Housing subdivisions, Sarasota County, Florida. Photo: USGS.

On March 15, my wife Harriet and I flew from London to Tampa to begin a three week visit to Florida and Georgia to visit family and friends and meet with community leaders of A2 (Anthropocene Alliance), our environmental non-profit. It was our first return to the U.S. since we moved to Norwich in June 2024 and since the election. The following are excerpts from my travel diary.

March 15 – Mickey at customs

The slow-moving line for passport inspection began on the jet bridge. Were Customs and Border Patrol agents deploying “enhanced vetting” to screen British families headed for Disneyworld? Or were they bent on challenging the citizenship of returning American dissidents? I imagined my meek plaint to CBP: “But officer, I’m from Queens.” After about 30 minutes, an agent trotted down the quarter-mile long cue, shouting, “U.S. passport holders follow me!” (Had I heard a prefatory Achtung?) A few dozen of us followed him into the customs hall where we were directed to a much shorter line and quickly processed by polite agents. For us, this was a welcome instance of America First. For the foreign bods – old folks, parents and kids with Mickey merch – not so much. Did an unlucky few wind up on a flight to El Salvador?

March 16 – Gated communities

“Amber Creek, Talon Preserve, Star Farms, The Isles, Bungalow Walk, Nautique, Esplanade, Silver Oak, Cresswind, Sapphire Point, Emerald Landing, Palm Grove, Lorraine Lakes, Kingfisher Estates, Monterey Palm, The Alcove, Hammock Preserve, Solera, Village Walk, Shellstone, Promenade Estates, Monarch Acres.” (Some of the hundreds of gated communities in Sarasota County, Florida.)

We’re staying with my sister Joan and her husband Barry in their comfortable home in a Sarasota subdivision. As we sat around her granite kitchen island, noshing on chips and guacamole (the Mexican avocados were tariff-priced — three bucks each), we reviewed the latest catastrophes and muted resistance from Democrats. “Any protests here?” I asked. “Bupkes” Joan replied. “Republicans outnumber Democrats in Sarasota County by 2 to 1.”

If you wanted to invent an acquiescent polity, you could hardly improve upon Florida gated communities. They are rarely located in towns or cities, so political governance is at the county level, the tier most remote from the populace. Residents expend their political passions at homeowners’ association meetings where they debate pool temperature, pickle ball accessibility, and lawn maintenance. A Publix supermarket is never more than a 10-minute drive. Restaurants, big box stores, car washes and medical clinics are just as accessible. Beaches may be a little further — the closer to the ocean, the more expensive the home, rising sea levels notwithstanding. For the Sarasota bourgeoisie – many of whom are retired and living off investments — the country beyond their subdivision gates is little seen or noticed. For a few, like my sister and her husband, it’s a threat — but distant, like thunder clouds passing behind Sabal palms.

March 17 – Ducks

Our visits here are always relaxing. Manicured lawns and shrubs, immaculate roads and sidewalks, and nearly identical ranch houses (“villas”), induce in Harriet a preternatural calm. Today, she indulged her favorite vacation activity: she had three naps.

In the late afternoon, we walked along Sandhill Preserve Drive to the pool. It’s temporarily closed because of a broken pump. But the day was still warm and sunny, so we reclined for a while in the chaise lounges, our only company a pair of non-migratory mottled ducks. They sat at first, on the concrete edge of the pool, then jumped in and started to perform. They bowed to each other, pecked at the water, circled, and rose up to display their wings. Then one mounted the other. The act lasted just a few seconds.

“Was that it?”

“I guess so,” Harriet replied. “But they seem pleased with themselves.”

“Do you think they’ll do it again?”

“It doesn’t look like it. Maybe when they were younger,” Harriet said wistfully, “they did it more.”

March 18 – The Uprising of the 20,000

Before cocktails, Barry and I had a conversation about immigration.

“My grandfather came over around 1900 with nothing,” Barry said. “No money, and no papers except what they gave him at Ellis Island. He somehow scraped together enough to open a small candy shop and after that, a children’s clothing store. He was a salesman, like me.”

After a pause, I gave unbidden, a potted disquisition on sales:

“Yours was an ancient and noble calling,” I offered, “simple arbitrage — buy low in one market and sell high in another. Under capitalism, trade expanded. The network of intermediaries grew, and profits accumulated at each nodal point. Today, monopolists control every stage of large enterprises, from production to distribution to consumption. Salesmen in some cases, are missing entirely. Pretty soon, robots will sell to other robots.”

Barry returned us to the present:

“When I hear about the deportation of immigrants today, I’m furious. My grandfather was no different from them. He worked hard and contributed to this country, just like they do!”

Later, I thought some more about Jewish peddlers, circa 1900, and did some online research. In most cases, I learned, they were immigrants who became migrant laborers. They’d schlep from street to street or town to town selling their goods from carts, duffel bags, or suitcases. Sometimes they’d spend the night at the residence of their customers. After getting up in the morning, a salesman might say to his host: “Oh, did I remember to show you last night, the latest shirtwaists from New York?” They sometimes made their best sales that way.

I found a great photograph (below) from the Library of Congress, captioned: “Coat Peddler, Hester Street, New York, c.1910.” (My father, Bertram Eisenman, was born on Hester Street in

1913.) Was the anonymous photographer thinking of Karl Marx’s “law of value,” Chapter 1, Section 2 of Capital?

“Let us take two commodities such as a coat and 10 yards of linen, and let the former be double the value of the latter, so that, if 10 yards of linen = W, the coat = 2W…. Whence this difference in their values? It is owing to the fact that the linen contains only half as much labor as the coat, and consequently, that in the production of the latter, labor power must have been expended during twice the time necessary for the production of the former.”

Unknown photographer, Coat Peddler Hester Street, New York, c. 1910. Library of Congress.

Marx was explaining how in a capitalist economy, labor was embedded in commodities, their value mediated by exchange. That observation enabled another, a few pages later, in a section

of Capital as remarkable for its title as content: “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof.” Marx wrote that “the social character of labor appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves.” That is, in the process of exchange, commodities appear to take on a life of their own, becoming fetishes or idols, masking the actual circumstances of their manufacture and sale. The two men in the photo, one haggling and the other observing, plus a third visible only by the shadow of his hat, know little about the itinerant salesman’s life and labor. They are unaware that New York was the biggest center for textile production in the country, and that it was powered primarily by immigrants. They knew only the value of the money still in their pockets and price of the fabrics and finished garments weighing down the short Jewish man wearing a coat several sizes too large.

There were some at the time, however, who understood the “social character of labor.” A few months earlier, on November 22, 1909, Clara Lemlich of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union addressed thousands of fellow textile workers, most of them recent immigrants, in Union Square. She spoke in Yiddish: “I am a working girl [arbetn meydl].…and I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in general terms. What we are here for is to decide whether we shall strike or shall not strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared now!” Lemlich’s resolution was approved, and the “Uprising of the Twenty Thousand” began. The strike ushered in a period of labor activism, leading to broader unionization of garment industry workers and improved wages and working conditions. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire a year later, which killed 146 garment workers, most of them women and girls, accelerated the campaign for better wages and safer working conditions.

But successes were short-lived. By the 1930s, liberal trade policy and competition from non-union labor in the U.S. South, punished textile workers and ultimately the industry itself. By the 1970s, American textile manufacturing was diminished in size and significance. Soon, the decline became a collapse. Between 1973 and 2020, the U.S, textile workforce shrunk from about 2.3 million to just 180,000. Today, employment levels are slightly higher, the result of foreign manufacturers, including from China, deploying the same labor arbitrage that U.S. manufacturers did, only in reverse. Where are the Clara Lemlichs of today? A strike by immigrant workers in textiles, agriculture, construction, health care or hospitality would bring the leaders of those industries – and Trump – to their knees!

March 21 – The rich move, the poor migrate

For a long time, Harriet and I wondered what we’d feel when we saw again our old house and garden in Micanopy, Florida. When we finally did, on a sunny, warm, Friday afternoon, we both felt approximately the same thing: nothing, or at most, unfamiliarity and distance . As we struggled to understand our feelings, I thought about a favorite song and short story: “A Cottage for Sale” (1929), by Willard Robison (music) and Larry Conley (lyrics), and “The Swimmer” (1964), by John Cheever.

I’ve always thought the one inspired the other. The song has been covered by almost everybody, including Nat King Cole (1957), Frank Sinatra (1959), and Billy Eckstein (1960). Judy Garland sang it, molto adagio, on her CBS TV show in 1963. Though her show had bad ratings, (it played against “Bonanza”), the critics in New York loved it. Cheever in Westchester probably saw it. The second verse summarizes the song’s subject: the fading of love (or life), the neglect of a garden, and the loss of a home:

The lawn we were proud of
Is waving in hay
Our beautiful garden has
Withered away.
Where we planted roses
The weeds seem to say…
A cottage for sale

Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer, Frank and Eleanor Perry (writer/director), Columbia Pictures, 1968. Screenshot.

Cheever’s story, made into a terrific movie with Burt Lancaster in 1968, is about a man named Neddy Merrill who decides to have an adventure: He’ll travel from his current location – his Friends’ poolside — to his home on the other side of Westchester, but do it by swimming the length of the backyard pools in between, which he calls them “the Lucinda River” after his wife.

As the story progresses, the weather grows cooler, his friends become less welcoming, and Neddy’s strength diminishes. At the end, it’s clear to the reader that Ned and his wife are separated or divorced, and his mind addled. He reaches his house only to find it dark and run-down. “Looking in at the windows, he saw the place was empty.” According to Conley’s lyric:

Through every window
I see your face
But when I reach (the) window
There’s (only) empty space

Seeing our old house through the prism of the song and short story, I began to understand what millions of others have more profoundly – that migration changes your perception. Harriet and I were migrants, though privileged ones to be sure. The rich move while the poor migrate. Moving is every American’s right; migration is something controlled and punished by state. authorities. Think of the extraordinary song by the folk singer and socialist, Sis Cunningham, about displaced families during the Dustbowl and Depression: “How can you keep on movin’ unless you migrate too?” (It was covered decades later by the New Lost City Ramblers and then Ry Cooder.)

Melania Trump and Elon Musk were “illegal migrants” to use the current, crude locution. They obtained American visas, green cards and citizenship it appears, based upon false testimony. But their wealth and power assure they will never be seen as migrants. They simply moved to the U.S. and became great successes, the one by modeling and then marrying a celebrity millionaire who became a presidential billionaire, and the other by a freakish combination of skill, ruthlessness, timing, and government handouts. The millions of people whom they, their family, supporters and staff castigate as “illegals” are obviously “no different from them” as my brother-in-law put it. Immigration can be voluntary or forced. That Americans embrace the former and condemn the latter is a cruelty that disfigures us; it’s a stain on our character that continues to grow.

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

We know that Donald Trump is not fit to be sitting in the White House.  He is a dangerously disordered president, and we have observed enough aberrant behavior to fill a psychiatric text book.  We know from his exchanges with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un that he has been quick to brandish his “bigger (nuclear) button” that has the unilateral power to kill us all.  And now we know that he is surrounded by a national security team whose members are totally unfit to serve and are willing to lie to an American public and an American Congress that has yet to come to grips with the normalization of Trump’s “no rules” presidency.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has already lied to the press about the nature of the group chat involving war plans, and on Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA director John Ratcliffe couldn’t recall any discussions of weaponry or targets, not even generic targets, in their testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee.  So don’t expect any accountability as the president and his national security team do their best to vilify an excellent journalist invited to the chat.

We can be thankful that Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic and an outstanding journalist for decades, responded to a call on the messaging app Signal that involved every member of Trump’s national security team, including the vice-president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and leading intelligence and military officials.  We are fortunate that Goldberg, sitting in his car on a Safeway parking lot, took a call that he initially believed to be bogus or simply part of a disinformation campaign.

Goldberg was invited by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who may have intended to invite U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer (JG), who had no more need to be in such a group chat than did the Atlantic’s JG.  Typically, the trade representative would never be part of the Principal’s Committee.  Conversely, Goldberg probably has a better idea of overall U.S. national security than Greer, who is obsessed with tougher export controls and sanctions against China, and little else.

Every government official with a high-level security clearance is inundated with warnings against using personal cell phones in discussing government matters.    Nevertheless, one of the participants in the chat, special envoy Steve Witkoff, was on the call on his cell phone while in Moscow.  Russian intelligence has repeatedly tried to compromise Signal, and Witkoff’s outrageous use of his personal cell phone for any discussion, let alone a discussion of precise military information dealing with the use of force.  The make-up of this particular group suggests that some or all of these members have been using Signal regularly for sensitive discussions.  It is particularly odd that not one individual questioned the presence of a journalist on the chat!

There is no national security information more sensitive that the discussion of war plans, which requires the highest level of operations security.  These discussions must be held in a sensitive and security facility that can be found at the National Security Council, the Pentagon, or throughout the intelligence community.  If an individual cannot be present at such a facility, at the very least he or she must be in a SCIF (a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) to prevent unauthorized physical or electronic access.  The high-level members even travel with their own classified communication systems.

Electronic surveillance and penetration has a long history.  When I was the intelligence advisor to the U.S. delegation at the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in 1971-1972, all professional matters were discussed in a SCIF that was flown to Vienna, Austria.  When I was stationed at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1976, I had to keep my office shutters closed because the KGB was targeting embassy windows to gather the signals emanating from the IBM Selectric typewriters that were used in the day.  In my 25 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, I was not permitted to bring a cell phone into the building because of the ease of foreign electronic penetration.

The group of misfits who occupy the highest national security positions that exist in Washington were simply too unwilling on a Saturday morning to travel to a SCIF.  It is highly likely that these Signal chats have been a regular feature of this particular team for the past two months.  We know that Donald Trump has no understanding or appreciation for intelligence security because of the case of the United States of America v. Donald Trump that filed 40 criminal counts related to his removal of sensitive classified materials from the White House to various insecure locations at Mar-A-Lago, including a bathroom, a ballroom, and a utility closet.

In the first months of his first term, Trump revealed a highly sensitive document—obtained from Israeli intelligence—to the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador.  Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State, and led Mossad—Israel’s CIA—to withhold the sharing of sensitive information for a period of time.  A U.S. official stated that Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”  It must be added that some of our best intelligence on foreign terrorism comes from foreign liaison sources, including intelligence sources that can be found in adversarial countries.

Finally, it must be noted that the participating members of the group chat, with the exception of Goldberg, were members of the Principals Committee of the National Security Council, which is the senior interagency forum for consideration and decision making of the most sensitive national security issues.  The NSC was created by President Harry S. Truman in 1947 to advise and assist the president on national security and foreign policy.  The intelligence services in Moscow and Beijing probably cannot believe their new form of access to such decision making.  Unfortunately, nothing will stop Trump from concentrating on his revenge tour and his campaign against the rule of law, not even the mishandling of Washington’s most sensitive intelligence information.

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Author, activist and surrealist Franklin Rosemont speaking at a Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS) conference in Chicago in 2007. Photo: Thomas Good / Next Left Notes. CC BY-SA 4.0

Please give me your attention, I’ll introduce to you
A man that is a credit to “Our Red, White, and Blue;”
His head is made of lumber, and solid as a rock;
He is a common worker and his name is Mr. Block.
And Block he thinks he may
Be President some day.
[And so it came to pass
Block changed his name to Trump
And he wasn’t even asked,
Becoming a complete and total ass.]

Oh, Mr. Block, you were born by mistake,
You take the cake,
You make me ache.
Tie a rock to your block and then jump in the lake,
Kindly to that for Liberty’s sake.

There’s a whole lot of false consciousness running around. How to battle against it?  It’s a matter of public health.  It’s as bad as the measles.  The Wobblies, or members of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) thought that song was essential, and their greatest songster was Joe Hill, and Joe Hill’s best song against false consciousness was Mr. Bloch who also became the main figure in the cartoons of Ernest Riebe.  Mr. Block thinks that doctors and nurses belong to different economic classes.  Same with professors and students; he thinks they’re not in the same boat.  Yet, we’ll all sink or swim together.  Joe Hill was executed in 1915 by the state of Utah (“murdered by the capitalist class,” says the monument in Salt Lake City).  His songs remain a painless vaccination to what ails us.

Why we need song and history just now.  Everyone’s talking about “story” like what story do we tell each other?  History or herstory?  Dig where you stand, the starting point of history from below.   How deep shall we dig?  Here in the Great Lakes, thanks to David Graeber, it’s easy to go back to Kondiaronk.  Or now, to go back to Franklin Rosemont (1943-2009) because he knew we had to dig deep.  He wrote the great biography of Joe Hill.  We need a Joe Hill to write more verses, Mr Block Goes to Palestine, Mr. Block Goes to the Border, &c.  Otherwise, it’s the measles.

Franklin wrote about tons of other things as well, all just as curious, interesting, funny, and needed.  He didn’t like misery at all and, he loved the marvellous.  We have such a book of Franklin Rosemont’s writing, Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture, edited by Abigail Susik and Paul Buhle (Oakland, California:  PM Press, 2025).  It’s totally splendid like a jewellery box of pearls, rubies, saphires, and diamonds.  Some for special occasions, ceremonial, intimate, beautiful, and some world-changing providing a great clearing of the air letting us see clearly or a thaw of the ice a releasing forgotten tales from the campfires or kitchen tables.   It has thirty-five chapters divided in seven parts, namely, Americana and Chicagoana, Comics and Animation, Music and Dance, Labor History, Play and Humor, Ecology, and Reminiscence.  Its playful original prose is infectious.

Abigail Susik writes a fine introduction telling how Franklin along with Paul Buhle “sought fresh possibilities for discovery within everyday life.”  She refers to his “highly idiosyncratic confidence in the persistence of moments of vernacular authenticity.”  C.L.R. James and Herbert Marcuse were their mentors, gurus, accompaniers.

Folkloric, homespun, regional, and lowbrow, his blue collar upbringing, teenage encounters with the Beat generation in San Francisco, prepared him for the possibilities of détournement both de-railing and re-routing.  In the Fifties he read Mad magazine.  After dropping out of high school and hitch-hiking to San Francisco, he returned to study for a time at Roosevelt University in Chicago where he studied with St. Clair Drake.  He joined the Wobs in 1962 taking out his red card, and running over to Michigan to help with the blueberry pickers strike.

This book is essential reading for May Day 2025.  The Haymarket riot of 1886, the subsequent hangings, the round-up of organizers and rebels, led to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward of the following year and later his book Equality.  Rosemont has a wonderful appreciation of both demanding nothing less than a complete transformation of the human condition to full equality.  The story of American socialism influenced Mark Twain, Frank Baum, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Morris, Eugene Debs, and Mme. Blavatsky.  They’re only the beginning of the afterlives of that first May Day of industrial capitalism.

After Haymarket, Franklin explains the terrorist in an essay “A Bomb-Toting, Long-Haired, Wiled-Eyed Fiend: The Image of the Anarchist in Popular Culture.”  When once again this figure, the terrorist, becomes of bogey-man of Mr Block, a lunatic, a communist, dark-skinned villain.  Also a figure of laughter in Buster Keaton, the cartoons, and the comics. Franklin sought out the old timers.  He enjoyed himself.  He lived life and loved well.  He went to Bugs Bunny, Thelonious Monk, André Breton, Paul Garon, and Penelope Rosemont. He was a people’s scholar.

With David Roediger he edited The Haymarket Scrapbook (1986, 2012) which Meridel LeSueur called “a magnificent work of research, memory, and love,” as it is indeed.  As a resource for the annual May Day celebration it should be in easy reach of every student, worker, and immigrant.   In 1983 with his life-long partner and comrade, Penelope, he took over the long-standing Chicago publisher, Charles Kerr.  They continued to synthesize radical political agitation and counter-cultural revolt of the 1960s.

His was the Chicago world of Nelson Algren and Studs Terkel.  His father was a leading typographer and unionist in Chicago, a leader of 1949 newspaper strike, and historian of American labor’s first strike, the Philadelphia typographical strike of 1786.  He named his son, Franklin, after Philadelphia’s most famous printer.  He knew the IWW old-timers, thorough study of IWW documentation.  Thus part of his patrimony included the birth of the republic, and though Franklin would never describe himself in any sense as a republican or as a “citizen” in that bourgeois sense, he drew his authority from the working-class history intrinsic to his surroundings.

He edited a book of the writings and speeches of Isadora Duncan.  He praised Marth Graham.  He wrote another on the Dill Pickle club of Chicago.  His oddest book is surely An Open Entrance to the Shut Palace of Wrong Numbers (2003).  Its “News from Other Nowheres” as he described it referred to that “no place” called from the Greek “utopia.”  Its title points to the central importance that the telephone had in the life of the day.  Instead of an introduction he writes, “’History’ tells us the Black Hawk War ended in 1832.  Why, then, do I see it, hear it, and feel it raging on all sides?”  Why indeed!

Briefly told, the Black Hawk War ended native resistance in the old Northwest.  Black Hawk led the Sauk and Fox indigenous people who had been forced from their homelands back to them in Illinois.  Settlers had to flee to Chicago.  Black Hawk and his allies were defeated at the Battle of Bad Axe.  It is significant for the American history of divide and conquer that fighting for the USA against the native people were both Jefferson Davis, future leader of the confederacy, and Abraham Lincoln, future leader of the Union.  That’s why the Black Hawk War had such a ghostly presence to Franklin Rosemont.

Franklin loved to quote Robin D.G. Kelley, “Now is the time to think like poets, to envision and to make visible a new society, peaceful, cooperative, loving world without poverty and oppression, limited only by our imaginations.”  That’s the problem, namely, how to de-colonize our imaginations?  That’s why writes about Bugs Bunny, the Wobblies, the Blues, and Surrealism.  Painting, song, and music, these have to be the numbers we dial to get an answer from Mr Block.  At first he may say, “wrong number,” but he’ll learn if there are enough of us and we are laughing!  Laughter, that’s the ticket.

