Photograph Source: DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Marianique Santos – Public Domain

The Democratic Party has forfeited every claim to moral and political credibility. It is not a bulwark against fascism but an accomplice to it, a party of cowardice and complicity that props up the most barbaric features of gangster capitalism-extending from staggering levels of inequality to its refusal to support national health care. Its leadership, craven, visionless, and drunk on Wall Street money, has become a machinery of war and despair. It is wedded to the military-industrial complex and normalizes through its silence a culture of war, misery, and cruelty. It sends billions in weapons to Benjamin Netanyahu, an indicted war criminal, fully aware those arms sustain a machinery of occupation and repression. With one act, fighting to cut off the flow of weapons, the Democrats could help end this slaughter. Instead, when Netanyahu recently visited the White House, they shook his bloodstained hand and smiled for the cameras, their shamelessness captured in a widely circulated, obscene photograph. This betrayal abroad mirrors the Party’s collapse at home. The Party’s cowardice is written into its very DNA.

 It is a party of whiners, trapped in ideological smugness and a flaccid discourse of compromise.  Given its political and ethical weakness, it is ironic that on occasion it drapes itself in the hollow language of “resisting Trump’s authoritarianism.” This becomes more obvious when it advocates, on occasion,  working with the regime, even as it props up authoritarians abroad and tightens the screws of neoliberal cruelty at home. Moira Donegan writing in The Guardian is right in stating that the Democratic Party is the party of self-sabotage, that is, it has a vision of American politics in which (they] have no power to set the terms of the debate on their own.” Its neoliberal policies have hollowed out working-class communities, shredded social protections, remained largely moot in calling out Trump’s regime as a criminogenic organization, and left despair in their wake, conditions that became the breeding ground for Trump’s authoritarian ascent. They created the void that fascism fills, and now they tremble before the monster they helped unleash.

The racist bile and fascist rhetoric spewed by Trump’s loyal sycophants, especially Stephen Miller, the president’s homeland security adviser and deputy chief of staff, receives far less outrage than the criticism directed at progressive voices like Zohran Mamdani, now running for mayor of New York City. When Miller brands the Democratic Party not only a domestic extremist organization but “an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gang-bangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists,” the silence from Democratic leaders is deafening. No effort is made to expose such language as rooted in the poisonous legacies of fascism and white supremacy, or  for that matter call for his resignation. Yet there can be no doubt that Miller’s discourse, and his influence in shaping Trump’s militarized immigration, education, and policing policies, is a five-alarm fire for democracy, one that demands unrelenting opposition. There is no effort on the part of the Democratic Party leadership to acknowledge that the Department of Homeland Security has become not only a domestic terrorist organization but a “white nationalist content, mill churning out bigoted, jingoistic schlock.” 

This cowardice abroad is matched by their silence in the face of fascism at home. Matters of moral witnessing, addressing war crimes, calling out massive violations of human rights at home and abroad are rarely acknowledged by the Democratic Party leadership. This is especially true with respect to the genocide taking place in Gaza. Not only is it morally indefensibly silent about its own complicity in arming Israel, it also reveals itself too timid to confront Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza, where more than two million people have been reduced to conditions resembling a “vast Ground Zero.” As a party wedded to Wall Street, it is too timid to challenge the predatory capitalism that now mutates into one of the most destructive and exploitative economic systems on the planet, an order that thrives on the obliteration of human needs, elevates profit as its only sacrament, and transforms the state into a corrupt crime syndicate.

At home, the Democratic leadership refuses to lift a finger for candidates who represent genuine hope. Their refusal to support Zohran Mamdani in New York is not an oversight but a betrayal. Schumer and Jeffries embody the Party’s moral bankruptcy: Schumer the coward, Jeffries the gutless tactician, both locked in servitude to corporate power, both content to preside over a politics of endless war, mass incarceration, obscene inequality, and the normalization of state terrorism. They are the pallbearers of democracy, not its defenders. Commenting on the fact that Jeffries and Schumer have so far refused to endorse Mamdani, journalist Mehdi Hasan wrote in a Wednesday column for The Guardian, “If you want to understand why the Democrats are polling at their lowest point for more than three decades, look no further than these two uninspiring Democratic leaders in Congress.” Mehdi only gets it partly right: these two politicians embody not individual cowardice, but a party that supports genocide in Gaza, refuses to stand up to the military-industrial-academic complex, and could not care less about the future they are destroying for young people. 

The American people deserve more than these moral zombies. What is needed is a new party, one unafraid to fight for radical democracy and the dignity of all. A party that calls for the end of staggering inequality, a universal wage, free health care, free quality education for all, housing for everyone, strict gun restrictions, the abolition of poverty, and the dismantling of the warfare state. A party that will slash the bloated defense budget and redirect those trillions into schools, hospitals, homes, and the expansion of social rights. A party that will name criminalized  capitalism for what it is: a death-dealing order of greed, violence, corruption, and disposability.

Fascism does not arrive fully formed; it is cultivated in the soil of despair, in the immiseration engineered by Trump’s cruelty and the Democrats’ cowardice. Left unchallenged, it corrodes everyday life until cruelty appears normal and democracy becomes little more than a corpse draped in patriotic slogans of hate, disappearance, and lawlessness. The Democratic Party cannot halt this descent. It is too compromised by its allegiance to corporate power, too wedded to the financiers of misery, and too invested in the politics of fear to offer anything resembling resistance.

The time for illusions is over. The Democratic Party cannot be reformed, nor can it be trusted to halt the march of authoritarianism. What is required is not the rehabilitation of a party of cowardice, but the creation of a new political formation, one that does not tremble before fascism but confronts it head-on. A movement that refuses to confuse capitalism with democracy, that rejects the barbarism of endless war and the plunder of Wall Street, that refuses to sacrifice children in Gaza or in America’s streets on the altar of profit and power. Such a movement must be rooted in the struggles of ordinary people, grounded in solidarity and sustained by collective courage.

The future belongs to those who can imagine and fight for a radically different order: a socialist democracy grounded in solidarity, justice, and care. It belongs to those who demand free health care and education, who insist on housing and dignity for all, who struggle for racial, gender, and economic equality, and who reject the culture of disposability that treats lives as expendable. It belongs to those willing to rise up, organize, and fight for a world where freedom, justice, and equality are not a privilege of the few, but the common inheritance of all.

If fascism grows in the soil of despair, then resistance must grow in the soil of hope. Against a politics of fear, we must summon a politics of courage. Against the machinery of death, we must build a mass working-class movement with the power to imagine and fight for a future in which socialist democracy is not an empty slogan but a hard-won reality, hammered out in struggle, sustained by solidarity, and carried forward by those who refuse to be ruled by fear. Democracy will not be saved by the cowards of compromise or the apostles of war, but by those in the struggles of workers and the oppressed who risk everything for justice, equality, and hope.

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Poster calling for release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, based on David Solnit’s art work. Photo credit, Code Pink.

In his last minutes of freedom before Israeli Defense Forces arrested him, Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, clad in a medic’s white coat, walked alone toward two Israeli tanks. His captors awaited him amid the rubble of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital. An artist swiftly created a dramatic poster showing Dr. Safiya striding through the ruins of the hospital he directed. The artist, David Solnit, recently updated the poster’s caption. It now reads:   Free Dr. Abu Safiya   Eight months in prison Dec. 27, 2024 – August 27, 2025.

Dr. Safia had already endured agonizing losses at the Kamal Adwan hospital. In late October 2024, an Israeli drone attack killed his son, also a doctor. In a November 2024 attack on the hospital, Dr. Safiya was wounded by shrapnel, but continued working, insisting he would not close the hospital. He witnessed his colleagues being humiliated, beaten, and marched off to prison. By December 27, 2024, when Dr. Safia’s ordeal as a prisoner began, most hospitals in Gaza were non-functional.

On August 28, 2025, Dr. Safiya’s lawyer, Ghaid Ghanem Qassem, visited him in the Ofer Prison. She reports he has lost one third of his body weight. While imprisoned in in the Sde Teiman military Detention Center, located in an Israeli military base in the Negev desert, he showed signs of torture. Subjected to beating with electric shocks and batons, he sustained blows which may also cause him to lose his right eye. Yet his message remains intact:

“I entered in the name of humanity, and I will leave in the name of humanity… We will remain on our land and continue to provide healthcare services to the people, God willing, even from a tent.”

Regimes conducting a genocide have more than one reason to eliminate brave professionals attempting, life by precious life, to undo their inhuman work: doctors not only seek to slow down the dying, but they, like the journalists the Israeli regime so frantically targets, are specially positioned and specially qualified to accurately report on the intensity and nature of Israel’s extermination campaign. Silencing the citizens most capable of reporting on genocidal savagery is a key objective of genocide. 

In one of the most egregious efforts to eliminate a key eyewitness, Israeli naval forces, on May 9, 2025, killed twelve-year-old Mohammed Saeed al-Bardawil, who, as a passerby alongside his father, had witnessed Israel’s March 23^rd pre-dawn execution of 15 unarmed emergency rescue workers. The murdered paramedics had driven their clearly marked ambulances to a spot where they intended to retrieve victims of an earlier attack. The bullets that killed them were fired over six minutes as Israeli soldiers advanced to shoot directly into the survivors’ heads and torsos, afterwards using earth-moving equipment to bury their corpses and vehicles. On that day, Mohammed and his father were detained and made to lie face down near a burning ambulance. He is listed as a source in a well-documented NYT video on the massacre, dated May 2^nd. Eleven days later, an Israeli gunboat fired on his father’s fishing boat, killing Muhammed in his father’s presence off the coast of Gaza’s southern Rafah governate. 

It was less than two weeks ago, on August 25^th, that Israel killed Reuters camera operator Hussam Al Masri and nineteen others, four of them also journalists, in a series of double-tap precision guided aerial attacks on buildings and a stairway of the Al Nasser Hospital. Al Masri was easily targetable as he broadcast a live video feed from a Reuters outpost on a top hospital floor. Describing the second wave of the attack,  Jonathan Cook writes:

And when Israel struck 10 minutes later with two coordinated missiles, it knew that the main victims would be the emergency workers who went to rescue survivors from the first strike and journalists — al-Masri’s friends — who were nearby and rushed to the scene … Nothing was a “mishap.” It was planned down to the minutest detail.

Snipers and weaponized drone operators routinely kill Palestinians who courageously continue to don bullet proof press jackets, set up cameras, and report on Israel’s atrocities. Israel refuses entry to foreign journalists and when brave, grieving, impassioned young Palestinians insist on carefully documenting their people’s agony for Western news outlets, Israel carefully targets them using the traceable phone and broadcasting equipment necessary to their work, before posthumously branding them Hamas operatives. Craven Western officials watch from within Israel’s patron states, discounting brown lives on whatever flimsy pretexts white authorities offer them. Almost daily, new faces appear in an assemblage of photos showing hundreds of journalists Israel has killed. 

Health care workers and journalists who are still alive do their work amid struggles to prevent their families, their colleagues, their neighbors, and of course themselves, from deaths not just by direct massacre but by militarily imposed starvation and its handmaiden, epidemic disease. Surgeons speak of being too weak to stand throughout an operation. Reporters document their own starvation.

Palestinians long for protection, but even the prospect of UN mandated protective forces carries terrifying possibilities. What if “peacekeepers” assigned to monitor Palestinians collect data the Israelis will use to control them? Weaponized “stabilizing forces,” equipped with U.S. surveillance technology, could be used to target, imprison, assassinate, and starve even more Palestinians.

In the summer of 1942, in Munich, Germany, five students and one professor summoned astonishing courage to defy a genocidal regime to which we, reluctantly, have to look if we want to find a racist cruelty comparable to that currently seizing not just Israel’s leadership but, in poll after poll, strong majorities of its non-native population. The students’ collective, called The White Rose, distributed leaflets denouncing Nazi atrocities. “We will not be silent” was the final line of each leaflet. Hans Scholl, age 24, and his sister, Sophie Scholl, age 21, hand-delivered the leaflets to their university campus in February of 1943. The Gestapo arrested them after a janitor spotted them disseminating the leaflets. Four days later, Hans and Sophie, as well as their colleague Christopher Probst, were executed by guillotine.

Jailers’ photos of Sophie and Hans Scholl days before they were beheaded by the Nazis. Photo credit: German federal archives

With Israel’s nuclear arsenal capable of out-killing the Nazi regime over the course of a few minutes, and in the process inciting humanity’s final war; and with its leadership and populace radicalized through decades of fascist impunity to the point of endorsing not just a genocide but multiple, preemptive military strikes upon most of its neighbors at once, we may well be arriving at the moment when, as a result of our having let Israel assassinate, with impunity, the reporters of its crimes, there will be no-one in the outside world left to receive reports. 

The silence we allow ourselves today may soon be involuntary, and absolute. Let us summon up a fraction of Dr. Safia’s, of young Mohammad’s, of Sophie Scholl’s and Hussam al-Masri’s courage and speak while we can. 

The post “We Will Not Be Silent:” Hearing Stilled Voices of the Gaza Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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“There is no longer a credible way to justify US continuing material and diplomatic support for Israel.” – Photo by Matthew TenBruggencate

Failures of the UN Security Council and Western democracies to maintain international humanitarian law has left Palestinians ensnared in genocide, famine, and forced displacement. Despite the clear grounds for intervention, political will remains absent. In this exclusive interview for CounterPunch, international scholar Richard Falk argues that the General Assembly has the precedent and authority under the Uniting for Peace Resolution to bypass the Security Council and act decisively to protect civilians. Gaza offers a crucial test of whether the international system can prioritize people over politics.

Daniel Falcone: Considering the immobilization of the United Nations Security Council and the disastrous letdowns by Western democracies to maintain (IHL) international humanitarian law, what would it take for General Assembly to authorize a peacekeeping force, such as Blue Helmets, to intervene in Gaza?

Richard Falk: Both the humanitarian and moral imperatives and legal mechanisms are strongly supportive of an armed protective force to ensure the establishment of a permanent Gaza ceasefire, the delivery of food, water, fuel, and medicine to the surviving traumatized and largely malnourished Palestinians that continue to be confined to the killing fields of Gaza. And yet at the same time Gazan Palestinians are being openly threatened with post-genocide forced dispossession from their Gaza homeland or re-occupied as recommended in a variety of plans under consideration without meaningful Palestinian participation. This clashes with the basic human rights commitment to uphold the inalienable right of a nation and its people to self-determination.

The Uniting for Peace Resolution [GA Res. 377(V)] is a flexible instrument empowering the UN General Assembly to act when the Security Council is paralyzed by the right of veto possessed by the five permanent members (P5) in critical situations of global security, war prevention, genocide prevention, and humanitarian emergency. It was initially adopted as a Cold War initiative of the Western UN members to have a means to circumvent Soviet vetoes. UPR was most successfully relied upon in 1956 to secure the withdrawal of French, UK, and Israeli forces from Egyptian territory in a situation where a threat of wider war was addressed by the agreed deployment of a blue helmets UN peacekeeping force. This move supported by the US against its closest European allies and Israel was the high point in the subordination of geopolitical alignments to the core anti-aggression provisions of the UN Charter and has never been repeated. Washington think-tanks and foreign policy advisors have consistently criticized international legal commitments when in tension with alliance relations.

In the aftermath of the Kosovo War of 1999, it became obvious that the global order needed a basis for armed intervention as a last resort if genocide prevention was to become a meaningful component of the international order that emerged after World War II. Previously, in the colonial era, European states often claimed to be engaging in ‘humanitarian interventions’ to disguise their true motivations, which usually involved the exercise of political control and economic exploitation of the country in the Global South so targeted. The Global South was suspicious of such protentional encroachments on their sovereignty and political independence, reacting both to the abuse associated with past claims of humanitarian intervention and objecting to language that seemed to associate what is ‘humanitarian’ with discretion to engage in ‘intervention.’ The UN Charter addresses the issue obliquely in Article 2(7) that prohibits UN intervention in the ‘domestic affairs’ of member states except in instances of UN enforcement operations as authorized by the procedures of Chapter VII of the Charter addressing authorizations of force in the interests of maintaining international peace and security.

The attempted reconciliation of sovereignty with a UN protective role in desperate humanitarian crises became known as “The Responsibility to Protect” or ‘R2P’ with genocide prevention explicitly in mind, adopted in 2005 at a UN Summit as a norm calling for Security Council implementation as circumstances warranted. R2P was discredited by NATO’s 2011 regime-changing intervention in Libya in disguised form being proposed as a humanitarian protective move to protect the allegedly threatened civilian population of Benghazi by Libyan armed forces. Fooled by the humanitarian trappings of the requested UN authorization of force, Russia and China that refrained from using their right of veto no longer trusted the US and its European partners to confine intervention to humanitarian protection.

At this point, given the emergency conditions in Gaza, the General Assembly could extend the Uniting for Peace rationale for self-empowerment in circumstances of UN inaction to the urgency of fashioning a meaningful response to famine and Israeli defiance to comply with international law or the rulings of the ICJ. If this was done immediately it would create a mutually reinforcing legal foundation for UN action including the authorization, funding, and equipping of an armed protective force as the only remaining option given the military escalation involving Gaza City and one million sheltering Palestinians who face slaughter if they refuse evacuation orders that entail facing ultra-hazardous conditions imperiling life and minimal health.

In many respects Gaza presents a unique situation that has confronted the civilian population of Gaza for the past two years since October 7 of at once being entrapped within the lethal combat zones of Gaza with no secure sheltering safe zones, widespread destruction of homes and residential areas, mounting hunger and disease, destruction of habitat both understood as cultural heritage (sacred sites, historic buildings, museums, schools and universities) ecological viability. It would be a final betrayal of law and justice if the perpetrators of the crimes committed by the prolonged and unabashed genocide carried out in Gaza would be allowed to preside over the establishment of Gaza governance, plans for reconstruction, and arrangements for peace, justice, and security.

As of the start of 2025 Israel’s sophisticated manipulation of political discourse has begun rapidly losing the Legitimacy War, even in the complicit countries, on the symbolic battlefields of law and morality, and this is a significant factor in determining political outcomes in major conflicts since World War II. A major exception to Israel’s loss of control over the politics of perception is the maintenance of the largely uncontested identity of Hamas as a hateful terrorist entity that should be permanently excluded from any future formal role in the administration of Gaza. This reductionist view of Hamas is a triumph of Israeli state propaganda as accepted throughout the West as a sign of credibility of mainstream critics, especially when comes to stepping back from all out support of Israel, as illustrated by the German, British, Canadian, and French qualified recognition of Palestinian statehood often accompanied by a ritualized denunciation of Hamas. This neglects the fact that Hamas won an international certified election in 2006 largely on the basis of its resistance to Israeli unlawful occupation and sought a long-term ceasefire with Israel lasting up to 50 years, a proposal explained in detail to me while I was serving as Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine by Hamas leaders in Gaza, Doha, and Cairo, and evidently promoted in Washington at the time, but to no avail as Israel was insistent on keeping Hamas on the terrorist list and determined to continue using Gaza as a free zone for the testing of new combat tactics and weapons innovations.

After years of blockading Gaza since 2007 and otherwise abusing the population in defiance of the obligations of international law with respect to belligerent occupation as set forth in the 4^th Geneva Convention, a cornerstone of international humanitarian law, the attack of October 7 was instantly characterized as ‘terrorism’ rather than as a hybrid event that acknowledged the Palestinian right of resistance while criticizing verified violations of international humanitarian law in terms of the killing of civilians. Israeli propaganda sensationalized these violation of the law of war through exaggeration and inflammatory, false allegations of barbarism, the refusal to treat their own abusive behavior as a necessary part of the context, and the suspicious failure of the Netanyahu government to heed highly reliable warnings of an impending attack given to Tel Aviv leading to uninvestigated impressions that Israel allowed the attack to happen providing a pretext for launching this massive retaliation.

Such factors give plausibility to the interpretation of Israel’s recourse to genocide as not directly about land and people, and not about security, self-defense, and revenge as is the hasbara claim. Indirectly, it was the largest application of the Dahiya Doctrine by which Israel adopted the doctrine of grossly disproportionate responses to hostile provocations, rationalizing a means to strengthen the deterrence of future provocations. The Dahiya Doctrine was condemned as violating international law in the Goldstone Report prepared under UN auspice after the Israeli military incursion in Gaza at the end of 2008, extending into 2009.

A final relevant consideration is the refutation of all Israeli claims of sovereign rights or occupational authority in Gaza. The Advisory Opinion of the ICJ issued on July 19, 2024 in a near unanimous decision on the applicable law concluded that Israel had so persistently violated its primary duty of an Occupying Power to protect the status quo of an occupied people and ensure its safety and security that it declared that it lost its right to be legally Occupy and was under a legal duty to withdraw from the Gaza and the West Bank within a year and forego any further efforts to control the governance of these Palestinian territories that have so long suffered from Israel’s unlawful policies and practices, culminating in apartheid followed by genocide.

It is against this background that recourse to armed intervention in the form of a UN protective force is the only hope for constructing a serious challenge to Israel’s evident and still active plans to achieve Palestinian erasure as a political presence whether by continuing on the path to extermination or by inducing a Palestinian acquiescence to the Zionist objective of establishing Greater Israel, a one state solution encompassing the whole of mandate or Ottoman Palestine, or more grandiosity of extending the sovereignty from the Nile to the Euphrates, which mean displacing or repressing regional peoples other than the Palestinians, and seriously encroaching upon their territorial sovereignty.

Of course, the formation of a responsible armed protective force remains a daunting practical challenge despite the overwhelming legal, political, and moral case for making it happen. At the very least efforts should be made not to allow Israel to benefit from its crimes by being rewarded in the peace process by shaping the design of future Gaza governance and the Palestinian victimization being further punished by excluding their participation in any future international efforts at peacebuilding in Gaza or the West Bank.

Daniel Falcone: You often stress faith in basic humanity. With the growing global protests and changing views of the public, how can social movements pressure state actors effectively in your view?

Richard Falk: I suspect this may be a misleading impression that may be created by the fact that I have opposed the excessive and abusive use of power by the West in this historical period, but in other settings I would have more faith in the regulatory wisdom of those holding the reins of governmental power than in the wishes and values of people who are susceptible to manipulation and propaganda as the triumphs of ultra-right populism throughout the world currently illustrates, and earlier the rise of European fascism confirms.

The legitimacy of elected governments as in the United States is undermined by the recent rise in influence on the policy process associated by special interests in the private sector but with often controlling influence when it comes to the shaping of government behavior. This is particularly true with respect to the privilege of the wealthy about taxes and inheritance, excessive funding of bloated military and intelligence budgets, and exaggeration of the national interest in relation to alleged security threats associated with remote conflicts and political developments. The US government in the domain of foreign policy, and especially with respect to the use of force overtly or covertly, shows little deference to the opinions of the citizenry, most dramatically illustrated by the unconditional support given Israel despite its defiance of international law and morality, and commitment to policies increasingly treated by public opinion and the mainstream media as ‘genocide.’

The national crisis at the present is a compound of failures: a government subservient to the priorities of special interests rather than the wellbeing of its own citizens or the public good of humanity; a public depoliticized by state propaganda that is not constrained by evidence or truthfulness, and a political opposition that is weak and also subject to similar patterns of responsiveness to special interests and monied pressures. This inadequacy of the Democratic Party as a source of benevolent government is recently and unabashedly illustrated by the refusal of the party leadership to back Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral election, despite his decisive victory in the primaries, and a platform that stresses the wellbeing of people rather than subservience to special interests, including the pro-Israel lobby that has used abundant funds to capture bipartisan unconditional national support for Israel, despite its Gaza campaign and denial of Palestinian rights in their own homeland. Also, unfortunate is the virtual absence of checks and balances to restrain the quixotic and anti-democratic maneuvers of the Trump presidency. There is no longer a functioning independent Supreme Court or Congress. This allows Trump to exert near absolute control over the political process in a manner dangerous for the country and the world, and a blatant repudiation of democracy in a constitutional republic.

Ever since the a-bombs were used in 1945 and the development of nuclear weapons in subsequent years, governments whether democratic or not, were subject to the will of the leader on questions that could eventuate in apocalyptic catastrophe whether by design, miscalculation, or accident. In this vital domain of policy, people and even elected officials are excluded. Decisions are ultimately made by the leader with access to ‘the nuclear football,’ and war plans for use and threat are matters of high secrecy as Daniel Ellsberg documented in his book, The Doomsday Machine, (2017) which disclosed dangerous war plans never disclosed to the public or even to Congress.

Responding to ecological challenges poses analogous issues, especially in the context of climate change, where the avoidance of future catastrophe depends on acting cooperatively in the global public interest. Despite the scientific consensus warning of the dangers of inaction and non-attentiveness, neither government nor the people exhibit the kind of mobilized consciousness needed for an effective global framework dedicated to ecological resilience and guided by allocating responsibility on the basis of perpetrating harm and ability to bear fiscal harm, and strong enough to curtail the efforts of corporations and others to retain the established order without addressing longer term threats. 

