Left’ ensued in the wake of the result, castigating those who didn’t vote for not ‘exercising their democratic right.’ While venting may feel cathartic for these people, this approach ignores deeper structural causes of low turnout. Globally, turnout has declined since WWII.

A 2023 study, Turning off the base: Social democracy’s neoliberal turn, income inequality, and turnout, highlighted how voters of the centre-left have become apathetic due to ‘socio-economic structural changes, such as the decline of their working-class base stemming from de-industrialization and globalization, but also policy changes, such as [centre-left parties’] embrace of market liberalism.’

The main ‘centre-left’ opposition parties, such as Sinn Féin and the Social-Democrats, mirror their global counterparts by accepting a status quo that perpetuates income inequality, the banking- and developer-led housing system, and underfunded public services.

With the continued rise to power of billionaires, the onward march of fascism, and the environmental collapse we see all around us, one would assume the ‘centre-left’ would realise social democracy is a busted flush – yet here we are.

Immigration

The far-right, government mismanagement, and liberal media mainstreaming of fascist talking points saw immigration become an issue during the electoral year.

Centre-left and left-wing parties struggle to address immigration within the capitalist and imperialist framework. Is there a middle-road, based on a material analysis, that is both pragmatic and humane? Can well-planned integration and a redistribution of resources be advocated effectively?

Ireland is certainly not ‘full,’ but the geopolitical instability caused by imperialism and climate change, alongside the likelihood of increasing migration, must be considered. Even with significant redistribution of resources, such as within a potential United Ireland, those resources remain finite against exponential population growth.

This issue, central to civil cohesion and the economic landscape, must be grappled with by ‘the Left’ to prevent citizens from succumbing to far-right narratives.

Democratic Deficit

It has been dystopian watching some on ‘the Left’ exuberantly celebrate their election or re-election, given the broader context of what is clearly a defeat. In such circumstances, one might opt for a more reserved ‘Roy Keane goal celebration’ over a braggadocious ‘Robbie Keane cartwheel, roll and gun celebration.’

Democracy has been hollowed out by billionaires who control economies, influence politics, and dominate media. As Noam Chomsky notes, key decisions in Europe are often made by unelected bodies such as the European Commission, the IMF, and the European Central Bank, leaving citizens feeling disempowered and disillusioned.

In 2008, the Irish electorate voted No to the Lisbon Treaty, rejecting further EU integration. Yet, following media bombardment and political pressure, a second referendum in 2009 yielded a Yes vote. As one voter put it: ‘Sure didn’t we vote No the first time and they didn’t listen to us? What’s the point in doing it again?’

Such moments reinforce the sentiment that ‘voting achieves nothing’, and subsequent elections only bolstered this mentality further. But where is the effective strategy by ‘the Left’ to involve people in struggle?

Failure to Mobilise

Returning to 2024, disengagement from politics resulted in low turnout in places like working-class Jobstown, where less than 1 in 5 voted. Similarly, turnout was low in Adamstown, with its high immigrant population. Two key groups—the most deprived working-class and immigrants—failed to mobilize.

Other factors contributed to this failure: the Irish Left’s inability to cooperate effectively (unlike their French counterparts), entrenched class and housing structures, and media complicity in manufacturing consent.

More broadly, ‘the Left’ remained wedded to electoralism. The ‘strategy’ now revolves around personal profile-building and harvesting votes every electoral cycle, leading to predictable stagnation. Their approach goes something like this:

1) Attempt to get people angry by highlighting government mismanagement, corruption scandals, media bias etc.

2) Harvest votes for electoral gain

3) Make no significant electoral gain

4) Repeat steps 1-3 every 4-5 years.

Even mainstream commentators have noted ‘outrage fatigue’ among voters. ‘Activist fatigue’ within ‘the Left’ will also be a factor when electoral breakthroughs are promised repeatedly but never delivered. It is often the case of one step forward, two steps back.

The ‘politics of perpetual outrage’ will not inspire people. People will only become involved through direct action and real cultural and workplace struggle that achieves tangible outcomes, not through delegating their voices to elected representatives.

The need for a movement

The last major class-based political mobilization in Ireland—as opposed to cross-class social movements like marriage equality and women’s bodily autonomy—was the anti-Water Tax campaign of 2016. Hundreds of thousands marched, forcing the government to abandon water privatization. However, the movement’s energy was never redirected toward housing or broader radical change.

Where is the movement connecting a fundamental shift on housing, such as Universal Public Housing, with workplace struggles, the demand for an end to the British occupation of the Six Counties, and everyday linguistic, cultural, and decolonial efforts to empower people? On the latter point, ‘the Left’ disregards identity at their peril as the far-right is clearly seeking to build on exclusivist ideas of identity.