“What’s Up, Doc?” asks the ever-friendly Bugs Bunny. He fights the pink-faced pudge named, Elmer Fudd, who plays a greedy gold-digger, greedy for money.  Elmer Fudd’s esemblance to Elon Musk is inescapable if accidental. His main activity is the defense of private property especially his carrot patch. Bugs is a street-wise city kid, a Brooklyn trickster, never at a loss for a flippant remark or legitimate question in an illogical situation.  Bugs Bunny helped form the sardonic attitude of the GIs who went off to fight Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, knowing that they had to watch their backs.  Hence, double V.  Victory over fascists abroad, and racists at home.  Not only did Bugs Bunny out-trick Elmer Fudd in all his capitalist guises, he did so munching a carrot.  This fellow was going to enjoy life even in the midst of disasters.  Rosemont calls him the “veritable symbol of irreducible recalcitrance.”

The brilliant versatility of Mel Blanc’s voice spoke to millions during cartoons on Saturday afternoons at the movies.  The supreme grace of Krazy Kat helped Franklin introduce his “The Short Treatise on Wobbly Cartoons” which was as thorough, brilliant, and very much as comical as the hard-hitting wobbly songs.  They anticipate photomontage; they’re the beginning of the stickerette.  Some said IWW stood for I Won’t Work, and in truth Franklin thought all would become artists in the new society.

Why music?  It is closest to the heart; straight, no chaser.  Africa, its rhythms, its instruments.  In blues lyrics he finds materialism, eroticism, humor, atheism, passion for freedom, sense of adventure, and alertness to the Marvellous.  Blues is black, blues is popular, blues is song, blues is collective, blues is muscular.  The blues people are alchemists of the word incanting against “the shabby confines of detestable reality.”  He takes the words for this music – blues, jazz, swing, bebop, and reggae – as expressing the full measure of African glory: looking ahead to a non-repressive civilization, harking back to Yoruba trickster tales, to the secret lore of slaves, to the underground railroad or the freedom ship (as Marcus Rediker is teaching us to see), to the loa of Haitian voodoo.

Franklin’s teacher at Roosevelt was St. Clair Drake whose father was from Barbados.  Drake became the friend of Padmore and Nkrumah.  He studied black seamen in Cardiff, Wales, in 1947 and 1948.  It was a coal and steel town like Chicago.  He helped make Franklin cosmopolitan and pan African.  He was a significant mentor, and himself a student radical at Hampton Institute in the 1920s.  Franklin, like Langston Hughes, knows rivers, and the rivers (as we know from Aldo Leopold) flow into the ocean, the Atlantic Ocean from Chicago, via the Great Lakes or the Mississippi.

The Atlantic problem or how the modes of doing things (culture, production, ethnology, reproduction) differs and mixes among the people and creatures of the four continents that form the four corners of that ocean.  Black skin and blue blood, white skin and ocher skin, people the color of the earth:  Africa, Europe, Latin America, Turtle Island:  together they form ‘the Atlantic problem.’  Small wonder that Chicago is one of its centers where solutions are sought.

Abigail Susik introduces the collection with a helpful essay on surrealism with its emergence in Chicago in 1966 with links to Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean.  To find the surreal in nonsurrealist phenomenon, to be able to wander (dérive), to be open to what arrives by chance (disponsibilité).  Drawing on the irrationality of dreams, Franklin propounded the oneiric life.

He learned early to do his own thinking, avoiding the “police-like aspects of literary criticism” and the mature result is original, a marvel, by re-writing it “in service of desire.” He formed his own judgements. Melville makes the cut, thundering “No!” in the land of the dollar.

Franklin loved word-play, puns and palindromes.  The palindrome turns the world of letters forward to back or back to front and the real world upside down or topsy turvy.

Rail at a liar.
Name no one man.
No lemons, no melon.
Rats live on No Evil Star.
Wonders in Italy: Latin is “red’ now.
Deer flee freedom in Oregon?  No, Geronimo, deer feel freed.

If there was one poet who Franklin put up top (well, after Joe Hill of course) that would be T-Bone Slim.  He was a tug-boat captain skilled at tenderly nudging huge ocean liners to their berth.  He does the same with language finding that a shout, a slogan, a koan, or a haiku could nudge continents together.  T-Bone Slim understood the latent content of the age.

“Wherever you find injustice, the proper form of politeness is attack.”  “A stiff without a brother is a ship without a rudder.”  “Half a loaf is better than no loafing at all.”  “Juice is stranger than friction.”  “Civilinsanity.”

Rosemont finds him at the junction between the phonetic cabala and the surrealist image.  T-Bone Slim’s grammar opens up between the lines.  Franklin admires his pamphlets, Power of These Two Hands (1922) or Starving Amidst Too Much (1923).  He was at home on skid row or in the hobo jungle.  Malcontents, dreamers, eccentrics, those ‘touched in the head.’ It is a phrase reminding one of an old attribute of sovereignty, ‘the King’s touch.’  Their disdain for “leaders.”  Their love of nick-names.  Their presence in the harvest drives.

Like Joe Hill, T-Bone Slim was Scandinavian (but Finnish not Swedish) from Ashtabula, Ohio.  His writing radiates slapstick poetic goofiness, vernacular surrealism.  He was a philosopher of the Wobblies, “bringing the sublime and the ridiculous into a compromising proximity.”  “Let us not lose sight of the fact that we are at grips with ‘the noble white man’ that made agony both ingenious and scientific, and relegated life’s possibilities to the select few and life’s ‘garbage’ to the many.”  If his writing seemed scrambled he replied, “so is the capitalist system.  Us great writers must conform with prevailing aggravations.”  “Living in what he termed ‘hoarse and bogey days,’ his confidence in what could be remained boundless: ‘We haven’t seen anything yet.’”

I have thought that experience as a tug-boat captain explains his powerful and gentle way with words.  On second thoughts I think his earliest formation came from his mother, a washerwoman, who took him with her on her rounds, making him used to moving about as well as gaining knowledge of dirty laundry and how folks dress themselves, princes and pauper alike.

In 1966 he went to Paris and met the surrealist, André Breton, hanging out with other surrealists at the café Promenade de Vénus.  “Surrealism” means beyond the real.  “What’s real now once was only imagined,” as Blake said.  “Sur” also means on, as in on top of, or superior to.  “Authentic art goes hand in hand with revolutionary social activity,” the surrealists believed.

He wrote another biography of the French soldier and surrealist Jacques Vaché, Jacques Vaché and the Roots of Surrealism (2008).  He loved their doodles, cartoons, drawings, and stickerettes. Their original, demotic thinking, street-wise, owing something to Studs Terkel as well as Nelson Algren.  He had hitch-hiked from Chicago to San Francisco in 1960 homing in on City Lights book store.  One thinks of Franklin at the tail-end of the Beatniks and the beginnings of the radical hippies.

Franklin’s roots were in the press room.  I think of him with Johannes Gutenberg or Marshal McLuhan because their work on print and page understood the medium preceding the digital era.  He liked to draw.  And what a scholar he was!  Really in the tradition of François Villon, independent of institutions of learning, yet foraging among them, wondering and wandering.

He made an exegesis of Karl Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks that brought the Iroquois League quite out of the distant past such that “it glows brightly with the colors of the future.” Once the Iroquois provided help to the settler colonists at the Albany Congress of 1754 in offering their experience with federalism as a way that several may govern as one – federalism.  Now again more than a hundred years later the Iroquois offered a notion of matriarchy, common property, and the long house.

He did this in the midst of the settlement of Marx into American academia.  Not as political economy but as revolutionary imagination.  He was helped by Raya Dunayevskaya and Thelonius Monk.  Originally published in an occasional journal he edited called Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion.  He generously welcomed E.P. Thompson’s huge screed, Poverty of Theory, to this task of recovering the life-long humanism of Karl Marx.

He was a man of the Movement.  Adept at the cut-and-thrust of sectarian in-fighting he avoided the unfeeling but shiny scars that could result.  He learned some of his Marxism from long-time Fred Thompson who in the midst of sectarian bickering would sing out the classic, “Oh, Karl Marx’s whiskers were eighteen inches long,” which could pretty much calm things down.  Rosemont found that “strange birds continue to build their nests in Karl Marx’s beard” and we could easily, in this same spirit, imagine the birds braiding the whiskers into dreads!

He could be as direct as a nail to the noggin of Mr. Block.  Is there a question about what he stood for?  Here is his credo as concise and comprehensive a definition of woke as you could possibly find outside your sleeping bag.  Faites attention, Mr. Block.

“In poetry as in life I am for freedom and against slavery:  for the Indians against the European invaders and the American explorers; for the black insurrections against the white-power structure; for guerrillas against colonial administrators and imperialist armies; for youth against cops, curfews, school, and conscription; for wildcat strikers against bosses and union bureaucrats; for poetry against literature, philosophy, and religion; for mad love against civilized repression and bourgeois marriage; and for the surrealist revolution against complacency, hypocrisy, cowardice, stupidity, exploitation, and oppression.”

With that we join Franklin Rosemont in saying, “Goodbye, Mr. Block,” and hello to May Day Earth Day combined.

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Insults, slurs, nasty comments and contempt for Social Security sprout up everywhere these days in Washington. Although Trump himself insists he will protect the program, his underlings sure hate it, and by extension, the nearly 70 million elders who rely on it; and “rely” is an understatement – for many it’s their sole lifeline. These people voted for Trump in their multitudes. But now they hear from his advisor Elon Musk that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme,” or from billionaire financial services ceo turned commerce secretary Howard Lutnick that only “fraudsters” cash their social security checks. It’s hard not to conclude that these haughty plutocrats want to snatch grandma’s money and leave her destitute.

Of course, this has long been official GOP policy. Just look at what the Republicans want to do to Medicaid. The House passed a bill in January to gut it, even dispensing with the prolonged, mendacious and de rigeur campaign to tar it with fraud. That’s the big lie about Social Security – that it’s riddled with fraud and therefore must be not just trimmed but slashed. I suppose Medicaid, like food stamps, so offends multimillionaire GOP House members that they figured they could dispense with the propaganda campaign and just ravage it.

Besides, all Medicaid recipients are poor, thus easily bullied by the mega-rich. And with its Medicaid bill, the Republican House revealed that it’s full of bullies, who’d like nothing better than to ditch Medicaire, Medicaid, Social Security and of course food stamps, so that the indigent can skip doctor’s visits, ration their chemo and their insulin, eat fewer, smaller meals and sleep under the stars. ‘Cause that’s where all this is heading – dispossessing tens of millions of people and shoving them into the ranks of the homeless.

Add the 70 million Americans on Social Security to the 90 million on Medicaid and you’re looking at 160 million people rendered destitute by snobs like Musk, Lutnick and GOP House leader Mike Johnson. These honchos of the Trump Sanhedrin apparently hate anyone who’s not rich. Lutnick best exemplified this vile disdain in a recent TV interview, where he proclaimed that his 94-year-old mother-in-law wouldn’t mind if she didn’t receive her Social Security check and only loud-mouthed “fraudsters” would grip about that.

Well, I don’t know how wealthy Lutnick’s mother-in-law is, but I’d bet she has a lot more cash on hand than your average Social Security recipient, so it sure would be nice if these Beltway plutocrats would stop bashing Social Security. Trump could snap a leash on them if he wanted, but he hasn’t. Meanwhile lots of us are so grateful he ended the threat of nuclear annihilation via a U.S./Russia blow-up that frankly, that’s rather distracting. Nevertheless, this ferocious combat against the poor’s skimpy sources of sustenance is hard to ignore. Yes, we’re happy we won’t be incinerated in Biden’s insane attack on Russia and we hope there will be no World War III sparked by a U.S. assault on Iran, which could quickly turn radioactive and would bust the global economy. Also on the wish list is a halt to the Gaza carnage, something Trump did once with his ceasefire/hostage deal and could easily do again, if he wants.

But now that the Atomic Apocalypse is off our bingo card and we are permitted to survive, for lots of proles the next question is, how? If aristocrats like Musk and Lutnick keep trashing ordinary peoples’ means of subsistence, are they paving the road to a hell of illness, hunger and destitution for 160 million Americans? That’s not much of a platform for the GOP to run on in two years.

Some weeks back, Musk pronounced Social Security a Ponzi scheme. This is false. It is not investment fraud. It is a government-run insurance annuity; the citizens make a series of payments in return for a stream of income later in life. Insurance annuities are used for retirement planning all the time, and if Musk regards that as fraud, then he not merely slanders Social Security but an entire financial industry. Does he regard a pension as fraud? Because that’s another comparison that Social Security brings to mind. Possibly he considers anything other than a retirement 401k in the stock market as some sort of cheat – a scam against Wall Street, which has lustfully eyed Social Security income since it was first christened by FDR.

As billionaires wage savage class war against the rest of us, where are the Dems? Largely mute, licking their self-inflicted wounds from the Joe “War Is My Legacy” Biden fiasco. In fact, any party that could foist a monumental deceit like that presidency on the American people deserves to be demolished, then rebuilt, from the ground up, with new people. But there’s no evidence of such efforts anywhere; the feckless Democrats, after nearly bumbling the world into nuclear Armageddon, under the “leadership” of a ruler who probably would have been happier in an old folks’ home, which they assiduously concealed, those Dems can’t seem to muster the will to rally for the great social programs they invented. Why? Because snotty social climbers who advocated – Biden is Exhibit A – dismantling those programs long ago captured the party. Maybe just skip the Democrats altogether. Time for a new People’s Party.

In a country where, as of 2023, 36.8 million people live in poverty, where 56 percent of Americans cannot afford a $1000 emergency, where 22 percent of tenants spend ALL their income on rent and where even the phony, manipulated, government labor statistics – which don’t count as unemployed the hordes of people who gave up looking for work years ago – reveal that officially almost 7 million people lack employment while nearly 9 million work multiple jobs, in such a country, you would think that politicians with their eyes on the history books would be falling all over themselves to boost social welfare programs. But no. What was once called economic freedom, namely freedom from want, is today merely the freedom to starve and sleep under an overpass.

The infamous truth is that the U.S. is a nation of very few fabulously rich oligarchs who hog all the resources and hundreds of millions of ordinary people struggling to get by. Stealing their skimpy subsistence – and we PAY for our Social Security, it’s not a gift – is not only a way to lose votes, it will earn its promoters the condemnation of history. Trump evidently knows this. But his advisors? That’s another story.

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President Donald Trump promised to unleash mass deportations on immigrants during his presidential campaign. But he has gone much further, with the disappearing of hundreds of Venezuelan nationals from the United States to El Salvador’s notorious gulag. It’s a warning shot—one that has serious consequences for all of us, immigrant or not.

The method and speed of his actions are breathtaking. Over several years, there has been an exodus of millions of Venezuelans from the left wing regime of Hugo Chávez, now overseen by President Nicolás Maduro. The U.S. Congress granted them Temporary Protected Status (TPS), enabling nearly 350,000 Venezuelans to legally reside in the United States.

That designation remained on the government’s books until the beginning of 2025. But, within weeks of Trump’s second-term inauguration in January 2025, he rescinded TPS for Venezuelans, invoked a 1798 law called the Alien Enemies Act, and immediately dumped three planeloads of Venezuelan mento El Salvador’s prisons for allegedly being gang members.

When an emergency ACLU-led court hearing resulted in U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordering an immediate halt to the deportations, including a demand that the flights be turned around midair, the Trump White House defied the order and pressed ahead. Their justification was that the planes were outside U.S. airspace and, therefore, the order didn’t apply.

This action, only one in an overwhelming series of violent political earthquakes unleashed by the Trump regime, is an intentional test of myriad institutional norms and laws.

First, Trump is making clear that this is no longer about deporting undocumented immigrants and that anyone can be disappeared at any time. His government is going after U.S. citizens of color. It is targeting academicsof color who are working or studying in the country with valid papers, particularly those who are Muslim or seeking justice for Palestine, such as Mahmoud Khalil and Bader Khan Suri. He is also targeting white Europeans and Canadian tourists, artists, and others. The situation is so dire that Germany and the UK have issued travel advisories against the United States.

Second, Trump is using disinformation so willfully and skillfully that he has news media fumbling on fact-checking him, as they take him at face value. He has asserted “pro-Hamas aliens” have infiltrated college campuses—relying on the bipartisan conflation of anti-Israel criticism with antisemitism—and is ominously taking his lead from a Zionist organization that sent him a list of thousands of potential deportees. Indeed, if Nazis—the worst antisemites—are to be found anywhere, it is among Trump supporters.

He has claimed the U.S. is being invaded by a dangerous and violent Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua—it is not. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt outrageously libeled the Venezuelan men who were sent to El Salvador as “rapists, murderers, and gangsters.” But there is no evidence of this, and even if there was, there are due process laws in place to deal with these allegations. Instead, innocent people have been indefinitely disappeared into a prison system known for torture and cruelty—what some have justifiably termed a “concentration camp.”

To add to the confusion about his actions, Trump claimed he didn’t sign the Alien Enemies Act—and why would he sign a 1798 law? But he did invoke it, in writing, on the White House website. This sort of confusion is designed to suck up media resources. For example, the Washington Post printed an entire story about it, wondering, “Did Trump misspeak? Is he trying to deflect responsibility for a decision?”

Trump did the same thing during his first term and many journalists tied themselves into knots attempting to cover his deception. “President Donald Trump lies, but not everything he says is a lie,” said CNN’s Brian Stelter in 2018. That’s like saying, “this man is a rapist but does not rape every woman he encounters.” The obfuscation is the point.

And third, Trump is testing the ability of the courts to stop him from breaking the law. Defying Judge Boasberg’s order to stop the disappearances of Venezuelans into El Salvador’s prisons, Trump violently railed against Boasberg as a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator,” and demanded he be impeached in a social media post. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr issued a rare rebuke denouncing such threats, but it was Roberts’s court that ruled Trump was legally immune from prosecutionfor actions conducted during his presidential terms. As it stands now, the president faces no consequences for defying judicial orders. He has also threatened to sanction law firms for accepting cases challenging his policies.

There is no more apt time to remind us of the poem, “First They Came,” by Martin Niemöller. Today the administration is going after Venezuelans and Palestinians—tomorrow it can be any one of us.

Those Trump supporters who cheered on the president, thinking themselves and their loved ones safe from his hate, now face the deportations of spouses and neighbors.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement even mistakenly detained a pro-Trump naturalized U.S. citizen who voted for the racist president and who then expressed shock that he wasn’t safe from Trump’s white supremacist dragnet.

Progressives warned for years that Trump’s presidency is based on maintaining white power and racial capitalism at all costs in a demographically changing nation. Critics also cautioned Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden against equating anti-Israel rhetoric with antisemitism and against leaning into anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies. They advised mainstream corporate media outlets against accepting and disseminating anti-immigrant narratives and social media platforms against spreading racist lies about immigrants.

Had liberal leaders and media outlets unabashedly embraced a multiracial democracy, there would have been a clear delineation between Trump’s Republican Party and the opposition.

Instead, by accepting the dehumanization of Palestinians, Muslims, Latin Americans, South Asians, and Arabs—as though there is a hard line between the humanity of immigrants and citizens—Americans opened the door to undermining all our rights. There is no limit he won’t cross unless forcefully stopped.

One pro-Trump conservative whose organization boasts about successfully pushing for an extremist Supreme Court majority warned, “What’s going to be on the horizon are denaturalization cases,” which means Trump is likely to begin stripping naturalized citizens (like me) of their citizenship. He’s also pursuing an end to birthright citizenship.

The danger of our current political moment is the inevitable outcome of accepting and internalizing dehumanizing narratives about people we deem “others.” Tolerating anti-immigrant cruelty opens the door to all of us being victims of such savagery. No one is immune.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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This is the last chapter of the genocide. It is the final, blood-soaked push to drive the Palestinians from Gaza. No food. No medicine. No shelter. No clean water. No electricity. Israel is swiftly turning Gaza into a Dantesque cauldron of human misery where Palestinians are being killed in their hundreds and soon, again, in their thousands and tens of thousands, or they will be forced out never to return.

The final chapter marks the end of Israeli lies. The lie of the two-state solution. The lie that Israel respects the laws of war that protect civilians. The lie that Israel bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas. The lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, while Israel routinely forces captive Palestinians to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) are responsible — the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets — for the destruction of hospitals, United Nations’ buildings or mass Palestinian casualties. The lie that humanitarian aid to Gaza is blocked because Hamas is hijacking the trucks or smuggling in weapons and war material. The lie that Israeli babies are beheaded or Palestinians carried out mass rape of Israeli women. The lie that 75 percent of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza were Hamas “terrorists.” The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly rearming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of the ceasefire agreement.

Israel’s naked genocidal visage is exposed. It has ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza where desperate Palestinians are camped out amid the rubble of their homes. What comes now is mass starvation — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said on March 21 it has six days of flour supplies left — deaths from diseases caused by contaminated water and food, scores of killed and wounded each day under the relentless assault of bombs, missiles, shells and bullets. Nothing will function, bakeries, water treatment and sewage plants, hospitals — Israel blew up the damaged Turkish-Palestinian hospital on March 21 — schools, aid distribution centers or clinics. Less than half of the 53 emergency vehicles operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society are functional due to fuel shortages. Soon there will be none.

Israel’s message is unequivocal: Gaza will be uninhabitable. Leave or die.

Since Tuesday, when Israel broke the ceasefire with heavy bombing, over 700 Palestinians have been killed, including 200 children. In one 24 hour period 400 Palestinians were killed. This is only the start. No Western power, including the United States, which provides the weapons for the genocide, intends to stop it. The images from Gaza during the nearly sixteen months of incessant attacks were awful. But what is coming now will be worse. It will rival the most atrocious war crimes of the twentieth century, including the mass starvation, wholesale slaughter and leveling of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 by the Nazis.

Oct. 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalization and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine. What we are witnessing is the historical equivalent of the moment triggered by the annihilation of some 200 soldiers led by George Armstrong Custer in June 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. After that humiliating defeat, Native Americans were slated to be killed with the remnants forced into prisoner of war camps, later named reservations, where thousands died of disease, lived under the merciless gaze of their armed occupiers and fell into a life of immiseration and despair. Expect the same for the Palestinians in Gaza, dumped, I suspect, in one of the world’s hellholes and forgotten.

“Gaza residents, this is your final warning,” Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz threatened:

The first Sinwar destroyed Gaza and the second Sinwar will completely destroy it. The Air Force strikes against Hamas terrorists were just the first step. It will become much more difficult and you will pay the full price. The evacuation of the population from the combat zones will soon begin again…Return the hostages and remove Hamas and other options will open for you, including leaving for other places in the world for those who want to. The alternative is absolute destruction.

The ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was designed to be implemented in three phases. The first phase, lasting 42 days, would see an end to hostilities. Hamas would release 33 Israeli hostages who were captured on Oct. 7, 2023 — including women, those aged above 50, and those with illnesses — in exchange for upwards of 2,000 Palestinian men, women and children imprisoned by Israel (around 1,900 Palestinian captives have been released by Israel as of March 18). Hamas has released a total of 147 hostages, of whom eight were dead. Israel says there are 59 Israelis still being held by Hamas, 35 of whom Israel believes are deceased.

The Israeli army would pull back from populated areas of Gaza on the first day of the ceasefire. On the seventh day, displaced Palestinians would be permitted to return to northern Gaza. Israel would allow 600 aid trucks with food and medical supplies to enter Gaza daily.

The second phase, which was expected to be negotiated on the sixteenth day of the ceasefire, would see the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. Israel would complete its withdrawal from Gaza maintaining a presence in some parts of the Philadelphi corridor, which stretches along the eight-mile border between Gaza and Egypt. It would surrender its control of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.

The third phase would see negotiations for a permanent end of the war and the reconstruction of Gaza.

Israel habitually signs agreements, including the Camp David Accords and the Oslo Peace Agreement, with timetables and phases. It gets what it wants — in this case the release of the hostages — in the first phase and then violates subsequent phases. This pattern has never been broken.

Israel refused to honor the second phase of the deal. It blocked humanitarian aid into Gaza two weeks ago, violating the agreement. It also killed at least 137 Palestinians during the first phase of the ceasefire, including nine people, — three of them journalists — when Israeli drones attacked a relief team on March 15 in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza

Israel’s heavy bombing and shelling of Gaza resumed March 18 while most Palestinians were asleep or preparing their suhoor, the meal eaten before dawn during the holy month of Ramadan. Israel will not stop its attacks now, even if the remaining hostages are freed — Israel’s supposed reason for the resumption of the bombing and siege of Gaza.

The Trump White House is cheering on the slaughter. They attack critics of the genocide as “antisemites” who should be silenced, criminalized or deported while funneling billions of dollars in weapons to Israel.

Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is the inevitable denouement of its settler colonial project and apartheid state. The seizure of all of historic Palestine — with the West Bank soon, I expect, to be annexed by Israel — and displacement of all Palestinians has always been the Zionist goal.

Israel’s worst excesses occurred during the wars of 1948 and 1967 when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized, thousands of Palestinians killed and hundreds of thousands were ethnically cleansed. Between these wars, the slow-motion theft of land, murderous assaults and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, continued.

That calibrated dance is over. This is the end. What we are witnessing dwarfs all the historical assaults on Palestinians. Israel’s demented genocidal dream — a Palestinian nightmare — is about to be achieved. It will forever shatter the myth that we, or any Western nation, respect the rule of law or are the protectors of human rights, democracy and the so-called “virtues” of Western civilization. Israel’s barbarity is our own. We may not understand this, but the rest of the globe does.

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As the world’s top billionaire rummages through the inner workings of its mightiest state, the influence of America’s oligarchs is hard to miss these days. Never before in modern U.S. history has a private citizen wielded as much political clout as Elon Musk.

It is exactly what President Joseph R. Biden warned about in his farewell address, when he proclaimed that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America.”

As if to prove the point, Musk proceeded to launch an unprecedented—and shockingly corrupt—bid to infiltrate the federal government. In short order, he dispatched a bevy of post-pubescent fanboys, newly emerged from their parents’ basements, into the government’s most sensitive computer systems, doing god-knows-what with their access.

The moves have prompted considerable alarm among the commentariat. “Elon Musk is President,” ran a headline in The Atlantic. “The top 1% are no longer just influencing policy from behind the scenes,” Ali Velshi of MSNBC declared, “they are seizing control of the levers of power.” A recent TIME cover depicts Musk sitting behind Trump’s desk in the Oval Office.

According to the emerging consensus, Trump is president in name only, little more than a puppet in the hands of the reactionary tech entrepreneur.

The reality is far different. Musk and his fellow plutocrats are not omnipotent. They are exceptionally vulnerable, in fact.

Having spent the past two decades studying oligarchs in Eastern Europe, I can affirm that we are witnessing something momentous. Only it is not oligarchization; it is authoritarianism.

As political scientist Jeffrey Winters explains, oligarchy can exist under any political regime, whether democratic or authoritarian. The U.S., for its part, is already an oligarchy and has been for more than a century. America’s richest moguls have long defended their vastly disproportionate wealth by exerting undue influence over tax policy and economic regulation. Nothing about that will change with Trump in office.

A New Order

But this hardly means business as usual—either for the oligarchs or the rest of us. The coming move toward authoritarianism will affect everyone, including the super-rich. Yet, far from enjoying a new heyday, they might not like what the emerging regime has in store.

Trump has already gone a long way toward dismantling the checks on his power. The only question is how far he will be able to go. The Putin model of full authoritarianism is almost certainly not attainable. Trump’s megalomaniacal fantasies will stumble upon myriad constraints, including federalism, a vibrant civil society, and his own incompetence, that will block him from forcing all opposition activity underground.

More likely is what political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way refer to as “competitive authoritarianism.” Under this arrangement, civil liberties are curbed while the electoral process is rigged to the advantage of incumbents. But the opposition can still take part in elections and threaten the ruling party’s hold on power.

Trump’s first imperative in this regard is the same one faced by any aspiring autocrat: to “capture the referees,” as Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt put it. This involves placing loyalists in charge of the key state agencies empowered to launch investigations and sanction rule violators. Trump has wasted little time getting to work on this task, appointing MAGA diehards to the Department of Justice, the Treasury, and other agencies. Unfortunately, when it comes to seizing the reins of federal power, there is little that stands in his way.

Once his lickspittles have taken charge, Trump can unleash the full force of the U.S. government against anyone he wants. As a result, actions that were once unfathomable will become very real. Few abuses of executive power will be off limits, from deploying the military against protesters to deporting masses of people without due process. Equally plausible are lawless and arbitrary investigations of his opponents. Among the likely targets are local officials who refuse to “find the votes,” district attorneys who decline to criminalize homelessness, business owners guilty of hiring Black people, and, of course, wealthy plutocrats who draw his ire.

Law, That Curious Relic

America’s oligarchs built their wealth at a time when constitutional rights and legal protections were taken for granted. Their property rights were protected by a system of courts whose decisions everyone, from ordinary citizens to the most powerful officeholders, regarded as sacrosanct.

This edifice was remarkably fragile, however, dependent on norms whose power derived from the collective expectation that they would be followed. If government officials refrained from violating property rights, it was because they presumed the courts would enforce them in rulings everybody expected everyone else to respect.

But if the president decides to ignore these norms, the law loses the very basis of its authority. In the event that Trump defies a Supreme Court ruling, who will force him to comply? His Justice Department sycophants?

The implications for the oligarchs cannot be overstated. Those who remain in Trump’s good graces stand to profit immensely. But those who cross him can lose everything.

The days when their tax burdens were their overriding concern will soon appear quaint. Instead, the oligarchs will be preoccupied with threats to their ownership rights and even the specter of unlawful detention. Scenarios once confined to developing countries, such as targeted intimidation by federal agencies, prosecutions on false charges, and other forms of administrative harassment, will become facts of life in the U.S.

The ultra-rich are used to lobbying for lower taxes. They are rather less accustomed to F.B.I. raids and asset seizures designed to strong-arm them into selling their assets and fleeing abroad. Yet, this is exactly what could befall an oligarch who runs afoul of Trump. The legality of such moves is beside the point; the feds can do more than enough damage before any countervailing orders come down from the courts which, in any case, can be ignored.

Musk’s sway, while extraordinary, is also fleeting. Snatching it away is as easy as slamming the Wendy’s Baconator button on the Resolute Desk.

It is only a matter of time before these two imbecilic, impulsive narcissists come to blows. When that happens, Musk will receive a harsh lesson in the reality of competitive authoritarianism. His immense wealth matters little when up against the guy who can wield the Justice Department as his personal bludgeon. In all likelihood, he will become the subject of multiple criminal probes and be chased out of the country. It is a lesson that will not be lost on his fellow moguls.

History is replete with examples of business tycoons coming to rue their past support for autocrats. Trump’s reign should prove no different. He is the one in charge, not the oligarchs. That is bad news for them—as well as for us.

This hardly means all is lost, however. As I explained in a previous post, the obstacles to authoritarianism in the U.S. are far greater than those faced by other countries that experienced democratic breakdown. America’s civil society, in particular, is unmatched in terms of its resources and depth. If and when it mobilizes effectively, Trump is finished.

But make no mistake; however dangerous Musk’s shenanigans are, Trump is the problem. It is toward him that we must direct our focus and efforts.

This piece first appeared on The Detox.

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As the world’s top billionaire rummages through the inner workings of its mightiest state, the influence of America’s oligarchs is hard to miss these days. Never before in modern U.S. history has a private citizen wielded as much political clout as Elon Musk.

It is exactly what President Joseph R. Biden warned about in his farewell address, when he proclaimed that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America.”

As if to prove the point, Musk proceeded to launch an unprecedented—and shockingly corrupt—bid to infiltrate the federal government. In short order, he dispatched a bevy of post-pubescent fanboys, newly emerged from their parents’ basements, into the government’s most sensitive computer systems, doing god-knows-what with their access.

The moves have prompted considerable alarm among the commentariat. “Elon Musk is President,” ran a headline in The Atlantic. “The top 1% are no longer just influencing policy from behind the scenes,” Ali Velshi of MSNBC declared, “they are seizing control of the levers of power.” A recent TIME cover depicts Musk sitting behind Trump’s desk in the Oval Office.

According to the emerging consensus, Trump is president in name only, little more than a puppet in the hands of the reactionary tech entrepreneur.

The reality is far different. Musk and his fellow plutocrats are not omnipotent. They are exceptionally vulnerable, in fact.

Having spent the past two decades studying oligarchs in Eastern Europe, I can affirm that we are witnessing something momentous. Only it is not oligarchization; it is authoritarianism.

As political scientist Jeffrey Winters explains, oligarchy can exist under any political regime, whether democratic or authoritarian. The U.S., for its part, is already an oligarchy and has been for more than a century. America’s richest moguls have long defended their vastly disproportionate wealth by exerting undue influence over tax policy and economic regulation. Nothing about that will change with Trump in office.

A New Order

But this hardly means business as usual—either for the oligarchs or the rest of us. The coming move toward authoritarianism will affect everyone, including the super-rich. Yet, far from enjoying a new heyday, they might not like what the emerging regime has in store.

Trump has already gone a long way toward dismantling the checks on his power. The only question is how far he will be able to go. The Putin model of full authoritarianism is almost certainly not attainable. Trump’s megalomaniacal fantasies will stumble upon myriad constraints, including federalism, a vibrant civil society, and his own incompetence, that will block him from forcing all opposition activity underground.

More likely is what political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way refer to as “competitive authoritarianism.” Under this arrangement, civil liberties are curbed while the electoral process is rigged to the advantage of incumbents. But the opposition can still take part in elections and threaten the ruling party’s hold on power.

Trump’s first imperative in this regard is the same one faced by any aspiring autocrat: to “capture the referees,” as Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt put it. This involves placing loyalists in charge of the key state agencies empowered to launch investigations and sanction rule violators. Trump has wasted little time getting to work on this task, appointing MAGA diehards to the Department of Justice, the Treasury, and other agencies. Unfortunately, when it comes to seizing the reins of federal power, there is little that stands in his way.

Once his lickspittles have taken charge, Trump can unleash the full force of the U.S. government against anyone he wants. As a result, actions that were once unfathomable will become very real. Few abuses of executive power will be off limits, from deploying the military against protesters to deporting masses of people without due process. Equally plausible are lawless and arbitrary investigations of his opponents. Among the likely targets are local officials who refuse to “find the votes,” district attorneys who decline to criminalize homelessness, business owners guilty of hiring Black people, and, of course, wealthy plutocrats who draw his ire.

Law, That Curious Relic

America’s oligarchs built their wealth at a time when constitutional rights and legal protections were taken for granted. Their property rights were protected by a system of courts whose decisions everyone, from ordinary citizens to the most powerful officeholders, regarded as sacrosanct.

This edifice was remarkably fragile, however, dependent on norms whose power derived from the collective expectation that they would be followed. If government officials refrained from violating property rights, it was because they presumed the courts would enforce them in rulings everybody expected everyone else to respect.

But if the president decides to ignore these norms, the law loses the very basis of its authority. In the event that Trump defies a Supreme Court ruling, who will force him to comply? His Justice Department sycophants?

The implications for the oligarchs cannot be overstated. Those who remain in Trump’s good graces stand to profit immensely. But those who cross him can lose everything.

The days when their tax burdens were their overriding concern will soon appear quaint. Instead, the oligarchs will be preoccupied with threats to their ownership rights and even the specter of unlawful detention. Scenarios once confined to developing countries, such as targeted intimidation by federal agencies, prosecutions on false charges, and other forms of administrative harassment, will become facts of life in the U.S.

The ultra-rich are used to lobbying for lower taxes. They are rather less accustomed to F.B.I. raids and asset seizures designed to strong-arm them into selling their assets and fleeing abroad. Yet, this is exactly what could befall an oligarch who runs afoul of Trump. The legality of such moves is beside the point; the feds can do more than enough damage before any countervailing orders come down from the courts which, in any case, can be ignored.

Musk’s sway, while extraordinary, is also fleeting. Snatching it away is as easy as slamming the Wendy’s Baconator button on the Resolute Desk.

It is only a matter of time before these two imbecilic, impulsive narcissists come to blows. When that happens, Musk will receive a harsh lesson in the reality of competitive authoritarianism. His immense wealth matters little when up against the guy who can wield the Justice Department as his personal bludgeon. In all likelihood, he will become the subject of multiple criminal probes and be chased out of the country. It is a lesson that will not be lost on his fellow moguls.

History is replete with examples of business tycoons coming to rue their past support for autocrats. Trump’s reign should prove no different. He is the one in charge, not the oligarchs. That is bad news for them—as well as for us.

This hardly means all is lost, however. As I explained in a previous post, the obstacles to authoritarianism in the U.S. are far greater than those faced by other countries that experienced democratic breakdown. America’s civil society, in particular, is unmatched in terms of its resources and depth. If and when it mobilizes effectively, Trump is finished.

But make no mistake; however dangerous Musk’s shenanigans are, Trump is the problem. It is toward him that we must direct our focus and efforts.

This piece first appeared on The Detox.

The post Elon Musk Is Not the Problem appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

We, the veterans of the resistance movements and combat forces of Free France, we call on the young generation to live by, to transmit, the legacy of the Resistance and its ideals. We say to them: Take our place, “Indignez-vous!” [Get angry! or Cry out!].

– Stéphane Hessel

Historically, the most terrible things – war, genocide, and slavery – have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience. We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”

– Howard Zinn

Jeffrey St Clair reminded me that St Paul hated clamour. For him, submission was the great virtue. In Ephesians 4: 31-32 he lumped clamour together with bitterness, wrath, anger, evil speaking, and all malice, as if he were trying to hide outcry, drown out the noise, smother it with all the things we need to clamour against. He was sending out his message in Koine Greek, in an age when clamour was powerful because public speaking and vocal expression were the main forms of social communication. Clamour, in Greek (κραυγή), was a spontaneous outburst or deliberate call for attention. St Paul was no fan of things spontaneous, including sex. As Australian historian Peter Cochrane wrote (personal communication), St Paul also “advanced the abysmal idea that our bodies were ‘vile’ and that sex was an impediment to salvation”. Sex is a clamorous need and, in some languages, “clamour” contains “amour”. This is, of course, anecdotal, but the connections are suggestive because if human bodies are “vile”, he’s not granting them dignity.

After three recent public lectures on human rights, genocide, and politics in general (with quite a lot of young people in the audience on each occasion), I was approached by several under-25s, who didn’t know each other, all wanting to talk more about human rights and what to do. Some came to visit afterwards and it was striking to see how they were all concerned about the same issues, how they expressed disgust at being forced to live in a world where civilisation’s genocides are a routine thing. These intelligent young people feel “tired”, “burnt-out”, “empty” because of the indifference all around them. They’re expressing what Durkheim called anomie (from the Greek anomos “without law, lawless”). This is a situation where expectations flounder, where the social system is broken and lawless, where young people feel worthless, weak, and in deep despair, with a cruel sense of unbelonging because there’s no community. When laws, conventions, promises, and ethics are trashed, there can be no society because there are no shared interests, no empathetic community to embrace those who feel alone.

The upshot of these encounters with young adults is an attempt to form a group where they can be heard and can clamour against the system that’s so impairing their lives as decent, caring people. The group’s still small but it’s early days yet. Ages range from 17 to 92. We held a first meeting with a couple of 50-ish specialists in housing and universal basic income, which are two of the main issues that arose. We older people, are there for support and not to give lessons, and others are willing to consult from various fields if needed. So far, there’s a possibility of a space to meet in one of Barcelona’s cultural institutions. If this doesn’t come off, Clamour could take to the city squares (just as the Indignez-Vous! movement did nearly 15 years ago), and a first public talk by the young people is being programmed for May. Some of them are good writers. They just need places to be published, to shout, to get their indignation heard.

The name Clamour echoes the outrage of Stéphane Hessel whose famous short essay Indignez-Vous! (Time for Outrage!), written when he was 93, inspired the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, and the Indignados movement in Spain. Many years earlier, Hessel was involved in writing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and he understood very well that, for all its flaws, its suggestion of universal human rights is one of the most radical political ideas ever. It seems that the British and American signatories recognised this too as they wanted to replace “universal” with the non-committal term “international” (and we know how many peoples are excluded by the term “international” today) rights. It was only thanks to Rene Cassin, national commissioner of justice and education in the government of Free France in London in 1941, that the “Universal” Declaration was adopted in the UN on 10 December 1948 by 48 out of 58 member states. The positioning of the adjective is revealing. It qualifies not human rights but the Declaration itself. In a globalised age, anybody can make a “universal” declaration in the hope of reaching everybody. If the word “universal” referred to rights, it would necessarily mean liberty equality, and fraternity for everybody. In a just world, the qualifier “universal” would be redundant because “human” is a universal category. As long as rights aren’t universal, “rights” can only be the privileges of some. And the circle of those some is shrinking fast as wealth is ever more concentrated. To give one obscene example, Elon Musk’s fortune greatly exceeds the GDP of his home country, South Africa (population 64.5+ million).

Seventy-seven years on, we need to clamour for universal human rights in the awareness that, in this age of ecocide, the basic human right to physical existence depends on the right to exist of all life forms in the human habitats on this planet. Perhaps we need a new name, something like a Declaration of Universal Rights on Earth. Ecocide, defined by the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts”, is surely something to clamour against because, if the UDHR is the only transversal rights narrative we have, the other side of the coin, ecocide, is the transversal crime that will affect everybody. The billionaires may feel safe in their bunkers with biotech replacing their organs and computers swaddling their minds forever-and-ever-amen, but they’ll be living in a sad world without elephants. It’s up to the rest of us to clamour for the lives of elephants, bees, and the little nesting turtledove that visits my balcony plants every day because all our fates as living creatures are interconnected. But what should we clamour against and for, and how?

The idea of the Barcelona Clamour group is to clamour for the human rights that were promised in the UDHR; for a universal basic income to guarantee the right to material existence for everyone, the basic condition for all the other rights; and to clamour against ecocide, an even worse crime than genocide, which is supposedly “the crime of all crimes”; clamour against billionaires and oligarchs whose antihuman, antilife political-economic systems are the basic cause of all the grief; and against abuses of AI, biotech, and fake news, today’s ideologies and mechanisms of repression. This very general framework is just an attempt to keep in mind the interrelationships in these five areas of concern. The connection between a specific issue like housing doesn’t exist in a vacuum but is connected with wider issues and the basic questions that should always be asked: what?, when?, where?, how?, why?, who?, whom?, and how much? In Spain the average age of emancipation is 30.3 years. Young men and women aren’t allowed to be adults. According to a recent survey, 35+% of young Catalan men and 27% of young women would accept a dictatorship. One respondent expressed the relationship between real-estate violence and antisocial political detachment, or the alienation of anomie, when he replied, “Why would I want democracy if I can’t pay my rent?”

A glance at Gil Duran’s summary of MAGA/Tech authoritarian ideology also illustrates overlaps. The tech allies of government leaders like Trump detest democracy. “They are actively trying to build these weird little dictator cities all over the world…” They want control over governments. They believe in imminent social collapse and are part of the cause of social collapse. They’re mostly rich, white, anti-public males. Governments and elected leaders lie, blatantly and on a tremendous scale, for and with these outrageously rich techno-oligarchs. This means that there is no social contract at government level. So, the only real social contracts can be made in grassroots organisations, large and small. Like Clamour. But clamour is needed everywhere and urgently if we don’t want to live in an anomic world built on lies, where genocide and ecocide are routine (and will therefore get worse).

The signatories to the UDHR promised to respect “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”. In Article 25.1 they aver that, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family”. They didn’t offer mechanisms for achieving this but the obvious good start would be a universal basic income, as a human right, which is how it’s defined in Article 1.3 of the Universal Declaration of Emerging Human Rights, Monterrey 2007.

The right to basic income, which assures all individuals, independently of their age, sex, sexual orientation, civil status or employment status, the right to live under worthy material conditions. To such end, the right to an unconditional, regular, monetary income paid by the state and financed by fiscal reforms, is recognised as a right of citizenship, to each resident member of society, independently of their other sources of income, and being adequate to allow them to cover their basic needs.

If this basic right isn’t met, none of the other promises of rights can be honoured.

If, as the Preamble declares, “freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people”, how can the common people enjoy these freedoms if they’re being murdered, starved, and displaced? If “it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law”, how can there be rule of law in political systems based on lies?

Article 1, the one about fraternity, has the beautiful sentiments that, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” It was patently true, even back then in 1948, that human beings aren’t born free and equal, and neither was there any spirit of brotherhood in those Cold War years. The language is masculine and the premise is false. But the baby shouldn’t be thrown out with the bathwater. This was more than hot air. It was a promise, a formally made promise of a friendlier, more sustainable world, a matter of “reason and conscience”. If “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”, then they should be “free and equal in dignity and rights” throughout their lives, every single day.