Daniel Falcone: The UN supported IPC (which leans conservative on methodology) and has declared famine in Gaza. It’s only the fifth such declaration in its history, as cited by the sharp analyst Idrees Ahmad. He cited previous famines in Somalia 2011, South Sudan 2017, 2020, and Sudan 2024. Considering this extreme classification, why do you think international responses remain bland and limited to boilerplate statements of concern rather than constructive paths like no-fly zones or UN peacekeepers?

Richard Falk: The simple answer is because there is not a strong enough political will to act on the part of governments critical of Israel, especially given US continuing support for Israel as evidenced diplomatically by reliance on the veto to block even a mandatory permanent ceasefire decision in the UN Security Council. Those former supporters, including NATO stalwarts UK, France, Canada, and Germany while stepping back, and antagonizing the Israeli government by tendering a recognition of Palestinian statehood, which even if hedged in various ways, was an expression of rising criticism of the latest phases of Israel’s tactics in Gaza, especially related to the blockage of humanitarian aid for a society officially declared to be in the midst of a famine with verified reports of daily deaths due to starvation and malnutrition, particularly affecting young children and the elderly.

While this step back from the Western solidarity with Israel is significant, it is mainly relevant with respect to the symbolic Legitimacy War, which the Palestinian are now winning decisively. We should take notice of the reality that in prior anti-colonial struggles waged since 1945 the side that politically prevailed in these conflicts was not the side that controlled the battlefield but rather the side that seized and held the high moral and legal ground in the conflict. In this sense, the emergence of Israel as ‘a pariah state’ may have more lasting political weight than recognition of Palestinian statehood or even an arms embargo. Thomas Friedman, always a trustworthy weathervane of establishment thinking in the US, has taken notice of this development in a column in the NY Times on August 25 with the provocative title, “Israel’s Gaza Campaign is Making It a Pariah State.” Although typically hedged by including a misleading demonization of Hamas and silence as to Palestinian self-determination rights, it can be viewed as a political surrender by the West in the all-important legitimacy war.

The more complex response to your question concerns the operationalization of an effective response in view of the geopolitical obstacles. What seems called for is an armed protective force supplemented by a no-fly zone over the whole of Gaza with sufficient capabilities to offer safety and security to the surviving Palestinian population. Whether Israel could be induced to consent to such an arrangement is extremely doubtful, and almost certainly the US under Trump would resist, if for no other reason, than opposition to any displacement of geopolitical primacy by deference to such a dramatic UN initiative.

It seems questionable, especially in view of the passive complicity of the leading Arab countries and Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), whether governments would put their citizens at mortal risk by undertaking such a mission even given the famine emergency and the widespread civil society support for such a rescue operation courageously undertaken despite dire risks. Israeli punitive responses to the Freedom Flotilla efforts to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza are suggestive of the dangers of attempting a forced entry to Gaza under UN auspices. The forthcoming Global Sumud Flotilla sailing from Tunisia, consisting of some 40 ships will further test Israeli resilience.

Daniel Falcone: Ahmad also stated that last year, USAID’s Famine Early Warning System sounded the alarms about the situation in Gaza. Biden forced a retraction and Trump only delivered on subsequent deterioration in this area. This was months before Israel blocked aid and later replaced UN aid distribution points with four GHF sites where Gazans were fired at. How should the public interpret the credibility of governments unwilling to act?

Richard Falk: As earlier responses suggest, it is a matter of mobilizing the political will to bear the costs and uncertain risks of challenging Israel’s behavior in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, however much it was itself acting unlawfully and now lacks any authority to perform as the legitimate occupying power. The US conduct dating back to the Biden presidency suggests a US unconditional commitment to Israel’s Gaza campaign. It is a matter of geopolitics taking clear, if disguised, dominance of the policy process, and a consequent disregard of the inhibitions of law, morality, and public opinion.

Now that the famine conditions are evident and combined with Israel’s defiant escalating violence directed at a starving, malnourished, and traumatized Palestinian survivors in Gaza, reinforced by the killing of truth-telling journalists and attacks directed at medical workers and facilities, there is no longer a credible way to justify US continuing material and diplomatic support for Israel. The Trump presidency is virtually silent as far as offering Israel sentiments of solidarity but continues to be active as by the recent sanctioning of the brave truth-telling UN special rapporteur on Occupied Palestine and officials of the International Criminal Court for acting against Israel.

Daniel Falcone: What are your thoughts on R2P and the ability to exercise it now? Is it time for the issuing of a no-fly zone and armed intervention at the IGO level?

Richard Falk: R2P was conceived in the aftermath of the Kosovo War in 1999, as an internationalized alternative to colonial era ‘humanitarian intervention’ by which the Global West used humanitarian arguments to disguise imperially motivated interventions, which usually were designed to protect ideological and economic goals. R2P was supposed to be a post-colonial expression of global responsibility for genocide prevention and other severe situations of danger arising from state repression or crimes against ethnic minorities. R2P was invoked in 2011 by NATO members of the Security Council in response to alleged dangers faced by the civilian population of Benghazi threatened by attacks from advancing military forces of the Qaddafi government in Libya.

Skeptical members of the Security Council, including Russia and China, were persuaded to abstain rather than veto the reliance on R2P to authorize a no-fly-zone and a protective armed force by reassurance that the goals would be confined to the humanitarian mission. R2P was discredited by NATO forces immediately engaging in a regime-changing military operation that resulted in producing chaos in Libya and the extra-legal execution of Qaddafi by a street mob. As a result, it was not relied upon in relation to prolonged Syrian or Iraqi civil strife as there was no longer any willingness on the part of geopolitical rivals to entrust uses of force to the West based on humanitarian reassurances.

The situation in Gaza is so desperate, and so widely perceived, that it might enable a Security Council mandate to invoke R2P, this time with the US refraining from exercising its right of veto by abstaining from a proposal to form a UN Protective Force as an urgent priority. If the US persists by vetoing such a decision, then by analogy to the Uniting for Peace Resolution, the procedural stalemate in the Security Council could justify the shift of burdens for the activation of R2P to the General Assembly. The UN for all its limitations has demonstrated a creative adaptation to overcome some of its operational shortcomings.

A notable illustration is the HRC development of Special Procedures, including the use of unpaid experts appointed by consensus in the 47-member Council Assembly, and recently vividly exemplified by the contribution of the Italian special rapporteur for Occupied Palestine who has analyzed and documented the Israeli military campaign in Gaza through her three influential reports on the Gaza genocide. I believe that the desperation of the situation in Gaza is an ideal context in which to make use of R2P as a mechanism of last resort to uphold fundamental humanitarian values.

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Photograph Source: Matt Johnson – CC BY 2.0

These days when I’m asked how I’m doing, I usually reply, “I’m fine until I start following the news.” It’s all so depressing. Donald Trump is everywhere. On front pages as well as in social media, DJT dominates. A day doesn’t go by without headlines mentioning something involving Trump. Tariffs? Attacks on the Federal Reserve or some other congressionally established institution? ICE? A recent court ruling for or against him? His Nobel Peace Prize quest? One could ask if his omnipresence is intentional. Does he set out to dominate the 24/7 news cycle or is his presence merely a reflection of his frenetic pace? “Attention, not cash, is the form of power that most interests him,” Ezra Klein wrote in the Times. Whether intentional or not, his media presence buries deeper stories. He diverts our attention from anything else. 

Trump stories appear, then quickly disappear. Today’s headlines have their own limited time cycle. We are now focused on Trump’s firings at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the fate of Susan Monarez as well as pressure on Jerome Powell and Lisa Cook at the Federal Reserve. What will be next? Will the next Trump headline bury the CDC story or the one about the Federal Reserve? Already we have trouble finding information about what happened to the U.S. Institute of Peace where its president, George Moose, was escorted out by local police. 

Like an avalanche, Trump news gathers speed and buries everything in its path only to pop up in another place. It’s exhausting, and overwhelming. As for intentionality, the former Trump chief adviser Steve Bannon described the strategy in 2018, “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” 

I asked a former CNN executive if true journalism is over with Trump’s domination. This is his response:

“Those believing journalism is on its last legs are mistaken. Certain people will always seek out information from reliable sources. There’s the catch: the seekers are fewer and fewer. There are also fewer and fewer reliable sources, some thriving, others fading away.

It’s true that media houses are distancing themselves from news output. The priority for executives is keeping the cash flowing. Venture capitalists and hedge funders have no interest in sending money to newsrooms. Crypto and AI is far more interesting. Sure, those products may be nothing more than 21st Century buggy whips and hula hoops, but buyers are lined up.

Some observers wax prolific about a declining audience for journalism. The more experienced know the true importance of readers, viewers and listeners who remain supportive of media outlets as opposed to those needing an hourly dose of celebrity, glamor or hate. Some media proprietors have made the lowest common denominator their choice.”

The former CNN executive is optimistic about the future of media, although he has seen and lived through several media outlets disappearing. There are those of us who do believe in fact-based media outlets. But are we enough to keep the media ship afloat? A recent story by David D. Kirkpatrick on “How much is Trump profiting off the Presidency?” in The New Yorker is an excellent example of the kind of long-term reporting that is needed. 

But there is a difference between longer articles in a weekly magazine – even The New Yorker now has a New Yorker Daily – and the 24/7 news cycle which feeds “an hourly dose of celebrity, glamor or hate.” DJT and his people have been able to appeal to a sizeable audience. “We want our news, and we want it now” is the current reality. The 24/7 news cycle gives instantaneous satisfaction; Trump fulfils that need. 

This is how the former CNN executive sees Trump’s relation to the media:

“Donald Trump was chosen by Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp. Mr. Thomson understands the media business better than all the rest. Mr. Thomson found a true believer in the power of television with highly addicted viewers, typically those offended by smart people. This was – still is – the Fox audience. The money flowed in from cable TV subscriptions and advertisers selling cheap goods.”

The relationship between Trump and the media is perfectly symmetrical. He wants to be front page every day. The media believes he sells. The result is that the public gets its dose of Trump news daily. So whether or not Trump sets out to headline the daily news, he manages to be there. The media can’t get enough of him – witness Maggie Haberman’s ongoing fascination with DJT in the Times. Nor is this something new. An Axios graphic in September, 2017, showed “The insane news cycle of Trump’s presidency in 1 chart.” 

How to get out of Trump’s dominated news? “How do you push back against a tidal wave?” political communication expert Dannagal Young asked. Besides retreating to some island with no connections, I began an experiment. At social gatherings I count the minutes before the conversation turns to Trump. Talk about the hot weather and climate change? An interesting movie or song that just came out? A book that’s worth suggesting to others? See how long it takes before the subject turns to Trump.

I’m not saying that Trump should be ignored. What I am suggesting is that his media domination is part of his personality and program. Being front and center is essential to who he is and how he functions. “[Trump’s] desire for that attention is so deep, it’s coming from such a deep place, he needs it so pathologically,” observed Chris Hayes, author of The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.  

Ignoring Trump may be one way of countering him and what he stands for. But I cannot promise not to read about him or write about him. What he is doing to the United States and the world cannot be ignored, and that’s not Maggie Haberman-like fascination. 

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View from Glastonbury Tor, August 30, 2025. Photo: The author.

Land of miracles

I don’t know how we wound up on Pilgrim’s Way, legendary site of King Arthur and Queen Guenevere’s graves. My wife Harriet and I stopped in Glastonbury last Sunday, intending only to recharge our EV on the way to Stonehenge, but there we were, trudging up Wearyall Hill in the rain.  Joseph of Arimathea is supposed to have traveled the same path 500 years before Arthur, planting his staff and seeing it sprout into a “Holy Thorn” tree (crataegus monogyna), incarnation of Jesus’s crown of thorns. This was a land of miracles, and I wanted one. I looked up at the sky and just that second, saw the sun break through the clouds. I quickly checked my phone for news, hoping the Supreme Court gained a conscience or that lightning struck players on a certain, West Palm Beach Florida golf course.  

Dialogue in Bristol

We travelled to Glastonbury from Bristol earlier that day after meeting for breakfast with our friend Wade Rathke. Wade is head of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), founded in 1970 by him and Gary Delgado. At its peak, it had some 1200 local chapters and 500,000 members in more than 100 U.S. cities.  ACORN waged successful campaigns in support of minority voter registration, living wage laws, and fair housing, among other things, until a right-wing smear campaign (in addition to some self-goals), nearly destroyed the organization in 2009. Since then, it’s regrouped and re-focused on international work, and is now leading ambitious housing, corporate accountability and environmental health campaigns in Latin America, Eastern Europe and the U.K. It was Wade’s ongoing support for Anthropocene Alliance – the environmental non-profit founded in 2017 by Harriet and me — that led us to meet up in Bristol. 

Wade is an energetic man with a sweep of white hair, prominent nose, and attentive blue eyes. He was born in Laramie, raised in New Orleans and gained his organizing chops in Little Rock. His accent reveals his Southern upbringing, and his speech is peppered with expressions like “that dog don’t hunt” and “all sizzle and no steak.” He’s a great talker but his confidence doesn’t get in the way of his ability to listen. After Harriet and I described some of the challenges of grassroots organizing, including the cost of underwriting it, we all fell into silence. After a little while, I broke it with flattery and a few cliches of my own: 

“Wade, we’re like the fox and you’re like the hedgehog; we have many wiles, but you have one big one. 

Right now, everybody agrees that grassroots organizing is the only way to halt the rise of fascism in the U.S. and U.K. In the U.S., the courts are disinclined to bail us out, Congress sure won’t, and when push comes to shove, the military will salute and follow orders from Trump. In the U.K., Labour seems to have a death-wish. It has cut budgets and services where it should increase them, for example social welfare, and raised them where it should cut them, for example defense. 

Democratic ships of state on both sides of the Atlantic are going down unless people go into the streets and demand change. Wade, you’re one of the people that really knows how to organize. Philanthropies ought to be throwing money at you to help fight this thing!”

Wade took a few beats before replying: “The folks I’ve met at the Malcolm X Community Center here in Bristol have been coming up to me and saying: ‘What are you gonna do about ‘that man’? How are YOU gonna stop him?’ 

I felt like they were blaming me – and why shouldn’t they? We didn’t do enough to prevent Trump’s rise. We just didn’t. And unless the Labour Party gets its act together, the same thing will happen here. Nigel Farage is waiting in the wings with his MAGA cap. 

And as for organizing, there’s never any guarantees. Some people are too tired, beaten, or scared to get organized. Others aren’t mad or hungry enough.  Eventually, they will be, and we need to be ready. But will it happen in time? I just don’t know. We may need a miracle.” 

We chatted some more and then said our goodbyes. Wade was flying back to New Orleans, and we were headed down to Stonehenge, on the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. William Blake painted and drew it several times, and I wanted inspiration for my planned monograph on the artist. He thought the builders of Stonehenge were Druids who practiced human sacrifice and cultivated war; their monument, he said, was a “building of eternal death, whose proportions are eternal despair.”  I wanted to see for myself.

Stonehenge, c. 2500 BCE, Wiltshire, England. Photo: The author.

Unplanned stop in Glastonbury

Heading south, we decided to stay off the motorways and stick to small roads; rural Somerset and Wiltshire have rolling hills with distant prospects and quaint villages with thatched cottages, and we wanted to see them. Our GPS however, obliged us too well. After about 30 minutes, we realized we’d gone far out of our way and were now approaching Glastonbury. Needing to recharge the car, we decided to stop there. 

The name Glastonbury is familiar because of the music festival held eight miles away in Pilton, and the ruined abbey, originally founded in the 8^th century. After charging the car, we walked up High Street for a cup of tea.  What a silly town! Nearly every other shop sold crystals, charms, herbal remedies, candles and books on witchcraft and paganism. Tourists here are a mix of pensioners (like me), New Age gurus, Wiccans, goths, hippies, dope smokers (in the alleys), Christians, Arthurians, and families with dogs and kids wanting a day out. 

Despite its thriving tourist industry, Glastonbury is a bit shabby, like almost everywhere in the U.K. For more than 15 years, under Tory rule, county budgets across the country were cut while expenses for social care, homelessness, education and environmental protection rose. As a result, most towns and cities are plagued by empty storefronts and decaying infrastructure, and its residents by unemployment or under-employment (“shit jobs”), poverty (especially child poverty), and food insecurity.

Refreshed by our tea, we were ready to see the sights. In a discarded National Trust brochure, I read about the fabled Glastonbury Tor, a nearby, conical hill on top of which sit remains of the 15^th century church of St. Michael. Deep below the church, I also read, there exists a cave (according to legend), leading to the fairy realm of Annwn where lives Gwyn ab Nudd, the lord of the Celtic underworld. Gwyn was renowned for heroic feats, including helping King Arthur seize the comb and scissors belonging to the ferocious boar, Twrch Trwyth. Remembering what Wade told us about needing a miracle to stop Trump (a ferocious bore if ever there was one) we decided to brave the rain squalls and ascend the Tor. 

Part way up, we paused at the gate leading to Chalice Hill, where Joseph of Arimathea is supposed to have buried the Holy Grail, the cup used by Jesus during the last supper, and later by Joseph to catch the savior’s blood during the crucifixion. The legend is of considerable antiquity and much honored, but nobody ever discusses how Joseph is supposed to have gotten to Glastonbury from Jerusalem, circa 33 CE. On reflection, however, I realized it might not have been so hard. He didn’t have to go through airport security or pass a customs inspection. He wouldn’t have had to brave the endless cue to board the Eurostar in Paris. In fact, as a Palestinian from Judea, he wouldn’t be allowed to enter the U.S. or the U.K. at all today! Back then, there were no passports or visas. All he needed to come to Glastonbury was a boat, a donkey cart to pick him up at the harbor, and a few good pairs of sandals.

About 20 minutes into our trek, we approached a fellow pilgrim – a man about 25-year-old, bearded, wearing a daypack and holding a walking stick. He slowed when he heard me telling Harriet that many people believe that Joseph of Arimathea was the possessor of “those feet” in Blake’s famous lyric, but that I wasn’t so sure:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

“The Holy Lamb of God,” from the Gospel of St. John, I said, clearly referred to Christ. Was Blake saying that both Joseph and Jesus were on that boat from Palestine? Why, of all the places on earth, I added, did they pick Roman-occupied Britain? That’s like going from the frying pan into the fire. 

That’s when the stranger piped up:  “But it must have been Joseph who came here. There are many, early sources that speak about Christ’s disciples in England, including Eusebius and Hilary of Poitiers. In the 12^th century, Robert de Boron wrote that Joseph sent the Holy Grail to Britain.  Why do you scoff at the idea that Joseph – and maybe his cousin Jesus too — came to England? There’s an 18-year gap in gospel accounts of Christ’s life. What’s to say he didn’t do a bit of traveling?”

I replied: “You mean, he took an extended gap year abroad?” 

My new friend answered: “Exactly! And there are other clues in the poem suggesting Joseph was the owner of “those feet.” He was a tinsmith, a metalworker, and Blake’s poem has refences to metalic weapons:

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

I’d clearly met my match and said so. Harriet and I said adieu and departed to finish our climb up Glastonbury Tor – 140 stone steps and a sequence of concrete ramps – to the ruins of the church of St. Michael. When we arrived, I cast my gaze in all directions, looking for more portent or signs. What about the swallowtail kite who seemed forever to hang in the air, held there by the steady rush of wind? I searched the news on my phone again – nothing. Deflated but undaunted, we headed back to town. We went down Chalice Hill, Wearyall Hill, Pilgrim’s Way and the High Street. We brushed past dogs and children, Wiccans and pensioners, dope smokers and Arthurians. This time, I walked more slowly past the New Age tchotchke shops and bookstores; I briefly browsed in one. Then we got back into our fully-charged car and drove back up to our flat in Norwich.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Vengeance.

It undeniably infects human affairs.

Parents observe it as their toddlers navigate playground dynamics: one child hits another; the other strikes back. Domestic feuds and old grudges can metastasize into jealousy, schadenfreude, and—if unchecked—retaliation. Belligerent drivers trigger micro-aggressions that can morph into road rage. In the extreme, assault and murder seem to beg for a commensurate response. Intentional harm breeds reciprocal foul. Whether on unabashed display or buried deeply beneath the surface, this base retributive impulse is potent, stealthy, and addictive—a perfect storm for inciting reactive violence. Society, to its peril, severely underestimates its capacity to do irrevocable damage.

Communally, this tit for tat unfolds with lethal consequences. Laws and government policies deftly conceal and enable the visceral thirst for vengeance through various forms of state-sponsored killing. This phenomenon particularly underpins two contemporary polarizing issues: the death penalty and the Gaza genocide. As the famed television personality and death penalty abolitionist Rev. Fred Rogers articulated, any form of the revenge model teaches children the patently hazardous lesson that two wrongs make a right. His wisdom rings true in both these cases.

The urge for retribution is insidious and subtle, often rendering it unrecognizable. It clouds objectivity, stifling judgment and self-awareness. It camouflages as false notions of “deterrence,” “public safety and security,” “justice,” a “Biblical mandate,” and “a lasting peace,” among other rationalizations. Many individuals and societies, therefore, vehemently deny any accusations of vengeful motivation—even for genocide—while unsuspectedly succumbing to its irresistible call.

The Shadow of the Holocaust

I should know. I once unwittingly operated under revenge’s cunning spell. As a third-generation Holocaust survivor, I used to experience the natural desire for vengeance against those who murdered my ancestors in cold blood. For years, that overpowering feeling contributed to my support of capital punishment. If I could not carry out that reprisal with my own hands, then I felt the state should do so by proxy against other murderers. “They should take ‘em out back and shoot ‘em,” some family suggested; “eye for an eye,” the Bible reinforced.

I was not alone among Jews in the wake of the Shoah (Holocaust) who harbored such feelings. Many certainly overcame rage and the urge for recompense, notably Elie Wiesel, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Albert Einstein, and Eva Mozes Kor. Other survivors and descendants like me held on to the pain and anger that grew from direct and intergenerational trauma.

A personal experience as recently as 2008 illuminated this reality for me. I was watching Mark Herman’s film adaptation of John Boyne’s fictional Holocaust novel “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” alongside a child survivor who was also a respected friend. In the climactic scene, the Nazis accidentally gassed to death a concentration camp commandant’s young son, who had befriended the film’s eponymous character. When the bereaved SS officer wept and screamed in agony upon discovering his child among the dead, my friend responded by flatly stating, “Good. Now they know how it feels.” In that fleeting moment, after watching a charged movie that so vividly portrayed the suffering of my ancestors, I agreed. While revenge was neither blissful nor sweet, for those few seconds, it felt bitterly just. Even after that emotion departed from my heart, how could I judge my friend for seeking to avenge his family members whom he had witnessed the Nazis murder, especially when I myself could identify with his reaction? We were only human, after all, living in the shadow of the wholesale mass murder of our people.

Unveiling Vengeance on Death Row

My vengeful impulse shifted later that same year when I started working as a Jewish prison chaplain in Canada with individuals whose convictions would have rendered them eligible for execution in certain United States jurisdictions. I learned what motivated those men and women to commit monstrous crimes, and I saw that many changed over time. They were not inherently evil. On the contrary, many began engaging in sincere repentance while safely incarcerated and no longer a threat to the public.

As I witnessed these human beings transform, so too did my views. My prison experiences unveiled my unconscious bias toward retribution, and I began to see it more clearly for what it was: an understandable wish for payback. In part to help break the cycle of violence into which I was born—and that I had been inadvertently perpetuating—I decided to launch into activism for death penalty abolition.

Since then, as an ordained cantor and co-founder of “L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty,” I have directly communicated for years with scores of condemned Americans— many now executed—as well as some of their victims’ loved ones. I have experienced the impact of government policies that shroud the collective appetite for vengeance in the form of psychologically and physically torturous state-sponsored executions. This pattern invariably repeats, even when murder victims’ family membersexpressly call for mercy. That tragically familiar scene unfurled again just this past week ahead of the United States’ most recent execution of Curtis Windom in Florida, whose governor predictably dismissed all such protests before he put him to death. As before, a political leader submitted to the will of death penalty advocates, many of whom harbor the mentality of “the more suffering, the better,” no matter if the existing execution methods of lethal injection, gassing, and the firing squad are unconscionable Nazi legacies.

Wielding Revenge in Gaza

A similar yearning to fulfill a deep-seated bloodlust has significantly influenced the Israeli government’s response to Hamas’ October 7, 2023, onslaught and the ongoing hostage crisis. That pogrom constituted the deadliest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, and the triggering of that historical memory and intergenerational trauma combined with the sheer devastation of the Hamas attack to create an unprecedented stimulus for violent response. Many have understood the incalculable brutality of that unjustifiable act of terrorism by observing that it, too, was in part a vengeful response to decades of suffering that Palestinians have endured since Israel’s 1948 independence, to which much of the Muslim world refers as the Nakba (“catastrophe.”) Since that unfathomable day nearly two years ago, Israeli hostage family members have increasingly demanded that government officials call for a ceasefire in Gaza to bring home their loved ones. Yet, the state has persisted in catering to hardliners who, motivated by vindictive extremism combined with Messianicreligious fundamentalism, use the excuse of Hamas recalcitrance to justify carrying out a genocidal policy of mass killing, destruction of societal infrastructure, and starvation. Pope Leo XIV rightfully labeled the outcome “collective punishment.” The effect strikingly evokes capital punishment, whose “machinery of death” so often overrides the wishes of murder victims’ families.