Irish Republicans and ‘the Left’ must empower and politically educate ordinary people rather than exploit them for electoral gain or risk losing them to fascism or mé féiner individualism. The current main players on ‘the Left,’ lacking critical self-reflection, seem incapable of this task despite commanding significant financial and infrastructural resources.

It seems this responsibility will fall to grassroots formations, focused both on activism and the digital space, to build a movement of empowerment and mobilization.

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Wikipedia.

Supporters of U.S. Air Force veteran and former NSA contractor Reality Winner made a last ditch effort last week to lobby outgoing President Joe Biden to pardon Winner for her 2017 violation of the 1917 Espionage Act. The “Reality Is Us!” campaign highlights how the young misfit from a Texas border town “showed America the proof that Russia hacked into our voter data right before the 2016 election, and certain government officials knew about it, but denied it ever happened. For calling that B.S. she was sent to prison for 5 years.”

Reality Winner’s crime against the state? Leaking a classified intelligence report that acknowledged the reality of Russia’s attempted interference in the 2016 election to The Intercept, an investigative news site that published a story about it. The leaked report indicated that hackers from Russian military intelligence had perpetrated a cyberattack on at least one American voting software supplier, sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials shortly before the election, and that the hacking operation may have penetrated deeper into American voting systems than had been previously understood.

Uncle Sam hates whistleblowers of any kind and has been waging a bi-partisan war on intelligence community whistleblowers. The Obama administration famously prosecuted more whistleblowers under the outdated Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined. It’s to be expected that whistleblowers will be prosecuted harshly to discourage others from doing so. But Winner’s case is a relatively unique one of a patriotic American merely attempting to warn her fellow citizens that our government wasn’t telling the whole truth when it came to troubling questions about the integrity of the 2016 election.

It will be interesting to see if former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard — nominated by Trump to serve as Director of National Intelligence – will continue pushing for reform of the Espionage Act, as she did with proposed legislation in 2020 that would enable defendant to discuss intent and add a defense of disclosure in the public interest (which Winner was not allowed to do.) Gabbard’s been flipping all over since jumping the shark from Bernie Sanders supporter to MAGA member though, so civil rights supporters probably shouldn’t get their hopes up.

Hollywood producer and activist Scott Budnick (best known as an executive producer of The Hangover) makes an effort to humanize Reality Winner in a recent biopic titled Winner, released in 2024 and soon streaming on Hulu in February. The film focuses more on Winner’s quirky life story leading up to her decision to leak the report, rather than the aftermath. In doing so, it provides a compelling picture of how Winner doesn’t pose a threat to anyone except political elitists who don’t like how she pulled the curtain back on the vulnerability of our electoral system.

“What got me excited about this script is that it was told as a comedy… The twist was you’re telling a movie that could be a straight drama about election interference and threats to our democracy, but you’re telling it as a coming of age comedy which I thought was really smart,” Budnick told Counterpunch. “As someone that’s worked with people in the criminal justice system for a long time, everything to me is about humanizing them… Crime is scary, but as soon as you start looking at them as human beings, people’s opinions start to change. And so I really loved the fact that they told this as a comedy and that’s what I latched on to.”

Winner’s charm as a patriotic animal lover and down to earth fitness freak makes it more difficult for Uncle Sam to paint her as a national security threat. Democrats spent much of Trump’s first term raising a ruckus about alleged Russian interference. Yet when actual evidence came to light in the report that Winner leaked, there were few who defended her courageous action.

“Let’s stop having her have to deal with being a felon and having a criminal record stop her from doing all types of things she wants to do, stop her from starting businesses she wants to start, and not being able to get professional certifications she needs,” Budnick said regarding the pitch to Biden. “I see her as a hero, I see her as somebody that let us know that a hostile foreign power was trying to interfere with our democratic process. I don’t believe in punishing heroes.”

Budnick says he hopes the film will inspire Americans to take a longer look at these electoral integrity issues. Biden could have given Winner her life back with a pardon, but didn’t since her real crime in Uncle Sam’s eyes is surely how she dared to violate the unspoken taboo of shining a light on the vulnerability of our electoral system. This sacred cow has been increasingly problematic since the advent of electronic voting systems that are potentially vulnerable to bad actors with inside connections and access.

There was reasonable suspicion that the 2004 election was stolen in Ohio, twice as galling after the Supreme Court gave Dubbya the 2000 election by stopping the Florida recount. Ohio was still a Purple bellwether state that could go either way back then, before the brain drain problem that turned it Red for Trump. 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry would later admit that he harbored suspicions about what went down, but chose not to raise them out of alleged fear that doing so would only toss the decision back to the Supreme Court again.