The broken promise of Article 2—“no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty”—has led, on migrant routes to Spain alone, to the deaths of 10,457 in 2024 alone. One could almost talk about “genocide of the vulnerable”. Data from May 2024 show that over 120 million people have been uprooted from their homes and land due to persecution, violence, war, or human rights abuse. No distinction shall be made. Really? Any Afghan refugee, for example, would beg to differ. And would add that the promise of Article 3, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person”, is also broken, though it could so easily be honoured in great part by introducing a universal basic income (paid for by taxing the rich).

Article 4 proclaims that, “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude”. Yet, about 50 million people are currently living in modern slavery. Evidently, in any decent world, “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”, but it’s happening all the time, especially to immigrants, refugees, Indigenous peoples, and the most vulnerable groups everywhere. Refugees have this dreadful status forced on them when their homes, their lands, their livelihoods have been snatched from them and destroyed, even though Article 17.2 assures that, “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property”.

Related with this is the fact that when people seek asylum they’ve already been gravely illtreated before the asylum seeker abuse begins, so Article 14.1, “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution” breaks two promises: about the right to seek asylum and the right to enjoy asylum (from Latin, “place of refuge, sanctuary”, and Greek (asylos) “inviolable, safe from violence”). Broken promises destroy people and destroy social life because they destroy the meaning of words.

In any society based on a social contract, it’s evident that everyone should have “the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law”, as Article 6, spells out, while Article 7 rules that, “All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination”. Article 8 enshrines, “the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law”. Article 28 famously refers to the international system: “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized”. But if governments are routinely violating their own and international laws, and when national tribunals aren’t “competent” because they’re corrupt, when governments commit or help others to commit genocide, then no person can feel that he or she has the protection of and right to recognition before the law. Governments must be held to account in accordance with their own laws and the covenants they signed. While they don’t honour these promises, there can be no world “order”. We need to clamour for an international system that makes this planet a safer, more friendly place for every single one of its living inhabitants.

Now, when forest guardians and Indigenous peoples are trying to defend their land, sea, rivers, prairies, steppes, mountains, lakes and many other natural formations and, in doing so, are fighting ecocide that is affecting the entire planet and all human beings, and when protesters are being illtreated, arrested, and killed, arbitrarily and everywhere, we’re told by Article 9 that, “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile”. “Exile” for many people who live in harmony with their habitat, their cosmos, means death. Reading that promise and knowing the reality, which has been pushed to the extreme of genocide (as in West Papua) and general indifference to it, is enough to make one weep. But clamouring is more effective than weeping.

Now that the Silicon Valley techs and billionaires are wielding power everywhere, openly and secretly, with wholesale online attacks like those from the “virtual militia” of the Bolsonaro government’s “hate cabinet”, and countless other manifestations we can’t even know about, the pledge in Article 12—“No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation”—is insulting, to put it mildly, when governments themselves are honing their skills in arbitrary interference, in the most damaging ways. “Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks”, we’re told, but when there’s no separation of powers, the law will only give protection to the powerful.

The last straw in all the broken faith is summed up in Article 30. “Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein”. This and all the other broken promises mean not just turning a blind eye but intent by governments to commit the crimes they’ve pledged to protect citizens from. Do we really want this autocratic, destructive anomie, the broken promises, broken societies, the “destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth” in the UDHR? “Give a thing and take a thing, an old man’s plaything.” This refrain from my childhood has taken on the meaning of broken promises on a worldwide and very grim murderous scale. The promise of human dignity was given and immediately snatched away. When freedom, justice, and dignity are denied us, the only way of achieving them is fighting for them, clamouring for them. And then we nurture other values like solidarity, ethics, friendship, and respect for all living beings.

Clamour! Clamour! Clamour!

The post Clamour appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

We, the veterans of the resistance movements and combat forces of Free France, we call on the young generation to live by, to transmit, the legacy of the Resistance and its ideals. We say to them: Take our place, “Indignez-vous!” [Get angry! or Cry out!].

– Stéphane Hessel

Historically, the most terrible things – war, genocide, and slavery – have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience. We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”

– Howard Zinn

Jeffrey St Clair reminded me that St Paul hated clamour. For him, submission was the great virtue. In Ephesians 4: 31-32 he lumped clamour together with bitterness, wrath, anger, evil speaking, and all malice, as if he were trying to hide outcry, drown out the noise, smother it with all the things we need to clamour against. He was sending out his message in Koine Greek, in an age when clamour was powerful because public speaking and vocal expression were the main forms of social communication. Clamour, in Greek (κραυγή), was a spontaneous outburst or deliberate call for attention. St Paul was no fan of things spontaneous, including sex. As Australian historian Peter Cochrane wrote (personal communication), St Paul also “advanced the abysmal idea that our bodies were ‘vile’ and that sex was an impediment to salvation”. Sex is a clamorous need and, in some languages, “clamour” contains “amour”. This is, of course, anecdotal, but the connections are suggestive because if human bodies are “vile”, he’s not granting them dignity.

After three recent public lectures on human rights, genocide, and politics in general (with quite a lot of young people in the audience on each occasion), I was approached by several under-25s, who didn’t know each other, all wanting to talk more about human rights and what to do. Some came to visit afterwards and it was striking to see how they were all concerned about the same issues, how they expressed disgust at being forced to live in a world where civilisation’s genocides are a routine thing. These intelligent young people feel “tired”, “burnt-out”, “empty” because of the indifference all around them. They’re expressing what Durkheim called anomie (from the Greek anomos “without law, lawless”). This is a situation where expectations flounder, where the social system is broken and lawless, where young people feel worthless, weak, and in deep despair, with a cruel sense of unbelonging because there’s no community. When laws, conventions, promises, and ethics are trashed, there can be no society because there are no shared interests, no empathetic community to embrace those who feel alone.

The upshot of these encounters with young adults is an attempt to form a group where they can be heard and can clamour against the system that’s so impairing their lives as decent, caring people. The group’s still small but it’s early days yet. Ages range from 17 to 92. We held a first meeting with a couple of 50-ish specialists in housing and universal basic income, which are two of the main issues that arose. We older people, are there for support and not to give lessons, and others are willing to consult from various fields if needed. So far, there’s a possibility of a space to meet in one of Barcelona’s cultural institutions. If this doesn’t come off, Clamour could take to the city squares (just as the Indignez-Vous! movement did nearly 15 years ago), and a first public talk by the young people is being programmed for May. Some of them are good writers. They just need places to be published, to shout, to get their indignation heard.

The name Clamour echoes the outrage of Stéphane Hessel whose famous short essay Indignez-Vous! (Time for Outrage!), written when he was 93, inspired the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, and the Indignados movement in Spain. Many years earlier, Hessel was involved in writing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and he understood very well that, for all its flaws, its suggestion of universal human rights is one of the most radical political ideas ever. It seems that the British and American signatories recognised this too as they wanted to replace “universal” with the non-committal term “international” (and we know how many peoples are excluded by the term “international” today) rights. It was only thanks to Rene Cassin, national commissioner of justice and education in the government of Free France in London in 1941, that the “Universal” Declaration was adopted in the UN on 10 December 1948 by 48 out of 58 member states. The positioning of the adjective is revealing. It qualifies not human rights but the Declaration itself. In a globalised age, anybody can make a “universal” declaration in the hope of reaching everybody. If the word “universal” referred to rights, it would necessarily mean liberty equality, and fraternity for everybody. In a just world, the qualifier “universal” would be redundant because “human” is a universal category. As long as rights aren’t universal, “rights” can only be the privileges of some. And the circle of those some is shrinking fast as wealth is ever more concentrated. To give one obscene example, Elon Musk’s fortune greatly exceeds the GDP of his home country, South Africa (population 64.5+ million).

Seventy-seven years on, we need to clamour for universal human rights in the awareness that, in this age of ecocide, the basic human right to physical existence depends on the right to exist of all life forms in the human habitats on this planet. Perhaps we need a new name, something like a Declaration of Universal Rights on Earth. Ecocide, defined by the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts”, is surely something to clamour against because, if the UDHR is the only transversal rights narrative we have, the other side of the coin, ecocide, is the transversal crime that will affect everybody. The billionaires may feel safe in their bunkers with biotech replacing their organs and computers swaddling their minds forever-and-ever-amen, but they’ll be living in a sad world without elephants. It’s up to the rest of us to clamour for the lives of elephants, bees, and the little nesting turtledove that visits my balcony plants every day because all our fates as living creatures are interconnected. But what should we clamour against and for, and how?

The idea of the Barcelona Clamour group is to clamour for the human rights that were promised in the UDHR; for a universal basic income to guarantee the right to material existence for everyone, the basic condition for all the other rights; and to clamour against ecocide, an even worse crime than genocide, which is supposedly “the crime of all crimes”; clamour against billionaires and oligarchs whose antihuman, antilife political-economic systems are the basic cause of all the grief; and against abuses of AI, biotech, and fake news, today’s ideologies and mechanisms of repression. This very general framework is just an attempt to keep in mind the interrelationships in these five areas of concern. The connection between a specific issue like housing doesn’t exist in a vacuum but is connected with wider issues and the basic questions that should always be asked: what?, when?, where?, how?, why?, who?, whom?, and how much? In Spain the average age of emancipation is 30.3 years. Young men and women aren’t allowed to be adults. According to a recent survey, 35+% of young Catalan men and 27% of young women would accept a dictatorship. One respondent expressed the relationship between real-estate violence and antisocial political detachment, or the alienation of anomie, when he replied, “Why would I want democracy if I can’t pay my rent?”

A glance at Gil Duran’s summary of MAGA/Tech authoritarian ideology also illustrates overlaps. The tech allies of government leaders like Trump detest democracy. “They are actively trying to build these weird little dictator cities all over the world…” They want control over governments. They believe in imminent social collapse and are part of the cause of social collapse. They’re mostly rich, white, anti-public males. Governments and elected leaders lie, blatantly and on a tremendous scale, for and with these outrageously rich techno-oligarchs. This means that there is no social contract at government level. So, the only real social contracts can be made in grassroots organisations, large and small. Like Clamour. But clamour is needed everywhere and urgently if we don’t want to live in an anomic world built on lies, where genocide and ecocide are routine (and will therefore get worse).

The signatories to the UDHR promised to respect “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”. In Article 25.1 they aver that, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family”. They didn’t offer mechanisms for achieving this but the obvious good start would be a universal basic income, as a human right, which is how it’s defined in Article 1.3 of the Universal Declaration of Emerging Human Rights, Monterrey 2007.

The right to basic income, which assures all individuals, independently of their age, sex, sexual orientation, civil status or employment status, the right to live under worthy material conditions. To such end, the right to an unconditional, regular, monetary income paid by the state and financed by fiscal reforms, is recognised as a right of citizenship, to each resident member of society, independently of their other sources of income, and being adequate to allow them to cover their basic needs.

If this basic right isn’t met, none of the other promises of rights can be honoured.

If, as the Preamble declares, “freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people”, how can the common people enjoy these freedoms if they’re being murdered, starved, and displaced? If “it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law”, how can there be rule of law in political systems based on lies?

Article 1, the one about fraternity, has the beautiful sentiments that, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” It was patently true, even back then in 1948, that human beings aren’t born free and equal, and neither was there any spirit of brotherhood in those Cold War years. The language is masculine and the premise is false. But the baby shouldn’t be thrown out with the bathwater. This was more than hot air. It was a promise, a formally made promise of a friendlier, more sustainable world, a matter of “reason and conscience”. If “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”, then they should be “free and equal in dignity and rights” throughout their lives, every single day.

The broken promise of Article 2—“no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty”—has led, on migrant routes to Spain alone, to the deaths of 10,457 in 2024 alone. One could almost talk about “genocide of the vulnerable”. Data from May 2024 show that over 120 million people have been uprooted from their homes and land due to persecution, violence, war, or human rights abuse. No distinction shall be made. Really? Any Afghan refugee, for example, would beg to differ. And would add that the promise of Article 3, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person”, is also broken, though it could so easily be honoured in great part by introducing a universal basic income (paid for by taxing the rich).

Article 4 proclaims that, “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude”. Yet, about 50 million people are currently living in modern slavery. Evidently, in any decent world, “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”, but it’s happening all the time, especially to immigrants, refugees, Indigenous peoples, and the most vulnerable groups everywhere. Refugees have this dreadful status forced on them when their homes, their lands, their livelihoods have been snatched from them and destroyed, even though Article 17.2 assures that, “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property”.

Related with this is the fact that when people seek asylum they’ve already been gravely illtreated before the asylum seeker abuse begins, so Article 14.1, “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution” breaks two promises: about the right to seek asylum and the right to enjoy asylum (from Latin, “place of refuge, sanctuary”, and Greek (asylos) “inviolable, safe from violence”). Broken promises destroy people and destroy social life because they destroy the meaning of words.

In any society based on a social contract, it’s evident that everyone should have “the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law”, as Article 6, spells out, while Article 7 rules that, “All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination”. Article 8 enshrines, “the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law”. Article 28 famously refers to the international system: “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized”. But if governments are routinely violating their own and international laws, and when national tribunals aren’t “competent” because they’re corrupt, when governments commit or help others to commit genocide, then no person can feel that he or she has the protection of and right to recognition before the law. Governments must be held to account in accordance with their own laws and the covenants they signed. While they don’t honour these promises, there can be no world “order”. We need to clamour for an international system that makes this planet a safer, more friendly place for every single one of its living inhabitants.

Now, when forest guardians and Indigenous peoples are trying to defend their land, sea, rivers, prairies, steppes, mountains, lakes and many other natural formations and, in doing so, are fighting ecocide that is affecting the entire planet and all human beings, and when protesters are being illtreated, arrested, and killed, arbitrarily and everywhere, we’re told by Article 9 that, “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile”. “Exile” for many people who live in harmony with their habitat, their cosmos, means death. Reading that promise and knowing the reality, which has been pushed to the extreme of genocide (as in West Papua) and general indifference to it, is enough to make one weep. But clamouring is more effective than weeping.

Now that the Silicon Valley techs and billionaires are wielding power everywhere, openly and secretly, with wholesale online attacks like those from the “virtual militia” of the Bolsonaro government’s “hate cabinet”, and countless other manifestations we can’t even know about, the pledge in Article 12—“No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation”—is insulting, to put it mildly, when governments themselves are honing their skills in arbitrary interference, in the most damaging ways. “Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks”, we’re told, but when there’s no separation of powers, the law will only give protection to the powerful.

The last straw in all the broken faith is summed up in Article 30. “Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein”. This and all the other broken promises mean not just turning a blind eye but intent by governments to commit the crimes they’ve pledged to protect citizens from. Do we really want this autocratic, destructive anomie, the broken promises, broken societies, the “destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth” in the UDHR? “Give a thing and take a thing, an old man’s plaything.” This refrain from my childhood has taken on the meaning of broken promises on a worldwide and very grim murderous scale. The promise of human dignity was given and immediately snatched away. When freedom, justice, and dignity are denied us, the only way of achieving them is fighting for them, clamouring for them. And then we nurture other values like solidarity, ethics, friendship, and respect for all living beings.

Clamour! Clamour! Clamour!

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American Art Center, 2. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: “Here are our monsters,” without immediately turning the monsters into pets.

– Jacques Derrida

+ Musk and Trump’s intended Shock and Awe bombardment of the federal government has turned into an Opéra Bouffe of Schlock and Chainsaw.

+ Here is Trump’s Secretary of Commerce Howard (Net worth: $808 million) Lutnick’s message to seniors (whose ranks I have now reluctantly joined) on the gutting of the Social Security Administration: “Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out your check this month. My mother-in-law, who is 94, wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up and will get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming and yelling and complaining.” As a writer who worked for decades as a freelancer, if I were to take my Social Security payments at the age of 65, the check would amount to about $40 a day. Try living on that for a month, never mind two months. The billionaire “economic populists” who are running the country haven’t the faintest clue how most of us live…

+ How many landlords are cool with you delaying your rent payment by a month and then not having enough left in the bank to pay the current rent?

+ Musk or Bust (Your Social Security checks)! Leland Dudek, acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, has threatened to shut down the agency in response to a court ruling blocking Elon Musk’s DOGE demolition teams from accessing sensitive taxpayer data.

+ Financial journalist Michael Lewis (The Big Short) talking with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on his new book, Who Is Government?:

When people throw around insults at federal bureaucrats, they’re really revealing they don’t know what goes on in federal government. It’s a mind-bendingly complicated place that does lots of different things, some of which they do very well and some less well. When you go in, you realize how hard fraud would be to perpetrate. Waste is different. Waste is more complicated. There are all sorts of inefficiencies that aren’t really the fault of the workers, that’s more the fault of the structure of the system. But you can’t take a federal worker to work and buy them a turkey sandwich. They just won’t take the money. They are watched every which way and they are conditioned to be very careful about what they do financially. If you said Mike, I’d like you to write a story about fraud; I’d much rather look for it in a private company…I worked on Wall Street. A million things happen every day in a Wall Street firm that if it happened in the civil service, it would be a scandal.

+ Even worse, DOGE’s mission is to defund and demolish the government agencies who are investigating fraud on Wall Street, while Trump issues executive orders and waivers removing any oversight for their own corrupt practices and conflicts of interest.

+ As Trump and Musk eviscerate the Federal Trade Commission, Public Citizen compiled a list of the donations made to the Trump campaign by corporations currently under investigation by the FTC…

Corporations currently facing FTC investigations & lawsuits that collectively gave $8,000,000 toward Trump’s inauguration:

Abbott $500K
Adobe $1M
Amazon $1M
Coca-Cola $250K
Meta $1M
Microsoft $1M
OpenAI $1M*
Syngenta $250K
Uber $2M*

*includes CEO donations

+ The Federal Trade Commission has erased from its website all content critical of Amazon, Microsoft, and AI companies published during the Biden administration.

+ This week, DOGE fired a disabled veteran who was working at the VA Medical Center in Salem, Virginia, despite excellent performance ratings. “This has put my wife and I in a terrible place mentally and financially…I’m being told by HR that I have lost everything.” And yet they want to require disabled, chronically ill, and injured people to work in order to qualify for Medicaid.”

+ Christopher Fasano, a former Senior Enforcement Attorney at the Consumer Financial Protection Board, on his firing by DOGE: “It happened on a Tuesday night at about 8:30. I got an email to my personal email address. It said that my skills and abilities did not meet the agency’s needs at that time. And that was it. And after that I was locked out of my computer and locked out of my work phone. And at that point, no longer employed by the CFPB. What really upsets me more than anything else is that all of the consumers I’ve spent my career defending are being left undefended at this moment. The worst companies, companies that Elon Musk runs, will be able to take advantage of them and commit all sorts of financial abuse and crimes.”

+ Illinois Governor JB Pritzker:  “Trump has handed over the reins of power to Elon Musk and his fellow DOGE-bags.”

+ Earlier in the week, Lutnick told CBS News that Trump’s goal is to eliminate taxes for anyone earning less than $150,000 a year. He’s actually raising them for anyone earning less than $360,000 a year…

+ Trump has chosen Crystal Carey as the NLRB’s next general counsel. A former NLRB staffer, Canyon has been working at the union-busting law firm Morgan Lewis, one of whose biggest clients is Amazon.

Fortune reports that “finance leaders are losing faith in the economy, with optimism plummeting 20% since last quarter.”

Goldman Sachs: “Trump won’t lead to a capital markets boom on Wall Street.”

+ According to Bloomberg News, the head of the world’s biggest ocean carrier has said that proposed US fees on Chinese-built ships and the companies that own them could raise container rates by 25% if imposed.

+ The Hippie Pope may be on his deathbed, but he still sees capitalism for what it is.

+ US Treasury Secretary Bessent: “There’s going to be a de-tox period for the economy.”

“De-Tox Period”: A recession generated by Trump’s insane tariffs followed by austerity measures for the 99% and tax cuts for the 1%.

+ An analysis of the House GOP’s budget bill by the Yale Budget Lab shows that it will enable an enormous transfer of wealth from the lowest-income Americans to the richest…

Income Group / Minimum Income / Change in Income

Bottom 20% / $0 /  -%1,125

2nd Quintile / $13,840 / -430

3rd Quintile/ $38,065 / $357

4th Quintile / $67,185 / $1.132

Top 20% / $125,010 / %6,222

Top 10% / $191,360 / $10,085

Top 5% / $272,065 / $16,835

Top 1% / $646,875 / $43,500

Top 0.1% / $3,265,655 / $180,910

+ Trump attacked the “globalist” Wall Street Journal…(though I don’t think “antiquated” is part of his standard 78-word vocabulary.)

+ Consumer confidence in the economy has now hit a 29-month low.

+ Deutsche Bank predicted that the market sell-off would continue for another 6% after steep declines in consumer and corporate confidence.

+ According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the GOP plan will increase the federal debt more than any measure in recent history, including the COVID relief and infrastructure bills.

+ Dark Lord Cheney: “Reagan taught us deficits don’t matter.” They only care about tax cuts and Pentagon spending and will use the deficits they create to justify further slashing federal social welfare spending.

+ According to Goldman Sachs, the recent plunges in the S&P 500 are “consistent with a market that is pricing in more recession risk.”

+++

+ Do you know what’s genuinely “inefficient”? The federal government not collecting income taxes from one of the world’s largest corporations…

+ By contrast, undocumented immigrants paid $59.4 billion in federal income taxes in 2022.

+ Tesla is recalling 48,000 Cybertrucks (one of the ugliest cars ever made) because the roof panels keep falling off while the vehicle is being driven. That’s 7 thousand more Cybertrucks than Tesla has sold (38,965)…

+ Pay of average Tesla worker: $27 an hour.

Musk’s income: $4 million an hour.

+ On the other hand, Musk has lost $120 billion of his personal wealth in the past month. That’s four billion a day or $166,666,666 every hour. Though I’m sure that comes as cold comfort to his underpaid workers.

+ As Tesla’s stock price continues its slide (down 53% since December and 35% in the last month), company insiders have begun dumping their shares:

Board Members / Value of shares sold

Kimbal Musk: $27 million
James Murdoch: $13 million
Robyn Denholm: $75 million
Company CO Vaibhav Taneja: $5 million

+ A poll of more than 100,000 Germans revealed that 94 percent wouldn’t buy a Tesla vehicle.