The terrorist organization Hamas, well-versed in revenge dynamics, strategically releases horrific videos of suffering and emaciated Israeli hostages such as Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski with the intention of stirring the popular bloodlust. On cue, Machiavellian and megalomaniacalleaders like Benjamin Netanyahu and convicted felon Donald J. Trump bow to the will of the riled hoi polloi so that they might hold onto power. Israel, in turn, continues its campaign of obliterating tens of thousands of innocent civilians who become martyrs, thereby playing directly into Hamas’ hands. Meanwhile, my coreligionists who are unable to see beyond vengeance’s capped lens project displaced anger onto those of us who dare to name the genocide that Israel’s government perpetuates.

Let there be no doubt: there is a time for fighting—even killing—to fend off lethal aggressors. The Axis Powers during the Second World War immediately come to mind, among many other examples. In the current human evolutionary phase, nations consequently must maintain strong militaries. Still, there is a time for even the most just wars to end, lest they cross the thin red line into unleashing a disproportionate force that cloaks collective punishment, as the Gaza genocide confirms.

Causality is complex, rarely reducible to a single point. As with any military conflict, multiple other geopolitical and historical factors are at play in the spiraling tempest that is Israel/Palestine. Likewise, various political considerations unrelated to the lex talionis psyche determine a state’s utilization of capital punishment. The carnal drive for vengeance, however, remains integral to both execution chamber protocols and to the policies that have buried countless emaciated children in the Gaza rubble. Neither would exist without the primitive urge of the revenge response that has propelled the cycle of violence and plagued humanity since time immemorial. Restorative justice practices, including harm acknowledgment, repentance, repair, forgiveness, and reconciliation, are the only viable means of breaking this fatal pattern.

“May the killings end.”

It will require vigilance to transcend the insidious fixation on vengeance, but it is indeed possible. Jewish anti-death penalty activism offers one telling model for achieving this. Traditional rabbinic parlance cites a specific posthumous honorific for murder victims who have died as martyrs, particularly in pogroms, genocide, or terrorist attacks. The acronym it adds after each martyr’s name is “HYD,” which derives from the Hebrew letters Hey-Yud-Dalet (הי״ד) and stands for “Hashem yikom damam” (”May G-d avenge their blood.”) Members of the “L’chaim!” (”To Life!”) death penalty abolitionist group, however, intentionally never invoke this vindictive formula when they pray for capital murder victims at execution vigils for their condemned assailants. In its place, without exception, they employ the more common refrain “Zichronam Livracha” (”May their memories be for a blessing”). They then conclude with the following prayerful intention for the murder victims:

May their abiding neshamot (spirits) be loving guides for us all.

May their loved ones be comforted among all the mourners of the world.

May no more blood be shed in their sacred names.

May the killings end.

So may it be for the tens of thousands of victims of both the October 7, 2023, barbarity and the resulting Gaza genocide, as well as all targets of vengeful acts—however veiled.

A version of this essay was first published in The Jurist.

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Photograph Source: Embajada de EEUU en Argentina – CC BY 2.0

During his confirmation hearings to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. emphatically pledged to prioritize tackling Long COVID, a debilitating chronic condition that develops after COVID-19 infections and leaves many patients with lasting symptoms, such as fatigue, brain fog, and respiratory problems. Sen. Todd Young (R-Indiana) asked Kennedy if he would commit to funding research into treatments and diagnostics for Long COVID. Kennedy’s response? “Absolutely, senator, with enthusiasm.”

Fast forward to August 2025, and Kennedy has dismantled not only federal COVID prevention programs but also much of the research infrastructure devoted to understanding and treating Long COVID. He closed the Office of Long COVID Research and Practice, a central coordinating body established in 2023 to unify agency efforts on Long COVID, and failed to meaningfully replace it. His sweeping reorganization of HHS eliminated or consolidated key centers essential for disease surveillance and chronic illness response, including the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Reckless funding cuts have dealt a significant blow to ongoing research, derailing NIH-funded clinical trials on antivirals and immunotherapies for Long COVID, halting large-scale cohort studies that track patient outcomes, and stalling the development of new diagnostics to improve detection and classification.

Long COVID is a chronic, multisystem condition that follows COVID‑19 infection. It can arise regardless of the severity of the initial illness and is characterized by symptoms that may persist or emerge weeks to months after the acute phase of infection. Researchers have drawn parallels between Long COVID’s impact and that of a stroke or Parkinson’s. Long COVID also shares similarities with other post-viral syndromes such as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), which similarly involve long-term fatigue and autonomic dysfunction. Studies have shown that both Long COVID and ME/CFS can lead to quality-of-life impairments that outstrip many advanced cancers.

Additional research suggests that Long COVID may be just the tip of the iceberg. Studies of large patient cohorts have found that COVID infection significantly increases the risk of cardiovascular complications, including myocarditis, arrhythmias, heart failure, and blood clots, even in people without prior heart disease. Other studies have documented a higher incidence of metabolic conditions such as new-onset diabetes. There are also neurological sequelae; COVID infections can cause or accelerate cognitive decline and dementia. Evidence suggests that repeated infection may accelerate cancer risk, in part due to inflammation and immune dysregulation. Taken together, these findings suggest that the long-term burden of COVID may extend far beyond what is captured by “Long COVID” alone.

Kennedy is not a solo actor in this. Closing the Long COVID office, for example, coincided with a Trump executive order to “reduce the federal bureaucracy.” The involvement of others does not absolve Kennedy — the head of HHS — of responsibility for what takes place in his agency on his watch. It does, however, suggest that this is not a one-man problem but something more systemic and entrenched. The issue is not limited to HHS; the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), for example, is currently seeking to remove the few remaining emergency reporting requirements for hospitals.

Creating Barriers to COVID Vaccines

Of course, one of the best ways to avoid Long COVID is to avoid getting infected with COVID. Kennedy has spoken about wanting to address root causes, and the root cause of post-COVID complications is infection with COVID, making prevention efforts a key way to prevent new health problems. Unfortunately, Kennedy has approached COVID prevention the same way he has approached measles prevention. He has gone after COVID vaccines, both the currently available shots and promising research into improved versions.

As a form of protection from Long COVID, the current vaccines appear to be useful, albeit insufficient on their own. Most studies indicate that vaccination reduces the risk of Long COVID, and several find additional benefits from boosters, although this varies by timing and variant. One meta-analysis found that COVID vaccination reduces the risk of developing Long COVID by around 30 percent, depending on variant and timing of vaccination. A more recent study suggested that vaccination had played a major role in observed declines in new cases of Long COVID during later infection waves. Primary series vaccinations appear to be the most effective in reducing the risk of developing Long COVID following infection. Subsequent variant-specific shots appear largely helpful as a means of preventing infection (as imperfectly measured by symptomatic disease), which in turn lowers the downstream risk of Long COVID. However, such protection is limited and short-lived. Vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic disease peaks at 50 to 70 percent within a few weeks of administration and declines substantially over the following months. It often approached negligible levels within six months, particularly in the face of immune-evasive variants like XBB and its descendants. Taken together, the evidence suggests that vaccines, although far from a silver bullet, are a useful tool for reducing Long COVID. Cutting off access to vaccines will almost certainly mean more Long COVID cases and more people with lasting complications.

Unfortunately, Kennedy’s leadership thus far has culminated in new barriers to COVID vaccination that threaten to severely limit this year’s uptake (assuming new vaccines become available at all). The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declined to approve COVID vaccines for those under age 65 without high-risk conditions, instead requiring randomized controlled trials in those groups before considering future approval. This includes both primary series vaccinations and additional variant-specific shots for those who have already received their primary series. The FDA also revoked the Emergency Use Authorization for Pfizer’s vaccinein children under the age of 5, leaving Moderna’s formulation as the only authorized option for high-risk children in this age group. For healthy children under 5, the only remaining path to vaccination is now through off-label use by a healthcare provider. The new framework imposes similar restrictions on adults: as of August 22, individuals under the age of 65 without high-risk conditions became ineligible to receive COVID vaccines through standard authorization channels.

The effort was touted as a cautious, evidence-driven approach, but its effect is to delay and potentially deny broad access to vaccines that were previously available (if not always affordable) to a much wider population. Limited access for children younger than 5 years old could be especially devastating. This age group has experienced some of the highest COVID-19 hospitalization rates of any pediatric cohort. Emerging data suggests that Long COVID may have overtaken asthma as the most common chronic illness affecting US children, with nearly 5.8 million affected by post-COVID conditions.

Kennedy has gone after public health officials who don’t share his approach to vaccination. Earlier this summer, Kennedy fired every member of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a critical advisory body, replacing many of them with known vaccine skeptics. The ACIP’s role is to make recommendations within the boundaries of FDA approval; its personnel shake-up suggests that even within the FDA’s more restrictive framework, the CDC’s recommendations will be guided by an anti-vaccine political agenda rather than science. While ACIP had not always taken Long COVID seriously before, it did greenlight broad COVID vaccine eligibility in 2024, even if said vaccines remained financially out of reach for far too many.

Kennedy, CDC Firings, and Massive Research Cuts

And this past week, President Trump (at Kennedy’s behest) fired Susan Monarez, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). A wave of protest resignations followed across senior leadership, including Chief Medical Officer Dr. Debra Houry, Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, and Director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases Dr. Daniel Jernigan. In his resignation letter, Daskalakis opined, “Having worked in local and national public health for years, I have never experienced such radical non-transparency, nor have I seen such unskilled manipulation of data to achieve a political end rather than the good of the American people.”

The insufficient protection afforded by current vaccines makes ongoing research into the next generation of prophylactics that much more crucial. But this month, Kennedy unilaterally slashed $500 million from mRNA-related research, which encompassed, among other things, vaccines targeting COVID, H5N1 bird flu, and RSV. Kennedy justified the cuts in part by suggesting that mRNA technology is inherently unsafe, an assertion not supported by scientific evidence. Earlier this year, Kennedy’s HHS issued a stop-work order to CastleVax for its development of an intranasal COVID vaccine. Intranasal vaccines have shown promise in inducing the mucosal immunity necessary to better prevent transmission. The Trump government, however, has declared COVID “over” (despite evidence to the contrary), and thus all further research related to it is considered expendable.

This month, Kennedy’s HHS also took aim at wastewater surveillance, a crucial tool for people trying to use real-world data to calibrate their preventive measures. Wastewater monitoring provides an early warning system for spikes in COVID and other infectious diseases, helping immunocompromised individuals — such as those recovering from cancer — decide when it may be safer to risk exposure from necessary activities like visiting the dentist. Kennedy’s HHS has doubled down on a favorite minimization tactic of the previous administration, and has changed the thresholds for transmission categories, such that virus levels that were previously categorized as “high” are now considered “very low.” More alarmingly, under Kennedy, the CDC has quietly stopped normalizing wastewater data (that is, adjusting for things like rainfall levels), a technical change that will significantly degrade its quality and comparability over time. Without normalization, raw viral counts are misleading, making it far harder for individuals, communities, and health systems to gauge real infection trends. This change threatens to undermine one of the most important and cost-effective surveillance tools still available.

Kennedy is clearly not interested in keeping the promise he made to the American people to tackle Long COVID. His behavior does, however, track with the ableist healthism that Julie Doubleday lucidly identifies as the beating heart of Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement. Ableist healthism is an ideology that equates being healthy with virtue and reframes public health as an individual lifestyle project rather than a collective obligation. It also conflates “natural” with “good,” which explains why MAHA advocates seem so unfazed by preventable deaths from ‘natural’ diseases like measles. Given MAHA’s complacency in the face of preventable death and disability from measles, it’s unsurprising that they would shun interventions like vaccines and other preventative medical interventions for COVID.

To be sure, Kennedy has capitalized on the earned mistrust of his predecessors. That mistrust was fueled by a series of blunders, including but not limited to downplaying the threat of long-term COVID sequelae, failing to fully grapple with the reality of airborne transmission, and an unwillingness to meaningfully revisit the “vax and relax” strategy even as evidence increasingly failed to support that approach. Many but not all of these blunders appeared to originate from corporate pressure to return to a “normal” with a weaker social state and fewer protections for workers.

However, rather than building back trust based on sound science, Kennedy has doubled down on misinformation. Rather than leveling with people about both the benefits and limitations of existing COVID vaccines, for example, he has cast ill-founded aspersions on their safety profile (and the safety profile of other preventative medicine). He has also actively made it more difficult for those who want to use vaccines to protect themselves to do so. Where the agency once sowed confusion through poor messaging, Kennedy has actively weaponized that communications weakness to recast scientific uncertainty as evidence of conspiracy, replacing cautious half-truths with clear falsehoods.

It is abundantly evident that Kennedy does not intend to prioritize the well-being of Long COVID patients. Instead of using his immense power to expedite research to help current patients and prevent new cases, he has taken a hatchet to the limited systems of care that were already in place. But disabled lives are not expendable. Millions of people living with Long COVID and other post-viral and chronic conditions deserve dignity, care, and a government that values their survival and well-being. Investing in scientific research and robust public health infrastructure is not charity, but a commitment to a collective future that values and includes everyone in our community. The Trump government’s abandonment of Long COVID patients and disdain for prevention is not acceptable and should be recognized for what it is: a political choice to deepen suffering rather than relieve it.

This first appeared on CEPR.

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The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown efforts have begun interfering directly with frontline responders of recent disasters – raising substantial fears about what could happen when more serious disasters strike.

On August 27, the Seattle Times reported that two firefighter crews deployed to fight the Bear Gulch fire on the Olympic Peninsula were held by Border Patrol agents, and two firefighters were eventually arrested after being accused of living in the country illegally. As the Times reported in what must be the most incredible understatement of the year, “It is unusual for federal border agents to make arrests during the fighting of an active fire, especially in a remote area.” The move is baffling, as it is pretty well known that nationwide, recruiting and retaining wildland firefighters has been an ongoing challenge. This issue, highlighted by the Government Accountability Office, stems from factors such as low wages, poor work/life balance, mental health challenges, and a lack of workforce diversity. The situation is so dire that California uses incarcerated labor. The recent arrests are likely to exacerbate the problem significantly. The administration is now prioritizing statistics, like the number of undocumented immigrants caught in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) sweeps, over the country’s ability to combat destructive fires. And doing that in the middle of an active fire is deadly for everyone involved.

The White House is taking other steps that clearly prioritizing immigration detention over disaster relief. The Washington Post reported on the same day of the ICE raid in Washington state that new Department of Homeland Security contracts for aid organizations responding to disasters require these organizations to act as agents of ICE. The latest Fiscal Year 2025 DHS Standard Terms and Conditions for grants, cooperative agreements, fixed-amount awards, and financial assistance now includes a “Communication and Cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration Officials” section. Within that section, recipients are required to share information, assist in immigration operations (including temporarily detaining people), provide access to information on disaster survivors, and maintain confidentiality around ICE operations. To be clear, this means that if an organization such as the Red Cross receives federal funding to set up a temporary shelter for evacuees, they are required to identify undocumented immigrants, detain them, and let ICE know.

There are so many logistical and ethical issues with this that it’s hard to know even where to start. Aid organizations are not equipped to meet these requirements, particularly for detaining someone.  Their core mission revolves around saving lives, not enforcing immigration law. Aid organizations, many of which are faith-based, have expressed concerns that the requirements “violate First Amendment freedoms, undermine religious neutrality, and force institutions to betray core values.” Another problem is that these requirements will deter survivors from seeking aid or services from any organization that receives DHS funding. This can be a death sentence for survivors of a disaster.

These are just two examples out of many in which the administration’s decisions at FEMA are creating a scenario in which all the worst possible things can and will go wrong simultaneously. It is a fear that is not going unnoticed inside the government. Last week, 182 current and former Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) employees addressed a letter to Trump’s FEMA Review Council and Congress stating recent decisions at the agency were putting the US at risk of another Hurricane Katrina-level disaster. Not surprisingly, the next day, about two dozen employees who had signed the letter were placed on leave. This reflects a pattern within the administration of replacing experienced and knowledgeable personnel who may disagree with policies with individuals who prioritize praising the president during meetings.

To be blunt, Trump’s interference with ongoing disaster recovery and relief efforts is dangerous. And as this pattern of politically motivated interference continues, the nation faces an escalating risk of failures in disaster response and an erosion of trust in the institutions that are supposed to keep people safe. With disasters increasing every year, lives are hanging in the balance. The US can’t afford political theater over doing what’s best for communities.

This first appeared on CEPR.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Donald Trump’s blatant campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize has a new claim for his resume—his “diplomacy” is contributing to a new world order.  Unfortunately, it is a world order that not only lacks a place for the United States, but actively excludes the United States.  This world order is contributing to the burgeoning ties between Russia and China, which are without precedent, as well as among China, India, North Korea, and Russia.  U.S. relations with each of them are in decline.  Relations between the United States and India are the most recent victim in the formation of the new world order.

The United States had been the key to understanding the world order created at the end of World War II.  For the first time in 80 years, the United States is on the outside looking in, not only in Europe but in the Indo-Pacific as well.  Washington’s decline can be perceived in terms of power, influence, credibility, and standing.  For the first time in 80 years, the United States lacks an influential national security team that can work closely with a president who has peculiar ideas about policy and process.  The fact that Marco Rubio serves as both secretary of state and acting national security adviser (and has very limited influence in either capacity) speaks to the problem.  As a result, Rubio has thrown his powers into limiting visas for foreigners, particularly for foreign students, a key factor in U.S. isolation.

Trump has gone out of his way to isolate the United States in the global community.  His latest action was the denial and revocation of members of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization to attend this month’s UN General Assembly in New York.  This comes at a time when key U.S. allies (Britain, France, Canada, and Australia) are planning to join with 147 UN members that already recognize a Palestinian state.

The denial of the visas for the PLO violates the 1947 UN charter, which states the United States “shall not impose any impediment” to the travel of representatives of the UN missions to the “headquarter district” in New York City.  This visa ban will affect more than 80 Palestinians as well as the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.  (In 1988, the General Assembly met in Geneva so that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat could address the assembly.)  This week, the Trump administration suspended all types of visas for all Palestinians.

Sino-Russia:  China and Russia have never had a relationship as close as the one that currently exists.  There are multiple reasons for this, but the actions of the Trump administration are central to the forging of these close ties.  Joint military exercises are a key part of the current situation as well as the generous exchange of military intelligence and weaponry.  The convergence of Moscow and Beijing contrasts with the growing discord between the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia.

Sino-Russia-India:  This week’s summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a Eurasian security group led by Moscow and Beijing, brought Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to China for the first time in seven years.  Again, Trump was the catalyst for Modi’s decision due to Trump’s tariff policies and taking false credit for the cease-fire between India and Pakistan several months ago.  Xi’s diplomacy played a major role in bringing India closer to both Moscow and Beijing.  Xi gained from making sure that India would not join Washington’s policy of containment against China.

Sino-Russia-North Korea:  Kim Jong-un’s attendance at the summit in China marks an important step in ending the discord between Beijing and Pyongyang.  Kim’s relations with Moscow are also on solid ground in view of the military support from North Korea for Russia’s war with Ukraine.  Trump’s mishandling of the recent meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and a tough trade policy with Japan are additional points of contrast.

BRICS:  The founding countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa have added Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates to the fold in an effort to form an alternative to the G7.  Its objectives are anti-Western and anti-US.  The Israeli genocide and US complicity, as well as Trump’s tariff and trade policies, have added to BRICS’ popularity and credibility.

U.S.-India:  Until recently, India, the world’s largest democracy, and the United States were on course to create a cordial and reciprocal diplomatic and economic policy where both sides could accommodate each other.  Trump has virtually brought this policy line to a halt with a doubling of tariffs on India exports.  At the same time, the United States and India have created troubled democracies.

Finally, the Trump and Biden administrations have both contributed to the isolation and alienation of the United States in the international community with their complicity in Israel’s profane genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.  Trump’s postwar plan, modeled on his notion to make Gaza the “Riviera of the Middle East,” would create a U.S.-administered trusteeship in Gaza for at least ten years, while it is turned into a tourist resort.  Only real estate barons such as Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Steve Wytkoff could come up with such a cynical and exploitative idea.  The fact that some of the same Israelis who created the dysfunctional Gaza Humanitarian Foundation that failed to distribute food to the starving masses in Gaza completes the hideous picture of Israeli genocide.

Meanwhile, the rubble in Gaza continues to mount, and deceitful Israelis continue to deny that famine exists.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

I endlessly hear people complaining that we should tax billionaires, which we should. But the more fundamental question that is rarely asked is, why do we structure markets to allow people to become billionaires and now centi-billionaires?

It is mind boggling how there is so little questioning of the ways that markets have been structured to shift massive amounts of income upward. I always harp on government-granted patent and copyright monopolies as the most obvious way in which the government structures markets to redistribute income upward.

I focus on these monopolies both because there is an enormous amount of money at stake, almost certainly well over $1 trillion a year ($8,000 per household), and the nature of intervention should be obvious to anyone who is not determined to ignore reality. Capitalism without government-granted patent and copyright monopolies is still capitalism. We can make these monopolies shorter and weaker, rather than longer and stronger, and also use alternative, more efficient mechanisms to support innovation and creative work.

Unions and Labor Law

But that is only part of the story of how the rich have structured the market to make themselves richer. To take another example, since this is Labor Day, we should note how they have structured labor law to advantage employers at the expense of workers.

We often think of labor law as protecting workers, and to some extent it does. But it also protects employers. The most obvious way is by banning secondary boycotts. Some months back I wrongly said that this prohibited unions from honoring each other’s picket lines. That is not true, although a contract may prohibit honoring another union’s picket line.

But the prohibition on secondary boycotts does ban a union from picketing at a company’s major supplier or customer. This means, for example, that if the UAW had a conflict with GM, they could not picket a steel company or some other company supplying inputs to GM. Similarly, if the Steelworkers were striking a major steel company, they could not picket or take other actions against the auto companies that used their steel. These could be very effective tactics that the government will arrest union leaders for if their union was to undertake them.

So-called “right to work” laws also are measures that the government imposes to benefit employers. The government has a hands-off attitude towards the conditions that employers impose on their workers. They can require them to wear silly uniforms or make obsequious greetings to customers, which workers have to live with. The argument is that they can quit and work elsewhere if they don’t like the employers’ rules.

But if workers choose to unionize and want to have everyone at the workplace share in the cost of supporting the union, the government in most states says they can’t. And this is the case even if the employer is willing to sign a contract that has paying a union representation fee as a condition of employment. This is a clear violation of the principle of freedom of contract. Incredibly, in US politics, it is the union contract itself which is presented as an interference with individual freedom.

Governments Create Corporations, not the Free Market

Going further into the basics of the economy, the legal structure of corporations is an obvious intervention in the free market. Individuals can freely form partnerships, but a corporation as a legal entity requires the government.

There is a plausible argument that allowing the establishment of corporations as legal entities can foster economic development, most importantly by making it easier to raise capital for major investments. If individuals or partners sought to raise money without corporate status, they would put their entire wealth at risk if the business went bad. The limited liability associated with corporate status means that only the assets of the corporation can be tapped to repay loans or other liabilities, not the shareholders’ personal assets.

The quid pro quo for corporate status used to be that corporations paid the corporate income tax. Profits that were leftover after paying the corporate income tax were available to be paid as dividends, re-invested, or whatever the management of the company desired.

This has changed hugely in the last 70 years, as Congress created the “S-corporation.” These are corporations that enjoy the benefits of corporate status, including limited liability, without having to pay the corporate income tax.

Originally, the S-Corp was established to benefit small businesses, but the restrictions on S-Corps have been widened over time so that many of the richest people in the country now run businesses as S-corps. Also, many partnerships formed by the very rich, like hedge funds and private equity companies, are now structured as limited liability corporations, which also do not have to pay the corporate income tax.

There is no reason that the government should separate corporate status, or the privilege of limited liability, from the corporate income tax. No one forces people to incorporate, if they want corporate status, they can pay the corporate income tax.

Bankruptcy Laws

The existence of and rules around bankruptcy are not written in the Bible. The government can and does change them all the time. Much of the business model of private equity (PE) depends on the abuse of bankruptcy laws. A standard practice of PE companies is to buy up portfolio companies, strip them of assets — like the real estate a store or hospital may be built on top of — and also load them up with debt which can be used to pay dividends to the PE company.

If the portfolio company manages to survive and become a profitable company, the PE company can then take it public and make a huge profit on selling shares. If it can’t, the portfolio company declares bankruptcy and the PE company moves on to its next project.

The profitability of this neat trick would be largely removed if the PE company were liable for the debts of its portfolio companies. This could be done by making a company liable for the debts of another company that it controls, as is certainly the case with the portfolio companies held by PE companies. The Stop Wall Street Looting Act, proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren, would have done this. If we had changed the bankruptcy laws along these lines, many of the great fortunes accumulated by PE partners would not exist.