Rolling Stone published a troubling story in 2006 detailing the array of dirty tricks that Republicans utilized in Ohio, an article now ironic for being authored by shark jumper Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ”You can rock the boat, but you can never say that the entire ocean is in trouble… You cannot say: By the way, there’s something wrong with our electoral system,” MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann told Rolling Stone at the time, alluding to grief he received from his corporate editorial overlords for attempting to pursue issues raised in the story.

Olbermann’s words have resonated ever since and seem the most likely explanation for why Biden didn’t pardon Winner. This only further tarnishes Biden’s tainted legacy as the man who helped enable the Trump regime’s return to power. Biden’s inaction sadly includes having allowed shady Attorney General Merrick Garland to suspiciously slow walk prosecution of Trump and his seditionist cronies for their actions in the insurrection of January 6, 2021. This is another aspect of Biden’s legacy that will live in infamy.

“Under Biden, the United States became the first country to face an attempted coup and not only fail to punish the coup plotters but allow them to hold office and make laws. There is no parallel in world history,” bestselling author and investigative journalist Sarah Kendzior lamented in 2023. Kendzior would go on to again outline Garland’s longtime role as one of the “Servants of the Mafia State” that has corrupted the Justice Department. But such deeper truth doesn’t make it into an increasingly consolidated mainstream media that exists to maintain the corporatocracy status quo.

Like the Greek prophet Cassandra, Kendzior and Winner have seen their concerns go largely unheeded by the Democratic Party. What’s left of American Democracy is now in critical condition and Reality Winner will continue to pay the price for merely trying to warn us, since Joe Biden once again proved he was either too cowardly or too complicit to do the right thing.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Societies survive and grow when they successfully navigate their contradictions. Eventually, however, accumulating contradictions overwhelm existing means of navigating them. Then social problems arise that persist or worsen inside such societies because they are unsuccessfully navigated or go unattended. Sometimes, the dominant conscious reaction to such social problems is denial, a refusal to see them. Denial of internal social problems displaces navigating the contradictions that cause them. The resulting social decline, like the set of internal contradictions it reflects, is denied and ignored. Instead, narratives or rhetorics can arise that position such societies as victims of abuse by foreigners. The United States in 2025 illustrates this process: its rhetorics of refusal aim to end its victimization.

In today’s United States, one such rhetoric refuses to allow continued abuse by foreigners “threatening our national security.” This rhetoric blames bad U.S. political leadership for its failure to put America first and thereby make it great again. Another rhetoric demands that “we” refuse to allow “our democracy” to be destroyed by foreign enemies (and their domestic equivalents): people who are said to hate, not understand, or undervalue “our democracy.” Still another rhetoric of refusal sees foreigners “cheating” the United States in trade and migration processes. Most Americans embrace one or more of such rhetorics. Yet, as we propose to show here, such rhetorics are ever less effective.

One reactionary rhetoric, Trump’s, gestures toward former greatness by literally renewing American imperialism. He threatens to retake the Panama Canal, change Canada into the 51st of the United States, conquer Greenland from Denmark, and possibly invade Mexico. All those foreigners are said to threaten national security or else “cheat” the United States. Trump’s typical bloviating aside, this is remarkable expansionism. Such repeated colonialist gestures feed broader notions of making America greater again.

Colonialism repeatedly helped European capitalism navigate its internal contradictions (temporarily escaping the social problems it caused). Eventually, however, it could no longer do so. After World War II, anti-colonialism limited that escape. The subsequent European neo-colonialisms and the informal colonialism of the American empire had shorter life spans. China and the rest of the BRICS countries are now everywhere closing that escape. Hence the frustrated rage of Trump’s insistence on refusing that ending by deliberately reopening the idea of an escape hatch of colonial expansions. It resembles Netanyahu’s idea (if not yet his violence) in trying to reopen that hatch for Israel by driving Palestinians out of Gaza. United States support for Netanyahu likewise associates the U.S. with colonialist violence in a world overwhelmingly committed to end colonialism and its unwanted legacy.

The United States boasts the world’s strongest military establishment. The dominant rhetoric in the United States casts everything it does as self-defense necessitated by foreign enemies. That justifies the government spending much more on defense than on the few internal social problems that rhetoric even recognizes. Yet the United States lost the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, and these countries’ military establishments were far from the world’s strongest. It turns out that the proliferation of nuclear weapons and technical competition among nuclear powers have changed military balances around the world. The United States’ gross underestimates of Russia’s warfare capacities in 2022 illustrate the change very dramatically. They also illustrate that a rhetoric stressing a refusal to be victimized by foreign militaries undercut or displaced sober analyses of a militarily changed world. Now the world observes not only changed global military configurations but also the costly denials of them by U.S. leaders. Political and economic leaders everywhere else are now rethinking their strategies accordingly. Rhetorics of refusal to be victimized can become self-destructive.