+ The Chicago Police Department sent about 50 cops to guard a Tesla dealership during an anti-Musk protest. If they’re standing in front of a Tesla showroom, they’re less likely to shoot a black kid walking home from playing hoops on the South Side…

+ After turning the White House driveway into a Tesla showroom, a stunt which seemed only to accelerate the collapse of Tesla’s stock, Trump took to Twitter and threatened to arrest kids who key-scratch Telsas as terrorists and have them thrown into Buekele’s dungeons-for-hire in El Salvador…

But given the cratering sales of Teslas, you’ve got to wonder how many of the arsons have been done by dealers looking to get an insurance payout…assuming the cars didn’t self-immolate as Teslas are prone to do.

+++

+ A six-year-old girl from West Texas became the first child to die in the US of measles in twenty years. The young caught the measles, which led to her contracting pneumonia. She was hospitalized, placed on a ventilator, and died. But in an interview with Bobby Kennedy, Jr.’s old group, Children’s Health Defense [sic], the child’s parents said they didn’t regret their decision not to vaccinate their daughter, saying that God had decided “it was her time” and that she was simply “too good for this Earth.” The girl’s mother warned others, “Don’t do the shots…[the measles] are not as bad as they’re making it out to be.” Is there something worse than the needless death of a six-year-old with a breathing tube stuck down her throat?

+ The girl’s father went even further into the realm of self-justifying fantasy, stating that “measles are good for the body,” fortify the immune system, and prevent cancer in adulthood.

+ According to the CDC, about 200 out of every 1,000 unvaccinated people who contract measles will end up in the hospital, one out of every 20 children who get measles will develop pneumonia, one out of every 1,000 children with measles will develop swelling of the brain (encephalitis). As many as 3 out of every 1000 kids who are sick with measles will die from respiratory or neurological complications.

+ The anti-vaxxers, of course, blamed the girl’s death, not on the parents or their own bogus claims, but on the hospital’s failure to treat the girl with massive doses of Vitamin A, a long-debunked snake oil con pushed by RFK, Jr, and others.

+ Ontario’s Public Health Department reports 470 measles cases since an outbreak began in October, an increase of 120 cases since March 14.

+ UNICEF: “In 2022, there were 941 measles cases throughout the WHO’s European region. In 2023, there were 61,000. In 2024, it was 127,350.”

+ Trump’s pick to run NIH, Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, has repeatedly claimed more children had died of flu than COVID. In reality, the American Academia of Pediatricians reported 133 pediatric COVID fatalities by November 2020, while there was only one pediatric influenza death that flu season.

+ “The only infectious disease that the United States accepts more than 10,000 deaths a year from is influenza — or at least it was, until now,” Dr. William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told the Washington Post. “We’ve still got considerably more than that with COVID.”

+ In 2024, at least 48,000 Americans died of COVID. By contrast, this year’s flu season, one of the worst in decades, has killed 22,000 Americans.

+ There’s no question that US AID has played a malign role in many operations to enforce US  “soft power” foreign policy against reluctant nations across the last five or six decades. There’s also no question that USAID has provided life-saving medical aid to impoverished countries. The New York Times took a hard look at the potential human cost from the gutting of the Agency’s health care operations and the numbers are appalling…

Potential deaths from the elimination of USAID’s medical and humanitarian assistance programs

AIDS: 1.65 million
Lack lack of vaccines: 500,000
Lack of food: 550,000
Malaria: 290,000
TB.: 310,000

+ Nicholas Kristof:

Elon Musk says that no one has died because he slashed humanitarian aid. I went to South Sudan to check if that’s true. It’s not. Within an hour of starting the interviews, I had the names of a 10-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl who had died because of decisions by wealthy men in Washington.

The visit that moved me the most was to a remote area that used to have no health care, where women routinely died in childbirth. Then, a US-funded maternity clinic opened through UNFPA  in December, and not one woman has died since. I showed up, and people mistakenly thought I was responsible for the clinic. One new mom wanted to name her baby for me, and the village elders thanked me and hailed America’s generosity. What they didn’t know was that Trump/Musk had cut all funding for UNFPA and that, as a result, the maternity clinic will close this month, and women will once again be bleeding to death in the dust.

Here’s a giftlink to my report from ground level about what the shutdown of USAID means.

+ Sophie Cousins writing in the LRB on TB: ‘Tuberculosis is the world’s most deadly infectious disease, killing more than a million people a year and infecting many millions more, even though treatment in the form of antibiotics has existed for seventy years. TB predominantly affects the poor in the Global South. As Paul Farmer wrote in Infections and Inequalities (1999), “the ‘forgotten plague’ was forgotten in large part because it ceased to bother the wealthy.”’

+ I’m reminded of the scene in Ali Abbasi‘s film The Apprentice, where Trump reacts with disgust at learning Roy Cohn’s lover has AIDS and then kicks him out of the Trump-owned hotel where he’d been living…

+ In anticipation that the Trump administration will soon end most research in the field, NIH officials have advised scientists to remove references to mRNA vaccines from their grant applications, even as the vaccines show promise against many forms of cancer.

+++

+ For the second consecutive month, the number of Canadians driving into the US has declined. Last month, it dropped by 23% from the previous. More and more Canadians are avoiding any travel to the US, including layovers at US airports.

+ Does Trump really think Canadians want to spend more than 30 days in this ever-deepening shithole of a country? Even the snowbirds are bypassing the US for more welcoming retreats in Mexico and the Caribbean.

+ In response to Trump’s barrage of threats against Canada, 45% of Canadians now support becoming a member of the European Union, while only 29% oppose doing so.

+ Petty, spiteful and stupid: “The U.S. government is closing the main Canadian access to the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, an iconic building that straddles the border between Quebec and Vermont, according to town and library officials.”

+ Canadian PM Mark Carney: “President Trump claims that Canada isn’t a real country. He wants to break us so America can own us. We will not let that happen. We’re over the shock of the betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons. We have to look out for ourselves.” Of course, as a central banker, we know who Carney will look out for first.

+ Ian Bremmer: “The world is witnessing a transition from a rules-based system of managed economic integration to one of coerced decoupling.”

+ François Holland, former President of France: “While the American people may still be our friends, the Trump administration is no longer our ally. It marks a fundamental break with the historical relationship between Europe and America. It is unfortunately, however, indisputable.”

+ Trump continues to threaten Greenland with an invasion of US troops, signaling he may intend to make it his very own Grenada: “Denmark is very far away. A boat landed there 200 years ago or something and they say they have rights to it. I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t think it is, actually …We really need it for national security … Maybe you’ll see more and more soldiers go there.”

+ Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Denmark’s Foreign Minister: “If you look at the NATO treaty, the UN charter or international law, Greenland is not open to annexation.”

+ Trump united all of Greenland’s political parties in a denunciation of his “unacceptable behavior.”

+++

+ Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth: “The Defense Department doesn’t do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.” The US military emits more than 59 million tons of carbon a year, a carbon footprint that’s larger than many industrialized nations.

+ Last year, atmospheric C02 levels reached an 800,000-year high, leading to at least 151 “unprecedented” extreme weather events in 2024.

Two domed solar sensors at the Mauna Loa Observatory, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Public Doman.

+ The Trump administration plans to pull the plug on the Mauna Loa Observatory, one of the world’s most crucial monitoring stations for atmospheric CO2.

+ The global average increase of atmospheric CO2 concentration in 2024 not only set a record at 3.7%, but represented a 25% increase over the previous record.

+ According to an IPSOS poll, climate activism continues to decline even as concerns about climate change increase.

+ A new report by the Boston Consulting Group and Cambridge University (Too Hot to Think Straight, Too Cold to Panic) predicts that by 2100, 13 major climate tipping points will be reached:

Greenland ice sheet collapse (1.5C)
West Antarctic ice sheet collapse (1.5C)
Extinction of tropical coral reefs (1.5C)
Abrupt thawing of permafrost (1.5C)
Barents Sea ice loss (1.6C)
North Atlantic subpolar gyre collapse (1.8C)
Tibetan Plateau snowmelt (2.0C)
West African monsoon shift (2.8C)
East Antarctic subglacial basins collapse (3.0C)
Boreal forest southern dieback (4.0C)
Gulf Stream disruption (4.0C)
Boreal forest northern retreat (4.0C).

+ At the onset of tornado season in the center lanes of tornado alley, the National Weather Service will be without weather balloons. Maybe the Chinese could loan them a couple (as long as the Air Force promises not to shoot them down this time)…

+ A recent study on congestion pricing in NYC (The Short-Run Effect of Congestion Pricing in New York City) documents increased commuter speeds and decreased emissions. The study found “no significant difference between neighborhoods with different incomes.”

+ Bees pollinate 70% of the world’s crops, but their population has dropped by 40% in the U.S. alone since 2006.

+ The Department of Energy estimates AI data centers could consume up to 12% of total U.S. electricity by 2028, up from just 4.4% in 2023.

+ While South Africa continues to generate 82% of its electricity from fossil fuels (mainly coal), Kenya has made a radical transition. It now generates 88% of its electricity from geothermal, wind, hydro, biofuels, and solar.

+ Javier Blas, energy columnist at Bloomberg News: “A senior executive of an American oil company told me, ‘We thought that Chris Wright, the energy secretary, was “our guy,” someone from the industry. And here in Houston we just realized that Mr. Wright is Trump’s guy. He’s not our guy. He’s going to do what the White House is telling us to do. And if that means $50 oil and bankruptcies in the oil patch, so be it.’”

+ The deglaciation of Glacier National Park is nearly complete: “In 1850, the area that is now Glacier National Park had approximately 80 glaciers; as of 2015, there were 26—all shrinking. In the last decade, 13 of those have broken apart and can no longer technically be considered glaciers.”

+ Paul Hawkins: “When people say we’re going to “fix” the climate … to me, it’s just so emblematic of this profound disconnection between self and other. We don’t have a climate crisis; the climate cannot have a crisis. We are the crisis”.

+ The Chinese EV maker BYD announced this week that its new line of cars can be fully charged in about the same time it takes to refill a gas-engine vehicle at the pump. It takes about 8 hours to fully charge a Tesla at home and up to 30 minutes to fully charge a Tesla at a “super-charging” station on the road…if you can find one.

+ Sandeep Vaheesan, author of Democracy in Power: “China pursues an abundance of tech while the United States opts for an abundance of tech billionaires.”

+ Elon Musk is sending rockets to deliver (and return) scientists to a space station where the kind of experiments being done are similar to the ones his DOGE wrecking crews are defunding back on Earth.

+ With the full backing of the Trump administration, Montana is escalating its vile war on wolves…

+ This week, some shithead in Oregon illegally shot a male breeding-age wolf outside the Cascade Mountains town of Sisters.

+++

+ Trump on Iran: “I’ve written them a letter saying, I hope you’re going to negotiate because if we have to go in militarily, it’s going to be a terrible thing for them.”

+ Trump White House: “Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon from this point forward as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of Iran.”

+ In the last 15 months, the U.S. Navy has used more missiles for “air defense”  combat operations against the Houthi naval blockade in the Red Sea off the Yemeni coast than it has used in all years since Operation Desert Storm in the 1990s.

+ Before Trump began badgering European nations for “underfunding” their military, the armed forces in Europe had been in steady decline, much to the benefit of world peace and their own socio-economic well-being:

EU

1990: 3.4 million troops
2020: 2 million troops

Germany


1990: 500,000 troops
2020: 195,000 troops

France

1990: 560,000 troops
2020: 320,000 troops

UK

1990: 320,000 troops
2020: 150,000 troops

+ The Kremlin’s foreign policy advisor, Yuri Ushakov, on why Russia rejected Trump’s ceasefire deal that Ukraine had accepted:  “It gives us nothing. It only gives the Ukrainians an opportunity to regroup, gain strength, and continue the same thing.”

+ After the Kremlin rejected the Trump/Zelensky ceasefire plan, Putin and Trump spoke by phone and supposedly hatched out a deal that would legitimize Russia’s seizure of Crimea and an agreement from Russia to stop attacking Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, which it has down consistently for more than 2 1/2 years, despite Sergey Lavrov’s laughable protestation that Russia has never attacked any energy sites.

+ Only minutes after the White House hailed Trump’s call with Putin as a “movement toward peace,’ Russia attacked Kyiv with drones and airstrikes, and Ukraine responded with attacks on Russian forces.

+ Poland’s President Duda on why he wants nuclear weapons based in Poland: “Russia did not even hesitate when they were relocating their nuclear weapons into Belarus…they didn’t ask anyone’s permission.”

+++

+ “WTF Chuck” Schumer, the leader of Resistance, Inc. in the Senate, folded to Trump last week on the Continuing Resolution he’d vowed to sink only a day earlier. That’s pretty definitive proof Schumer isn’t a Palestinian (according to Trump), after all…

+ Schumer is postponing his book tour amid the angry fallout from Democrats over his decision last week to pass the CR. Statement from Schumer’s office: “Due to security concerns, Senator Schumer’s book events are being rescheduled.” Other than the lobbyists who are prepared to buy anything with his name on it to curry favor with the Senator from Citibank, who even knew Schumer had a book coming until the backlash against him?

+ Perhaps some of the threats are coming from fellow senators. During a meeting before the vote, Sen. Michael Bennet angrily accused the Democratic leadership of having “No strategy, no plan, and no message on this spending bill.”

+ Here are the 10 Democratic senators who voted for the CR: Dick Durbin, Angus King (technically an independent who conferences with the Dems like Sanders), Brian Schatz, Chuck Schumer, Catherine Cortez Masto, Maggie Hassan John Fetterman, Peters, Kristen Gillibrand, Jean Shaheen.

+ Bernie Sanders on the capitulation of the Democratic Party leaders in the Senate:  “In order to pass this legislation, the Republicans needed 60 votes, which meant that they had to have seven votes from Democrats — and they got them. Actually, they got ten votes. That’s sad. That is an absolute dereliction of duty on the part of the Democratic leadership. Nobody in the Senate should have voted for this dangerous bill.”

+ After losing to Trump twice and putting up little resistance to Trump’s agenda, the favorability of the Democratic party has fallen to a new low of 27 percent. And that’s only among registered voters.

+ Chuch Schumer: “Let me state unequivocally: I do not believe Donald Trump is an antisemite. But he all too frequently has created the feeling of safe harbor for far-right elements who unabashedly or in coded language express antisemitic sentiments.”

+ Unequivocally, Chuck? Set aside, for a moment, the Nazi-saluting, German neo-Nazi AfD party-supporting DOGE czar and check out this from Trump’s vice president:

+ Translation: If Germany takes in any more Jews, Roma or Sinti people, homosexuals, deviant Cubist painters, lesbian socialists, door-bell ringing Jehovah’s Witnesses, kids with Downs syndrome, or black jazz musicians, it will destroy itself (for the better)…

+ Although Schumer avers that Trump isn’t an antisemite, he apparently believes that American Jews who oppose Israel’s barbaric treatment of Palestinians are.

+ In its DEI cleansing operation, the Pentagon has erased any mention of the Navajo code talkers and Jackie Robinson’s military career from Department of Defense websites. Jackie was a Republican his entire life. He even testified before HUAC against Paul Robeson, a decision he came to regret deeply. More proof this is about race, not ideology…except, of course, the ideology of race (white supremacy)…

+ Carol Miller, nurse and Green Party activist in northern New Mexico: “Erasing tribal sovereignty, the Code Talkers and putting all BIA facilities on the closure list within a few days is frightening. Magafascists have talked about deporting natives because they aren’t citizens in the Constitution. There is a lot of fear building in Indian Country, much more since last week.’

The Black Lives Matter mural on the road to the White House, as seen by the Planet Labs satellite orbiting overhead. Planet Labs – In Space, We Can Hear Your Screams. CC BY 2.0.

+ Making explicit what’s been implicit all along: Black Lives Don’t Matter to the government, not even in historically black cities like DC, which surrendered to Trump’s demand that it erases all traces of Black Lives Matter Plaza from the two pedestrian blocks of 16th Street, where it created in 2020 to commemorate the George Floyd Protests, which have so aggravated Trump and his MAGA supporters…

+ The Return of Apartheid in America, brought to you by someone who was born under apartheid, whose family got rich from apartheid, and who wants to bring it back to his native South Africa, as well…

+ In her ruling blocking Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military (there are only 4200 who identify as such, less than 0.2 percent of Pentagon personnel), federal Judge Ana Reyes  wrote that the ban was based on little to no evidence and instead was “soaked in animus” and “dripping with pretext.” Reyes concluded her scathing ruling by saying that“the law does not demand that the Court rubber-stamp illogical judgments based on conjecture.”

+ Two days later, Trump ordered the revocation of $175 million in federal grants to his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, for its policies on transgender athletes.

+ Judith Butler: “Trump speaks in the name of science, but…he does so…to insist that God decreed the immutable character of the two sexes and that he, Trump, is decreeing it once more.”

+ Trump’s war on universities: First Gaza, now transgender people. What next, teaching about climate change? Evolution? Slavery? Women’s suffrage? The history of imperialism and colonization?

+ Speaking of education, under a new academic standard, Oklahoma teachers would be required to teach students that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump and have students “identify discrepancies in 2020 election results.”

+ As the Dodgers opened play in Tokyo against the Cubs, with both teams loaded with international talent, MLB baseball buckled to the Jim Crow-era demands of Trump and erased all mention of “diversity” from its website. Will they cancel Jackie Robinson Day (April 15), too?

+ Is it any wonder a Gallup poll of American youth reveals collapsing trust in government, social institutions and their own future…

Confidence in the federal government: 32% (- 20% since 2010)

Confidence in US judicial system: 45% (-20%  since 2010)

Suitable affordable housing in their city: 37% (-25% since 2010)

Satisfaction with freedom in their life: 70% (-20% since 2010)

+++

+ Herbert Marcuse: “Do the technicians rule, or is their rule that of the others, who rely on the technicians as their planners and executors?” I ask myself this every morning when I fire up the Mac (or, possibly, it fires me up.)

+ Earlier this week, Trump ordered a bunch of Biden pardons rescinded because they were signed by an autopen. Now the Presidential autopen has run amuck again, signing the invocation of the Enemies Alien Act without Trump’s knowledge!! Trump: “I don’t know when it was signed ‘cause I didn’t sign it. Other people handled it. But Marco Rubio’s done a great job, and he wanted them out, and we go along with that.”

+ Won’t Shut Up and Won’t Play: The celebrated classical pianist, András Schiff, who lived in NYC for many years, announced this week the cancelation of all performances in the US in 2025/2026, citing a moral obligation to protest the “unprecedented political changes in the United States.”

+ The great mathematician Norbert  Wiener (The Human Use of Human Beings) on the Manhattan Project scientists and the dropping of their monstrous creation on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The pressure to use the bomb, with its full killing power, was not merely great from a patriotic point of view but was quite as great from the point of view of the personal fortunes of people involved in its development. I was acquainted with more than one of these popes and cardinals of applied science, and I knew very well how they underrated aliens of all sorts, particularly those not of the European race.”

+ From Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams: “In 2015, Zuckerberg asked Xi Jinping if he would ‘do him the honor of naming his unborn child.’ Xi refused.”

+ For your “They Just Don’t Write Like That Anymore” collection: Lord Byron to Caroline Lamb, 1812: “You know I have always thought you the cleverest, most agreeable, absurd, amiable, perplexing, dangerous, fascinating little being that lives now or ought to have lived 2000 years ago.”

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

In Praise of Floods: the Untamed River and the Life It Brings
James C. Scott
(Yale)

Shark: The Illustrated Biography
Daniel Abel and Sophie A. Maycock
(Princeton)

Christopher Hill: the Life of a Radical Historian
Michael Braddick
(Verso)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Here We Go Crazy
Bob Mould
(Granary)

Consentrik Quartet
Nels Cline
(Blue Note)

Oceanside Countryside
Neil Young
(Reprise)

An Age of Insecurity

“We have entered an age of insecurity—economic insecurity, physical insecurity, political insecurity. The fact that we are largely unaware of this is small comfort: few in 1914 predicted the utter collapse of their world and the economic and political catastrophes that followed. Insecurity breeds fear. And fear—fear of change, fear of decline, fear of strangers and an unfamiliar world—is corroding the trust and interdependence on which civil societies rest.”

–Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land

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This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

The federal bureaucracy is under a microscope as Elon Musk and his DOGE gang run roughshod over key government agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Aviation Administration, among several others. Federal government workers have been fired apparently indiscriminately, with many rehired shortly thereafter, sparking protests and widespread disapproval of Musk’s chaotic chainsaw approach. Musk and Trump are rapidly losing trust and goodwill, even among their allies.

The DOGE onslaught comes on the heels of the Supreme Court’s decision last summer in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which also spotlighted the federal administrative state, overturning 40 years of the Chevron doctrine, a legal test calibrating judicial review of federal agency actions. Whatever one thinks of Musk or the decision to scrap Chevron, there seems to be something in the air. The moment calls for a more careful and fact-based assessment of the administrative state and its place in American political economy.

The political left—defined broadly as defending labor, transparency and democratic control of government, environmental and ecological protection, and social equality—has tended to see the administrative state as at least necessary to its goals, and in any case as indispensable to effective government in an age when specialists and experts are thought to be needed to administer public policy in complex domains. Thus has a folk history built up around the administrative state, obscuring its record of abuses and collusions with corporate power.

Over the past 100 years in the U.S., there is a startlingly clear correlation between the size of the administrative state and the size and power of multinational corporations headquartered in the U.S. Trust in and deference toward the administrative state on the political left is disturbingly underdetermined by the available data. That is, it is far from clear that the net effect of an extremely powerful and centralized army of apparatchiks has been to regulate corporate power and protect Americans. The creation of these massive islands of concentrated power in the federal government has not curbed the exploitative, socially destructive excesses of capitalism. Notably and counter-intuitively (at least under the naive theory of centralized government power), some of the most independent federal agencies regulate some of the most powerful and unaccountable industries: for example, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Federal Reserve System rank as among the most insulated from democracy.