Reform Section 230 to Make Facebook and X Less Profitable

Section 230 gives Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk protection from liability for spreading defamatory material on their platforms. While print and broadcast media can be held liable for spreading lies, as Fox was when it paid $787 million to Dominion for promoting lies about Trump winning the 2020 election, social media platforms have no similar concerns because of Section 230 protection.

There is an argument that they can’t possibly be responsible for monitoring the hundreds of millions of items that are posted daily, but they could be required to respond to takedown notices as they already do in the case of copyright infringement. It would also be possible to structure a reform of Section 230 to allow sites that do not rely on advertising or sell personal information to continue to enjoy the same protection they do now.

Change the Rules So the Billionaires Aren’t So Rich

In a society with enormous inequality, it is understandable that many people (including me) want to tax the billionaires. But massive inequality of wealth also translates into massive inequality of power. The billionaires won’t nicely agree to have their massive wealth taxed.

If anyone had paid attention to how they had been rigging the rules, we would have many fewer and poorer billionaires today. We can and should continue to push to make the billionaires pay higher taxes, but we should also push to restructure the rules for the market so that less money goes to the top in the first place.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

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Pentagon image of airstrike on alleged “drug boat” in international waters off the coast of Venezuela.

On September 2, the US government claimed that military operators acting on its behalf murdered 11 foreign nationals aboard a boat in international waters off the coast of Venezuela.

I say “claimed” because Venezuelan communications minister Freddy Ñáñez suggests that a video of the murders released by the US government is an AI-generated “deepfake.” Regimes lie, and it’s not obvious which regime is lying in this particular instance.

But let’s assume that US regime officials, including US secretary of defense Pete Hegseth and US secretary of state Marco Rubio, were truthful in their claims.

If so, it’s reasonable to also assume they’re truthful when they claim that these 11 murders are just the start of a “campaign,” and that the US government intends to “blow up and get rid of” (per Rubio) even more victims.

When someone credibly confesses to murder, announces an intent to commit further murders, and clearly possesses the means to do so, it seems to me that whatever law applies should be brought to bear.

Under 18 U.S. Code § 1111, “Within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States, Whoever is guilty of murder in the first degree shall be punished by death or by imprisonment for life; Whoever is guilty of murder in the second degree, shall be imprisoned for any term of years or for life.”

Said jurisdiction is defined in 18 U.S. Code § 7. It includes any vessel or aircraft belonging in whole or in part to the United States, meaning that the military personnel involved in the murder mission are themselves criminals … IF the law is applied.

Similarly, the entire chain of command, all the way up to US president Donald Trump (who has publicly admitted to approving the crime) are clearly on the hook for “conspiracy to murder” under 18 U.S. Code § 1117 … IF the law is applied.

Unfortunately, the US Supreme Court ruled last year that presidents enjoy immunity for all “official acts,” even illegal ones like, say, ordering 11 murders. So Trump himself is as unlikely to be held accountable for this atrocity as for other crimes he’s ordered, such as the murder of eight-year-old American girl Nawar Anwar al-Awlaki in 2017.

But what about Hegseth, Rubio, and the various military officers who must have been involved in planning and directing the operation?

Holding them legally culpable may be as unlikely as bringing Trump himself to justice, but it’s theoretically possible. So far as I can tell there’s nothing to prevent a grand jury from indicting some or all of them.

The biggest hurdle to get over is that the US Department of Justice answers to Trump and likely won’t ASK a grand jury to do any such thing.

So, once again, the US government will get away with murdering anyone it announces is a “terrorist,” “drug smuggler,” etc., without having to prove the charges.

The only unique aspect of this particular mass murder is that its sole purpose seems to have been to distract us from the matter of Donald Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Did it work?

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Why is there such a rush to resurrect the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan? The lights have not gone out in Michigan since Palisades closed; there are no current AI data centers in Michigan clamoring for the power.

Once upon a time in Michigan, there was an aged nuclear power plant called Palisades. Since it started operation in 1971 until it was permanently closed in 2022, it ran about 73% of the time, about three days out of every four. But the old nuclear plant could not financially compete against renewables, and after its electric subsidy from Michigan expired in 2022, Palisades was closed and sold for scrap metal.

Holtec, the scrap company that bought the Palisades’ carcass, had never designed, constructed or operated a nuclear power plant. Its expertise was demolishing (decommissioning) them. So it neglected the aging steel pipes, allowing them to sit idle and deteriorate. It should come as no surprise that, like everything metallic, the nuclear pipes began to corrode and crack from that neglect.

In essence, Holtec deliberately pushed Humpty Dumpty off the wall and claimed that it “wasn’t unexpected” that cracks developed in the nuclear plant’s pipes. They were supposed to be demolishing Palisades so the cracks did not matter!

Now here is where things get weird. In 2024, after two years of neglect, Holtec decided to “resurrect” the carcass of Palisades (resurrect is Holtec’s own word!). The State of Michigan gave Holtec hundreds of millions of dollars and the Department of Energy (DOE) promised billions in additional funds for the resurrection. And the Department of Agriculture even awarded subsidies to Rural Electric Cooperatives to buy power from Palisades.

Everyone seemed to forget how the nursery rhyme ends, the part about “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again”! To no one’s surprise, when Palisades nuclear reactor components were examined in 2024 and 2025, it had extensive cracks! Everywhere!

Two years after acquiring Palisades, Holtec finally performed inspections to see how extensive Humpty Dumpty’s cracks really were. Those new inspections showed that stress corrosion cracking, SCC, was extensive throughout all the nuclear reactor components. Only one tube was found damaged in the 2020 inspection before Holtec bought the facility while more than 700 tubes were found to be damaged under Holtec in 2024.

Unlike Palisades previous owner, Holtec ignored the need to maintain excellent water chemistry inside the nuclear plant’s pipes. Holtec acknowledged that proper “wet layup” water chemistry was NOT maintained for about two years and also recognized that cracks “were not unanticipated.”

Without adequate control of water chemistry through the addition of oxygen scavengers and proper pH control, Palisades tubes and pipes had rapidly deteriorated. Holtec put no priority on maintaining excellent water chemistry inside the nuclear plant’s pipes. Their indifference to industry standards pushed Humpty Dumpty off the wall and made cracking inevitable.

The cracked components could have, should have, been replaced. In fact, Holtec acknowledged to DOE that many components were unrepairable. Half a billion dollars of DOE funds were requested “to replace old worn-out hardware such as the Steam Generators^[1]”. After securing DOE funding, Holtec chose not to replace any of the cracked nuclear components.

Rather than replace key nuclear components as they promised the DOE, Holtec asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for permission to apply Band-Aids to the cracked, broken pieces, to stick them back together. These Band-Aids were called “relief requests” or “license amendment requests”.

If Humpty Dumpty were really an extensively cracked egg, the Food and Drug Administration would never have allowed consumers to eat it. But our Humpty Dumpty is an extensively cracked nuclear power plant, subject to oversight and regulation by the NRC. And the NRC has never met a nuclear plant it didn’t like.

And what did the NRC do when they were asked to analyze and regulate Humpty Dumpty’s cracks? It approved restarting Palisades without replacing the cracked components!

A retired former Palisades executive and I have independently and repeatedly asked, no, we’ve begged the NRC to consider the totality of the crack damage at Palisades. To look at Holtec’s incompetence as the real root cause of the cracking in the first place. To understand the technical literature that shows the cracks will worsen if the reactor is pressurized and heated back up. To do their job and regulate, not perpetuate Humpty Dumpty’s flawed repair scheme.

Under executive orders from the Trump administration to speed up nuclear approvals, the NRC chose not to place public safety at the forefront of the Palisades resurrection. Rather, it placed legal constraints around the applicability of the expert reports, allowing my engineering analysis in those reports to be ignored. Last month, the NRC granted Holtec permission to load fuel and begin startup testing of the aged reactor in spite of the known cracks and the likelihood that they will grow larger.

So I thought that perhaps I was wrong, possibly Holtec did not push Humpty Dumpty off the wall after all. Perhaps the NRC was right and the cracks could be repaired. Maybe the cracks would not grow when heat and pressure were applied. So, for an independent analysis, as any 2025 college grad would do, I asked Grok and ChatGPT.

Here is what GROK said:

Hundreds more indications, possibly 10-20% additional plugging needed within 1-2 years, risking loss-of-coolant accidents if unchecked.

Here is what ChatGPT said:

It’s not far-fetched to think of a worst-case where a tube could leak or rupture soon after …We could anticipate one or more tube leak events in 2025–2026 if the plant runs without replacing SGs [Steam Generators].… the likelihood of a serious tube event is undoubtedly higher now than it was historically.

Ironically, Holtec claims the power from Palisades is needed due to increased electric demands from AI Data Centers, yet the AI programs identify that Palisades would be unreliable and unsafe. Catch 22!

Why is there such a rush to resurrect Palisades? The lights have not gone out in Michigan since Palisades closed; there are no current AI data centers in Michigan clamoring for the power, and indeed, the power that Palisades plans on providing will need to be subsidized to be competitive with renewable energy sources.

WHY? Follow the lobbyists and the money. Holtec is a privately held company. It plans an Initial Public Offering (IPO) early in 2026 that has been valued at between $5 billion and $10 billion. The cornerstone of that IPO is the resurrection of Palisades. When discussing the IPO, Barrons states:

“ Nuclear Power’s Biggest IPO in Years Is on the Way…

Holtec is also on the verge of doing something never before attempted in America—bringing back a decommissioned nuclear plant. The company is restoring a reactor at the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan, which had been shut down in 2022 for financial reasons. It has received hundreds of millions of dollars of support from the state of Michigan and the Department of Energy for the project.^[2]”

Ten Billion Dollars is a lot of money. Does Holtec plan on being rewarded for pushing Humpty Dumpty off the wall? I pray that my analysis is wrong, and that Palisades will not suffer radiation releases that could result in evacuating parts of Michigan if it is allowed to restart. But I know there is no second verse, no happy ending to the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme. There is no “And they all lived happily ever after”.

Author’s note: This short piece is based on several months of detailed supporting analysis. Three longer, more complete reports including my expert report, testimony and the complete AI analysis are available at this link: https://beyondnuclear.org/9472-2/

NOTES

1. Page 2, HOLTEC INTERNATIONAL APPLICATION FOR FEDERAL AND STATE SUPPORT TO ENABLE THE RESURRECTION OF THE PALISADES NUCLEAR GENERATION STATION SUBMITTED JULY 5, 2022 ↑

2. https://www.barrons.com/articles/nuclear-power-holtec-ipo-6d2f07ae ↑

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“Are we liberal imperialists who take a knee for antiracism when it’s fashionable, but fall silent when an ethnostate openly conducts a campaign of extermination?” Photo by Daniel Pelaez Duque.

The following remarks were delivered at the “Take Back Our University” Rally held at Cornell University on August 28, 2025.

We are witnessing a wholesale, systematic attack on black and brown people, at home and abroad, and, true to form, much of the white majority either stands by passively or actively colludes, willfully ignorant to the reality that Du Bois described in 1935: namely, that white nationalist reaction is disguised class warfare against the bottom 90 percent of society.

We knew the institutional commitment to racial justice was paper-thin. We knew the DEI regime was a bland half-measure that allowed higher ed to claim social relevance and moral legitimacy. But even the cynics among us marvel at how rapidly craven administrators dismantle the diversity apparatus through which the corporate university once signaled virtue. DEI was the cream smeared on the face of structural racism. Now that it is inexpedient, look how easily it evaporates!

Make no mistake: white supremacy is the force behind the colossal disrespect, the sheer contempt, to which this society and this university routinely subject black and brown people.

What the colonizer cannot comprehend is that white supremacy degrades us all. It convinces us that settler-colonialism is natural or inevitable. It assures us that the concentration camp is built for someone else. White supremacy is the reason we believe a Palestinian child is less precious to her parents than our own children are to us. It allows us to watch a little girl being vaporized on social media while we continue to insist that the situation is dreadfully complicated.

Palestinians, you see, lack the protections of whiteness that their colonizers have mostly acquired, to disastrous effect.

White supremacy says who is expendable. It tells us who may be massacred with minimal opposition. At the same time, it convinces us that drones over Gaza do not prefigure drones over our heads. And yet, imperialism boomerangs. Militarism comes home to roost. One experiments in Gaza to execute at home. Technologies of repression, tested abroad, are deployed against domestic enemies.

Those of us who have experienced colonialism, whose families have experienced colonialism, can never forget this. We know that ANY racialized slaughter is a prelude to our subjection.

Every time we accept the erasure or exceptionalization of Palestinians, we reaffirm a human hierarchy that we disavow in every other aspect of our lives.

What hypocrisy! We decry the targeting of immigrants on our streets while condoning the kidnapping, torture, and indefinite detention of scores of Palestinians. We condemn attacks on higher ed while ignoring the criminalization of students who have somehow found the temerity to oppose a holocaust. Indeed, we let a handful of soulless bureaucrats cast into exile our best and our brightest. (Imagine how utterly hollow you must be, how cowardly…

to keep rolling out new codes of conduct as the children of Gaza, desperate and hungry, are annihilated.)

We lament the growth of a police state on our own soil while denying the transnational and collaborative nature of authoritarianism. Somehow we forget that violations of due process and human rights are the very terms of colonialism and occupation. We fail to realize, until too late, that Palestine is the tip of the spear that now points at our hearts.

You don’t have to be an Ivy League professor to see the links between militarized checkpoints in Washington, D.C., and militarized checkpoints overseas. Perhaps it is precisely the status and privilege of such professors that keeps them from publicly acknowledging the connection.

Remember, fascism feeds on silence. You don’t have to bend a knee for it to thrive. Just shut your mouth. Truth is, ALL that we do here is tainted by genocide. The whole enterprise. Every exchange, in the classroom and beyond, occurs under the pall of institutional and personal complicity.

One is tempted to ask: who are we, really? Are we liberal imperialists who take a knee for antiracism when it’s fashionable, but fall silent when an ethnostate openly conducts a campaign of extermination? Are we self-absorbed scions of the professional-managerial class, destined to lead lives of decadence and indifference? Are we hirelings of the Pentagon and the weapons industry? Are we narrow careerists? Are we mercenaries? Because, if we’re just scared, then goddamn us. We deserve the hellscape that the billionaires are preparing for us.

It’s been almost two years. Starving children are foraging amid carnage and debris. For God’s sake. Do SOMETHING. A humanist acts not because she lacks fear, but in spite of it.

Our silence exposes us. It mocks our professions of enlightenment. It defiles our land acknowledgements and decolonial metaphors and “Be kind” lawn signs. Our hands are drenched in blood. Our hands are drenched in blood. It may not be too late to redeem ourselves, to salvage some modicum of decency and morality. But the sun is setting.

What would it mean to refuse? Refuse to participate. Refuse to lie. Refuse to labor. Today the challenge is simply to declare, collectively and unequivocally, that we are horrified. We are heartsick. We are ashamed. We are ready to act.

I’ll end with a message to the donor class and their retainers in Day Hall. Please understand that we will NEVER abandon the Palestinian people. Solidarity is more precious to us than prestige or rank or any of the petty rewards you may dangle before us. And now that we have found our voice, we cannot return to the shadows of docility and compliance.

Free Palestine. Free Congo. Free Sudan. Free Los Angeles. Free Washington, DC. Hands off Venezuela. Hands off Cuba. US out of Africa. Resist! Resist! Resist!

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In Indonesia, there is fear that if militant protests continue, state violence may become even more murderous—photograph by Angiola Harry.

Less than a year after taking office, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto is facing the most militant anti-government protests in years. Recent street actions are caused by the country’s incredible inequality and rule by an entrenched political class. Inequality in Indonesia is extreme, and the gap between rich and poor is widening. While the middle class is shrinking, the elite is becoming ever more wealthy, and arrogantly so. The parliament recently voted themselves a substantial hike in monthly housing allowances, bringing their total monthly income to over 100 million rupiah, more than $6000. Meanwhile, the average monthly wage for workers in February 2025 was 3.09 million rupiah, less than $200. The country’s unemployment rate hovers at 15%, more for youth, the highest in Southeast Asia.

On Thursday morning, August 28, labor unions peacefully assembled outside the parliament building to call for higher wages, tax reform and adherence to existing labor laws. After workers dispersed, students surged around the building, demanding cancellation of politicians’ new housing allowances and dissolution of parliament. That night, Affan Kurniawan, a 21-year old Ojek driver (an online motorcycle delivery/taxi service) was run over and killed by a 14-ton police water cannon and riot control vehicle. A co-worker suffered a broken leg.

Dismissed from his role as one of the most powerful generals 30 years ago for his involvement in the disappearance of pro-democracy student activists, president Probowo now claims to be ‘shocked and amazed’ by the death of the Ojek driver. He urges calm and ordered an investigation into ‘ethical’ issues related to Affan’s death. The sudden eruption of militant actions across the peninsula compelled him to visit the family of the slain driver and promise that the government would support them for their lifetimes. Affan’s funeral procession was made up of hundreds of green uniformed Ojek motorcycle drivers.

These marginalized workers daily come face to face with Indonesia’s stark inequality. They routinely pick up food at luxurious malls and deliver it to middle-class homes. Their financial situation is so precarious that on December 8, 2024, Darwin Mangudut Simanjutak starved to death in Medan as he waited for a customer’s order. The night before he died, he had complained to a friend that he hadn’t eaten because he didn’t have any money. Six months later, on May 20, 2025, thousands of drivers who worked for the Gojek online platform took to the streets in 18 cities. The Indonesia Online Drivers Union reported that at least 12 of their members had died due to fatigue because workers sometimes were on the job 18 hours per day. These drivers represent thousands of others who have been denied the benefits of the country’s economic development. For years, they have struggled to get improvements to their wages and conditions only to suffer from recent tax increases and wage reductions.

Despite the president’s appeal for calm, people refused to obey. After Affan’s killing, ‘Pembunuh’ (murderer) graffiti suddenly appeared on the streets of many cities. A leading student organization called on all citizens to join them in the streets, noting that, ‘An institution that should protect has turned into uniformed executioners, trampling the dignity of civilian citizens.’ On Friday, August 29, rallies and protests were organized across the archipelago. Regional parliament buildings were set afire and the national parliament in Jakarta was surrounded and besieged. More than a dozen bus and subway stations were destroyed, as were highway toll booths and carefully selected police buildings. The basement and first floor of a large police headquarters in East Jakarta was heavily damaged by fire. Hundreds of protesters massed outside the headquarters of the Jakarta Police’s elite Mobile Brigade (Brimob), the unit blamed for Affan’s death, throwing firecrackers as police responded with tear gas. A determined group of protesters, screaming ‘Pembunuh,’ tried to tear down the gates of the notorious unit, and pulled down a sign from the building’s exterior. Protests spread to other major cities, including Bandung in West Java, Semarang in Central Java, Surabaya in East Java and Medan in North Sumatra. In Yogyakarta, people besieged the regional police headquarters for five hours. Several government vehicles, a police service center, and a traffic post were set afire. Water barriers were attacked as well, forcing closure of the northern ring road.

The next day, Saturday, August 30, people’s anger continued to be expressed. Large buildings containing the regional parliament and city council in Makassar, Sulawesi went up in flames. Three government workers were trapped in the buildings and jumped to their deaths from the third floor. Another person was mistaken for a police spy and perished after being attacked by a crowd. In Solo, former President Jokowi’s hometown, the parliament building was also torched. In Jambi, the vice-governor’s official residence burned. In Martaram, protesters set on fire the massive regional parliament. Across the country, dozens of motorcycles, cars and buses were burnt.

At a televised press conference on August 30, the head of the country’s police and the army commander refused to apologize for the murderous state violence. Instead, they blamed anarchists. By dawn, stunned citizens observed dozens of burnt shells of cars surrounded by rocks and bottle fragments in many urban areas. As television news teams surveyed the damages from the street fights, their headlines uniformly declared, ‘anarchists harm the public good.’

Elite Arrogance Spurs Popular Response

After students called for the dissolution of parliament, Ahmad Sahroni, an influential member of parliament, called that perspective ‘a foolish mentality…That kind of person is the most stupid person in the world.’ After Sahroni repeated his remark, he left for Singapore. While he was gone, hundreds of outraged people surged into his private residence. They looted it while soldiers stood by, pleading with people not to burn the house. The army watched as people carried away the bathtub, refrigerator, washing machine, furniture, and expensive designer bags. A watch valued at more than $300,000 was among the appropriated items. Liberated dollars and rupiah were thrown into the air for all to share in the expropriated cash.

Eko Patrio, another member of parliament and a popular social media influencer, served as DJ for a dance party in parliament after pay raises were enacted. His outspoken celebration led people to converge on his residence. He engaged the protesters, claiming ‘everybody makes content.’ After he left for China, his residence was looted. People also streamed into the house of Finance Minister Sri Mulyani and Uya Kuya before taking all their belongings.

Crass public statements made by leading Indonesian government officials have continually made news. When a journalist asked minister of human development Pratikno about a large worm killing a young child, he publicly laughed out loud. Pratikno pointed to his ‘tired eyes’ before breaking into laughter. The five-year-old child named Raya had been diagnosed with tuberculosis. Once in the hospital, a worm began to come out out her nose. After she died, tapeworms weighing approximately one kilogram were found inside her body. The country’s minister of health later claimed infection, not worms, were the cause of death.

Although no one knows what will happen next, clean-up crews work at a feverish pace to clear streets of burnt out vehicles and to repair public transportation infrastructure. Of more than 500 people injured, dozens are still hospitalized, according to Street Paramedics Organization. Negotiations are underway for the release of more than 600 arrested people and for punishment of police involved in the killing of Affan. One eyewitness to Affan’s murder publicly stated that the Brimob vehicle ‘suddenly sped through the middle of the road without paying attention to the gathered crowd.’ Officials have detained seven Brimob officers for ‘ethical’ questions in connection with the driver’s death. Not surprisingly, government investigators have yet even to determine who was behind the wheel.

Political reforms of little consequence to the poor have been swiftly publicized. Probowo suspended the new housing allowances. Eko has been suspended as secretary-general of National Mandate Party (PAN). Apparently the final straw came after people criticized parliament members dancing to celebrate their housing allowance raise. Eko posted a video mocking people angered by the dancing. Ahmad Sahroni was also suspended from parliament by his NasDem Party, mentioning his statements ‘have offended and hurt the feelings of the people.’ Another party member, Uya Kuya, was shown dancing over a caption reading, ‘just dance with it, you guys thought that Rp3million a day was a lot.’ She was also suspended.

New repressive measures have also been enacted. Probowo warned that the protests could be considered ‘treason and terrorism.’ Three newly created mobile patrols of hundreds of heavily armed police now roam Jakarta. The country’s police chief ordered his officers to shoot with rubber bullets anyone who enters Brimob headquarters. The University of Indonesia has suspended all in-person classes and replaced them with online formats for at least the next week. At the same moment, preliminary reports indicate that protests continue to erupt across the archipelago.

Clearly, recent street actions and looting have stoked fear among the elite and middle class. The uprising has also provided new energy and pride to Ojek drivers and marginalized citizens, a palpable change that could be one of its most important outcomes. Prabowo canceled a trip to Beijing, where he had long planned to attend a summit of leaders of countries opposed to US imperial actions. While he has expressed sympathy for Affan’s family, he has also promised that firm responses will meet ‘anarchist acts,’ damage to public facilities, and looting of public and private properties. Many people fear that if militant protests continue, state violence may become more murderous.

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How Will Capitalism End: Reflections on a Failing System – A Lecture by Wolfgang Streeck. Tuesday, April 4, 2017. Photograph Source: Center for the Study of Europe Boston University – CC BY-SA 2.0

Wolfgang Streeck, director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, is in the front ranks of Europe’s social thinkers, having come out with some of the most penetrating analyses of the crises of neoliberal economics and the ills of neoliberal society over the last 30 years. No stranger to controversy, he has criticized the technocratic elites in Europe and the United States for placing adherence to so-called “universal values” rather than the democratic process as the basis of the right to rule, called for an end to Europe’s subjection to the United States, dismissed the Russian threat as a fiction manufactured by the Baltic states, and called for the transformation of Europe and the global order into systems of small states.  Though a man of the left, he has distanced himself from both the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Die Linke (The Left Party) on matters of peace, immigration, and social policy and become identified as a strong supporter of the party (BSW) of the controversial Sahra Wagenknecht in the lead-up to the 2025 Bundestag elections. His latest book is Taking Back Control? States and State Systems after Globalism (2024)

Trump: Purveyor of Chaos and Uncertainty

WB: Let me turn to another issue. What do you think is going to happen with Trump and Europe?

WS: Before I address that issue, let me say that we have, in Germany, 40,000 American troops, the same as Okinawa. In addition, we have an unknown number of American nuclear warheads stationed in Germany. In Ramstein and Wiesbaden, we have the two most important command centers of the American military apart from the Pacific. Anything that is being done in the Middle East is being done out of the American military command in Wiesbaden, Germany. So, German foreign policy must always be seen in this perspective. And we have a political elite that over decades has been trained that Germany on its own cannot do anything unless the United States supports us.