Another reason those leaders are redesigning their growth plans follows from the intertwined declines of the U.S. empire and the U.S. capitalist system. What U.S. leaders deny, many foreign leaders have incentives to see, evaluate, and take advantage of. The BRICS members (9) and partners (9), as of January 2025, account for nearly half the world’s population and 41 percent of the world’s GDP (in purchasing power parity terms). Four other nations have been invited and are likely to join in 2025: Vietnam, Turkey, Algeria, and Nigeria. Indonesia just joined as a full BRICS partner adding its roughly 280 million population. In contrast, the G7—the world’s second-largest economic bloc—accounts for about 10 percent of the world’s population and 30 percent of its GDP (also in purchasing power parity terms). Moreover, as data from the International Monetary Fund documents, recent years show a widening gap between the annual GDP growth rates of the G7-leading United States and the BRICS-leading China and India.

Across the history of capitalism from its earlier times in England through the American empire’s peak early in the 21st century, most nations focused chiefly on the G7 in strategizing economic growth, debt, trade, investments, currency exchange rates, and balances of payments. Large- and medium-sized enterprises did likewise. Yet over the last 15–20 years, countries and enterprises have faced an altogether new, different global situation. China, India, and the rest of the BRICS countries offer an alternative possible focus. Everyone can now play the two blocs off against one another. Moreover, in this play, the BRICS now hold better, richer cards than the G7. Rhetorics of refusal spin these changes in the world economy as the evil intentions of foreign others—who likely hate democracy. The United States should righteously refuse and thereby frustrate those intentions, they argue. In contrast, far less attention is paid to how internal U.S. social problems both shape and are shaped by a changing global economy.

The changing world economy and the relative decline of the G7 within it have turned U.S. capitalism away from neoliberal globalization toward economic nationalism. Tariffs, trade wars, and “America first” ideological pronouncements are concurrent forms of such turning inward. Another form is the call to bring parts of the outside of the United States inside: Trump’s unsubtle imperialistic threats directed at Canada, Mexico, Denmark, and Panama. Yet another form is the advisory many major U.S. colleges and universities are sending to enrolled students from other countries (over a million last year). It suggests they consider the likelihood of great visa difficulties in completing their degrees amid increasing U.S. government hostility toward foreigners. A reduced foreign student presence will undercut U.S. influence abroad for years to come (much as it fostered that influence in the past). U.S. higher education institutions, already facing serious financial difficulties, will find them deepening as paying foreign students choose other nations for their degrees. “America first” rhetoric risks the self-destruction of the United States’ global position.

Politically, the U.S. strategy since World War II was to contain perceived foreign threats by a combination of “hard” and “soft” power. They would enable the United States to eliminate communism, socialism, and, after the Soviet implosion of 1989, terrorism, wherever possible, overtly or covertly. Hard power would be deployed by the U.S. military via hundreds of foreign military bases surrounding nations perceived to be threatening and via invasions if, when, and where deemed necessary. Hard power also took the form of implicit threats of nuclear warfare (made credible by the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and by total U.S. arms race expenditures on nuclear and non-nuclear weapons that no other countries, alone or in groups, could match.

“Soft power” would serve globally to project particular definitions of democracy, civil liberties, higher education, scientific achievement, and popular culture. These definitions were presented as best and most exemplified by what actually existed in the United States. In this way, the United States could be exalted as the global peak of civilized human achievement: a kind of partner discourse to other discourses that denied internal social problems. Enemies could then readily be demonized as inferior.

U.S. soft power was and remains a kind of political advertising. The usual commercial advertiser promotes only everything positive (real or plausible) about his client’s product. Typically, everything negative (real or plausible) is associated by that same advertiser only with his client’s competitor’s product. One might call this “advertising communication.” In the 20th century’s Cold War, U.S. soft power entailed an application of advertising communication where the United States and its supporters, public and private, functioned as both client and advertiser. The United States advertised itself as “democracy” and the USSR as its negative opposite or “dictatorship.” Cold War advertising communication continues today in the slightly changed form of “democracy” versus “authoritarianism.” But like advertising, after too many repetitions its influence lessens.

Unfortunately for the United States, economic problems now besetting its capitalist system—both those caused by accumulated internal contradictions and those caused by its declining position within the world economy—directly undercut its soft power projections. Brandishing tariffs and repeatedly threatening to increase them reflect the need for governmental protection for decreasingly competitive U.S.-based firms. U.S. rhetorics that instead blame foreigners for “cheating” sound increasingly hollow. Deporting millions of immigrants signals an economy no longer strong and growing enough to absorb them productively (what once “made America great” and showed that greatness to the world). U.S. rhetorics denouncing “foreign invasions” of immigrants encounter growing skepticism and even ridicule inside as well as outside the United States.