Reuters recently reported that as of this writing in March 2025, there are 438 federal agencies, directly employing more than 3 million people. But this is hardly the full picture: according to the Government Accountability Office, the U.S. gave about $760 billion to its manifold contractors in fiscal year 2023, up over $30 billion from the previous year. We have privatized many of the government’s most important functions through this state-corporate nexus, yet we have no information from the federal government on the number of contractors and subcontractors it employs at any given time.

From the founding period and before, the American ruling class has understood that a strong, centralized, active U.S. government is the key to creating modern commercial power. If this seems counterintuitive, it is only because our political discourse has lately become invested in the deeply naive and ahistorical idea that the state is there to limit the power of private capital. No idea in our politics is more misguided and unmoored from the historical and empirical record.

The folk belief that the American state serves as a real counterbalance to corporate interests is a shallow misconception contradicted by centuries of historical evidence. Among the core debates of the Framers was the role of the central government in the broader political and economic system. The Federalists argued in favor of a powerful and centralized national government capable of laying a deep institutional foundation of special prerogatives for commercial interests, in particular banking and financial institutions. Alexander Hamilton championed a robust central government intertwined with burgeoning corporate entities, not as a check on them, but as a way to empower them with special favors. His advocacy for the establishment of the First Bank of the United States exemplifies this merger of state power and corporate interests. Hamilton’s vision laid the foundation for a financial system where government authority and corporate power are not adversaries but partners.

Today’s federal government, true to its roots and its primary role in the system of production, furnishes its favorite corporate giants with an extraordinarily deep menu of advantages and privileges, designed to prop up and subsidize otherwise impossible size, and to make it far more difficult and expensive to operate at smaller scales. Because complying with their dictates is so absurdly expensive and labor intensive, executive branch agencies have become one of the most powerful tools corporations have for maintaining their size and power, curating the marketplace for those with the means and infrastructure to enter the game. State support of large-scale businesses is much more intensive than most Americans understand—and much more critical to corporate domination. The state and capital are mutually reinforcing and codependent, with overlapping leadership and shared priorities.

Today, although it was originally contemplated as the most powerful branch of the three, Congress is largely for show, having abandoned the legislative function to an outgrowth of the executive branch that now operates without meaningful democratic oversight. The executive branch has been operating outside of the prescribed constitutional structure for decades, performing the functions of all three branches, overseeing its own courts and judges, propounding administrative rules that are tantamount to law, and enforcing both the law and its own rulemaking.

There are several reasons that the American left should counsel extreme caution in embracing this kind of consolidated and unbound state power, not the least of which is that it exists to partner with today’s lordship: multinational corporations. Because this vast system is nowhere contemplated in the U.S. Constitution, there are no ready and available means to challenge its actions or hold it to account. Its fundamentally authoritarian and insulated character notwithstanding, the federal administrative state has somehow become progressive-coded within American political discourse.

The aggrandizement of boundless executive power has been a thoroughly bipartisan project for decades, arguably for the country’s entire history. For all of our talk about democracy, Americans are inured to the rule of supposed experts nominally working in the executive branch, but in fact standing in a nebulous liminal space. The ability of federal government power to inhabit this dimension—and the willingness of the other branches to delegate their powers and functions to it—is among the American state’s most powerful and invulnerable tricks for consolidating power.

In the overturning of Chevron’s rule that the judiciary defer to the government’s “reasonable” (in practice, this supposed test is a non-test that acts to auto-validate executive branch action) interpretations of its own rules and regulations, there is an opportunity to genuinely decentralize and democratize our political system, restoring political power to the people and elected officials. Under the standard pronounced in Chevron, neither the judiciary nor the legislature need take any responsibility for particular outcomes: the “reasonableness” of an agency rule was formulated in a way that made it nearly impossible to question the government’s actions. Fundamentally, the legal question at issue is who has the constitutional prerogative to resolve an “ambiguity in a statute meant for implementation by an agency.” Such sweeping deference to government power opened a space for the most dangerous kinds of government overreach and abuse. It also coincided with a period of dramatic corporate consolidation and rapidly widening inequalities of wealth and income, yielding larger corporate organizations more closely tied to and reliant upon the federal government.

Writing for the Chevron 6-3 majority in its reversal of the D.C. Circuit, Justice John Paul Stevens reasoned that “[w]hile agencies are not directly accountable to the people, the Chief Executive is, and it is entirely appropriate for this political branch of the Government to make such policy choices.” The Chevron opinion held that where there “is a reasonable choice within a gap left open by Congress,” the judicial branch should not step on the toes of the political branches of government. “In such a case, federal judges—who have no constituency—have a duty to respect legitimate policy choices made by those who do.” The argument was decidedly pro-democracy. But in employing this democratic reasoning, Justice Stevens did not seem to fully understand the de facto relationship between the president and the administrative state, assuming that the former could exercise control over the latter.

In the Supreme Court, what appear to be disagreements and debates about the substance of the law are often much more questions about what is actually happening in fact. Already by the time Chevron was decided, neither Congress nor the White House had the reins of the fourth branch. In practice, federal agencies had grown quite independent, in the sense of answering to no one. Unless we treat constitutional law as akin to the reading of tea leaves or the interpretation of augurs, addressing this factual question about accountability mechanisms requires an empirical analysis of a given agency’s design, one focused on requirements that insulate it from direct democratic influence and control.

Today, few of the Chevron doctrine’s champions care to recall that the case was in fact a challenge to the EPA’s adoption of a more lax, industry-friendly standard, which opened the door to more air pollution in violation of the text and intent of the Clean Air Act; the EPA’s position was supported by industry intervenors in the litigation, including Chevron. In fact, it was no less a progressive hero than Ruth Bader Ginsburg whose opinion in the D.C. Circuit was reversed by the Supreme Court in the case. The flaw in Chevron was present at the outset: the focus of the legal inquiry for judges should be the congressionally enacted statutory language, not the whims of agency “experts” beholden to powerful and well-organized industry groups. Part of the importance of allowing Congress to make the laws is that if we permit the executive branch to make them, as Chevron did in practice, we might get a Reagan undermining the Clean Air Act—or a Donald Trump undermining just about everything.

The close of the Chevron era opens the door to the active reclamation of democracy—understood correctly as genuine and direct participation in political decisions that affect us—from the stranglehold of bureaucratic and corporate elites. If federal judges no longer have to abdicate their constitutional function, reengaging with robust judicial review, we may find that the text of the statutes themselves already demand much stronger protections for, for example, labor and the environment.  As Chevron itself demonstrated, it is not at all clear that federal agencies should be more careful than judges to preserve Congress’s intent.

The causal factors acting on this question are so dense and variable that the balance of power should be preserved rather than further undermined. The focus should be the balancing mechanism. The judiciary could adopt standards of review that are more stringent than those currently used to test the legality of government actions. Few Americans today know that even apart from the Chevron test, Supreme Court precedent requires Article III judges to rubber stamp almost anything the federal government does through a legal test called the “rational basis” standard. This test requires judges to make “every possible presumption is in favor” of the validity of government action under the law, even ignoring the facts of the case at bar in favor of hypothetical scenarios that could have rendered such action valid.

Legal scholars Jennifer L. Selin and Pamela J. Clouser McCann have admirably set out to study the relationship between the perceived “need for neutral, expert administrative decision-making” and democratic responsiveness and accountability. Their goal is to give “qualitative, theoretical, and empirical insight into ‘the concept of bureaucracy beyond judicial review.’” In a recent paper, Selin and McCann show that “combined with statutory provisions dictating agency independence, increasing an agency’s exposure to unelected federal judges can increase administrative responsiveness to elected legislators.” While the authors see this result as ironic or surprising, it is not clear that it should be so, for the strong expectation of judicial review surely motivates federal agencies to align their actions with the contemplated preferences of elected representatives in Congress.

Legal scholars and political commentators have tended to underestimate the importance of incentives and material interests in favor of abstract and idealistic notions about how government actors are likely to behave. Quite unsurprisingly, it turns out that an agency’s design features are the factors that best predict how much or little political responsiveness we can expect to find in its actions.

Selin relied on “a Bayesian latent variable model to capture the relationship between observed features of agency design found in statutory law and two distinct dimensions of agency independence.” The first of these two dimensions, the Decision Makers Dimension, is “the ability of political actors to influence the structure of key agency leadership.” Here, design features “such as multi-member governing boards, fixed and staggered terms, and conflict of interest provisions correlate with increased structural autonomy.” Selin contrasts such features to statutory provisions that permit the president to remove leaders at will, or that make an agency “a bureau within the executive departments.”

We may pause to ask here: what could an executive branch agency possibly be if Congress has attempted to make it something other than a bureau within an executive department? This question goes to the heart of the problem with Chevron. The second dimension (the Policy Decisions Dimension) looks at the contours of ex post review of administrative branch actions, i.e., the ways political actors monitor and control agency behavior after the fact, beyond the initial design parameters.

Legal scholars have created a “dynamic agency exposure index” in an attempt to measure the exposure of agency decisions to judicial review over time. More scholarship of this kind is desperately needed, as it probes the actual, functional relationships between powerful actors in government rather than speculating using vaguely defined terminology that seldom describes much of anything. As the authors note, “judicial review has distinct costs and benefits that legislators must balance when making the decision to delegate.”

Fundamentally, however, the Constitution’s non-delegation doctrine means that Congress is not permitted to decide in advance, during the legislative process, how much exposure administrative agencies have to federal courts: “The availability of judicial review is the necessary condition, psychologically if not logically, of a system of administrative power which purports to be legitimate, or legally valid.” Nevertheless, legislators do very often attempt to calibrate this exposure during their legislative wrangling.

While the literature points to a “tension between a need for expertise and control in administrative policy,” this, too, is almost always a false choice, as federal agencies are seldom merely applying cold expertise in their decision making. In the real world, material interests, incentives, and agency design matter much more than any polite pretense about ostensibly neutral experts. Under contemporary American technocracy, “expertise” is more often a cudgel against democratic accountability than it is an attempt to predict the results of a given policy. The political left understands this well in certain contexts, such as criminal justice, where a whole cottage industry of supposed experts on “terrorism” sprang up precisely to allow the government to steamroll civil liberties and the constitutional rights of criminal defendants. But in other contexts, we fall into the comforting belief that federal agencies are our benevolent protectors, forgetting that one can find a qualified expert to sign a report or study in support of just about any position.

Today’s expert class represents, “a contempt for (if not a profound fear of) the citizenry.” Expertise is never objective, neutral, or unbiased; it is recreated through social processes that are always suffused with political and normative positions, and these are often quite invisible to the expert himself, even taking for granted a good faith desire to produce objective science. The experts are beholden to the system of corporate power they are charged with regulating. Modern bureaucratic systems are constructed to render society “legible” for the various administrative purposes of the central power. These systems introduce a process of simplification, reducing complex local realities into standardized forms that make it possible to govern through top-down decrees.

A more decentralized and fact-sensitive approach to the review of agency actions would help to prevent organized commercial lobbies from capturing their regulators. Unlike federal agencies, federal judges “are relatively decentralized in their decision-making,” which can have salutary effects in instances where the executive branch behaves in high-handed, imperious ways. Writing in the Yale Journal on Regulation, law professor Kevin Frazier argues that we have abandoned an important “anti-power-concentration principle” in our legal and political tradition:

Restoration of this principle is critical to preserving liberty in an age of massive corporations and huge agencies having retained significant resources and substantial influence over our political system as well as our individual lives.

Mammoth scale preempts participation in government in that it requires the rule of the few as a matter of course: as a practical matter, given the size of the country in both physical and demographic terms, the United States government’s institutions must be steered by an extremely small group with access to real decision-making power at the national level. Real political power is exceptionally and dangerously concentrated within a group of people that could be on the order of thousands—for a country of over 340 million people.

There is no substantive democracy in the United States today. Large, hierarchical organizational forms are, ceteris paribus, much more readily able to create and maintain the conditions of domination and exploitation, burying the individual within a rigid command structure in which power is held in the hands of a small coterie at the top. The most important decisions the federal government makes are the most removed from democracy by design, usually predicated on classified information and involving unelected national security and intelligence officials. With large scales comes increasingly impenetrable opacity, rendering accountability in its normal sense impossible, and providing an open season for would-be predators like Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

The U.S. has an enormous army of white-collar professionals who have never been elected by anyone and are completely anonymous and largely invisible to the people, but who hold extraordinary power and discretion. If the normative policy goal is something like full, material social and economic equality, then such agglomerations of power and influence are a perilous approach. Community self-reliance and resilience are also undercut by the choice to subdue social life, subjecting it to the arbitrary commands of the government agency underbosses and caporegimes. Hierarchical, authoritarian, and undemocratic, these agencies operate internally very much like private corporations. There is no meaningful feedback mechanism or source of accountability, as the overwhelming majority of executive branch personnel are never tested in the crucible of electoral politics.

Our political dialogue abides several frameworks, competing and complementary, for making sense of institutions and policies. These frameworks operate along several axes; we have the common right vs. left spectrum, but we may also think of political bodies and particular policies in terms of several other antagonisms (for example, authority vs. liberty, centralized vs. decentralized, hierarchical vs. horizontal, capitalist vs. socialist, individualist vs. collectivist, nationalist vs. internationalist, reformist/incrementalist vs. revolutionary, bureaucratic vs. participatory, elite vs. popular, and the list goes on). These ways of conceptualizing tensions within the political world are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and it is not always clear how we should expect them to interact with one another.

Instead of allowing superficial political coding to dominate our conception of the executive branch and its function, preempting more materially grounded ways of approaching it, we should strive to understand it in terms of its actions and the kinds of relationships it creates. Part of what is needed to embark on such an approach is an ability to step outside of inherited categories and concepts, confronting on-the-ground reality more directly and honestly. Massive, highly centralized government bodies are gravity wells irresistibly attractive to those who want to wield and profit from unaccountable power.

Regardless of the intentions or subjective mental states of their founders, their creation was and remains a way to extend the power and influence of a ruling class whose members occupy the highest positions in both the formally public and private sectors—and, as we shall see, this distinction is also a false one that does not reflect the reality of our political economy. Though our mainstream political conversation stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the clear connection, scale matters tremendously to accountability and the lack thereof. There is no doubt that the administrative state of today performs many socially beneficial and broadly popular functions, but we can magnify their benefits tremendously by removing them from the hands of the few and integrating them into real human-scale communities of people.

A genuinely people-focused socialist economy can only be had at a small scale because the Brobdingnagian institutions of the state and capital will always be captured and controlled by a rich, mobilized elite. It is not only the organizations established to regulate the system of production that must change—it is primarily the system of production itself that must be altered fundamentally to serve the needs of the community of people rather than a small ruling class. After-the-fact tweaks through a superimposed regulatory regime will never suffice to address issues that arise from the most fundamental structural features of capitalism. A people-focused economic system is attainable only at scales comprehensible to human beings.

As Helena Norberg-Hodge explains, “It is in robust, local-scale economies that we find genuinely ‘free’ markets; free of the corporate manipulation, hidden subsidies, waste, and immense promotional costs that characterize today’s global market.” A genuinely free economy might see people regain control and value through community land trusts and commons, local currencies and credit unions, mutual aid and solidarity networks, and cooperative enterprises and agriculture. We can start right now. No one in the state will help us prefigure this new social economy, “self-managed, decentralised, built and organised from the bottom-up in a federal structure.”

We find, as E.F. Schumacher argued, “amazingly small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results,” results that value people more than abstract, misguided notions of growth and capital accumulation. He wanted to shift our focus away from false dichotomies (like public vs. private and state vs. market) and toward the more meaningful and explanatory question of size and scale. While at the appropriate small scale, private ownership is “natural, fruitful, and just,” it becomes something very different at today’s massive scale, “a fiction for the purpose of enabling functionless owners to live parasitically on the labor of others.” In no way was Schumacher advancing the counterfeit limited government promised by today’s conservatives and right-wing “libertarians,” which would rip from government anything socially ameliatory, leaving only the crushing power of global corporations. Schumacher argued that our obsession with growth and colossal size is in fact profoundly irrational, alienating us from each other, the land (and the natural world more generally), and even ourselves. He recommended a political economy of “simplicity and non-violence,” with local, sustainable systems of production replacing distant corporate power. Schumacher’s ideal is a network “pluralistic economic systems rather than a global monoculture”—not one system imposed from on high, but a diverse ecosystem of interlinked bioregional economies.

Government such as we’ve had—rigidly top-down, oligarchical, centralized, distant—is by definition a government we could not participate in, and this is by design. It is important for the left to remember that, particularly at or near the top of the pyramid, the regulators and the regulated are the very same people, constantly reshuffled through the infamous revolving door that connects the fourth branch and the corporate ruling class. The secret is to take down the pyramid and build something better for people.

The post The Corporate State and the Fourth Branch appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: SWinxy – CC BY 4.0

Introduction

The abduction of Mahmoud Khalil is not an isolated event—it is a chilling testament to the authoritarian turn in the United States, where dissent is met not with debate but with brute force, and the machinery of state terror moves with ruthless precision. In his own words, Khalil, a Columbia University graduate, an activist for Palestinian freedom, and a permanent U.S. resident, was seized by ICE agents without warning—handcuffed, dragged from his apartment lobby, shoved into an unmarked black car, and disappeared. In minutes, his rights were violated and his body made vulnerable and disposable. Khalil instantly became another casualty in the Trump administration’s escalating war against those who refuse to kneel before its politics of white supremacy, settler-colonial violence, ominous threats, and unchecked lawlessness. His disappearance is both a precedent and a warning—a stark reminder that in regimes built on repression, silence is coerced, and resistance is a crime.

What happened to Khalil echoes through history, from the Gestapo’s pursuit of political dissidents to the “Dirty Wars” of Latin America, where students, intellectuals, and activists were labeled as terrorists and made to vanish without a trace. The equating of dissent with terrorism is a central feature of authoritarian regimes. The end point of which is the torture chamber, prisons, concentration camps, and the death of any vestige of human rights, civil liberties, and democracy. Today, those same logics of power are being reanimated under the guise of national security, as Trump’s government systematically dismantles the right to protest, the sanctity of citizenship, and the democratic ideals that once stood as a bulwark against tyranny.

To understand Khalil’s abduction is to confront the broader assault on dissent in an era where the state wields the power to disappear those who refuse to conform or be complicit. The illegal abduction of Khalil is not only about the attack on free speech, but also about the gutting of historical memory, civic literacy, and the institutions that provide a culture of critique that creates informed citizens. The state terrorism on display in Khalil’s case is not just about one student, one protest, or one administration—it is about the fate of democracy itself. The question now is not whether we recognize these warning signs, but whether we act before it is too late.

The Nightmare Returns

Trump’s return to the White House has unleashed a full-scale assault on civil liberties, democratic institutions, and the very possibility of holding power accountable. No longer constrained by those who once sought to temper his worst impulses, Trump now governs with open contempt for the rule of law, emboldened by a movement that thrives on cruelty, grievance, and unrelenting violence. His language has always been a weapon—honed by fear, sharpened by menace, and wielded to incite violence against immigrants, Black Americans, and anyone who dares to challenge his rule.

For years, the mainstream press dismissed Trump’s rhetoric as nothing more than bluster—an act designed for entertainment or spectacularized provocation rather than a genuine call to power. His declaration of wanting to be a “dictator for a day” and a subsequent quote, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,”  were met with little more than a shrug, treated with barely a flicker of concern. Many assumed his fascist threats were nothing but empty theatrics, comforted by the belief that handlers and legal restraints would keep him in check. But that illusion has now been shattered.

As his second presidency unfolds, the machinery of authoritarianism is no longer emerging—it is fully operational. The punishing state now stands boldly, criminalizing dissent, weaponizing the justice system, dismantling public and higher education, abducting individuals, embracing corruption, and executing mass deportations with a cold, calculating efficiency that evokes some of America’s darkest historical chapters. This legacy echoes in the Palmer Raids of 1919-1920, when thousands of leftists, anarchists, and immigrants were arrested without cause, often enduring brutal treatment. The Red Scare, especially during the McCarthy era of the 1950s, marked another grim chapter, as government-sanctioned witch hunts destroyed lives and careers on the flimsiest of accusations. In the wake of the Vietnam War, opposition to the conflict was labeled un-American, culminating in the tragic deaths of students at Kent State. More recently, the Bush administration’s War on Terror after 9/11 extended this grim tradition, with mass surveillance, indefinite detention, and the widespread abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay—all justified in the name of national security.

 From the Palmer Raids and McCarthyism to the abuses of the Bush era, these events form a brutal continuum, each rooted in the criminalization of dissent and the targeting of marginalized communities. They expose the long-standing tradition of the state using its powers of repression to quash opposition and enforce ideological orthodoxy. Trump has not only laid bare this dark legacy of state violence and the war on dissent, he has also modernized it, appropriating tactics honed during the “Dirty Wars” in Argentina, the deadly repression of students under Pinochet in Chile, and the Gestapo-like methods employed by Nazi Germany in service of racial cleansing and the politics of disposability. In doing so, he has reinvigorated a dangerous historical playbook, turning it into a weapon against those who dare to resist and those who support the notion of universal citizenship.

History Matters

History—and the dangerous memories it carries—matters because it exposes the lingering shadows of authoritarianism, offering warnings essential to recognizing and resisting its return in new forms. As Paul Gilroy reminds us, “Those horrors are always much closer to us than we like to imagine. Preventing their recurrence requires keeping them in mind.” Fascism today is not a replica of the past, but its mobilizing passions remain dangerously familiar. Primo Levi’sprescient warning echoes in our time: “Every age has its own fascism, and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own free will.”

Under Trump, the treatment of dissenters does not mirror exactly what we saw under Hitler, Pinochet, or the Argentine dictatorship, but it bears what Martin Wolf has called “authoritarianism with fascist characteristics.” As history teaches, repression begins with language before it becomes law, and law before it becomes violence. The Nazis labeled dissenters as terrorists, with Heinrich Himmler making clear that students who defied the Reich had no place in its vision, likening them to pests that needed to be eradicated. Pinochet branded universities as breeding grounds for terrorists, justifying mass arrests, torture, and executions. Argentina’s military regime abducted students hurled them from planes and murdered over 30,000. Trump’s administration has not committed such atrocities, but the rhetoric and policies are in place. The machinery is being built, and history warns us: once the conditions are set, the horrors we thought belonged to the past can return in forms we failed to imagine.