Now to Trump, I’ve never been in a situation where it’s so difficult to make predictions. As a leader this man is a source of chaos—chaos means you don’t know what’s going to happen next. For this reason, one needs to look at the deep state in the United States. Trump is sitting on something. That something is the biggest military in the history of mankind and the biggest espionage and sabotage operation. In Europe, the two former fascist countries that were defeated in the Second World War, Germany and Italy, are still basically occupied by the United States. By the US military. Will they leave if Trump tells them to? I don’t think so. What they’ve dug into the ground in terms of technology, you can’t even speculate on this sort of thing. But there must be billions and billions worth of high technology on German soil, or underground. Will they pull it out? Career opportunities in the U.S. military have to do with their 750 military bases around the world. 750! If Trump is thinking about making “America Great Again” by rebuilding American society, finally building decent high schools and finally getting a decent health care system in place and ending the drug epidemic, then he would have to bring these people back into the real life on the American ground. They would have to learn to be decent policemen or decent doctors. Can you imagine this? This is what I think what Trump will have to get done to keep himself in office if MAGA is about the United States as a society rather than an empire.

WB: Let’s talk a bit about the deep state and how there might be dissatisfaction there with Trump’s policies. Do you think there are people in the US military who would be willing to move against Trump?

WS: It’s hard to think about someone in the U.S. military who would want to become a dictator. But J.D. Vance might fit the bill. To me he seems like someone who’s both very intelligent and absolutely ruthless. There’s a procedure in the American constitution, the 25^th Amendment, to declare the president incapable. The procedure has to be started by the vice president. If he can convince the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader that Trump is mentally incapable, according to the constitutional procedure for removing the president from office if he’s no longer mentally fit, he might do it. Then he will be president.

Will Capitalism Again Reorganize Itself through War?

WB: Do you see the relations between Europe and the US as irreversibly deteriorating?

WS: When Trump came in during his first term and also at the start of his second term, there was this sense that European countries must have a common foreign policy and security capacity because the United States will leave. Then in a very short time, we had the NATO chief sucking up to Trump. From one extreme to the other. My view is that we need to have something different from both a United States of Europe and from Europe as a trans-Atlantic extension of America. In recent writings I have tried to point out the difficulties involved in both extremes, in order to really understand what Europe is and where it should go.

But before discussing that, let me share my biggest nightmare, which is capitalism reorganizing itself through war. Capitalism, in fact, has again and again organized itself through war. Capitalism was reorganized when the Dutch took over from Genoa and the center of capitalism moved from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, then the British defeated the Dutch and the center moved to London, then came the First World War which destroyed the old quasi-feudal European empires, replacing them with the modern nation-states, after which came the chaos of the 1930s, when Britain could no longer maintain world order while the United States still refused to do the task, leading to the Second World War, which saw Germany and Japan become allies, each seeking their own “zone of influence,” modeled after the Monroe Doctrine, then the postwar settlement—the second after 1918—which gave rise to the bipolar order and the colonial wars of liberation, and finally the end of the Cold War—without bloodshed only because of the wisdom of Gorbachev—making the United States the new hegemon, bringing in three decades of neoliberalism—George H. W. Bush’s New World Order—which is now in ruins.  Around which power, or powers, will capitalism reorganize itself this time? And will it, once more, be reorganized by war? There are just two candidates, the United States and China.

What is frequently being discussed in the United States is the scenario Thucydides gives when trying to account for why Athens, the leading power of its time, lost the Peloponnesian War. As he recounts it, Athens was defeated by Sparta because it didn’t strike early enough, when it still had the strategic advantage. It watched the new hegemon rise until it was too late, Sparta having become too strong to be defeated. Note the ambivalence in Trump’s posture in relation to China. Sometimes he sounds very warlike, sometimes you’re not so sure. If Trump told an American military planner today that 10 years from now the United States would probably have to go to war with China, the answer might be that this would be too late because the Chinese would by that time have become too strong. So, the army might prefer to do the job now. Europe would inevitably be dragged into this conflict, unless it takes steps now to move away from its dependence on the United States.

Europe’s Crisis and the German Question

WB: So where is the thinking among European elites on this question?

WS: Since German unity in 1990, the rhetoric was always that Germany must accept its responsibility and act as the leading country in Europe. What this meant, however, was that Germany would pay the costs of keeping Europe together, but that being the leader did not mean telling others what to do. And that led to Merkel in particular, always hiding behind other countries, especially France.

The present German government, under Friedrich Merz, the new chancellor, has changed the tone. Now the rhetoric is about Germany as Europe’s most powerful nation. What this really means is that they actually want to lead, not just to pay. This makes for conflict, certainly with France. For the French always saw the Europe of the European Union as being led by a tandem, with them steering and the Germans sitting at the back. Now, things seem have to become different. Recently, someone suggested that one reason why the current German government has taken on such a lot of debt is to preempt Italy and France from getting their way by allowing the EU to take on debt on their behalf and with the Germans providing the de facto collateral. If the EU would now acquire debt on a large scale, interest rates would become prohibitive. Generally, I think that the new German leadership under Merz now aspires to a leading role of Germany in EU and Europe beyond just picking up the bill, basically out of political necessity, to avoid having to act in the interest of others instead of its own interest. In a longer perspective that points to Germany as the hegemon of the Western European state system in a multi-polar world.

My view, as I have said several times, is that Germany does not have the military capacity to support this kind of project. Since the 1960s, when France set up the Force de Frappe, the French governments have always had a deal in mind along the following lines: their nuclear force is expensive, so if we promise to extend our nuclear deterrence to the defense of Germany, Germans can pay for some of it. Since they don’t and can’t have a nuclear force, they have enough money to pay for a strong conventional army, the opposite of the French situation. There were several efforts by France to set up a deal like this, and Germany was sometimes willing to entertain something like it, paying part of the costs of the Force de Frappe in exchange for French nuclear protection. But when the Germans asked for the target catalogue for the French nuclear missiles, they heard that targeting had to remain a French prerogative as a sovereign nation. The problem behind this was that most of the targets were in Germany, since the idea was to stop the Russian army from getting to France, and where you stopped them was and could only have been in Germany. So, they never even came close to a deal, and this reinforced the dependence of Germany on the United States.

Interestingly, the new floor leader of the CDU in the Bundestag recently raised the question of whether Europe would need a nuclear umbrella of its own and where Germany would fit in this. If my memory serves me right, this had not been discussed since the 1960s. He repeated in an interview that Europe would need its own nuclear capacity but left unanswered who would be in charge of the nukes, saying it was still a problem that needed a solution and going on to propose something completely ridiculous like in the likelihood of war, countries could draw lots. Can you imagine giving Giorgia Meloni or Marine Le Pen the nuclear trigger? So, the implication is, if you can’t have a European nuclear weapon, then it has to be a national nuclear capacity for Europe, and if you don’t want it to be a French one, then Germany is the obvious candidate to develop this.

Is Russia the Enemy?

WB: Let me go to the question of Russia. Is Russia the enemy?

WS: No, I don’t see that. The official rhetoric in Europe is that Russia is the enemy, and that in five years’ time, the Russians will be ready to march on Europe. Now this is a picture that is above all spread by the Baltic states. The three Baltics countries are very small. They need someone else to fight their wars for them, and this can only be the Germans. They had tried this alliance in the last world war, and it did not end very well for them. They, in fact, wanted German protection so much that they armed several SS regiments fighting Russia under German command and assisted the Nazis in the persecution of the local Jewry. Very much like Ukraine.

Realistically, it seems totally ridiculous to think that Putin would want to conquer Germany or any other West European country. In principle they can sell gas and oil and other resources to the West Europeans and prosper. Why should they want to rule Germany or, for that matter, Finland, if they have a hard time ruling their own country?

One reason why the Baltics are so excited is that they  have sizeable Russian minorities that some of them treat very badly. The tensions with Russia might be more manageable, without these immense preparations for war, if the Russian minorities would be given full citizenship and language rights and federal autonomy. That would mean they would no longer call on Moscow to help them against their governments. The worse they treat their Russians, the more Moscow might feel forced to do something for their compatriots. It is up to the Baltic states to decide how much pressure to put on their Russian minorities so that at some stage they will turn secessionist or irredentist. Instead there are wild dreams about getting the West to defeat Russia for the benefit of the smaller nations on the Russian periphery. For example, Kaja Kallas, the former Prime Minister of Estonia, who is now responsible for the foreign policy of the European Union, is said to have once suggested that Russia should be sliced up into four or five different states, and that only then will Europeans—that is, the Baltics—be safe. This, of course, has been tried before, and it turned out a disaster, including costing the lives of 15 million Russians alone. I claim that a safe life in Europe and in Germany is only possible if we find an arrangement to coexist in peace with Russia on the Eurasian continent, and this is linked to the bigger question of where Europe should go.

Is Another Europe Possible?

WB: And where is that?

WS: Europe is a collection of old societies and states, and the idea that someone can come and merge this into one, either a United States of Europe or as a trans-Atlantic extension of America—that is a very mistaken idea. So, my view is that if we can talk the Baltics out of dragging us into a war with Russia, we need to move into something that is both realistic and good for everyone.

That is, European countries cooperating voluntarily, and extending their freely chosen relations to the rest of the world. Nowadays, logistics are much easier than the 1930s. Germany, or other European countries, could develop amicable relationships with places like the Philippines or South America, or whoever. We could deliver things these countries urgently need, take desalination plants for example, and they could deliver things to us that we need. So, if different European countries on their own initiative, moving together with other European countries that have similar interests, could strike up relations with countries on the Southern side of the world, but also inside the continent of Eurasia, in particular with Russia, that would be something. In this context, we must deal with Russia in a positive way. In a Eurasian perspective, the old idea from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Putin, “a zone of peace and prosperity from Vladivostok to Lisbon,” if that could be constructed, then we could see the end of our dependence on the United Sates, a dependence which partly depends on resources, since Russia has all the resources the Americans have. There will, of course, be security issues, but there needs to be shared security, with arms control, disarmament, confidence-building measures—none of this is new. If we manage to have a stable system of international security in Eurasia, the Americans can go wherever they want, hopefully in peace. Is that an illusion? I don’t know but if you ask me, what could be a positive legacy for our children and grandchildren, I’d say something like that.

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Image by Koshu Kunii.

I have spent the bulk of my career — on and off since the late Carter Administration — following the money that drives war and repression. What I have finally learned after so many decades of doing research on the war machine is that while research is critical, it must be in the service of a smart strategy backed by a lot of hard work by organizers from all walks of life.

My interest in using research to promote social change was sparked by my years at Columbia University in the 1970s, when I was a researcher and advocate in the divestment movement targeting the apartheid regime of South Africa and a participant in other social justice movements like the boycott in support of the United Farmworkers Union and the opposition to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.

Henry Kissinger’s justification for the U.S.-backed coup in Chile that put Augusto Pinochet in power still sticks in my mind: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

So much for the land of the free and the beacon of global democracy.

The U.S. role in the coup was eventually recounted by many media outlets, but for me the first and most important was the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), which devoted several issues of its magazine, then called The Latin America and Empire Report, to the origins of the coup, including the role of U.S. corporations. I was so impressed with their research and commitment that I applied to work at NACLA after graduating from Columbia in January 1978. They wisely demurred, since my background on Latin America was largely limited to what I had read in their own reports. Still, their skill in deploying detailed research to debunk the official lies that surrounded the coup stuck with me.

Research Against Apartheid

My real schooling in research, however, came in the anti-apartheid movement, starting with the divestment campaign at Columbia and expanding into my work with national anti-apartheid organizations like the American Committee on Africa (ACOA). Again, research was front and center. In order to make effective demands for divestment, we needed to know which companies were supporting the apartheid regime, and which of those companies our universities held stock in. ACOA was of great help in this, including through Richard Knight, who worked in a back room of their offices at 198 Broadway and had what may well have been the messiest desk in the history of progressive politics. But if my memory serves me correctly, he seemed to be able to remember exactly where he put a given document in one of the many piles of paper that obscured his desktop. The work he did, along with colleagues at ACOA, helped fuel the student divestment movement, along with research by students on campuses around the country.

Another key group at that time was Corporate Data Exchange (CDE). Tina Simcich, who worked at CDE and was also part of the New York Committee to Oppose Bank Loans to South Africa (COBLSA), did the definitive research on which banks were lending to the apartheid regime.

At Columbia, we made an interesting discovery that put the lie to the university’s position on divestment. In response to demands to divest from firms involved with the apartheid regime, university leaders argued that, if there were objections to the actions of companies they were invested in, they felt it would be more productive to support shareholder resolutions seeking to change their conduct than to divest from those companies’ stocks.

But after digging around in past Columbia University documents, we found a memo from a prior year in which the university had responded to a request to support a shareholder resolution on behalf of trade unionists in Chile, some of whom had been murdered by the Pinochet regime. The university’s position then proved to be precisely the opposite of what it said just a few years later when asked to divest from companies involved in South Africa: they didn’t think it was productive to engage in shareholder resolutions. If there was an ethical issue with one of their holdings, their preference was to divest from the stock of that company.

Although it was a small instance of hypocrisy, it was nonetheless revealing. At that point, the university had been determined to do absolutely nothing to hold companies that were complicit in repression accountable. Our divestment campaign of the mid-1970s did not succeed, but in 1985, another cohort of student activists did finally persuade Columbia to divest. The next year, in 1986, Congress passed comprehensive sanctions on South Africa, overriding a veto attempt by President Ronald Reagan.

Obviously, research was only partly responsible for our success. It was research in the service of organizing and sound strategy that won the day. The fact that the liberation movements in South Africa, including the African National Congress and the Black Consciousness Movement, were calling for divestment greatly strengthened our case. And inspiring organizers and speakers like the incomparable Prexy Nesbitt and the late Dumisani Kumalo, a South African exile who went on to be liberated South Africa’s first representative to the United Nations, played a huge role, as did thousands of campus activists, religious leaders, trade unionists, state and local officials, and heads of pension funds.

Eight years later, in 1994, Nelson Mandela was sworn in as the first president of a free South Africa. The vast bulk of the credit for that historic change goes to the people of South Africa, but the divestment campaign and the larger global boycott of the apartheid regime played an important supporting role, a role much appreciated by activists in South Africa.

As for me, my work in the anti-apartheid movement shaped my career. I worked for a while as part of the collective that put out Southern Africa magazine, an independent journal that supported the anti-apartheid movement and the liberation movements in Southern Africa. The original editor was Jennifer Davis, the brilliant exiled South African economist who went on to direct ACOA. I wrote articles about the divestment campaign, violations of the arms embargo on South Africa, and the role of U.S. firms in propping up the apartheid regime. The skills and values I learned there were far more important to my career than my philosophy degree from Columbia, an institution whose leaders have now covered themselves in shame by cracking down on students speaking out against U.S.-financed Israeli genocide in Gaza.

The Impact of ‘68

Our work against apartheid was inspired in part by the generation of 1968, whose research exposed the role of companies fueling the war in Vietnam, including Dow Chemical, which produced napalm that was used to kill and maim untold numbers of people. We were also influenced by publications like “Who Rules Columbia,” as well as a handy publication on how to research the corporate ties of one’s university, published by the ever-relevant and crucial NACLA. And groups like National Action Research on the Military-Industrial Complex (NARMIC) were invaluable for peace activists from the anti-Vietnam War period onward.

Other influences on me from that generation of researchers and analysts included Michael Klare, whose reports and books like Supplying Repression, War Without End: American Planning for the Next Vietnams, and Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws: America’s Search for a New Foreign Policy were foundational in forming my understanding of U.S. military spending and strategy. And my perspective on the domestic factors driving Pentagon spending began with The Iron Triangle, written by my friend and mentor Gordon Adams (now Abby Ross).

The Corporate Role in Fueling Genocide in Gaza

Activists pushing universities to divest from companies profiting from Israel’s war in Gaza have made connections with the earlier generation of researchers described above, from webinars with members of NARMIC to essays that link to documents like “Who Rules Columbia?”

A key organization in the middle of current efforts is Little Sis — a powerful research organization whose name is based on the idea that they are the opposite of Big Brother. They facilitate research and make connections on a wide range of issues, but at this moment one of their most important products is a webinar they did with Dissenters, a youth anti-militarism group based in Chicago, on how to research the corporate ties of universities. It’s a tutorial on researching university ties to war profiteers, going well beyond the issue of stock holdings in arms makers to look at the connections of trustees, financial institutions, and other relevant ties to weapons makers.

Groups of dedicated students within the ceasefire and anti-genocide movements on U.S campuses have done excellent work in researching the corporate ties of their own universities. I appeared on Santita Jackson’s radio show in February 2025 and connected with Bryce Greene, a student at the University of Indiana involved in the ceasefire/Gaza movement there. He and his fellow students were researching the military ties of the university and they wanted me to review their research to see if they were missing anything. As it happened, they had dug up far more information than I would have, in part because of local connections. Their biggest find was related to the university’s ties to the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC), Crane Division, which provides technical support for everything from missile defense systems to Special Operations Forces. University professors had gone back and forth between Crane and campus, and Crane had a direct presence at the school. Students then started a “keep Crane off campus” campaign.

Researchers focused specifically on Israel/Gaza include the American Friends Service Committee, which has a web page on “Companies Profiting from the Gaza Genocide,” and No Tech for Apartheid, which, among other things, reaches out to workers at Google and Amazon to encourage them to take a stand against technology from tech firms going to support the Israeli war effort. One of the most valuable current resources is the United Nations report, “From the Economy of Occupation to the Economy of Genocide,” produced under the supervision of Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, which describes its purpose this way:

“This report investigates the corporate machinery sustaining Israel’s settler-colonial project of displacement and replacement of the Palestinians in the occupied territory. While political leaders and governments shirk their obligations, far too many corporate entities have profited from Israel’s economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and now, genocide. The complicity exposed by this report is just the tip of the iceberg; ending it will not happen without holding the private sector accountable, including its executives.”

Models of Research and Strategy

The most effective current model for using data to shape the debate on security issues is the Costs of War Project at Brown University. Their work on the costs of America’s post-9/11 wars ($8 trillion and counting), the number of overseas U.S. counter-terror missions, the cost of U.S. military aid and military operations in support of Israel (over $22 billion in the first year of the war in Gaza) is routinely cited in the press and by political leaders, and provides fuel for activists in their writing and public education efforts.

The best current example of merging research, organizing, and strategy is the new Poor People’s Campaign, co-chaired by Reverend William Barber of Repairers of the Breach and Reverend Liz Theoharis of the Kairos Center. Their campaign was inspired by the effort of the same name announced by Martin Luther King Jr. in November 1967. King was assassinated before his campaign came to fruition, but the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) and other groups picked up the work of making its signature event, The Poor People’s March on Washington, happen.

One of the bedrock principles of the current Poor People’s Campaign is that the people most impacted by poverty should lead the movement. But cultivating such leadership, especially among those who have been excluded from the halls of power and influence for so long, requires an ongoing process of research, education, and training. Theoharis, director of the Kairos Center and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, underscores this point in her new book on the history of poor people’s organizing, co-authored with Noam Sandweiss-Back:

“Without a continual process of learning, reflecting, and growing intellectually, our organizing is reduced to mobilizing, an exercise in moving bodies without supporting existing leaders and developing new ones . . . mobilizing people is important, but when it becomes our sole focus, we sacrifice long-term power for short-term action.”

As Theoharis notes, King made a similar point in Where Do We Go From Here?:

“Education without social action is a one-sided value because it has no true power potential. Social action without education is a weak expression of pure energy… Our policies should have the strength of deep analysis beneath them to be able to challenge the clever sophistries of our opponents.”

In the midst of the torrent of lies and repressive practices emanating from Washington, the use of research to guide strategy and support organizing is more important than ever. But as the Trump administration stops collecting some kinds of data and destroys other kinds altogether, the job of research will be ever more difficult. That can be partially compensated for by drawing on the collective knowledge of researchers, organizers, and community members alike, taking our lead from people who are on the front lines of dealing with repressive policies.

Occasionally, when I am giving a talk on how to reduce the influence of the war machine, I point out that, if there were not people organizing for change, my research would be little more than a peculiar hobby. That is only a slight exaggeration. We need to bring together researchers, organizers, and strategists, taking our lead from members of impacted communities, to work in partnership against the challenges we now face on a daily, at times hourly, basis.

This means the content of our work may take different forms. Rather than reports and briefings, we may need to rely on music, storytelling, art, and ritual to share insights on the political terrain and tales of resistance and revival in these times of escalating crisis. This may become even more to the point as traditional forms of protest continue to be criminalized.

We have a rich history to guide and inspire us, but the task is ours.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

When it comes to for-profit, private corporate incarceration of immigrants, making lots of money is like drinking salt water, the more they drink, the thirstier they get. Roman proverbs say that the more money a rich man has, the more driven and addicted he becomes to accumulating even more money. Wealth addiction is at the root of giant private prison corporations domination of the U.S. government as communities take a back seat to the need for private profit. Many government leaders from both political parties share the same ‘profits over people’ ideology. The industry is preparing for explosive growth. On recent earnings calls, CoreCivic executives announced plans to triple the number of beds in their facilities within a few months. That would mean an additional $1.5 billion in revenue for the corporation, more than doubling its annual earnings. The U.S. private incarceration system is a deeply entrenched network of public-private partnerships that make billions from incarceration and detention every year.

Just like large. private health insurance corporations, the U.S. private-profit incarceration system has the inherent tendency to invent new needs, disregard all boundaries and turn everything into big profit.  Limitless greed for money becomes a disease where a person may become over-saturated with food….but no one or private prison corporation ever has enough wealth. Wealth addiction is a greedy compulsion to obtain more and more wealth, and specifically obtain what belongs to others. The effect is to injure others because it is adversarial/harmful to society as a whole..The private prison industry pushes for harsh immigration policies intended to drive up immigration detention. And private immigration detention centers suffer from many of the same problems as private prisons and jails, but the people held in them have even fewer rights and thus, at times, can suffer even more abuse.

What is Private Immigration Detention?

Emerging from the Reagan administrations advocacy of privatization of public services, immigration detention is now a booming business for private prison corporations. Today’s profiteering involves the complete outsourcing of the criminal legal system to the highest bidder. Corruption of money in politics allows greedy corporations to decimate families in disproportionately black, brown, and Indigenous communities.

With burgeoning anti-immigrant rhetoric and legislative crackdowns at all levels, private prison corporations are increasing their hold on U.S. detention policy. Today about 90 percent of detained immigrants are held in privately operated facilities, the highest percentage in U.S. history. In a for-profit prison, jail or immigrant detention facility, people are imprisoned by a private third party that contracts with a government agency. Contractual agreements between governments and private entities commit prisoners to privatized facilities and are paid a per diem or monthly rate, either for each immigrant or prisoner in the facility, or for each place available, whether occupied or not. Such contracts may be for the operation only of a facility, or for design, construction and operation.

The Trump administration leaves no doubt that it will detain as many undocumented immigrants as it can and send them to for-profit centers. And to help make sure that happens, private prisons companies spend millions on campaigns and congressional lobbying efforts, just like businesses that sell cars, real estate, hamburgers or toothpaste.

Next to private health insurance corporations, there is no greater disconnect between the public good and private interests than the rise of corporate owned and operated for profit jails. The interest of private jails lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates, but instead having as many immigrants and prisoners as possible housed as cheaply and profitably as possible. In the push for austerity and privatization, private profit U.S.prison corporations have become premier examples of private capitalist enterprises seeking profits from the misery of man while trying to ensure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.

Profiteering private prison corporations are cashing in on the misery and desperation of U.S. citizens as many county jail and state prison systems privatize throughout the nation. Private companies house over ten percent of the nation’s total prison population, with privatization/profiteering madness now extending to well over 6 million people under correctional supervision, more than ever were in Stalin’s gulags.

Very alarming, the private prison industry now incarcerates 90 percent of all immigrant children, adolescents and adults . A spokesman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE), Alonzo Pena, acknowledged that the private companies have all too often fallen short, noting that “It wasn’t their priority to ensure that the highest standards were being met”. ICE deserves some blame/responsibility. “We set up this partnership with the private industry in a way that was supposed to make things much more effective, much more economical, but unfortunately, it was in the execution and the monitoring and the auditing we fell behind, we fell short.”

How to Privatize Jail

The standard method for privatization of jails:
1). Defund government services to make sure things don’t work and people get angry
2). Hand program over to private capital.
3). Continue to defund local publically funded jail and state prison services.
4). Urge/pressure county commissions and state government to allow for-profit, private prison corporations to take over under the guise of “rescuing” jail functions.
5). Promote the ‘appearance of rescue’ of the county jail or state service by self-serving private profit driven programs to the community.