The gross inequality of wealth and income in the United States and the global exposure of billionaires’ power over government (Musk over Trump, CEOs donating millions of dollars to Trump’s inauguration celebration) replace perceptions of the United States as exceptional in its vast middle class. The record levels of government, corporate, and household debt alongside abundant signs that such indebtedness is worsening do not help project the United States as an economic model. The year 2024’s experience with a dominant U.S. strategy denying social problems while rhetorically stressing the dangers of evil foreign forces suggests it may be approaching exhaustion. The year 2025 may then provide conditions for a profound challenge to that strategy matching the challenges confronting the global position of U.S. capitalism.

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Photo by Juan Domenech

The Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday is one of the worst things that happened to the man’s legacy.

Let’s me be clear: King was a radical.

Go to a MLK celebration these days and you will hear Black politicians using this holiday as a platform to run for Office. Most white pastors use the day as a time to get in a pulpit and talk to their mostly white congregations about King’s dream about racial harmony, ignoring all the other things he wrote and said about his disappointment with how White people embodied Christianity. Or worse yet, they will ask a Black minister to do it, and a Black minister will tap dance for the white listeners, allowing them to leave the white church, drive home to their white communities and feel like they are a friend to Black people.

But it needs to be said again: King was a radical.

About the America treats the poor, the man said, “there must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism.” He also asked, “What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?” and “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”

That won’t be said at the local MLK celebration.

Toward the end of his life, when thinking about what he accomplished and seeing how white America was treating Black people, he said “I’ve come to believe we are integrating into a burning house,” making it plain that he was not as optimistic about race relations in May of 1967 as he was when he gave his “I have a dream speech in August of 1963.

Given the radicality of his thought, I wonder if King would recognize the man America valorizes on January 20. To understand why King is portrayed as a gentle dreamer instead of an angry prophet, we have to understand what concession were made to get the King hoiliday in the first place.

The first time a bill to have a King holiday was proposed in congress, it was introduced by Representative John Conyers, a Democrat from Michigan, and Senator Edward Brooke, a Republican from Massachusetts in 1979. That bill failed by five votes. A bill was finally passed in 1983, but not before Republicans opposed the bill, openly asking whether King was important enough to receive such an honor.

To get enough votes from the Republican controlled Senate and a signature from President Ronald Regan, advocates for the King National holiday were forced to highlight his unifying rhetoric to the detriment of his actual thoughts on things like universal healthcare and economic justice.

We don’t honor the real Martin Luther King, Jr. anymore. We honor the King that does not offend white people, and that is why this holiday is one of the worst things to happen to his legacy.

There is a danger in reducing any person’s life and work to a sound bite or any single speech or essay. To fully appreciate a thinker as complex as King, we must consider the totality of his work. Not just something he said one day in August.

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The Capitol dressed up for the inauguration. Photo: Mark Medish.

We returned to these places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

– T.S. Eliot “The Journey of the Magi” (1927)

Poets and historians remind us that situational awareness is a key life skill.

The impressive funerary proceedings for Jimmy Carter brought to mind the vivid opening scene of Barbara Tuchman’s magisterial Guns of August describing Europe veering onto the on-ramp to the First World War:

“So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration… three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun… After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens…  Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.”

The onlookers that May morning in London were likely unaware they were witnessing the ending of an era, the imminent collapse of powerful empires and the unraveling of a century-long period of domestic and international order – the old dispensation — often known as “the concert of Europe.”

As we move from the civil solemnity of Carter’s funeral to the portentous pomp of Trump’s second inauguration, do we now find ourselves at such a historic turning — an inflection point, as policy wonks like to say — a hinge moment after which our reigning assumptions about the world that seem so solid will “melt into air,” to use the phrase of a noted manifesto-writing nineteenth-century German philosopher?

What is history’s clock saying about this moment?  If an epoch is ending, what will be the motto of the era that might lie ahead – a restored Great America, a new Time of Troubles, a Dark Enlightenment, or something entirely different?

I do not know the answer.  But judging from the strangely hollow-looking array of ex-, exiting and incoming presidents in the front pews of Carter’s service, these are fair questions to ask. And they raise the problem of historical perspective — the difficulty of knowing in real time the significance of the time we happen to be living in.

I was a Cuban Missile Crisis baby, born in 1962, the same year Tuchman published her book.  Today is about as far removed in time from that perilous nuclear showdown, at the height of the Cold War, as that date was from the splendid Edwardian funeral.  The human species was essentially the same, but each of those times seem fundamentally worlds apart, socially, materially, mentally and technologically.

This is why I recommend occasionally doing the “flash-back test” as a thought experiment to think in time and to appreciate the flow and flux of things. It’s simple to imagine: just reflect on the conventional wisdom about the state of the world in roughly 25-year intervals, basically a generational timespan.