It is crucial to emphasize that the abduction and state persecution of Khalil and other students fighting for Palestinian freedom, along with their defense of the university as a democratic public good, is not merely an assault on free speech and academic freedom—it is a direct embodiment of what  G.M. Tamas identifies as the core feature of fascism: “hostility to universal citizenship.”  As part of his grab for uncontested power, Trump views citizenship as only something he can grant rather than a constitutional right. Tamas views this rightly as central feature of what he calls post-fascism.

This reveals something even more insidious and deadly: Trump’s relentless tirades against communists, trans people, immigrants, Black people, Jews, and LGBTQ individuals are not just acts of ideological aggression—they are attempts to strip these groups of their very humanity. As Tamas notes, framing them “as non-citizens,“ Trump casts them as non-human, relegating them to a status beneath recognition and rights. This dehumanization is the very linchpin of fascism, paving the way for the violence that inevitably follows—violence framed as justified, even necessary. The barbaric actions of ICE and other elements of the punishing state, function as “a racial police force”—engaged in often illegal, sensationalized arrests and abductions of students, and grotesque chain gang marches of immigrants—carry a dark racial undertone. The defense of these actions are laced with the poison of racist police brutality and emboldened vigilantism, poisoning communities and revealing the deep, dangerous roots of racialized violence that is spreading to every corner of American society.

Domestic Terrorism as the Organizing Principle of Politics

For Trump and his morally vacuous sycophants, war has become the negation of democracy, if not politics itself. With its focus on the elimination of dissidents, critics, and those considered disloyal and disposable, the militarization of all aspects of society moves from the margins of society “the very heart of governance. As Theodore Adorno and othershave illuminated, Trump’s actions echo long-established patterns of domination, crystallizing into a chilling celebration of hierarchy, power, cruelty, and the cult of masculinity, all underscored by a profound disdain for those deemed weak. In his alignment with authoritarian figures, Trump not only venerates dictators but also threatens to unravel alliances forged over generations, launching trade wars and territorial aggression in his wake. His regime is not merely lawless—it is a deliberate and systematic dismantling of democratic norms, reshaping the United States into a fascist order where power is consolidated, the billionaire class is enriched, and opposition is silenced through fear, repression, and the chaos he himself stirs. This is not governance, but a descent into a state of perpetual turmoil, designed to secure control at any cost.

This brand of authoritarian governance is most evident in its assault on higher and public education, waging a relentless campaign to ban books on gender, Black history, and courses addressing transgender issues and pressing social injustices. But it doesn’t stop there. As Jason Stanley notes, Trump’s plan to dismantle the Department of Education is a brazen attempt to strip funding from Title I, a program that provides essential federal support for students in underfunded urban and rural schools, special education programs for disabled students, and a host of other vital educational initiatives. Weaponizing a fabricated charge of antisemitism, Trump has also threatened to withdraw federal funding from 60 colleges as a means of coercing universities into submission. In doing so, he has targeted faculty, students, and entire academic programs deemed incompatible with a white nationalist, Christian fundamentalist vision of education. This is not just an attack; it is an attempt to remake education as a tool of ideological indoctrination and authoritarian control. Disturbingly, a growing number of universities are capitulating to these demands, with Columbia University among those enabling them.  Unfortunately, too many university presidents and academics remain silent, “refusing to make a firm public defense of democracy”—rendering themselves complicit in an educational model that bears an alarming resemblance to the historical precedents of Nazi Germany and the current reality of Orban’s Hungary.

Clearly the gravity of this moment demands more than the usual analyses of corruption and political overreach. What we are witnessing is not just the dismemberment of constitutional protections or the expansion of a violent state—it is domestic terrorism orchestrated from the highest levels of government. This is not simply the erosion of rights but the calculated deployment of fear, a homegrown machinery of repression that transforms governance into an instrument of terror. It is a malignant legality, waging war on the American public under the guise of law and order, where power no longer merely punishes but seeks to invoke a living death on those it marks as enemies. The arrest of Khalil and others—both Jews and non-Jews—who stood in solidarity with Palestinian freedom, has been smeared as antisemitic violence. This framing blurs the line between state repression and the broader attack on critical thought itself. Under the Trump regime, thinking is viewed as a form of moral cowardice and as Umberto Eco insightfully observed in his critique of fascism, critical thinking is also smeared as a form of emasculation.

The Politics of Annihilation and Disappearance

This is a politics of annihilation—one that does not always kill outright but keeps entire populations in a state of unrelenting precarity, caught between survival and disappearance. As Judith Butler warns, this is the logic of governance that “produces precarity, sustaining populations on the edge of death, sometimes killing its members, and sometimes not.” It is a form of slow violence, where existence itself is made tenuous, where immigrants, dissidents, the poor, and the racialized are left in a state of permanent vulnerability, their lives dictated not by the rule of law but by the whims of power.

Trump’s ceaseless torrent of lies, his relentless branding of dissidents as “terrorists,” “Hamas supporters,” and “enemies from within,” along with his call for brutal retribution and the imprisoning of his foes—journalists, judges, politicians, and prosecutors—forms an insidious architecture of terror and lawlessness. This system is designed to silence, disappear, and annihilate those who resist. We must pause and reflect when Attorney General Bondi claims that a judge supports terrorism merely because he ruled against the Alien Enemy Act’s use for mass deportations. Or when, under the guise of  a restraining government order, Dr. Rasha Alawieh—an esteemed Lebanese kidney transplant specialist and Brown University professor who holds a valid H-1B visa—was illegally deported. However, it is crucial to consider the racialized and religious context of this action. Dr. Alawieh, as a Muslim Arab woman, is not being targeted not for any criminal wrongdoing, but more than likely because of her identity.

The persecution of Khalil is not an isolated injustice but part of a broader, systemic pattern of state-sanctioned repression—one in which individuals of Muslim or Arab descent are disproportionately targeted, not for any crimes they have committed, but for who they are. As Jeffrey St. Clair aptly observes, Khalil is now facing deportation despite never having been charged with a crime. In reality, his only “offense” is daring to exercise his right to free speech—denouncing, with moral clarity, what countless international organizations and human rights groups have recognized as Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians.

This is precisely why authoritarian white nationalists like Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Stephen Miller have seized upon Khalil, transforming him into a high-profile political prisoner. Their attack on him is inseparable from their broader war on dissent, on youth resistance, and on the right to condemn state-sanctioned atrocities. Khalil’s crime in their eyes is not violence, nor extremism, nor any violation of law—it is his refusal to be silent in the face of the illegal and morally depraved slaughter of innocent women and children in Gaza by Netanyahu and his far-right government.

What unnerves Trump and his enforcers is that Khalil, like so many other young people, refuses to bow before their authoritarian rule. His activism stands in direct defiance of the ideology they seek to impose—an ideology that demands obedience, that criminalizes resistance, that seeks to erase the very possibility of solidarity between oppressed peoples. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Trump administration’s willingness to wield the full force of a lawless, punishing state to crush those who dare hold power accountable.

The government has branded Khalil a threat, falsely accusing him of siding with terrorists, of making Jewish-Americans “feel unsafe,” of aligning with Hamas. Yet, as St. Clair makes clear, Khalil’s statements on Israel are strikingly diplomatic, rooted in a vision of justice that recognizes the inextricable ties between Palestinian and Jewish liberation. St. Clair quotes Khalil to make this point clear.

As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand in hand, and you cannot achieve one without the other.” He described the movement as one “for social justice and freedom and equality for everyone.” Khalil told CNN during an interview in 2024: “There is, of course, no place for antisemitism. What we are witnessing is anti-Palestinian sentiment that’s taking different forms and antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism [are] some of these forms.

Khalil’s case is not just about him. It is about the Trump administration’s broader assault on democracy, on protest, on the very right to resist injustice. He has become a symbol of a state determined to silence its critics, a state that punishes the young for their refusal to submit to its dictates. And in that, he stands as both a warning and an inspiration. Because if Khalil’s persecution tells us anything, it is that the struggle for justice is far from over—and that those in power will wield every instrument of state violence to suppress it.

Yet his fate is not an isolated tragedy; it is a harbinger of a deeper, more insidious transformation—the descent into a lawless regime that openly defies the courts, weaponizes ancient statutes like the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, and erases due process with impunity. Trump’s brazen push to expel hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants, without legal justification, is not an anomaly; it is a template, a warning shot for a future in which dissent itself is criminalized, where anyone—Palestinian, immigrant, student, protester—can be branded a “terrorist” and exiled from the nation’s conscience. As Norman Ornstein, no radical, warns with chilling precision: This is American Gestapo. But history has shown, time and again, that movements born in truth do not die under repression. They only grow stronger.

Weaponizing Terrorism

Trump’s tendency to label any dissent as terrorism is both absurd and dangerous. His words on the White House lawn, stating that people protesting at Tesla dealerships across the country “should be labeled domestic terrorists” illuminate this perfectly. Branding dissenters and anybody who is critical of the Trump administration as terrorists is a hallmark of fascism—not just a weapon against free speech, but a means of erasing their humanity. It casts them as evil, irredeemable, and a threat to be crushed, legitimizing state violence in the process. The reckless expansion of this charge is the mark of a state that mutilates bodies, justice, democracy, and the very notion of humanity itself.

This politics of deceit, lawlessness, abduction, and disappearance reveals the mechanisms of white supremacy at work by which people of color are rendered disposable. At loss here are not just political and legal rights, but the dispossession of bodies thrust into zones that accelerate the death of the unwanted in what Robert Jay Lifton has described as a “death-saturated age.”  The danger here is not simply that Trump and his political officials criminalize opposition and eliminate free speech, but that they are laying the groundwork for horrors of the past, once thought unimaginable in the United States. These include: the widespread use of state-sanctioned violence, mass arrests, disappearances, death squads, and the slow, methodical erosion of any space where truth, justice, and dissent might still survive.

Conclusion

To understand Trump’s reign of terror, we must move beyond conventional political analysis. We must historicize it, trace its roots, expose the cultural forces that make it possible, and refuse to look away from the totality of his repression. The normalization of fascist politics in America is not just a function of law or policy—it is a war over meaning, over memory, agency, over the capacity to imagine a different future. What we are witnessing in the current historical moment is the final evolution of neoliberal violence with the appearance of a criminogenic state that criminalizes social problems and dissent, repackaging them as a war on terrorism. Salvation comes with blind loyalty, the normalization of a politics of disposability, erasure, and the bold face emergence of a police state.

State engineered violence, cruelty, and rise of organized terror as the governing principle of the Trump regime is not a mere aberration; it is an intentional distortion of governance—a calculated shift in how the state wields power. This is a moment when state-engineered violence and cruelty are not just actions but guiding principles, tearing at the fabric of justice, and embedding terror into the very essence of what was once an unassailable democracy. This crisis—the systemic violation of civil rights, the suppression of free speech, and the targeting of political activism—must be understood as part of a historical rupture. It is part of what Nancy Fraser once called “a crisis of the social totality, one in which conscience, ethics, and politics are yoked together in a struggle to retain our collective humanity.”

Khalil’s story is not merely an anomaly—it is a stark warning. His suffering, like that of countless others, illuminates the brutal consequences of a society where those who challenge power, or who refuse to conform to the narrow confines of white Christian nationalism, find themselves not only stripped of citizenship and dignity, but disappear into the black hole of social and political abandonment. In an era overshadowed by rising totalitarian fascism, the very fabric of American society is being redefined by reactionary ideological closures that determine who is deemed worthy of belonging, who is silenced, and who is subjected to state violence. These actions are not random or isolated; they are part of a chilling, systemic effort to expunge history, destroy the capacity for critical thought, criminalize dissent, disappear the bodies and identities of those deemed ‘other’ by race, ethnicity, or religion.

This is the fascist machinery of control in motion—an apparatus designed to reshape the world in the image of those who hold power, leaving in its wake a landscape where justice is no longer governed by the rule of law, but by the dictates of global authoritarianism. It is the nightmare of a capitalism that has reached its terminal point, now ruling through terror, force, a reactionary culture, and a machinery of death. The promises of equality, social mobility, the redistribution of rights, and justice have crumbled, facing a legitimacy crisis and all but dead in their appeal. What remains is a brutal form of gangster capitalism, a technofascism where the ideologues of Trump and Musk boldly and unapologetically proclaim not merely that the U.S. has become a more recognizably authoritarian state, but that an endpoint has been reached where the U.S. if not the world “can belong only to a few.” This is no longer the promise of democracy, but its death knell.

Trump’s assault on civil rights, his war on free speech, and his crackdown on political activism do not mark the beginning of authoritarianism in America—they are its continuation, its escalation. This playbook is not new. It echoes the brutal tactics of countries such as Saudi Arabia, Israel, and India, where dissent is silenced, resistance is rebranded as terrorism, and critics of the state disappear without consequence. What we are witnessing is the slow but deliberate dismantling of the legal and democratic guardrails that once restrained power.

Arwa Mahdawi’s warning in The Guardian is both urgent and undeniable: “We are sliding toward an authoritarian future at alarming speed.” But this is not some distant horizon. Repression is not creeping—it is here. Freedoms are not eroding—they are being stripped away in real time, before our very eyes. And as Mahdawi reminds us, “All of our freedoms are intertwined.”

To defend one is to defend all. The fight for justice cannot be compartmentalized, parceled out to the persecuted few. When one of us is silenced, shackled, imprisoned, deported, or erased, it is not just a student, an activist, or an immigrant who suffers—it is democracy itself that is wounded. The struggle is not solitary; it is shared. The stakes are not theoretical or abstract; they are existential, lived, drenched in a painful assault on the body. Resistance is no longer an idea—it is an imperative. It is the fault line between democracy and tyranny, between freedom and subjugation, between life and death. Silence is complicity. Now is the time to rise. This is not a moment for half-measures or polite appeals—it is a battle that must be waged collectively by workers, educators, students, cultural workers, unions, minorities of color and class, and all those who refuse to live under the yoke of gangster capitalism and its brutal machinery of exploitation. This is not a plea for reform—it is a call for radical transformation, a decisive break from the obscene inequalities, entrenched power, and suffocating grip of financial elites. The future cannot be a mirror of an authoritarian present; it must be seized, forged in struggle, and built from the ruins of a system that has long served only the powerful. The shadows of fascism are thickening, spreading across the globe. We either resist—or we are consumed. The struggle against a capitalist future will be difficult, but there are no other options as the death march of fascism increasingly encircles the globe.

The post Abducting Bodies, Silencing Dissent: Mahmoud Khalil and the Rise of State Terror appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Jessie Hoffman Jr., 46. Image courtesy of the attorneys for Jessie Hoffman.

Three hours before he was to be murdered by the State of Louisiana, Jessie Hoffman greeted me with a strong handshake and an embrace. He stared deep into my eyes and thanked me for coming. We discussed his son, also named Jessie, and how proud he has made his dad.

Also visiting were three of the many lawyers who had been fighting for his life, Cecelia Trenticosta Kappel of the Loyola Center for Social Justice, Samantha Bosalavage Pourciau of the Promise of Justice Initiative, and Sarah Ottinger, who had been representing Jessie Hoffman for 19 years. I was there to witness the murder of Mr. Hoffman if Louisiana reversed its course and allowed one of the legal team to remain through the whole process.

Already in the room when we arrived was Rev. Reimoku Gregory Smith, a Buddhist priest Hoffman chose to accompany him. Jessie is a practicing Buddhist and has been a leader among those in prison for decades. Reverend Reimoku was in long black robes. He was serene and almost glowing in kindness.

We sat around a big wooden conference table that had the logo of the State of Louisiana carved into the middle of it. Uniformed officers from the Louisiana State Penitentiary sat in opposite ends of the room. There were two big pictures on the walls – one of Elijah on a flaming chariot and one of Daniel in the lion’s den.

The room in which Louisiana planned to murder Jessie Hoffman was steps away.

Jessie Hoffman is about six feet tall and muscular. He was wearing a black t-shirt that said Life Row in white letters on it – the name that its 50-plus occupants prefer to call what the outside world calls death row. He has been fasting for days. He mostly sits silently with his arms on the wooden table, staring intently at whoever was talking to him.

Jessie was holding his favorite book, THE HEART OF THE BUDDHA’S TEACHING: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy and Liberation by Thich Nhat Hanh. Thich Nhat Hanh was a Vietnamese Buddhist Zen Master, author, poet and peacemaker who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967 by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Jessie asked Reverend Reimoku to read his favorite passage from the book to us. It was called the Four Immeasurable Minds: Loving-Kindness, Compassion, Joy and Equanimity. He read and reflected as we took in these words together. Jessie occasionally closed his eyes.

Louisiana was scheduled to murder Jessie Hoffman by first immobilizing him by tying down his arms, hands, legs and torso on a crucifix-like platform. Then, once he was helpless to resist, they would cover his face with an industrial-grade respirator and pump his lungs full of poison high-grade nitrogen gas. Nitrogen gas causes death by depriving the body of oxygen, essentially causing suffocation in a phenomenon known as hypoxia. This method is so horrible all but two states have stopped using nitrogen gas on animals declaring it inhumane. The United Nations Commissioner on Human Rights has condemned the use of nitrogen gas in executions saying its use could amount to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment in violation of international human rights law.

Jessie Hoffman was to be murdered by Louisiana because he had as a teenager, after years of shocking physical, sexual and psychological abuse, committed a horrible murder in 1996.

Now the Louisiana Governor claimed it was necessary for the state to respond to this murder by itself murdering Jessie Hoffman to “prioritize victims over criminals.”

Yet the actual family members of the victim of Jessie’s murder were not asking Louisiana to murder him.

The victim’s sister-in-law specifically asked Louisiana not to murder Jessie Hoffman, saying “Executing Jessie Hoffman is not justice in my name, it is the opposite.”

The victim’s husband refused to attend the state execution and said he is now “indifferent to the death penalty vs life in prison without parole.” He also another reason for not attending was he was “just not really feeling like I need to watch another human being die.”

Years before, Jessie Hoffman wrote a statement apologizing to the victims. Louisiana refused to deliver it to the family.

Jessie and the victim’s sister-in-law tried to talk by zoom so Jessie could apologize to her directly but Louisiana would not allow it.

As our visit continued, another long-time lawyer arrived. Caroline Tillman, who has been working to save Jessie Hoffman from state murder for 22 years, came directly from federal court in New Orleans. Teams of lawyers tried to stop the state murder of Jessie Hoffman, filing in several state and federal courts. Only the U.S. Supreme Court had not been heard from yet.

More prayers were said. The letter from the sister-in-law asking that the state murder not go forward was read aloud. More prayers. More than 250 faith leaders had recently signed letters asking Louisiana not to revive the practice of state murder with nitrogen gas.

With less than an hour to go before the scheduled murder of Jessie Hoffman, the Warden came in and politely but firmly terminated the lawyers’ visit. He refused permission to allow any lawyer to stay and witness the murder of Jessie Hoffman. Only Reverend Reimoku was allowed to remain.

After the lawyers were escorted out, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to stop the murder of Mr. Hoffman by a vote of 5-4, one vote short of the 5 votes needed for a stay.

The murder of Jessie Hoffman by Louisiana could now begin.

John Simmerman, a journalist with nola.com, was one of two media witnesses allowed to view the execution of Jessie Hoffman. He reports that at 6:21 the ultra-high-grade nitrogen was pumped into the immobilized Mr. Hoffman. The prison draped him in a blanket. His breathing became uneven. His chest rose. He made a jerking motion. His body shook. His fingers twitched. He pulled at the table. His hands clenched. His breathing slowed. His head moved inside the mask. He jerked slightly around 6:27 and stopped moving. Louisiana officials reported the poison gas was pumped into Jessie Hoffman for 19 minutes until he was pronounced dead. The last view of Jessie Hoffman with his face now uncovered showed “his head was tilted back, teeth exposed in a grimace.”

The murder of Jessie Hoffman by Louisiana was now complete.

Samantha Pourciau, who was with Jessie Hoffman on his final day on earth, said: “Tonight, while many in our state cannot afford groceries, the state used countless resources to kill one man. The governor cannot cloak this in fighting for victims, because today we learned that this is not, in fact, what this family wants. This is what the governor wants. This has been in service of no one, but the bloodlust of our state government.”

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Bret Stephens speaking at the 92nd Street Y, Youtube screenshot.

This article was originally published on CounterPunch+ in March 2024. For more investigations like this and to support our efforts, please consider subscribing today.

On October 15, 2023, a week after Hamas’s attack on Israel and in the early days of an indiscriminate Israeli response, New York Times editorialist Bret Stephens wrote a column titled “Hamas Bears the Blame for Every Death in This War.”

After allowing that “[r]easonable people can criticize Israel for not allowing enough time for civilians to get out of harm’s way,” Stephens, having rhetorically covered himself, endorses the impending ground invasion and arrives at the conclusion inscribed in the column’s title. “The central cause of Gaza’s misery is Hamas,” he writes. “It alone bears the blame for the suffering it has inflicted on Israel and knowingly invited against Palestinians.”

After five months of war, at least 30,000 Palestinians dead (12,000 children, certainly an undercount), innumerable documented atrocities, a partial indictment for genocide, and the prospect of a spiraling Middle East conflagration, you might think his tune would have shifted, even a little. After all, even Tom Friedman has managed to squeeze out some criticism of Israel.

Not Bret. As the horror of the assault has ballooned and the genocidal logic underlying it become clearer than ever, Stephens hasn’t budged, calling for the permanent defunding of UNRWA, attacking the UN investigation into allegations of genocide, even approvingly citing his October 15 essay in a late-January column blaming Hamas’s tunnel-building for the dismal state of the territory that has been blockaded for nearly two decades.

In doing so, he has arrived at something like the capstone of his career, two plus decades in media defending and cheerleading Israel and helping to prep the ground for genocide in what may be the most violent assault of the twenty-first century. Hats off to Bret, then, whose long career as Israeli propagandist could only lead him here.

A Brief History of Bret Stephens

Let’s go back to 2017, when editorial page editor James Bennet brought Stephens over from The Wall Street Journal as seeming correction for the Times’ myopia in the lead-up to the 2016 election. This was an odd choice, given that blind dismissal of Trump really lay in failing to understand a revolt against calcified elite consensus—a consensus few people in media embodied better than Bret Stephens, who grew up and entered media via extraordinary privilege.