In reality it’s not long until privatization falls short in quality service; the private jail program saves money by employing fewer, less trained guards and other workers and pays them badly, with horror stories often accompanying how these jails are run. In addition to Department of Justice studies and experience showing that governments save little money, if any, by turning over prison functions to private outfits, the Dept.of Justice also concluded that private prisons were in general more violent than government-operated institutions, and ordered a phaseout under the Obama and Biden administrations of their use at the federal level. Regrettably, reversing that order was one of the first things that President Trump did on taking office.

Claims of Private Prison Corporations

Without evidence, private prison corporations always claim that their program will save the county and state millions annually. Private companies, such as CCA/CoreCivic and GEO Group dominant, tout their virtues by saying they build and operate prisons more cheaply than governments can, due to the public sector’s many mandates. Their day-to-day operations are similarly more efficient and less costly, they assert, and they do it all without compromising public safety. The bottom line, they say, is that they allow governments to free up public funds for pursuits that mean more to most taxpayers than how felons or immigrants are jailed. To make sure that happens, private prisons companies spend millions on donations to politicians from both political parties at all levels of government, campaigns and congressional lobbying efforts, just like businesses that sell cars, real estate, or hamburgers.

“Privately operated facilities are better equipped to handle changes in the flow of illegal immigration because they can open or close new facilities as needed,” said Rodney E. King, CoreCivic’s public affairs manager. Critics tell a different story. They cite moments like a 2015 riot to protest poor conditions at a prison in Arizona run by another major private player, Management and Training Corporation. Earlier at that same institution, three inmates had escaped and murdered two people.

Many case examples show scrimping by private immigrant detention facility operators, with bad food and shabby health care for inmates, low pay and inadequate training for guards and hiring shortages. At immigrant detention centers, operators see little need to offer extensive educational programs for children or job training since people held there are mostly destined for deportation. Basic hygiene items like toothpaste or tampons are marked up by 300 percent or more by Commissary corporations. Contributing to suffering and preventable deaths, some private health care providers routinely delay or deny treament behind bars. Private food vendors serve meals that are frequently expired or nutritionally inadequate, all in the name of cutting costs and maximizing returns.“To maximize profit, you minimize your expenditures,” said Rachel Steinback, a lawyer for hunger strikers.

U.S. Dept. of Justice Concludes No Cost Savings

Despite many promises that jail and prison privatization will lead to big cost savings, such savings, as a comprehensive study by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, part of the U.S. Department of Justice concluded, “have simply not materialized.” To the extent that private prison and jail operators do manage to save money, they do so through “reductions in trained staff, fringe benefits and other labor-related costs.” Economist Paul Krugman noted that “as more and more government functions get privatized, states become ‘pay-to-play’ paradises in which both political contributions and contracts for friends and relatives become quid pro quo for getting government busines.”

Conclusion

The corrupt nexus of privatization and patronage by private one percent corporations and oligarchs is undermining local and state levels of government across the USA. Longer-term institutionalization by for-profit corporations is promoted via harsh sentencing guidelines and other means for keeping inmates doing lengthy, and very profitable for the corporation, sentences. To fix this problem, we should demand that private corporations be removed from the administration of our local, state and federal public prison programs. Privatization of jail services increases costs without any corresponding increase in quality or care. Until then, the powerful in county, state and federal government, along with their corporate oligarch partners to whom they are beholden will continue privatizing and profiteering as they please, while laughing all the way to the bank. Everyone interested  should join all state and local efforts to end privatization. profiteering and  barbarous inappropriate imprisonment of immigrants.

In the new book, “The Prison Industry: How it Works and Who Profits”, authors Bianca Tylek and Worth Rises write:

“Private prisons have embedded themselves in every facet of the criminal and immigration systems. While people have begun to challenge private prison corporations, there must be vigilant attention paid to the industry’s attempt to change its toxic image and expand into adjacent business lines. After all, whether walls are built out of concrete, wire, or WiFi, a prison is still a prison, and a private prison still needs more bodies to grow. No matter their form, private prison corporations have no place in any system that claims to be about justice”.

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Photograph Source: SC Guard – Public Domain

The Trump administration’s race toward fascism is unfolding at breakneck speed and on multiple fronts. At the heart of this transformation lies the emergence of the United States as a warfare state, a captive state that merges the interests of the military-industrial-academic complex with the toxic ideologies of white nationalism and white supremacy. What makes this moment especially dangerous is that warfare no longer refers solely to foreign conquest; it has become a central organizing principle of governance at home. The state itself has been weaponized, turning inward against its own population, normalizing domestic terrorism as a tool of rule. The scourge of militarization as the driving force of American politics, which has its contemporary roots in the terror state created by Bush and Cheney after 9/11, is even more intensified as a domestic and foreign policy mode of governance. The long legacy of armed intervention abroad by the U.S. now appears on the streets of Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. as well as in universities, courthouses, and even sports fields. As Melissa Gira Grant notes, “federal agents are the new proud boys.”  Perpetual war is now waged against Americans, legitimated as a normal condition of politics. 

This is domestic terrorism, the transformation of inflammatory, fear-mongering, and dehumanizing rhetoric into acts of state violence.  It is a form of necropolitics wedded to the notion of death worlds and the ascendence of a corpse-like order. As Achille Mbembe argues,  “death worlds” mark regimes in which “new and unique forms of social existence [emerge] in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions conferring on them the status of the living dead.” Trump’s regime of domestic terrorism, especially his war on immigrants and naturalized citizens is driven by a death drive that constitutes an orgy of annihilation wedded to the dictates of capital accumulation, the dynamics of class and racial hierarchies, and bold embrace and displays of racist histories and neo-Nazi symbols. Under Trump’s notion of gangster capitalism and politics of vengeance, there is no room in the U.S. except for white Christian nationalist and supine loyalists. 

There is no pretense of democracy here, only the workings of gangster capitalism masquerading as the future. When a government deploys violence and coercion to intimidate its own population, driven by nativism, racism and political extremism, it meets the definition of domestic terrorism. Its policies and language are designed to cultivate fear, intimidate, and amass power in the hands of the rich. Dehumanizing speech does not simply wound; it punishes, it draws blood, and it prepares the ground for expulsions, detention centers, and a culture saturated with hate. Words like “invaders,” “vermin,” and “criminals” are weaponized against immigrants to mark them as disposable. Policies of family separation, mass deportation, and indefinite detention are constructed not only to punish but to terrorize. Confronted with this dehumanizing rhetoric and violence-soaked policies, Trump, chillingly and without irony, declares, “A lot of people are saying maybe we’d like a dictator.” 

Trump’s authoritarian obsession with violence and punishment is evident in his relentless drive to criminalize dissent and weaponize the state against what he calls “enemies of the people.” He has demanded draconian penalties, including prison time, for those who burn the American flag, an act of protest protected under the Constitution. Stephen Prager argues in Common Dreams that Trump has issued an executive order that puts in place portals and legal mechanisms that may permit “‘random fascist vigilantes’ to help him crack down on protests across the country, according to one prominent civil rights lawyer.” In addition, he has called for the reinstatement of the death penalty for murder cases in the nation’s capital, deploying the ultimate form of state violence as both spectacle and warning. These are not isolated authoritarian postures but militarized acts of domestic terrorism, designed to fuse punishment, repression, and vengeance into the very core of political life. 

What we are witnessing in the United States is not simply the corrosion of democratic norms but the rise of an aggressive fascist politics, one that weaponizes the threat of punishment to enforce Trump’s whims and vanities. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat rightly observes, Trump seeks to transform the Department of Defense into the Department of War, a blunt instrument of his personal authority. He boasts of sending armed troops into Democratic-run cities he despises, embracing the military as his private army. Journalist and historian Garrett Graff underscores the gravity of this descent, arguing that “America has finally tipped over into fascism.” While he does not explicitly invoke the term domestic terrorism, his depiction leaves little doubt that the necropolitics of state terror have taken root under Trump’s regime. Graff writes: 

America has become a country where armed officers of the state shout “Papers please!” on the street at men and women heading home from work, a vision we associate with the Gestapo in Nazi Germany or the KGB in Soviet Russia, and where masked men wrestle to the ground and abduct people without due process into unmarked vehicles, disappearing them into an opaque system where their family members beg for information.

Anti-Communism Fanaticism and the Ghost of Roy Cohn

It is precisely out of this obsession with punishment and terror that Trump revives another of fascism’s oldest weapons: the anti-communist smear. At the core of this politics of fear, dissenters are not engaged but denounced, not debated but branded as traitors. In the McCarthy era it was used to silence dissent, dismantle unions, and destroy lives—think especially of “the Hollywood Ten.” 

Under Trump, anti-communist smears are wielded once again, not as an argument but as a weapon, meant to mark whole movements, cities, and communities as enemies of the state. A chilling illustration of this came in a rant by white nationalist Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff. Speaking at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station on August 20, 2025, during a stop at Shake Shack with Vice President J.D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, while visiting National Guard troops. Referring to protesters shouting at Miller in Union Station, he stated:

 They’re the ones who have been advocating for the one percent. They’re criminals, killers, rapists, and drug dealers. And I’m glad they’re here today because me, Pete, and the vice president [are] going to leave here and, inspired by them, we’re going to add thousands more resources to this city to get the criminals and the gang members out. We’re going to disable those networks, and we’re going to prove that the city can serve law-abiding citizens. We are not going to let the Communists destroy a great American city, let alone the nation’s capital… So we’re going to ignore these stupid white hippies, who all need to go home and take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old, and get back to protecting the American people and the citizens of Washington, D.C.

Here the slur “Communists” does not name an ideology, it operates as an epithet, a scarlet letter of treason designed to criminalize protest and erase dissent itself. As Thom Hartmann reminds us, fascism rarely marches into being with tanks rolling down the avenues; it seeps into everyday life through language that glorifies violence, legitimizes cruelty, and sanctifies authoritarian power. By branding critics as “Communists” and ridiculing protesters as “criminals” and “stupid hippies,” Miller’s rant exposes how hate-saturated speech fuses with state repression to cultivate a culture where fear and violence appear natural, even necessary. He surely knows the lineage he is invoking. Anti-communist rhetoric, in the hands of George Wallace and Richard Nixon, functioned in the 1960s as a weapon to justify brutality against “domestic enemies”: liberals, civil rights activists, student radicals, leftists of every stripe. The irony is unmistakable: Miller resurrects the anti-communist hysteria of Roy Cohn, Trump’s mentor and enabler during the darkest days of McCarthyism, channeling a script of fear and denunciation that once destroyed lives and now returns as a blueprint for authoritarian rule. History leaves little doubt: the anti-communist vocabulary revived today by Trump, MAGA, and their sycophants is far from rhetorical excess, it is a deliberate strategy, a time-tested script, to sanctify authoritarian rule, legitimate state-sanctioned violence and silence democratic resistance.

Infamous for his rabid attacks on immigrants, Miller has long been the ideological architect of Trump’s fascism. His racism and nativism fuel three central pillars of this project. First, Miller insists that all immigrants are criminals, fit only to be expelled or incarcerated. Second, he casts the assault on immigration as the cornerstone for erecting a police state, eroding justice, truth, morality, and freedom itself. Third, he has become a leading force in the war on public and higher education, branding them as “cancerous, communist, woke culture” that is “destroying the country.” Such language, echoing Trump’s lexicon, is code for dismantling the critical, inclusive, and democratic possibilities of education: the chance for diverse students to learn, to question, and to act as informed agents of a democratic society.

For Miller, schools must not cultivate critical consciousness but instead drill children in patriotism, uncritical reverence for America, and hostility toward “communist ideology.” The details of this pedagogical assault are chillingly familiar: banning books, whitewashing history into a racist mythology, abolishing critical pedagogy, and hollowing out the capacity for informed and ethical thinking. What emerges is a pedagogy of repression, one that seeks to erase historical memory, extinguish democratic values, and turn education into a factory of indoctrination.

The Rise of the Police State and the Attack on Citizenship 

This is not an isolated campaign. The broader discourse of racism, white nationalism, and state repression is now flaunted by Trump and his cadre of shock troops in mainstream media, not with shame but with fanatical glee, and rarely interrogated as the lifeblood of fascist ideology. The legitimating force of this repression is what gives state violence its sheen of inevitability.

One stark example makes this clear. Christopher Rufo, one of the most influential propagandists of the MAGA movement, recently declared in a Substack post that agencies like ICE should “dispatch unmarked vans to follow key agitators and snatch them from the streets while the media are not looking.” The essence of fascism is always in such details. Trump and his allies know that secret abductions, forced disappearances, and the proliferation of masked federal agents who refuse to identify themselves, and who act with impunity, are not aberrations. They are the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes. And let’s be clear, Trump’s domestic terrorism and war on immigrants are not only a mask for creating a police state, it also provides grotesque opportunities for private prison companies to profit from Trump’s feverish attempt to imprison thousands of immigrants, dissenters, and anyone else opposed to his dictatorial delusions.    

The erosion of due process, equal justice, and above all citizenship is the most chilling marker of this new warfare state. As John Ganz argues, the essence of Trump’s movement is an assault on the very concept of American citizenship, stretching from birtherism and the stolen election lie to attempts to revoke birthright citizenship and expand denaturalization. In Trump’s world, citizenship no longer exists as an inalienable right; it is stripped of its universality and recast as a privilege. In his hands, it is both gift and cudgel, “a transferable and revocable commodity,” wielded to divide, discipline, and destroy. This is the state’s cold choreography of fear, where terror, abduction, violence, and disappearance become the grammar of governance and the language through which power is spoken. 

Trump’s attack on citizenship cannot be separated from the ongoing militarization of America. As Greg Grandin notes in The New York Times, at its core this attack is a “fight over the meaning of America” and reveals both  the white racism driving MAGA nationalism, and the pernicious claim by the Trump regime that they will decide “who gets to call themselves American in Mr. Trump’s America?” He adds:

Mr. Trump and operatives like Mr. Miller are waging a war not only on migrants but also on the concept of citizenship. According to one report, Immigration and Customs Enforcement expelled as many as 66 citizens during Mr. Trump’s first term, and now he has issued an executive order ending birthright citizenship. His government is exiling children who were born in the United States, including a 4-year-old boy with late-stage cancer. The Justice Department says it is “prioritizing denaturalization,” establishing a framework to revoke citizenship from naturalized citizens the White House deems undesirable.

To dismantle citizenship is to resurrect one of history’s darkest horrors: the rendering of people stateless, expelled not only from a nation but from the very category of the human—denied memory, voice, and existence itself. Deportation, detention, and denaturalization are not bureaucratic measures but weapons of political cleansing. This is domestic terrorism, not a metaphor, not an exaggeration, but the systematic transformation of incendiary rhetoric into instruments of state violence. Ganz is right: Trump’s attack on citizenship carries the unmistakable signature of fascism, the logic of totalitarianism reborn, the totalitarian machinery of erasure turned against the present, made into a spectacle suitable for instant viewing and the rush cruelty provides as a pleasure quotient.

Rachel Maddow captures the full weight of this authoritarian consolidation. The United States, she warns, is no longer on the brink but already living under a consolidating dictatorship. Secret police snatch people off streets, immigrants are scapegoated as the perpetual enemy, and even “homegrown” citizens are threatened with loss of citizenship. Whole swaths of U.S. territory have been reclassified as military zones, with armed, active-duty troops now exercising arrest powers. Massive detention centers are being built on military bases. Universities, the press, and courts are being militarized, coerced or dismantled. Like the state, spaces once reserved for asserting one’s rights, protection, and care are now held captive by agents, masked, and armed in tactical gear. As Mark Peterson points out in The New Yorker, spaces, such as court hallways, are now captive as  sites of intimidation, fear, and disappearances  The rhetoric of a captive state and space are not metaphors, they have become the normalized tactics of fascism in real time.

The Spectacle as Opiate and Cover

The spectacle operates both as distraction and as pedagogy. By dramatizing state violence as entertainment, whether through militarized parades, campaign rallies, or sensationalist media coverage, the Trump regime trains the public to see authoritarian repression as normal, even desirable. The spectacle is a form of civic illiteracy: it numbs historical memory, erodes critical thought, and recodes brutality as patriotism.

The spectacle is more than distraction; it is a smokescreen for systemic violence. Behind the theatrics lie black-site detention centers, the militarization of U.S. cities, and surveillance technologies that monitor everyday life. The media’s complicity, obsessed with immediacy and balance, enables this process by masking the deeper truth: the rise of an authoritarian warfare state at home.

What emerges is not merely a culture of distraction, but the weaponization of spectacle itself. Under Trump, the media’s hunger for shock and drama has transformed authoritarian repression into mass entertainment, flooding the public sphere with images of violence, erasure, and conquest, all while consolidating executive power.

Guy Debord’s notion of the Society of the Spectacle has returned with a vengeance in the abyss of American fascist politics. What the media too often dismiss as “Trump’s diversions” or “stunts” are in fact ritualized performances of state violence, acts of political theater that function as pedagogy. These spectacles do not simply distract—they indoctrinate. They whisper that cruelty is virtue, that repression is order, that vengeance is justice, that fear itself is the normalized rhythm of everyday existence.

Consider the arming of the National Guard in Washington, D.C., staged as patriotic pageantry rather than as a militarization of civic life. The raid on the home of John Bolton, once a close adviser, later a critic, was choreographed as a national morality play in which betrayal is punished publicly. Trump’s retaliatory campaigns against adversaries like New York Attorney General Letitia James, Adam Schiff, and other so-called “enemies of the state” transform into grotesque spectacles of retribution, political theater driven by an unyielding demand for loyalty. These acts unfold as a public, performative display of power, relentlessly signaling that dissent will not only be silenced but criminalized. The bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities is framed as a display of strength, not reckless escalation, while ICE raids and masked agents abducting immigrants become national security dramas. These scenes, endlessly replayed across media, merge terror with pedagogy, cruelty with consent, both as performance and an unmistakable threat. But beneath this spectacle lies a deeper truth: a wannabe dictator using state power against, not for, the people and the principles of democracy. Today, state violence targets ICE victims, students, protesters, dissidents, and anyone on Trump’s retribution list—but in the end, no one will be safe from his fascist regime. 

This celebration of cruelty and state violence is not limited to highlighting Trump’s political enemies; it extends via a slick promotional ventures used by his political lackeys. For instance, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a MAGA-aligned official. shamelessly staged a promotional video shamelessly staged a promotional video against the bleak backdrop of shirtless, caged prisoners in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. In her performance, a brutalizing system of incarceration was transfigured into an aesthetic of power and punishment, a stage set for political ambition.  Noem’s spectacle reveals how authoritarian pageantry circulates transnationally: the prison state of El Salvador becomes a visual script for U.S. politicians eager to display toughness, exporting the grammar of fascist performance across borders. In this spectacularized culture, politics dissolves into the aesthetics of cruelty, where lawlessness and repression are repackaged as civic virtue and photo ops for what Wilhelm Reich, in Mass Psychology of Fascism, called “the libidinally deranged.”

Here the spectacle does not conceal fascism but embodies it. Each act dramatizes the message that Trump alone decides who is safe, who is punished, who is disposable. Reich’s insight into the fascist “perversion of pleasure” is central: the staging of cruelty is not only meant to terrify; it is meant to gratify. Citizens are invited to experience the humiliation of the weak as a form of release, to find satisfaction in the punishment of the vulnerable. Theodor Adorno’s warnings about the authoritarian personality come into sharp relief here: the blending of obedience and enjoyment, submission and aggression, produces subjects who come to desire domination as if it were freedom.

What emerges is an authoritarian economy of desire in which cruelty is transformed into theater. Images of militarized parades, mug shots of political enemies, or caged immigrants circulate across media platforms like advertisements for repression, producing both fear and illicit pleasure. The spectacle trains citizens to consume cruelty as entertainment, to eroticize domination, and to accept vengeance as the highest civic virtue. Watching becomes complicity; complicity becomes a source of satisfaction; satisfaction becomes a form of loyalty.

This authoritarian theater is not confined to U.S. borders; it reverberates globally, most visibly in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. Here the spectacle of state violence is magnified to a planetary scale: live-streamed bombings, images of flattened neighborhoods, and drone footage of entire families buried in rubble circulate as both military propaganda and cultural pedagogy. Just as Trump repackages cruelty as patriotic theater, Israel transforms mass death into a performance of deterrence, staging domination as necessity and erasure as security. Gaza becomes both a laboratory and a screen, where militarized cruelty is rehearsed, aestheticized, and then exported as a model for authoritarian regimes worldwide. The Iron Dome is celebrated as technological mastery, while beneath and beyond its arc lies a devastated landscape of disposability, an unending spectacle of suffering meant to teach not only Palestinians but the world that resistance will be met with extermination. In this sense, Gaza is not an exception but a mirror: a brutal stage on which the pedagogy of fascism is made global.

Under such circumstances, moral witnessing disappears, the burden of conscience on a global level is undermined, and older bonds of solidarity collapse as cultural and educational institutions devoted to the public good are gutted. The rise of the military–prison–carceral state becomes entertainment, a spectacle that fuses torture, the pornography of violence, and mass distraction into the central cultural grammar of politics. The spectacle numbs thought, erases memory, invents false villains, and produces a civic illiteracy that leaves the public disarmed before fear and manipulation. What disappears in this haze is the recognition that the United States is undergoing not a temporary aberration, but the consolidation of a new fascism, one that fuses militarized violence, pedagogical terrorism, and state-sanctioned domestic cruelty to construct a fascist subject fit for the twenty-first century. Fascism today is not simply a state-sponsored show of force; it is a pedagogical regime, an apparatus of cultural engineering that decides who counts as a citizen, whose lives matter, and whose may be discarded.

Domestic Terrorism as a Pedagogical Regime

Under the Trump administration, culture is not simply a mirror of political power but the very ground upon which authoritarianism takes root, fashions its subjects, and legitimates the warfare state. Trump’s reliance on brute force, his addiction to state violence, and his expansion of the carceral state are undeniable, yet the most enduring battlefield of his domestic terrorism is consciousness itself. Here, the public is trained to forget, taught to mistake lies for truth, and subjected to the pedagogical violence of disimagination machines that wage war on literacy and the imagination. Trump’s regime turns cultural engineering into a weapon, deciding what is remembered and what is erased, which values are sanctified and which are discarded. The goal is not only to control politics but to colonize consciousness, producing a population that internalizes obedience, fear, and historical amnesia. This is the logic of pedagogical terrorism: a cultural and educational apparatus that normalizes coercion, erasure, and dehumanization by teaching people to accept such practices as common sense.

The attack on the Smithsonian, the banning of books, the silencing of universities, and the stigmatization of “woke” as a code word for racial justice and historical truth all make visible how white supremacy fuels the cleansing project of Trump’s authoritarianism. There is more at work here than Trump’s attempt to rewrite history, it is a project aimed at obliterating historical memory. Chauncey Devega, writing in Salon, points this out in illuminating detail. He writes:

The president’s assault on the Smithsonian is serious. But his whitewashing campaign — or, more precisely, his White racial erasure project — does not exist in a vacuum. It extends far beyond the Smithsonian. We are witnessing a thought-crime regime that is taking control of the country’s intellectual history and collective memory, which have been deemed “woke.” This includes higher education, with a particular focus on elite colleges and universities; rewriting history textbooks and other educational materials; destroying public media such as PBS and NPR; restoring Confederate monuments; removing the historical context of public parks and other spaces and their connections to the color line; cutting federal funding for scientific and health research that benefits marginalized communities, including women; and ordering the Pentagon to purge officers and other leaders who are not white men, and remove the names and contributions of African-American and other nonwhite veterans — as well as women and LGBTQ Americans — from its libraries, website, reference materials, bases and ships.

 At the state level, this project takes grotesque forms, as with Oklahoma’s Ryan Walters requiring applicants from “liberal states” to pass an anti-woke test before teaching. These assaults are not isolated. They are part of a systematic effort to weaponize education, culture, and memory to manufacture a fascist subject, passive, obedient, and stripped of critical thought.

Militarizing Society and The Spectacle of State Terror

These attacks are not simply about dismantling DEI or critical race theory. They are attacks on the values and institutions that make democracy possible. The merging of militarization with cultural engineering signals that authoritarianism now functions as a dual form of colonization that includes institutions and cultural pedagogical apparatuses shaping consciousness itself. ICE terror, secret abductions by masked paramilitary forces, the criminalization of dissent in universities, and the surveillance of public space are matched by the colonization of language, identity, and memory.

Trump’s rhetoric of crime, corruption, and invasion functions not only as political theater but as a spectacle of state terror. It is worth repeating that his repeated rants about “the enemy within”, Marxists, communists, fascists, and others he brands as “sick” and “evil”, are not mere insults but part of a fascist script of alleged internal enemies. Such rhetoric, as Greg Sargent notes, maps directly onto historical fascist traditions where opponents are dehumanized as existential threats, legitimizing violence against them.

This language has already been paired with force. Trump has unleashed the National Guard in Washington, D.C., rolling tanks into the capital for a military parade while signaling the city’s residents, largely Black and Democratic, that they live under the shadow of armed force. More recently, he federalized 2,000 members of the California National Guard without the governor’s consent to crack down on protests in Los Angeles, the first such move in 60 years. ICE agents hurled flash-bang grenades and fired “non-lethal” bullets into crowds, while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threatened to mobilize Marines if the unrest continued. Trump cast Los Angeles as “occupied by illegal aliens and criminals,” vowing to “liberate” the city. According to Trump, this act of military occupation will soon take place in Chicago and Baltimore, if not all the major Democratic controlled cities in America.