For example, rewind back 25 years from today, seemingly on the edge of a Third World War, and we were still celebrating the galloping globalization of the 1990s — 9/11 had not yet happened.

Go back a quarter century, to 1975, and we were at another climax of the Cold War, after the fall of Saigon and the run-up to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Another 25 years, to 1950, the dawn of the age of nuclear confrontation and the specter of species annihilation.  Next, back to the Roaring 1920’s, a burst of post-bellum optimism and freedom, before the Great Depression and the rise of Nazism. And so on.

For me, the most salient point is the Heraclitan quantity and quality of change in relatively short chunks of time, all in living memory but easy to forget. Historical perspective should teach a degree of epistemological modesty.

In thinking about the meaning of the present, we should be careful not to get carried away with metaphors, whether about domestic affairs or international relations.  We always need and use theories and hypotheses as a basis for policies.  And it is probably natural to indulge in grand narratives about the meaning of an epoch only to learn that things were — and are — far more contingent and fluid than imagined.

We are all too familiar with the regnant metaphors and prestigious mantras of recent times such as “the end of history,” “borderless world,” “the Washington consensus,” the “BRICs” thesis, “the rules-based liberal international order,” “the international community,” the “global war on terror,” and “American exceptionalism.”

These potent memes have been based on certain facts and rational aspirations — but they have also proved less trenchant, less inevitable and less durable than hoped and advertised by their promoters.

The problem is not that the narratives lack evidence, but that they are grossly over-written and over-determined relative to the complexity and contingency of what we should know is out there. They become dogma.

This is because our reductionist fables tend to be eloquently crafted and backed by eminent policy scholars, propagated by political leaders and elite pundits, fortified by groupthink and financed by vested commercial interests. Challenging the veracity of such grand narratives is rarely easy — until the conventional wisdom supporting them has faded and given up its glittering grip on power.

As my colleague Ivan Krastev at the Vienna Institute for Human Sciences has recently observed of the U.S. election: “Trump captured the public imagination not because he had a better plan for how to win the war in Ukraine or manage globalization, but because he understood that the world of yesterday could be no more. The United States’ postwar political identity has vanished into the abyss of the ballot box. This Trump administration may succeed or fail on its own terms, but the old world will not return. Even most liberals do not want it back. Few Americans today are comfortable with the notion of American exceptionalism.”

When I worked in the early 1990s on the U.S. foreign assistance program for the former Soviet bloc countries, our top policymakers insisted on marketing the aid, whether cash or technical assistance, as support for “irreversible change,” which was supposed to be in our national security interest. It was practically a firing offense to disagree.

Apart from the many inherent problems of foreign aid (lack of scale, absorptive capacity, and local ownership of reforms), a central flaw with the irreversibility thesis was that the amazing fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR illustrated precisely the opposite reality: that paradigms could change, that policies are reversible and institutions can be undone.

To say that the Soviet Communist system collapsed of its own weight explains everything and nothing. All societies are in the same boat with respect to vitality, legitimacy and durability. Things are fluid, and nothing is inevitable until it is.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant famously asked, what may I reasonably hope for?  The radical openness of history is at odds with both progressive determinism such as the Enlightenment theories of the historical process, whether Hegelian or Whig, with their faith in rationality and dreams of perfectibility on one hand, or the various old-school conservatisms which posit “plus ca change,” Original Sin or human nature as ineluctable limiting factors to societal progress.

I think we can and do make progress as a species and as social beings, even in a collective international setting, though not as much and not as inevitably as rationalist philosophers such as Harvard’s Stephen Pinker posit.

There is a middle school of pragmatism associated with the likes of John Dewey, Richard Rorty and Roberto Unger who in various ways expounded on  “meliorism” or experimental improvement, which may be America’s best claim to political exceptionalism.  But even this more nuanced and modest conception of the historical process is vulnerable to back-sliding and atavism in practice. Plasticity is not unidirectional.

The Enlightenment Project, vitally linked as it is to our sense of modernity and progressive values, will always inspire but it will also be haunted by the reality of bloody revolutions, two world wars and the Holocaust, as well as the nuclear threat.

It is not for nothing that the British art historian Kenneth Clark started his sprawling 1969 BBC series on “Civilisation” with an episode titled “The Skin of Our Teeth.”  Far from being pretentious about European culture, looking at the sweep of history Clark was acutely aware of contingency, how societies can thrive, but also how great societies can decay and decline, how things can fall apart.

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Jabbar serving as the information technology team chief for the 82nd Airborne Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team during his Army service, pictured in 2013 at Fort Polk. Photograph Source: 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army – Public Domain

Recent headline-making events in two of America’s most famous party-hardy cities sent us back to our well-thumbed copy of Touching the Dragon, a 2018 memoir by James Hatch.