At a press conference, Christi Noem declared, with a fevered logic, that federal troops must occupy Los Angeles and other largely Black, Democratic cities, claiming such militarization is needed to “save them from the socialists.” These actions exemplify domestic terrorism: the use of military and police power to intimidate civilian populations, criminalize dissent, and declare  Democratic cities and multicultural strongholds as enemy zones in need of military occupation. Such actions are the domestic equivalent of martial law. In historical terms, they echo Bull Connor’s police dogs in Birmingham, the National Guard’s bullets at Kent State in 1970, and Pinochet’s use of tanks and soldiers to terrorize Santiago. The pattern is clear: state violence deployed against citizens to secure authoritarian rule, all of which feeds into Trump’s authoritarian fantasies. As Jackson Lears observes, the Trump regime is “drunk on exceptionalist fantasies and committed to conquering populations they deem inferior.”   

Few places reveal the politics of state terror more starkly than Trump’s fantasy of a “Golden Dome” over the United States. Borrowed from Israel’s Iron Dome, it presents itself as defense but functions as a fantasy of total control: a canopy to shield authoritarian power while legitimating its violence. The real lesson of Israel’s Dome is that security for some is purchased through annihilation for others. Inside its arc, protection is mythologized; outside, destruction reigns. The destruction and genocidal annihilation of Gaza shows how defense becomes the alibi for genocide. Trump’s “Golden Dome” would perform the same trick, translating perpetual war and militarized repression into the language of protection.

Like all authoritarian myths, it is pedagogical: it trains citizens to equate safety with obedience, and it redefines dissent as a threat to national survival. Walter Benjamin’s warning that fascism aestheticizes politics finds fresh resonance here, the Dome becomes not only a technology of war, but a political fantasy of beauty and order built on violence and erasure. 

Militarizing Public Space: The Fascist Aesthetic Reborn

Public space is now militarized, transformed into a stage where the technologies of surveillance and the omnipresence of armed police are the opening act in the script of spectacularized domestic terrorism. Under the Trump regime, theatricalized state videos merge the pornography of fear with the visual grammar of high-fashion editorials, an aesthetic in which the Homeland Secretary, Christi Noem, appears like a frozen model of repression, posed against the cold geometry of prison walls, razor wire, and armored convoys. This is not mere propaganda; it is the fascist aesthetic reborn, where violence is stylized, repression is choreographed, and the machinery of state terror is rendered seductive.

In this theatre of domination, public space is no longer simply occupied, it is choreographed into a tableau in which fear becomes both commodity and spectacle. As with all pedagogies of tyranny, such images do not merely display power; they teach the public how to desire it, naturalizing the presence of militarized authority as both inevitable and aspirational. The primitive tribalism of a toxic masculinity is now wedded to what Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls “imperial technologies” that “militarize American politics and politicize the American military.” 

At the heart of this authoritarian spectacularized system lies the fusion of punishment and erasure into a closed pedagogical loop, one that weaponizes culture as both a tool of domination and a means of shaping subjectivity. Punishment operates not only through the criminalization of dissent and the disciplining of communities by militarized policing, but also through the normalization of coercion. ICE raids, public abductions, and the omnipresence of surveillance function as public lessons, training people to internalize fear and accept repression as part of everyday life. Erasure complements this pedagogy of fear by cleansing the crimes of power from historical memory and cultural consciousness. This takes the form of censorship, the banning of books, the silencing of universities as democratic public spheres, and the disappearance of inconvenient truths from the social imagination. Together, punishment and erasure create a culture of pedagogical terrorism in which repression is naturalized and historical amnesia becomes the foundation for an upgraded form of fascist politics, one that not only controls bodies and institutions but also remakes culture itself as an apparatus of authoritarian rule.

Colonizing Memory and the Militarization of Consciousness

Fascism does not only occupy institutions; it occupies memory. It dictates what is remembered and what is silenced, ensuring that alternative visions of history and democracy cannot take root. Hannah Arendt warned that the destruction of citizenship and the rendering of people stateless amounts to an “expulsion from humanity itself.” Today’s authoritarianism similarly expels dissenting voices from public life by erasing their histories. Central to this process of erasure is the elimination of public space, the militarization of the institutions that produce informed citizens, and the transformation of cultural apparatuses or what Adorno called ‘the culture industry,’ transforming it into pedagogical mechanisms of silencing and propaganda. Central to this spectacle of militarization is not just the creation of an authoritarian subject, but also what is being erased—democratic values, critical education, public goods, communities of solidarity, basic human needs, the welfare state, the rule of law, the promise of economic equality,  and a democratic vision of the future.

To resist authoritarianism requires not just political action but a reclaiming of memory as a democratic act. This means refusing the state’s monopoly over historical narratives, preserving the memory of solidarity and struggle, and cultivating new visions of justice. Memory becomes the terrain of democratic resistance, the counter-pedagogy to fascism’s culture of amnesia.

The most insidious aspect of the warfare state is that it does not simply control institutions, it colonizes thought by weaponizing knowledge as a form of power.  It recasts war as a permanent condition, teaches cruelty and fear as civic virtues, and portrays empathy as weakness. Adorno’s work on The Authoritarian Personality illuminates this process: authoritarian regimes cultivate not just obedience but a psychological disposition that equates domination with strength and compassion with treason. What must be grasped, if fascism is to be resisted, is that it is not merely a political order but as Ergin Yildizoglu notes, is a pedagogical regime, a machinery of teaching and unlearning, of shaping consciousness itself through aesthetics, media, and the algorithmic reach of artificial intelligence. Its pedagogy is one of domination: it scripts emotions, dictates values, and implants narratives that define who must be hated, who must be forgotten, and who must remain invisible.

Fascism does more than capture the state; it colonizes language, memory, and identity. It erases the past by silencing historical memory, narrows the horizons of imagination, and drains public life of critical vitality. It produces subjects who are loyal not to truth but to power, obedient not to conscience but to command. This is the ultimate aim of pedagogical terrorism: not only to militarize the state, knowledge, and values, but to also militarize the mind. By narrowing what can be said, remembered, or imagined, it criminalizes dissent and turns language itself into an arsenal of cruelty. Under Trump, fascism is not only a militarized spectacle, it is a model of war. If fascism is not only a government, a form of gangster capitalism, but also a culture, the fight against it must not only be economic, ideological, but also pedagogical space where education becomes central to politics and culture speaks to individuals in a language in which they can both recognize themselves and organize into a mass movement.

As Antonio Gramsci, in the Prison Notebooks, reminded us, “all politics is pedagogical.” If fascism teaches fear, cruelty, and obedience, then resistance must teach solidarity, critical memory, and the courage to imagine a different future. Against fascism’s pedagogy of dispossession, we must cultivate a pedagogy of liberation—one that expands the field of the possible, restores the dignity of memory, and reclaims language as a weapon for democracy rather than domination.

Conclusion: Resisting the Warfare State

The United States is now living under a warfare state that fuses domestic terrorism with pedagogical terrorism. Its purpose is not only to dominate bodies but to colonize minds, erase memory, and manufacture a culture of passivity, obedience, and brutality. Resistance, then, cannot be reduced to exposing corruption, police violence, or opposing policy, however important; it must reclaim culture, language, and memory as the lifeblood of critique and democratic possibility. Only through this reclamation can we grasp how the darkest impulses of the past have been resurrected in the present, and how new media platforms and disimagination machines work tirelessly to normalize fear, ignorance, state violence, domestic terrorism, and the making of militarized subjects.

With respect to the making of militarized subjects, Sable Elyse Smith reminds us, ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge, it is a form of violence. It is woven into the fabric of everyday life by disimagination machines that train us not only to consume pain but to take pleasure in it, to elevate cruelty into entertainment. Trump has sanctioned and expanded this spectacularized culture of abandonment, legitimating a politics where justice is disposable and civic institutions are hollowed out. He is less an aberration than the distilled emblem of gangster capitalism–a postmodern Frankenstein monster, theatrical and self-absorbed, who embodies decades of greed, savagery, and cruelty reaching their poisonous endpoint in American authoritarianism.

The spectacle of fascist politics is not a sideshow; it is the main event. Trump, as T.J. Clark observes, instinctively understands its power to “scent out the reaction of a virtual audience.” Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor remind us that the Trumpian spectacle, with its apocalyptic narratives, signals an ideology that has abandoned not only democracy but the very livability of our shared world. What emerges is a war culture, an authoritarian pedagogy in which cruelty is naturalized, memory is obliterated, and fear becomes the grammar of everyday life.

Against this militarized pedagogy of dispossession, every element of spectacularized fascism must be exposed: its cruelty illuminated, its lies unmasked, and its machinery of terror dismantled. Education should become an axe that breaks through the manufactured “common sense” of authoritarianism, a language that speaks to the deepest needs of the public, rekindles memory, and makes visible both suffering and the capacity to resist. If fascism teaches fear and obedience, then democracy must embrace the power of critique, hope, solidarity, and mass resistance.

The task before us is not only to defend the remnants of democratic institutions but to cultivate a cultural and educational imagination capable of shattering the grip of authoritarianism. To resist is to reclaim the future: to forge a pedagogy of liberation that restores dignity to memory, possibility to politics, and justice to the social fabric. Only then can we dismantle the machinery of terror and reclaim the possibility of a socialist democracy as a living, breathing project of freedom, equality, and justice.

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 Ku Klux Klan parade in downtown Hoquiam, Washington.  Photo courtesy of Polson Museum, Hoquiam.

It’s not hard to find episodes of business class cooperation in United States history. Particularly when it comes to labor relations and suppressing workers’ rights, employers from different parties, industries, regions, and religions have much in common—and act accordingly. During the early twentieth century, bosses routinely expressed this solidarity by creating organizations ranging from chambers of commerce and professional associations to citizens’ committees and citizens’ alliances. The latter groups, in fact, were responsible for some of the bloodiest acts of vigilante terrorism in western U.S. history as merchants and manufacturers came together to bust unions and drive troublesome workers from their towns and workplaces. On the Pacific Coast, employer-led committees brutalized radical and militant workers in cities from the Mexican border to the Olympic Peninsula.

In Grays Harbor, Washington, which for decades made headlines for its record-setting lumber shipments and bloody labor wars, the mid-1920s witnessed the rise of a dominant Right-wing coalition with a firm grip over local politics and influence in national politics. The region was no mere backwater; in the 1920s Aberdeen—and its “Twin City” Hoquiam—were some of the Northwest’s largest and fastest-growing cities, and the Harbor’s goings on regularly turned up in major metropolitan dailies. Different branches of the Far Right and Further Right took their turn. In the early and mid-1920s, the center of right-wing activism was the hooded knights of the Ku Klux Klan. While many Americans believe that the Klan was limited to southern states, many of its deepest wells of support lay in the U.S. West and Midwest.

During the mid-1920s, a new struggle on Grays Harbor shifted from contests between the Left and Right, to a war between the Far Right and Further Right—as the Chamber of Commerce (and their citizens’ vigilante committee front groups) increasingly struggled for dominance with the KKK. Both groups had leaders drawn from the region’s employing class. Both the Chamber and the Klan had experience in politics; moreover, both groups maintained close ties with “law enforcement,” and both positioned themselves as representatives and defenders of their community. Still, if traditional politics and “justice” failed them, both groups proved willing to resort to vigilante justice to get their way. 

In late 1924, the city’s municipal elections earned media attention across the region: the booming industrial city of Aberdeen, one of the Northwest’s largest municipalities, elected a Klansman to head its government. The Klan’s main rivals came from non-KKK (but pro-vigilantism) employers who showed that force worked not only for suppressing labor movements, but also for removing obnoxious elected officials. 

Although the specifics of this local history are unique—perhaps a bit bizarre—they shine a bright light onto U.S. business history a century ago at a time when the Right ruled triumphant over much of American politics, culture, and economy. Counterpunch readers will likely notice the reverberations between the America of the Roaring Twenties and today’s world—exactly a century later.

Considerable ink gets spilt in discussions over divisions within the U.S. business elite, with our valiant Fourth Estate inquiring whether “Boss A supports progressive movements?” or “Will that divorce between Boss B and their spouse lead to a windfall for anti-Trump campaigns.” There are real schisms among those atop our society, but the unfortunate truth is that employers’ class interests have always attracted them toward movements of the Right. It’s this reality that makes possible what we see before us today: the schisms between the neocon Cold Warrior imperialists of the Democrat-Never Trump Republican wing of the United States; and the quasi-fascist movements lined up behind Trump. Both have billionaires and powerful institutions backing them, and both will continue their decades-long practices of harming those on this country’s—and global—margins.

What’s more, this Pacific Northwest regional history of a century past provides a useful reminder that those who run the U.S. economy and political institutions have little interest in democracy, except in finding ways to eradicate it from this “land of the free.” No fact so clearly shows the Upper Crust’s disinterest in democracy as the growth of today’s vast “union avoidance” industry, dedicated as the name suggests, to keeping workplaces non-union. Thus, the (non-union) workplace, where Americans spend so much of their lives, is as dictatorial as any authoritarian country—places where the freedoms of expression and association do not apply, and any show of critical thinking can—and often is—met with retaliation, even termination.

Congressman Albert Johnson, 1920. Photo courtesy of Polson Museum, Hoquiam.

Albert Johnson: King of the Right

Few men figured so prominently in the 1920s American Right as Albert Johnson, longtime publisher of the Daily Washingtonian in the lumber town of Hoquiam. Johnson rose through the ranks of western publishers and established himself in the early 1910s through his militant anti-immigrant and anti-radical politics. Following his role in crushing a strike of (primarily) immigrant lumber workers in the spring of 1912, he founded The Home Defender, self-described as: “A National Newspaper Opposed to Revolutionary Socialism.”

A fervent bigot, Johnson channeled his anti-radical and anti-immigrant views into a decades-long crusade to expand immigration restrictions. Elected to Congress as a Republican in 1912, Johnson maneuvered into House leadership and assumed his prized position atop the House Immigration Committee. He and his movement peaked a century ago, in 1924, when Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, dramatically curtailing immigration from outside northwest Europe—eugenicists’ favorite nations. 

Indeed, eight decades before Grays Harbor’s Kurt Cobain brought his song “Come As You Are” into the world, Albert Johnson, the region’s other most (in)famous resident, championed laws declaring, essentially, “Unless you’re from northwest Europe, don’t come at all.”

Unsurprisingly, given his accomplishments at the national level, Johnson drew support from all sides of the Northwest business classes: the lumbermen, bankers, news editors, and others who joined Johnson in their citizens’ committees and chambers of commerce in the early years of the twentieth century. Support also came from the proto-fascist movement of the Twenties, best represented by the Ku Klux Klan. Both the traditional business Right and their upstart challengers viewed Congressman Johnson as a champion. After all, he promoted both Northwest business development and an assortment of discriminatory policies designed to, in the words of his Home Defender, “put up the bars” against immigration.

Klan Towns

The KKK organized in haste on the Harbor in the early and mid-1920s. The movement’s growth paralleled that of the national movement as by 1924 the Klan had millions of members stretching across the country. A mass organization, the KKK appealed to the racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, xenophobia, and anti-radicalism of large swaths of white, protestant America. 

Across the United States, Klansmen controlled dozens of local governments, and maintained a stranglehold over officials in states such as Oregon. The organization, too, ranked among the nation’s most dedicated fighters against the “Red Menace” of the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW) and Communists. In 1924, the white terrorists’ anti-labor activism reached a grim crescendo when California Klansmen descended on the San Pedro Wobbly hall, brutally assaulted attendees with guns and clubs, and burned IWW children so badly that they had to be hospitalized.

Few subjects so confound students in my classes as our discussions of the strength and composition of the “Second Ku Klux Klan” during the 1920s. They are sometimes blissfully unaware of the terror group’s existence, but more likely familiar with the oft-told legend of the Klan as a small group of hillbillies as depicted in popular media.  Indeed, Americans seem to struggle when confronted with the fact that the Klan was one of the largest and most powerful social movements of the first half of the twentieth century and that much of its membership—particularly its leadership—hailed not from the fringes of society, but instead the ranks of professional and business classes—the “Respectables” of the chamber of commerce. It’s possible that believing this mythical version of the Klan’s history is comforting for Americans, so often taught to accept anti-worker perspectives and believing that the uneducated and poor were—and are—the people most likely to hold white supremacist views.

In Grays Harbor, as across the United States, the Klan had its greatest appeal among business owners, professionals, and public officials. In Portland, Oregon, one of the largest blocs of Klansmen were police, and across the country the KKK actively recruited preachers who helped the white supremacist group reach their flocks. After observing one local Klan celebration, one Grays Harbor Wobbly claimed that the Klansmen hailed from the “gentry.” The Klan agreed. In 1921, Kleagle W.D. Norris spent four weeks recruiting in Hoquiam; he announced that most of the new members were businessmen.

Norris’s assessment was telling. Like in many other areas of Klan strength, the Harbor’s most-active KKK members included small businessmen and professionals, including several wealthy members of the owning class. Moreover, like many other groups formed by managers and professionals, the Klan demonstrated its class character as Klansmen pledged to fight intoxication, thus maintaining a sober, punctual, and hard-working labor force.  

The Harbor’s best-known Klansman was Ransom Minkler. Ransom was a prolific joiner who enjoyed the networking and socializing common to fraternities and employers’ associations. By 1918, he led the Grays Harbor Dairyman’s Association; in later years he led the area’s chamber of commerce and an automobile dealers’ association.

Although Minkler was not one of the Northwest’s lumber barons, he was wealthy. The Twenties was a dynamic period with vast fortunes made in the automobile industry, and Minkler cashed in. In 1927, Minkler started the Sunset Oakland Automobile Company in Aberdeen, paying for a $20,000 Hudson auto dealership. 

The Klan’s message reached large audiences through its parades and mass meetings. In 1923, state Klan leaders held a gathering in Grays Harbor attended by “between 900 and 1,000 members, according to an estimate given by members who were there.” Members of the Aberdeen and Hoquiam organizations gave the “king kleagle of the Aberdeen klan” a gold knife, “in recognition of the work he is said to have done for the organization on Grays Harbor,” according to the Aberdeen Daily World. On July 4, 1925, the Klan turned out for a massive Hoquiam Independence Day parade, donning white robes for members and the horses pulling their float, as well as a large sign reading: “Americanization through Education is One of Our Objects: The Klu [sic] Klux Klan:” 

The War on Vice

The Klan was an explicitly Protestant Christian organization and its membership and values connected it to elements of the temperance movement. Klansmen placed a high priority on enforcing laws that outlawed “vices” such as liquor, gambling, and prostitution. Enforcing the 18th Amendment was high-profile and often dangerous business. According to one estimate, nationally more than 1,300 persons were killed during the Twenties “in which it is known that prohibition enforcement was directly at issue. In every case one or more sworn officers of the law or their agents were involved as principals, either as the killers or the killed.”

The Harbor had its fair share of sensational dry raids; some ended in bloodshed. Klan-affiliated police directed some of the raids, as Klan members raided moonshiners’ homes, destroyed stills, and lobbied politicians in favor of enforcing alcohol laws.

The KKK’s campaigns against booze and prostitution distinguished it from some other right-wing business-led organizations—notably the citizens’ committees, which were more “Big Tent” operations—at least among the employing class. Those committees enrolled businessmen from “diverse” backgrounds. What really mattered to the citizens’ committees like those formed in Grays Harbor was the businessmen employers’ willingness to unify to defeat unions—using any means necessary.

At the center of Grays Harbor’s legal and extra-legal battle against the “demon rum” was the notorious “phantom dry squad” run by one of the Harbor’s most prominent Klansmen, an octogenarian Civil War veteran and constable named Albert G. Hopkins. Local governments created the dry squad to carry out a “clean-up campaign,” enrolling men such as Hopkins as constables. The press referred to the Hopkins operation as a “phantom squad,” which was likely a reference to the similarity between Klan and ghost costumes. 

The dry squad activities generated attention—including dramatic news stories—as Hopkins led armed raids onto private homes and businesses across Grays Harbor—even conducting a raid at the Aberdeen mayor’s home. His brash tactics in defense of “law and order” won him supporters among large swaths of the voting public.

A KLAN MAYOR IN TIMBER TOWN

During the elections of the Roaring Twenties, in many cases, voters could choose between candidates from the Far Right and Further Right. In November 1924, the hooded knights succeeded when their chosen candidate, A.G. Hopkins, became mayor, unseating the incumbent, in the primary and winning the general election by more than 500 votes a month later. 

Many Americans hold exaggerated views of their country as a bastion and beacon of democracy. The reality, of course, is more complicated—or rather—the reality is that elections in the United States have never been all that democratic. Women won the vote in the Evergreen State in 1910, ballooning voter rolls. However, the electorate remained laughably unrepresentative of the population with immigrants, itinerant laborers, and young people largely excluded from the polls. In the booming city of between fifteen and twenty thousand residents, a small minority of 4,500 voted; the new mayor received 2,562 votes. A paltry percentage of residents supported the new mayor, but of those (mostly white, native-born, older adults) who had the vote and the time to cast a ballot, the far-right proved popular.

The election of a Klan mayor made statewide news, proving an embarrassment to some of the business owners and professionals who worried about losing investments and tourism in their area. Leading the charge against the new mayor was banker William J. Patterson, one of western Washington’s wealthiest men and an old hand at dealing with sticky “problems” through extra-legal solutions. During a string of labor conflicts in 1911-1912, Patterson organized and led the citizens’ committee vigilantes as they beat, jailed, and deported men, women, and children from the Harbor. 

In the interim between Patterson’s attacks on the Wobblies in 1911-1912 and the 1924 election, he reflected on his past as an anti-labor ruffian, proudly recalling: “We organized that night a vigilante committee—a Citizens’ Committee, I think we called it— to put down the strike by intimidation and force. . . . [W]e got hundreds of heavy clubs of the weight and size of pickhandles, armed our vigilantes with them, and that night raided all the IWW headquarters, rounded up as many of them as we could find, and escorted them out of town.”

Summarizing the non-Klan business group’s opposition to Mayor Hopkins, Patterson reported that “Aberdeen would like to devote its interest to the things that will contribute to its growth and to the development of Grays Harbor country in general.” Expressing these views, the Seattle Star wrote that many businessmen “charged him [Mayor Hopkins] with causing the town to lose its former prosperity.”

Another of the charges leveled against the mayor will be eerily familiar to readers in the 2020s as our own era’s elderly and infirm elites have yet to pass power to future generations. Mayor Hopkins’s opponents claimed that the elderly man was doddering and frail, unable to overcome the many hurdles opponents put in his way. Patterson contended that “the duties of the office of mayor had become too strenuous for a man of Mr. Hopkins’ age.” Moreover, the new mayor violated political norms by replacing appointed officials with his supporters. Ransom Minkler served as chief political operative; opponents charged the KKK political duo of stacking the police force and city government with their Klansmen pals. For good measure, Mayor Hopkins crafted new police regulations, including an authoritarian measure—the mass finger-printing of anyone charged with traffic or parking violations. 

The conflicts between the Harbor’s two pillars of the business elite led to an exceptionally chaotic term for Hopkins, dubbed “a bitter political strife for months” and a “civic war” by the Seattle Star. The mayor’s wealthy opponents spent weeks organizing to counter the city leader’s political maneuvers—with the goal being the mayor’s ouster. The Seattle Star summarized the period: “This town is in the throes of one of the bitterest political fights it has ever had.” This was quite the statement considering the area’s long history of bloody conflicts.

Aberdeen’s two principal newspapers – the Daily World and Grays Harbor Post – opposed the Klan and Mayor Hopkins in print. The World, though, muted its criticism, ostensibly providing a “just the facts” reporting. Notably, it did not use the same discretion when “reporting” on labor activists; instead, at times, that paper incited its readers to take up arms against working-class radicals and downplayed years of anti-labor murders, round-ups, and property destruction.

J.W. Clark, editor of the Grays Harbor Post, went much further. He condemned the Klan in the harshest language possible. The newspaper featured front-page headlines and lengthy, biting editorials denouncing the Klan as “an unlovely thing that has no place in the United States of America,” an “unhealthy mental epidemic” which “every other intelligent citizen and right minded man” should confront should help in “blotting out.” Harsh feelings were apparently mutual; one issue of Seattle-based Klan paper The Watcher in the Tower attacked the Post: “Does the editor of the Grays Harbor Post really know what an American is? He is like a lot of the present day editors, who have a limited knowledge on certain subjects and when these are presented, makes what he thinks is a bright a retort, for an answer, that stamps him for what he is quicker than any branding iron ever could.” Displeased at the attack, Clark used the entire editorial page of his weekly to issue a sharp rebuttal to the Klan.

Clark mocked the KKK’s cowardice since they “hide their identity” and “wear sheets.” He also condemned their reliance on “direct action,” which he defined as to “take what you want when you want it.” One irony of Clark’s attack, however, was that in Aberdeen, the KKK gained power through an election, while the press worried that the “Hooded Order Is Active In Election.” Moreover, Clark and his fellow employers had their own history of using violent direct action to get their way. For decades, businessmen like Clark had used guns, clubs, rope and fire to terrorize union activists who tried to inject a little democracy into “lumber capital of the world.”

Hopkins’s mayoral stint didn’t last long. Four months after the December 6 election, a group of businessmen hostile to Hopkins again used force to make change. Many of these local elites had experience with removing elected officials, although unsurprisingly they almost always trained their political guns on the left. A decade before the Klan mayor reached office and amid a strike of thousands of local lumber workers, Grays Harbor employers forced a successful recall vote against Hoquiam’s prolabor socialist mayor and simply ousted the socialist city clerk—an official in the local labor movement. Recalls have long been a tool in the belt of Washington’s business class, useful ways to rid government of the rarest of politicians—those who put the interests of the working-class majority first.

When recalls proved too slow and unpredictable for Grays Harbor employers, they resorted to more direct methods of political change. And for once, they trained their political guns on those even further to the right.

On April 3, 1925, only a few months into Hopkins’s term, the “town fathers” had had enough. That night, a group of prominent citizens—described by the Seattle Star as “business men, bankers, and the ‘open town’ element”—took the aged mayor to the Morck Hotel in Aberdeen. The Star set the scene: With “armed deputy sheriffs standing guard,” the mayor “sat dumbfounded, with no friends to counselor cheer him,” as “nearly 100 leading businessmen” hurled charges for four hours. After the lengthy period of “third degree methods,” “a paper was thrust before him to sign. It was his resignation.” Hopkins complained of being “forced to quit.”

As in earlier decades with business-led vigilantism against immigrants and labor radicals, the Harbor’s businessmen got their way through force. In the mid-1920s, however, employers’ interests motivated them to target a right-wing hate group. The Klansmen’s reputations—and potentially their commitments to enforcing prohibition—threatened investments and statuses of the other businessmen who undoubtedly wanted to keep their city out of the headlines. When attacks on the old mayor’s age and policies failed to yield results, businessmen used force to get their way.

Like the KKK’s outlandish costumes and customs, the improbable story of Aberdeen’s Klan mayor’s rise and fall shouldn’t distract us from the Klan’s wider significance. Fundamentally a racist and nativist organization, the Klan embodied the culture wars of the 1920s and was right at home in the Pacific Northwest. The Klan was representative of a large swath of the nation’s (and Grays Harbor’s) white Protestant population, and as across the country, many of Grays Harbor’s elites had power in the hooded order. Indeed, many of the area’s leading citizens, including Mayor A.G. Hopkins, and (future) Chamber of Commerce President Ransom Minkler – were notable Klan members, or at least strong supporters of KKK platforms. Congressman Albert Johnson even played an important part in turning Klan beliefs into public policy; generations of migrants turned away from America’s guarded gates are part of that legacy.

AFTERWARD

Ex-Mayor Hopkins’s reputation and influence was barely (if at all) diminished by his disastrous term. Reporters sometimes turned to Hopkins for his political opinions, while a decade after his brief mayoral stint, the Seattle Daily Times celebrated Hopkins’s birthday, reporting “Aberdeen’s Lone G.A.R. Man is 90.” 

More significant support went to Ransom Minkler. His years in the Klan had done little to dampen his reputation—quite the opposite—as the businessman continued to exert considerable influence. A decade after his time as political advisor made statewide news, his fellow businesspeople chose Minkler to serve as president of the Grays Harbor Chamber of Commerce. In 1940, as Grays Harbor again rose to national infamy for right-wing vigilante attacks on labor, Minkler served in the vanguard as a director of the controversial Grays Harbor Business Builders, an employers’ organization at the center of the area’s anti-labor and anti-immigrant violence. 

Nationally, the Ku Klux Klan’s strength waned as the 1920s wore on. Weakened by charges of political and sexual corruption, the KKK declined from a membership in the millions in 1924, to numbering around thirty-seven thousand by 1930.

But in some parts of the country, the “secret empire” maintained itself into the 1930s. Historian David M. Chalmers viewed the Harbor as the KKK’s main base of strength in the Pacific Northwest during the late 1930s. “With the exception of the Aberdeen, Washington, Klansmen, whose stones rattled the windows of the town’s union halls, the only active realm in the West was California,” noted Chalmers. 

The Klan’s persistence on Grays Harbor was at least partly due to the group’s base among employers and that class’s decades-long embrace of vigilantism. Indeed, as Depression-era workers across the United States struck and unionized by the millions, the Klan remained in some labor strongholds where they lived up to their militant anti-union reputations. The KKK played a notorious part in the opening convention of that most storied union—the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU)—held in Aberdeen during April 1938. With leaders of the dynamic new union in town, Klansmen attempted to terrorize the group, leading union president Harry Bridges to condemn the KKK as union-busting “red-baiters.” In much of the country it was left to the labor-left to do battle alone against far-right groups like the Klan as police and other “peace officers” both looked the other way or collaborated with reactionary forces. 

Looking back a century later, the parallels between 1920s and 2020s America are hard to miss.  Whether we’re talking about the “division” between the early twentieth century citizens’ committees (alliances) and the KKK, or the “divisions” between the billionaire-dominated Democrats and Republicans, in all cases we’re talking about elites who favor discrimination and brutality against immigrants, mass incarceration and surveillance, and a refusal to assist the working class through universal health care, pro-worker labor law reform, or even increased minimum wages.

Our own era is dominated by reactionary forces; the oppression and exploitation from the Right can appear invincible—inescapable. And while much about the current era is new, the overwhelming power of the American Right is not without precedent; instead, it’s been a feature throughout the country’s history. A century ago, it was the collective power of the working class that faced down and temporarily tamed the Right, ushering in an era of material benefits for the working-class majority. Any path that leads us out of our own era of rightwing domination is likely to emerge from similar sources—through mass unionization and societal disruptions led by a militant labor movement.

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Last month, on the Daily Beast podcast, journalists Joanna Coles and Michael Wolff took turns reeling off a list of famous people who Wolff met while visiting Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan home. The recited names were a who’s who of rich, powerful, and perverted men, many of them recognized Friends of Jeffrey. But one name stood out as unusual: the Dalai Lama. (The list of names starts at about the 18:25 timestamp on the full recording.)

Coles thought so too, asking Wolff, “Did you actually meet the Dalai Lama at Jeffrey Epstein’s?”

“Indeed,” said Wolff.

Asked why the Dalai Lama was there, Wolff said that a lot of people hung out with Epstein to try to wheedle money out of him. And there was something compelling about the upscale salon-like scene: “It was always extraordinary,” said Wolff.

Wolff said that he started spending time at Epstein’s house in 2014, six years after the infamous pedophile was given an extremely favorable plea deal for sex crimes charges because, former U.S. district attorney Alex Acosta once said, “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.” Wolff was working on a potential book about Epstein and was given access to the now-deceased sex offender’s wealthy social milieu. Epstein later became an important source for Wolff’s best-selling books about President Donald Trump.

Any writing about Michael Wolff seems to require the proviso that his reliability has been questioned by assorted enemies and media critics. Wolff is a gossip hound, practicing the art at a very high level, and he hangs out with unsavory politicians and oligarchs who might like the idea of having a famous journalist around — until he publishes a book about them. Wolff gets into marble-floored rooms that many journalists don’t, so his comments are worth considering.

With that throat-clearing aside, let’s consider why His Holiness the Dalai Lama may have been at now-deceased sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s house. People generally hung out with Epstein for two reasons: sex and money. Wolff suggested that, in this case, it was the latter. Did the Dalai Lama, or an organization with which he’s associated, receive a donation from Epstein?

The Dalai Lama’s press office did not respond to an emailed list of questions. I was unable to reach Michael Wolff for comment about the Dalai Lama’s visit to Epstein’s home.

It wouldn’t be the first time the Dalai Lama had received money from a sex trafficker. In 2009, the Tibetan spiritual leader spoke at an event for NXIVM, the abusive sex cult whose leader, Keith Raniere, was convicted in 2019 on seven criminal charges and sentenced to 120 years in prison. During the 2009 appearance, the Dalai Lama gave a speech and placed a ceremonial Tibetan scarf on Reniere’s shoulders. For his efforts, the Dalai Lama reportedly received $1 million. The deal was made by billionaire heiress Sara Bronfman, who, along with her sister Clare, gave Raniere and NXIVM at least $150 million. Sara Bronfman was alleged to be having an affair with the Lama’s personal peace emissary Lama Tenzin Dhonden, who was later removed from his post for corruption.

Despite evidence that he ran a child sex trafficking operation, the source of Epstein’s wealth has never been sufficiently accounted for. People who spent time around him have said that they didn’t know what he did for a job and that he seemed to do very little actual work. For some reason, billionaires liked to give Jeffrey Epstein huge amounts of money. Les Wexner gave Epstein tens of millions of dollars — he later said that Epstein misappropriated $46 million from him — along with one of the most valuable residential properties in New York City. Leon Black, who has been accused of rape in civil suits, paid Epstein $158 million for “tax advice.”

Whatever Epstein was as a financier — sometimes he was described as a financial bounty hunter, reclaiming assets stranded overseas — he was adept at moving money around the world. And he had help from pliant bankers, as demonstrated by victims’ lawsuits against JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank, which led to nine-figure settlements. Sen. Ron Wyden recently said that the Treasury Department has documents about banks looking the other way for more than $1.5 billion in Epstein-related financial activity, and that Treasury should release the documents. Wyden, who has overseen a long-running investigation into Leon Black’s taxes, also said that Black’s payments to Epstein should be investigated by the IRS.

In short, there’s still so much we don’t know about where Epstein’s money came from and where it went — and to what ends. But following the money trail as far as it leads can tell us something about Epstein’s network, how he operated, and who enabled him. And sometimes a single $50,000 payment can open up the aperture, letting in some light.

In the official 2020 MIT report regarding Epstein’s relationship with the university, two partners from the law firm Goodwin Procter “analyzed all donations received by MIT, both those made directly by Epstein (whether individually or through his charitable foundations) and those made by third parties at Epstein’s alleged behest.” The report found that, during a 15-year period, Epstein donated a combined $850,000 to Seth Lloyd, a physics professor, and to the MIT Media Lab, which was then headed by Joi Ito. Michael Wolff mentioned Joi Ito as one of the prominent guests who attended Epstein’s regular home gatherings.

The report claims that Lloyd, who was placed on administrative leave before being allowed to return to teaching, accepted transfers from Epstein in his personal bank account and tried to conceal the source of the donations. The report similarly describes MIT officials as trying to keep quiet Epstein’s donations to the Media Lab and his visits to campus.

The report doesn’t look at relationships between MIT staff and Epstein that occurred outside the university. While the authors write that they looked into donations that may have come through Epstein proxies, it’s not clear how far that investigation went, or was allowed to go. Former MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito received at least $1.2 million from Epstein for his own venture capital firm, which the MIT report mentions in a footnote.

The MIT Media Lab had an uncommonly high profile for a university organization, with an orbiting network of billionaire tech moguls, scientists, writers, government officials, politicians, and TED-talking NGO types. That made the Media Lab’s director, Joi Ito, an important relationship for the prestige-obsessed Epstein. The two seemed to be in close contact, with Ito once “strategizing with [Epstein] as to how he might be able to ‘mollify the bad press’ after a series of articles were published concerning a civil lawsuit brought by Epstein victims,” according to the MIT report. Ito, who sat on the boards of the New York Times and the MacArthur Foundation, repeatedly solicited Epstein for more money for the university. MIT’s investigators claimed that his big-money asks weren’t answered:

Epstein used ostensibly philanthropic donations in order to win favors, borrow academics’ intellectual prestige, or to move money where it wouldn’t normally be allowed to go. The MIT report describes Epstein using Professor Lloyd (with the professor’s participation) to see if he could make donations to the university without setting off alarm bells:

In November 2013, Linda Stone, who first introduced Epstein to Ito, sent an email to Ito suggesting that a 501(c)(3) might be used to mask Epstein’s donations, although, she wrote, “there may be disclosure issues.” Ito then took the idea to MIT’s VP of Development, according to the MIT report.

In 2017, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit called Education Advance donated $50,000 to the Prajnopaya Institute at MIT. The money for that donation came from an entity called “J Epstein Virgin Islands FD Inc,” which that same year gave Education Advance $55,000, according to IRS filings. Education Advance took in an additional $1,500 in 2017, which appears to be the only year it was ever in operation. Its IRS filings report no other donations or dispersal of funds, suggesting that Education Advance might have been purpose-made for the Prajnopaya Institute gift. After 2017, Education Advance never filed another Form 990, leading to its nonprofit status being revoked.

Education Advance was overseen by Svetlana Pozhidaeva, a Russian model who worked for MC2, a modeling agency run by Jean-Luc Brunel, an Epstein accomplice accused of rape and sex trafficking who died in a French prison in 2022. Education Advance was registered to an Epstein-owned Manhattan building. Pozhidaeva, who had been photographed leaving Epstein’s house, also shared a lawyer with him: Darren Indyke, who is now co-executor of Epstein’s estate. Epstein’s Virgin Islands-based foundation, the initial source of the funds, was sometimes called Enhanced Education.

The Prajnopaya Institute transaction isn’t mentioned in the 2020 MIT report, which covers the years “between 2002 and 2017.” The existence of the transaction had been reported a year earlier by the Daily Beast. MIT’s media office did not respond to questions about why the Prajnopaya Institute donation did not appear in its 2020 report on the university’s relationship with Epstein.

The lack of official acknowledgement from MIT is another indicator that Epstein’s money flows remain poorly charted. Some parties might prefer it that way. Epstein also helped muddy the waters by lying and exaggerating about the scope of his charitable giving — a deception that included Epstein making edits to Wikipedia pages about himself, his foundation, and some of his associates.

The Prajnopaya Institute told the Daily Beast in 2019 that it returned the $50,000 donation. The Institute didn’t respond to an email asking how the donation was brokered and if the Dalai Lama or Tenzin Priyadarshi was involved. A separate inquiry to Priyadarshi, sent through his website imonk.org, received no reply.

Priyadarshi has long been associated with the Media Lab and Joi Ito, who described Priyadarshi as his friend. They podcasted together and co-taught an MIT class called Principles of Awareness. Ethics programs that began in the Media Lab later moved to the Dalai Lama Center, where Priyadarshi is CEO. Ito and Priyadarshi have appeared on discussion panels together. Ito, a prolific photographer, has posted photos of Priyadarshi and the Dalai Lama, and he’s cited them in his writing. The Dalai Lama has attended at least three events hosted by the MIT center named after him.

Dr. Babak Babakinejad, an MIT whistleblower and research scientist who first alerted me to the Prajnopaya Foundation donation, offered the following statement:

“The MIT Epstein report is institutionally compromised. MIT has persistently resisted transparency regarding Epstein’s connections to the Media Lab and its associated initiatives, particularly regarding Open Agriculture and its Food Computers. This project is implicated in fraud, environmental misconduct, and retaliation. These are issues I have been actively challenging as part of an ongoing lawsuit.”

Epstein’s interest in MIT was about more than just showering a couple programs he liked with cash. Epstein visited MIT’s campus at least nine times and attended MIT Media Lab events, which could attract wealthy tech and political figures like billionaire Reid Hoffman. Epstein spent time with MIT professors and staffers, some of whom he met through the literary agent John Brockman, who acted as a connector between Epstein and scientists and academics. It’s hard to think that Epstein’s MIT-related contributions during a 15-year period only amounted to $850,000, especially when the donations that are now documented were once obfuscated. As shown here, the Prajnopaya Institute donation means the real amount that Epstein gave to MIT is at least $900,000.

It’s not clear why Epstein, who as far as I can tell never mentioned Buddhism or had any association with Tibetan culture or causes, made a $50,000 donation to a Buddhist organization at MIT. Perhaps someone influential asked him. Perhaps he was once again looking “to see if the line jingles.”

The alarm did go off after all, but it was too late for anyone to care.

This piece first appeared on Jacob Silverman’s Substack.

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Photograph Source: Kremlin.ru – CC BY 4.0

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told an NBC interviewer last week that the expansion of the North Atlantic Treat Organization was a “violation of Russian security interests” and one of the “root causes” of the war against Ukraine.  Russian officials have made these statements in their private meetings with American counterparts, but this is the  most explicit public statement since the start of the war three and a half years ago.  The conventional wisdom in the United States does not accept NATO expansion as a cause of the war, but I’ve been arguing since the war began that there was such linkage.

Lavrov’s comments make it clear that an end to the war with Ukraine include security guarantees for Russia as well as for Ukraine.  It’s unlikely that anyone in the Trump administration understands this linkage, which means that the war is not about to reach a negotiated solution.  The United States simplistically blames only President Vladimir Putin for the start of the war, but no Russian leader would have accepted the extensive U.S. and NATO buildup on Russia’s western border.

Lavrov has been critical of Trump’s failure to discuss specifics of a negotiated end to the war, which is typical of Trump’s lack of process in dealing with difficult geopolitical issues.  When asked about security guarantees, Trump responded that “We haven’t even discussed the specifics.”  Trump still proclaims that he doesn’t know which side to blame for the start of the war.  His most absurd statement regarding the war: “We’ll know which way I’m going, because I’m going tot go one way or the other,” he told reporters last week.

In addition to limits on Ukraine’s military buildup and the occupation in Ukraine by western forces, the Russians will push for limits on Western troops based in East Europe, an end to the deployment of a regional missile defense system as well as an end to the permanent deployment of German troops in such Baltic states as Lithuania.  Russia will press for limits on U.S. bases in Poland and Romania as well.  Even before the war began, Putin in December 2021 proclaimed that Russia demanded talks on the NATO threat to Russian national security.

Lavrov also stated that Ukraine has the “right to exist,” but only if it stops the cultural and linguistic limits on ethnic Russians and Russian speakers who the Kremlin believes “belong to Russian culture.”  The majority of the population on the Donbas is ethnic Russian. For the past 30 years, Russian leaders have claimed it is their “duty” to protect those who share the values of the Russian language and the “Russian world” (“Russkiy mir”).  Moscow uses the term “near abroad” to defend its support and protection for Russian ethnics throughout the former Soviet empire.  Kazakhstan, with its large ethnic Russian population could be a target of similar Russian expansionism. 

The Trump administration and U.S. policymakers in general do not seem cognizant of the fact that actions Washington has taken over the past 25 years in East and Central Europe are threatening to Russia.  Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, every U.S. administration has taken advantage of Russia’s national security weakness to expand the U.S. role in the region.  Presidents Clinton and Bush ignored warnings not to expand NATO.

Clinton was also responsible for NATO’s bombardment of Serbia 1999 without a UN mandate and without touching base with the Kremlin, which has had a special relationship with Serbia for generations.  The Bush administration was a strong supporter of the “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine, where Putin believed there was a strong U.S. and CIA covert role.  It was the provocative actions of the Georgian government in disputed territories that led to brief Russian military intervention in 2008.  Bush clearly overplayed his hand in threatening Russia by pursuing a special relationship with a strongly nationalistic Georgia.

Bush overlooked the warnings from German Chancellor Angela Merkel to avoid encouraging NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine.  The hardliners in the administration backed off somewhat, but only reluctantly.  Bush’s forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were  perceived as threatening to Moscow because they contributed to greater insurgency and terrorism in areas close to Russia’s borders.  The United Sates could have pursued diplomacy to coordinate actions with Russia in these areas, but no U.S. administration was willing to take Moscow seriously in view of Russia’s political, military, and economic weakness.  Putin actually offered significant assistance to the United States in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington,

Meanwhile, U.S. policymakers and political analysts as well as the mainstream media totally dismiss the idea that NATO expansion had anything to do with Russia’s use of force.  The New York Times and the Washington Post particularly dismissed the idea that “NATO provoked Russia’s invasion.”   Again, the conventional wisdom was that Russia was engaging in an “illegitimate response to the hostile actions of a democracy.”

There is good reason for Moscow to believe that the expansion of NATO was a marker of Washington’s return to containment and a threat to its national security.  Russia was angered about the expansion from the outset, particularly since President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker had assured their Russian counterparts that the United States would not “leap frog” over Germany if the Soviets pulled their 380,000 troops out of East Germany in order to reunify the German state.  The past five administrations have pursued a policy of militarism in Europe toward Russia.  Contemporary foreign policy experts anticipate a Putin threat to NATO beyond the threat to Ukraine, which portends greater U.S. pressure on Russia.   Meanwhile, NATO expansion virtually ensures that a Cold War will exist between the West and Russia for the near future.

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Photograph Source: @shanghaidaily – x.com

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov wore a sweatshirt to the recent Alaska summit that vividly displayed his nostalgic imagination. Written in large Cyrillic letters was “CCCP” or USSR. Like Donald Trump’s red cap featuring the slogan “Make America Great Again,” Lavrov indicated that he, like Vladimir Putin, imagined the Russian Federation returning to its past glory as the Soviet Union. The 70-year-old leaders of the United States and Russia are in time warps. Geopolitics exists in linear time. Countries, like individuals, cannot return to their past glories in circular time. 

Nostalgia for the past can be an obsession. I’m no exception. Each season I closely follow the results of the New York Yankees and the New York Knicks to see if they can repeat their past glories. (They have not won major championships since 2009 and 1973, respectively.) Mine is not a simple optimism about the Yankees and Knicks winning games; it is an optimism about the teams returning to their former championship status. 

Now it is one thing to imagine a sports team returning to a past dominant position, it’s quite another to imagine a country returning to its past hegemonic role. Can countries or empires which were once dominant return to those previous situations? While sports seasons repeat the same number of games and similar formats to win the ultimate title, geopolitics evolves in time with no similar set of rules or formats. Baseball and basketball have regulated rules and procedures; geopolitics does not.

I know what the Yankees and Knicks need to do to win the World Series and NBA crown. I don’t know what has to happen for the Russian Federation to return to the glory of the Soviet Union. Or for the United States to be truly great again. 

Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers present similar temporal perspectives. Both describe how empires/hegemons rose and fell. Lavrov’s sweatshirt, and Trump’s omnipresent cap represent a different temporal perspective. Lavrov/Putin and Trump imagine that their empires/hegemons rose, fell, and will rise again. 

When President Putin remarked in the post-summit that “a fair balance in the security sphere in Europe and the world as whole must be restored,” the emphasis was on restored. He implied that that is “the root causes” of the crisis with Ukraine. Putin’s nostalgic imagination is that the post 1945 Soviet Union’s regional hegemony and global power should be restored. 

Trump’s cap says much the same. The American hegemonic rise also happened after World War II. The Vietnam War – if one needs a specific starting point – saw the decline of the United States. Trump’s cap’s slogan promises that he will return the U.S. to its post 1945 dominant position. When DJT says “Make America Great Again,” the emphasis is on Again. 

Instead of linear time moving forward with new technologies and new geopolitics, Lavrov, Putin, and Trump imagine circular time going back to something that was before. Restored and Again are the keywords. So just as sports team repeat how the game is played, the nature of the schedule and the criteria for becoming champions, Lavrov, Putin, and Trump see geopolitics as circular in time as well.

But geopolitics and sports are not the same. European countries like Spain, Portugal, France, England, and the Netherlands all had their historic periods of geopolitical glory. They all had extraterritorial moments of domination. Today, none of their leaders envisions a return to that position. (The British Commonwealth of Nations is not the same as when “the Sun Never Set on the British Empire.”) 

Sports teams can return to their previous glory. Individual athletes, politicians, and movie stars may make comebacks; empires/hegemons cannot. 

And who is imagining a return to past glory? Sergei Lavrov is 75 years-old, Vladimir Putin 72 years-old, and Donald Trump is 79 years-old. All three are caught in the same nostalgic imagination. All three aging leaders project their temporal decline on a geopolitical imagination of a return to their countries’ past glories under their leadership. All three are caught in the same nostalgic time warp. 

Individually, we would all like to remain young and healthy. We would all like to de-age and increase our longevity. Botox, plastic surgery, injections, exercise and pills are all part of that effort to counter linear time. Pictures of Putin’s physical prowess are regularly presented to defy his 72 years. Trump loves to show himself energetically playing golf; he often mocked Joe Biden’s age when he himself was in his late 70s. His favorite songs, the oldies but goodies his staffers play when he is in a bad mood, are “Memory” from Cats, and the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

Lavrov/Putin and Trump have taken the personal narrative of countering aging to a nostalgic, geopolitical level. 70 year-old men’s desires to maintain their youth has become part of a larger geopolitical narrative. Science may have succeeded in the de-extinction of the dire wolf, but there is no indication it will succeed with infinitely prolonging human longevity or restoring a country’s empire. Empires/hegemons rise and fall; they do not rise again. History may repeat itself in different forms, but geopolitics does not. Nostalgia for the past has its limits. And seventy year-old men should act their ages. 

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