Never heard of Hatch? Well maybe that’s because he spent much of his military career as a Navy SEAL “warfighter” always “close to the enemy” in Bosnia, Africa, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but never seeking headlines. A survivor of 150 combat missions, Hatch returned home in bad mental and physical shape; in fact, his crippling wounds of war ended his career. Then, adding insult to injury, he was “forced to reintegrate into a society that I had spent two decades defending, but in which I didn’t feel I had a place.”

In his insightful and prophetic book, Hatch warned that his generational cohort of “special operators,” who experienced a similar “volume of fighting,” were now facing: “A serious volume of aftermath. Marriages falling apart. Alcoholism. Guys getting kicked out of their houses. Guys drowning in opioids. The real recoil hasn’t even hit yet.”

During this holiday season, that “recoil” was definitely felt in different—but now sadly familiar ways—by the dozens of civilians left dead or injured in Las Vegas and New Orleans.

The final missions of Army Sergeants Mathew Livelsberger and Shamsud-Din Jabbar left millions of other Americans scratching their heads.  Why would two much-saluted young men—who served their country so honorably at home and abroad, for a combined total of 33 years—both rent trucks in two different locations, within the same week? And then turn them into instruments of mass and/or self-destruction?

In notes left behind, Livelsberger, a decorated Green Beret combat veteran, insisted that his action “was not a terrorist attack” but rather “a wake-up call” necessary because “Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence.” His declared goal was “to cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.” Jabbar, a former information technology specialist, left video messages announcing that he had switched sides in the “war between the believers and the disbelievers” and had become a follower of ISIS.

Asymmetrical Warfare

The two soldiers spent a total of four tours of duty in Afghanistan, where only one set of combatants had B-52 bombers, fighter jets, helicopter gun-ships, long-range artillery, and tanks. As a result, both Jabbar and Livelsberger were familiar with key tools of the “asymmetrical warfare” waged by the Taliban (suicide vests, improvised bombs, and speeding vehicles packed with explosives).

Back home, they geared up, in equivalent fashion, and became domestic terrorists. But their actions were definitely not without precedent. In fact, the most reliable predictors of who will perpetrate mass violence in modern-day America is military service.

According to the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START),  “A U.S. military background is the single strongest individual-level predictor of whether a subject …in the PIRUS ( Profiles of Individual Radicalization In the United States) data is classified as a mass casualty offender.” A record of military service, START explains, is, in fact, an even more reliable predicator than mental health problems or a criminal history.

Consider the long list of those who preceded Din Jabbar and Livelsberger down the same path. In 1995, Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh parked his Ryder truck, with a home-made bomb, outside the federal building in Oklahoma City. He walked away, leaving 168 people dead and 680 injured, a crime for which he was executed in 2001.

Jabbar, who  contemplated murdering his own estranged family,—seemed to be channeling the murderous energy of another quiet  Texan, Charles Whitman.  A former Eagle Scout and Marine sniper, Whitman killed 15 people and injured 31 during a 1966 shooting spree conducted from the clock tower of the University of Texas at Austin. (On his way to campus, he did fatally stabb his wife and mother.)

More recently, in 2009, at Fort Hood, Texas, Major Nidal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, murdered 12 soldiers and one civilian, and injured 30 others, a crime for which he is now on death row. In March of 2018, Albert Wong, who saw combat in Afghanistan (where Hasan was headed before his killing spree), shot himself and three care-givers at a veterans clinic in Yountville, California.

 That same year, ex-Marine Ian David Long, decorated for his service as a machine gunner in Afghanistan, killed twelve people at a country and western bar in Thousand Oaks, California. And just sixteen months ago, in Lewiston, Maine, Army Reservist Robert Card slaughtered 18 of his neighbors at a local bowling alley, while wounding 13 others. Both Card and Long killed themselves to avoid capture.

If readers are noticing a pattern here, it’s because there is one.  While veterans’ advocates correctly point out that the majority of former service members are certainly not mass murderers, it is also true that a tiny subset of veterans have been responsible for a disproportionate number of mass shootings and other violent attacks.

  Military Socialization

One big factor behind that data point is their military training and indoctrination.  As retired Army Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman explains in his book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, the cultivation of anger and aggression is critical to overcoming normal human resistance to killing other people. This becomes part of the socialization of all military recruits, even those who never see combat.  For those who do, the battlefield deaths of close friends and comrades, can, according to Grossman, further “enable killing.”

As clinical psychiatrist Jonathan Shay reported in his 1994 study Achilles in Vietnam, “replacement of grief by rage has lasted for years and become an entrenched way of being” for many sufferers of combat-related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Researchers at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System in Seattle, Washington, found that, among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, anger was “independent from, albeit related to, ptsd.”

Veterans who had been diagnosed with ptsd or “subthreshold ptsd” reported increased levels of anger, hostility, and physical aggression, particularly in their intimate relationships.

If service members have a history of behavioral problems, before enlisting, being in the military can make them worse. Albert Wong suffered from PTSD, which is why he was a patient of Pathway Homes (the northern CA treatment center made famous in Thank You For Your Service). But, like Ian David Long, his mental health issues predated his active duty.

Both Wong and Long were troubled children and adolescents. Wong was raised by a series of friends and foster parents and had difficulty in high school. According to one news account, friends and neighbors did not report their concerns about Long’s aggressive behavior when he was a teen-ager because they didn’t want to spoil his dream of enlisting to “kill for his country.”

Better screening of recruits like Wong and Long might have kept them out of the military.  Unfortunately, when both signed up—thanks to simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—the U. S. military was suffering from a “serious recruitment crisis.” As a result, screening and drug testing standards were relaxed and even a felony conviction was not necessarily disqualifying.  In 2017, the Army even waived a previous ban on signing up young men and women with a history of “self-mutilation, bipolar disorder, depression, and drug and alcohol abuse.”

Traumatic Brain Injury 

Sevice-related traumatic brain injury (TBI) can be a toxic affliction of former soldiers with past combat exposure, like Livelsberger, and even those, like 40-year old Robert Card, who never served abroad. Dave Philipps’ investigative reporting in The New York Times, has revealed how Card, an experienced Army Reserve grenade instructor, was subject to repeated blast injuries that seriously damaged his brain. The result was increasingly erratic and, ultimately, very deadly behavior.

Philipps’ latest reporting has focused on Livelsberger’s blast exposure in training and when deployed. An Army nurse and former girlfriend, Alicia Arritt, had no trouble recognizing his symptoms—anger, aggression, depression, and inability to concentrate – because she had encountered them before among her  patients still on active duty (as Livelsberger was until his “wake up call” in Las Vegas).

The Department of Defense (DOD) tends to downplay such links, at the time and after-the-fact. In the Card case, it took an independent commission, appointed by the Governor of Maine, to confirm that Card’s superior officers failed to heed warnings about him from fellow soldiers, concerned family members, and mental health clinicians.

During his treatment at a civilian psychiatric hospital, three months before his rampage, Card was found to be experiencing psychosis, having homicidal thoughts, and even had a “hit list.”  Last Fall, on the first anniversary of the Lewiston massacre, survivors and relatives of victims notified the DOD of their intention to sue for damages.  As the group’s lawyer asked, “How many other Robert Cards are out there right now, suffering from mental illness, with ready access to assault weapons?”

Fortunately, as part of the just approved National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Congress has finally required the DOD to set  limits on blast exposure, consider its impact on the brain in designing  new weaponry, and “standardize and improve the detection, treatment, and reporting” of blast injuries.

These harm reduction measures won’t make medical detection any easy because imaging techniques don’t always confirm the impact of blast injuries. That’s why friends, family members and care givers for service members or veterans need to better understand and be alert for symptoms like those displayed by Livelsberger and Card

Access to Skilled Care?

 It’s even more important to expand access to public hospitals and clinics operated by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Due to restrictive eligibility rules legislated by Congress, the VA-run Veterans Health Administration (VHA) currently covers only half of the nation’s 19 million former service members.

 Unlike the DOD, which just ignores the impact of PTSD, blast injuries, and other service-related injuries until forced to acknowledge them, the VA has an actual track record of treating mental and physical health problems.

Unfortunately, President-elect Trump and former Georgia Congressman Doug Collins, his nominee for VA Secretary, have little appreciation for the VA’s essential role. Rather than supporting its direct care and related research functions, they will be expanding a costly and largely unnecessary network of private sector providers, known as the Veterans Community Care Program (VCCP).

Before even more VHA patients accept referrals to the VCCP, they should check out a research study published this month in Health Affairs. The headline sums up its findings: “Veterans May Be Seeing Lower-Quality Clinicians in the VA Community Care Network.” Among the documented shortcomings of outsourced care is the fact that most doctors, in private practice, are not familiar with links between blast injury and depression or PTSD and related anger and aggression.

Dr. Harold Kudler, a Duke Medical School professor, is a skilled care-giver who does recognize those symptoms based on years of experience with VA patients. As he told us: “It’s important to remember that neither PTSD, traumatic brain injury, moral injury, depression or even schizophrenia are likely to make you a mass shooter. That said, these recent events in Las Vegas and Louisiana, like so many others, make it clear the burden that so many of our veterans bear.”

Without a properly functioning healthcare system of their own, too many former soldiers will be left to carry that burden themselves. If they crack under the strain of doing so, the consequences can be devastating– not only for their friends, family, and former comrades, but everyone else on the receiving end of a “mass casualty “event.

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