Stephens’ ostensible “diversity” as a hire was in being a never-Trumper, but then so was everyone else at NYT; his public views—climate skepticism, anti-Arab racism, libertarian tax policies—were just particularly reprehensible. Fundamentally Stephens reflected an antiquated Bush-era neoconservatism, retrenchment rather than novelty in the Trump era, which made his hiring especially senseless.

He immediately leaned into the role: his first column for the paper offered half-baked climate denial which ultimately required a correction for factual inaccuracies, and led publisher Arthur Sulzberger to email frustrated former subscribers asking them to return. (Stephens has since lightly retracted these views on climate change; an exciting, one assumes all-expenses-paid junket to Greenland to see glaciers melting did the trick. Sounds fun!)

In subsequent years Bret has dutifully covered other ground. He endorsed Trump’s 2017 trickle-down tax bill. He claimed that masks to prevent Covid transmission didn’t work. He wrote a particularly galling column entitled “20 Years On, I Don’t Regret Supporting the Iraq War” in which he essentially claimed that Iraqis, not the United States, were to blame for the violence of the insurgency, and that even if nukes or chemical factories weren’t found Saddam Hussein himself was a weapon of mass destruction (throughout failing to make any of mention of the million-plus dead or forced to flee due to the war).

Nevertheless—perhaps Bret can see things others cannot? In another memorable column—“The Secrets of Jewish Genius”—he wrote about the genetic superiority of Ashkenazi Jews, citing as evidence a paper which had appeared in a eugenics journal (this column also required a correction and a long editors’ note, which reads, in a darkly comic way: “After publication Mr. Stephens and his editors learned that one of the paper’s authors, who died in 2016, promoted racist views”).

Zionist Ideologue

But nowhere has Stephens been so vociferous as on the issue of Israel.

The one-time editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post—a job he took in 2002 because he felt that post-9/11 media was insufficiently supportive of Israel (“Insofar as getting the story right helps Israel, I guess you could say I’m trying to help Israel,” he said)—who once wrote that antisemitism was a “disease of the Arab mind,” has repeatedly, aggressively, and unequivocally defended the Israeli state.

In 2018 he defended the passage of the Israeli nation-state law, a racist provision that legally elevated Jews over non-Jewish minorities in the country and established “Jewish settlement as a national value.” Running a particular kind of cover for Israel—an enduring theme—Stephens specifically implored liberal Jews not to “[give] up on Israel on account of an overhyped, underwhelming law whose effects would be mostly invisible if they hadn’t been so loudly debated.”

In 2021 he attacked a small handful of progressive Democrats for trying to block funding for Israel’s Iron Dome, in the process arguing that the missile defense system “very likely saves Palestinian lives by vastly reducing the political pressure on Israeli leaders to rapidly eliminate Hamas’s vast rocket arsenal by ordering a ground invasion.” (How did that work out?) He also called Jamaal Bowman, Pramila Jayapal, and Rashida Tlaib antisemitic—this sort of smear being another pattern of his.

The congressional vote to which Stephens refers, of course, came a few months after Israel’s May 2021 assault on Gaza, which killed at least 260 people and wounded 2000, a war Bret enthusiastically endorsed in a column titled “For the Sake of Peace, Israel Must Rout Hamas.”

But in that case Hamas had launched rockets; how might Bret respond to explicitly nonviolent protest? Similarly, it turns out: in 2018–2019 he wrote columns denouncing the Great March of Return, during which Israeli solders killed over 200 Palestinians near the Gaza fence and injured nearly 10,000 in a particularly sadistic bout of violence. “If Palestinians want to build a worthy, proud and prosperous nation, they could do worse than try to learn from the one next door,” Bret wrote.

Increasing Fanaticism after 10/7

Unsurprisingly, Stephens’ writing since October 7 has gotten even worse, as he has adopted a genocidal enthusiasm and one-sidedness extraordinary even by American media standards.

In his second column after the attack, Stephens scolded leftists and Palestinian supporters for being, in his recurring refrain, antisemitic—blaming “a much broader swath of the left that looks in heartfelt horror at what happened on Saturday but rarely stops to wonder whether it played any role in creating the moral and intellectual climate for what has unfolded.” In this attempt to guilt them one also reads a call for a return to Zionism—another theme in his writing, particularly after 10/7.

His next column (“Hamas Bears the Blame for Every Death in This War,” mentioned above), preemptively blamed Hamas for what would obviously be an inconceivable death toll; a week later, “The Palestinian Republic of Fear and Misinformation” cast doubt on that very death toll (“It’s bad enough that Hamas tyrannizes Palestinians and terrorizes Israelis. We don’t need it misinforming the rest of us,” he wrote).

These themes have persisted over the last several months: unmitigated defense of Israel, attacks on anti-Zionists (including Jews), blaming Palestinians, and arrogant and baseless accusations of antisemitism. In “For America’s Jews, Every Day Must Be Oct. 8” (does he write his own headlines?), Bret reminds Jews—presumably, American Jews—not just to remember what happened on October 7, but to remember that “[o]n Oct. 8, Jews woke up to discover who are friends are not.”

Who, exactly, are these enemies? Bret names Black Lives Matter, Jewish Voice for Peace (whose members, he condescendingly writes, are “being used as Jewish beards for aggressive antisemites”), and American universities—and for good measure, again casts doubt on the almost certainly vastly undercounted Gaza death toll.

But the heart of it comes at the end. “What can Oct. 8 Jews do? We can stop being embarrassed, equivocal or defensive about Zionism, which is, after all, one of the world’s most successful movements of national liberation,” Bret writes. “We can call out anti-Zionism for what it is: a rebranded version of antisemitism, based on the same set of libels and conspiracy theories.”

Pro-Israel Side Gig

Stephens’ obsessive propagandizing on behalf of Israel—and his recurring conflation of Israel with Judaism—is surely attractive to those powerful interests who stalwartly support the Middle Eastern state. Israel has one of the most powerful PR machines in the world, devoted to Hasbara, a particular kind of Israeli propaganda directed at an external, largely Western audience.

So it’s interesting to note that while Bret’s main gig these days is at the Times, he also holds a side job working as editor in chief of a new journal called Sapir, a role he began when the publication was founded in 2021.

Sapir describes itself as “a journal exploring the future of the American Jewish community and its intersection with cultural, social, and political issues,” but a cursory look at its coverage belies this neutral description: it is avowedly pro-Israel, quick to throw around allegations of antisemitism, and despite branding itself as a “quarterly journal of ideas for a thriving Jewish future” has little room for American Jews critical of Zionism (it partners with the right-wing news site Jewish Insider for digital distribution).

Sapir is published and funded by the Maimonides Fund, which raises more questions than it answers. Maimonides Fund describes itself as “a private grantmaking organization that funds in North America and Israel,” but this also-mild descriptor obfuscates the organization’s status as a dark-money fund with unknown donors, as Eric Alterman noted in columns in The American Prospect.

But Maimonides evidently has money: a recent listing for a full-time program manager at the Sapir Institute offered a $120,000–$140,000 salary with competitive benefits (the Sapir Institute was established in 2023 to turn ideas in the flagship journal into “viable plans of action”).

It is challenging to find out much more about the organization. According to another self-description, “Maimonides Fund aims to connect Jews to their people and their heritage, and to contribute to the vitality of the State of Israel.” Other projects they’ve contributed to include a Jewish storytelling organization co-launched by Steven Spielberg, to which they gave $1 million; Fuente Latina, a nonprofit that “seeks to bring pro-Israel information to Spanish-language media”; and Birthright Israel, where they are listed in the $500,000–$999,999 range for the 2022 annual campaign, right next to Haim and Cheryl Saban.

The fund’s evident agenda raises questions about Bret’s role at Sapir and its relation to his work at the Times. Presumably Bret gets paid for his editorial direction by this well-funded organization? And if he is indeed compensated by an organization that aims to “contribute to the vitality of the State of Israel,” should a disclaimer be put on the numerous columns he writes on the war in Gaza, or on Israeli–Palestinian issues more generally? When Tom Friedman wrote a column supporting Michael Bloomberg for president, he disclosed that his wife had received funding from Bloomberg—why is something similar not the case for Bret?

When Alterman asked the Times about this, spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha told him this had been deemed unnecessary, the implication presumably that Stephens is so pretenaturally pro-Israel that there could be no conflict of interest in his work for Sapir. In a media environment already so heavily weighted in favor of pro-Israel coverage, this is a weak explanation.

What is absolutely clear is the posture at Sapir toward the war in Gaza. The contents of their recent special issue on what they call the “War in Israel” are ominous: titles like “Anti-Zionist Committees of the American Public,” “The Road to a Second Kristallnacht” (penned by Stephens), “The Palestinian Problem Is a Religious Problem,” “To Jewish College Students Who Are Scared,” “The War Against the Jews,” and a ten-part diary of an IDF soldier.

Bret’s leading editorial—“‘We Are Alone’: Reflections on the Jewish-American Response to October 7”—is a dismissive and contemptuous piece that pretty well sums up his general attitude, opening with an attack on writer Joshua Leifer, who wrote a piece for what Bret describes as “far-Left publication Jewish Currents.”

Leifer, Stephens writes, and other progressive Jews were deluded to believe in any genuine peace process; they were in fact “useful idiots” to think they could escape something like eternal antisemitism (particularly on the left), and they—not decades of a cruel occupation—have served to mainstream anti-Zionism.

Now, Bret says, the wise ones will have to make a break and return to Zionism—it’s the only way.

The “Bret Stephens Policy”

Not content to simply convey his views by print column in the most important newspaper in the United States, Stephens also has a habit of directly targeting and smearing critics.

In 2019, Stephens was ridiculed—and ultimately left Twitter—after emailing GWU professor David Karpf in response to a tweet Karpf wrote about a bedbug infestation at the Times office (“The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens.”)

Shortly thereafter, Stephens emailed Karpf (and cc’d his provost, Forrest Maltzman), writing: “Someone just pointed out a tweet you wrote about me, calling me a ‘bedbug’… I would welcome the opportunity for you to come to my home, meet my wife and kids, talk to us for for a few minutes, and then call me a ‘bedbug’ to my face.”

While the petulant response was risible, as Karpf (who is Jewish) pointed out in a subsequent editorial, Bret’s intent was not. In cc’ing his boss, he was plainly trying to get Karpf in trouble, “to impose a social penalty… for making jokes about him online.” (Two days after Karpf’s op-ed was published, Bret wrote a column lamenting vague uncivil speech, noting how Nazis called Jews “bedbugs.”)

As Karpf also pointed out, only months earlier Bret had done something similar, ambiguously threatening journalist Samer Kalaf, who had sent him an angry email over one of his columns on the Great March of Return.

But this behavior is apparently not limited only to those outside the paper. In 2020, New York Times contributor Wajahat Ali posted a Twitter thread that went viral in which he outlined the “Bret Stephens policy,” the seeming exception to criticism to which Stephens was entitled at the paper.

“So many have been contacted by editors because Brett has whined or complained,” Ali wrote. “This is so common there’s now a community of us writers & editors whom Bret has narced on bc he was upset they were critical of one of his many terrible takes… As a result many walk on eggshells when it comes to him. There’s a simmering resentment and feelings of a very real double standard. People fear for their jobs so remain quiet.”

Reached by phone, Ali expanded on his experience.

“I think I quote-tweet responded to [one of Bret Stephens’ articles] and said something like, you know, racist garbage. And I thought nothing of it,” Ali said, describing how the incident started.

And then he got a call from a Times editor.

“I could tell from his voice that he did not want to make that phone call. He said hey, there’s some terms and conditions of, you know, how we behave with fellow employees and… maybe you referring to Bret this way is not appropriate,” Ali said.

Later, Ali said, other writers reached out to share that they’d had the same experience.

“There’s several writers he’s done this to, overwhelmingly women and people of color, who like me were kind of infuriated that they even had to tolerate this call from management on behalf of Bret Stephens and his aggrieved feelings,” Ali added. “But nobody was willing to go on the record because they believed that the old boys network would retaliate against them. So they just kept quiet.”

New York Times Frontman

An obfuscator of Israeli crimes, extreme anti-Palestinian bias, a shady pro-Israel side gig, nasty interpersonal relations with media workers—how does Bret Stephens keep his job with the New York Times?

Something like an answer might be found in his March 5 column, “The New Rape Denialism.” In it, Bret attacks critics—again, particularly left-leaning critics of Israel—who have voiced skepticism about the allegations that Hamas committed mass rape on October 7, attacking them as dishonest, and yet again, as antisemitic.

But it’s a curious piece: if you follow the hyperlinks, a nondescript link in the fourth paragraph to “one recent article” takes you to the major story that ran in The Intercept on February 28, which meticulously picked apart the Times’ enormously impactful story of December 28, “Screams Without Words.”

The NYT story, landing when it did, was not, as Stephens seems to suggest, a mere account of the horrors of October 7. The story specifically argued that there was a “broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7” and arrived at both an apparently concerted campaign to spread the narrative of mass sexual violence and a rising international backlash to the devastation in Gaza.

As The Intercept painstakingly breaks down, the Times’ reporting—along with a host of supplementary information, including previous interviews by supposed witnesses, and the podcast comments of the unusual freelancer at the heart of the story, Anat Schwartz—does not convincingly back up that allegation of a pervasive pattern.

While The Intercept is careful to note that this does not mean sexual violence didn’t occur on October 7—and a UN report from early March does support the notion that some did, while also examining allegations of sexual violence against Palestinians in Israeli custody—the February 28 story emphasizes that the accusation of a pattern lent a very specific kind of legitimacy to Israel’s incessant assault.

And so here Bret gets clever, dismissing the disturbing problems with the Times report to blur everything under the broad brush of antisemitism—“If, God forbid, a gang of Proud Boys were to descend on Los Angeles to carry out the kinds of atrocities Hamas carried out in Israeli communities, I’m pretty sure no one on the left would devote any energy trying to poke holes in who got raped”—and going so far as to compare The Intercept’s careful parsing of problematic story to Holocaust denial.

But then, isn’t this precisely why Bret keeps his job? It’s why he has this job, and it’s why he can—in fact, is paid to—say whatever he wants about Israel. Stephens may be a cartoonish fundamentalist, but he is not an aberration at The New York Times; he is an expression of the paper’s underlying biases. He is unlikely to be censured because his job is to be an Israeli propagandist. As Gaza descends into famine, this never-ending assault may be the preeminent test of how good he is at it.

Addendum

Two days after this piece ran, Stephens published another column, “Israel Has No Choice but to Fight On.” It’s a doozy. In it, Stephens holds an imaginary conversation with himself, or what he characterizes as a hypothetical “intelligent critic” of Israel’s war on Gaza. Obviously intended to shore up US support (an almost inexplicable goal, as it’s been limitless), Stephens ends up convincing himself that, yes, Israel must see this war through to its mythic end. At one point, Bret asks himself, “Do you have any specific suggestions for how Israel can defeat Hamas while being more sparing of civilians?” to which his imagined critic replies, “I’m not a military expert.” Brave stuff. One wonders why Bret couldn’t speak to one of the hundreds or thousands of real-life intelligent critics—perhaps even a Palestinian? Probably because his insipid and lazy commentary crumbles under even the most minimal pushback—plus, it would require actually doing a bit of work. Bret’s response, when his critic asks how he can justify starvation, which via an entirely manmade famine created by Israel’s siege, is daily killing children throughout Gaza? “Like all wars, this one is horrible and heartbreaking. But I blame Hamas, not Israel, for the devastation.”

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Photo by Levi Meir Clancy

After the horrors of World War II and yet again in humanity’s history, law was seen as a rational means for containing such rampant, insane violence. And it has proven, yet again in humanity’s history, to be a frail straw to clutch at as world leaders and the societies they head seem to be madder and madder by the day, to the extent of ignoring national and international law and covenants and striking at fundamental aspects that supposedly define humanity, the sapiens species, and even at the very life of the planet that humans inhabit together with all the other species on which their existence depends.

In its very first article, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights spells out the essential condition for human rights. Human beings are “… born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience”. The current deplorable state of human rights shows that humans are far from making good use of this natural endowment. In today’s wars, humans who start and prolong them are vicious in their violation of moral values, and of the ethics of war itself. Hate dictates action. Sustained by false justifications, the will to exterminate triumphs. Human behaviour becomes demented.

Before war and faced with war, we’re frightened for this is a time of anxiety, of uncertain waiting, of real, already-started wars that threaten to become global, of attacks against international law and organisations that work for peaceful coexistence. People are scared about war and, as psychoanalysts, we are also worried about the human madness (non-reason, and non-conscience) that leads to war. In “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” (1946), Melanie Klein described madness as an internal war from birth, in which fear of death linked with rage and hatred (that the mother tries to soothe as best she can) is projected onto others. Trying to be free of suffering, the Ego is dominated by illusory beliefs, and anything opposing these deceptive fantasies and desires are seen as malign. Hate commands action, and the will to exterminate takes over.

On the national scale, this attack on “reason and conscience” takes the form of “straight power concepts” increasingly managed by dishonest, corrupt—but elected—leaders whose violent, supremacist, hate-laden discourse spurs on wars of plunder and dispossession, and also genocide and ecocide. Ten months before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed, George Kennan, architect of the Marshall Plan, brutally described a future dominated by the great powers, first states and then, more stealthily, corporations.

We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population.[…] Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.[…] We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. […] The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

Even in gestation, the Declaration of 1948 was condemned to languish among “unreal objectives”, because disparity of wealth and its inevitable cruelty had to be maintained.

It is generally believed that, unlike the Hominidae or great apes, whose “cognition is structured by stable cognitive abilities that respond to different developmental conditions”, humans have come to rule the Earth as a species that is able to observe reality and think, have self-awareness, value freedom, and be creative. Widespread notions of human superiority or exceptionalism tend to project a civilised species capable of periods of peace. But human wars are characterised by bestiality and inhumanity, which are also part of human nature.

In his 1955 inquiry into the psychotic part of the personality, the British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion showed how fragile the human thinking mechanism is in being affected by the emotions of the social animal that humans are. He describes the attempt to think—“reason and conscience”—as a “a central part of the total process of repair of the ego”. In 1974, from the social standpoint, the French sociologist Edgar Morin criticised the designation of Homo sapiens sapiens and observed that Homo is sapiens-demens. He describes the human as “a reasonable and unreasonable being who can be subdued and excessive. Subject to intense unstable affectivity, he smiles, laughs, and cries but is also able to understand objectively. He is serious and calculating but also nervous, anguished, playful, excitable, ecstatic; he is a being of violence and tenderness, love and hate; a being invaded by the imaginary who can recognize the real”. This species, its members, and its civilisation has a large part of demens—the stubborn insanity of attempts to shun reality in the ways people interrelate and function in society, and the madness of individuals faced with, or fearing threats and danger—which Freud anticipated, in his way, by turning to the mythology of Eros and Thanatos and their fusion in the human being.

One extreme case of murder, widely reported in the Italian press in September 2024, reveals the connection between individual and social pathology. Riccardo, a “serious, studious, easy-going” seventeen-year-old, stabbed his parents and younger brother to death after a family meal and then called the police. Asked why, he said he didn’t know, except that he felt oppressed and thought he could free himself by killing them, that he always had the sensation that he was alone, a stranger with them and with his classmates. He’d been thinking about killing his family and he “exploded” at midnight. He thought that one thrust of the knife would kill them. But he didn’t want them to suffer so he stabbed them again to be sure they were dead. Then he coldly realised that he was mistaken. Killing his personal version of the family as a social institution hadn’t freed him from being a member of the wider society.

It seems that Riccardo had managed to repress his inner conflicts and feelings of oppression for some time previously, which is why his teachers and friends believed he was a stable boy. He’d projected the suffocation (of his inner world) onto his family (external world). He thought he’d be free if he killed these suffocating people. He was unable to think about his subjective experience of being suffocated and alone, of being a stranger everywhere, so he killed the people who loved and cohabited with him. His solution was demens, with a dose of sapiens (he didn’t want them to suffer). There are many socially enraged Riccardos in this world, as school-shootings/ in the United States alone show. Since the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999, more than 390,000 students in the U.S. have experienced gun violence at school. That’s about 1,300 children per month.

Demens appears in the perverse parts of the human personality, which are well described in crime novels, amongst other literary genres. In brief, its versions could be:

+ Wanting to harm, revenge, total power, but seeing this as good;

+ Distorting the reality of things;

+ Corrupting individuals and social institutions;

+ Selfishly, erotically, and cruelly enjoying attacks on truth and people, and seeing it as a victory.

Demens doesn’t think properly, or uses thinking to do harm. Like Riccardo, it attacks and parasitically abuses its carers and the world that sustains life, turning them into enemies and oppressors. It assaults the Ego itself, and all its affective connections in the course of its thanatological and demented expression. The anxieties described by Riccardo are typical of psychotic crises, unbearable archaic feelings which, in our training of observing infants, we psychoanalysts have seen as going back to early feelings of suffocation, hunger, rage, and acute fear of death. To be free of such pain, babies use projective evacuation to get rid of what is gnawing inside and suffocating them, and then they see it as being outside themselves.

Experiences that tend to be explosive and full of rage must be contained, which is what the mother does for her baby, making them utterable and representable, while satisfying essential needs such as feeding the infant and providing human contact and love. As psychoanalysts we do our best to help the patient understand this quality of “containment”, which must be learned.

Sapiens loves and fights for life, for peaceful coexistence, accepting that, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”. It strives to solve problems and to be more sapiens. In the elected political leaders of many countries (which signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in favour of “reason and consciousness”), demensaspects submit healthy Ego functioning of “reason and conscience” to cruel, despotic control. Individual clinical cases of madness (psychosis) and its social demens dimension are aspects of the same reality: Homo sapiens demens.

The baby’s fear of dying is similar to the terror of society of being annihilated in a war. This dread of a threatenedwar can actually lead to real war, as the example of Israel suggests. The trauma of the Holocaust was brought to Palestinian lands when the state of Israel was established and, with it, the fear of being annihilated all over again. Inexpungible anguish shaped the country’s mentality, with two main reactions. The dominant one (demens) favours war, in an endless vicious circle, and the minority one (more or less sapiens) understands that the only hope is hope itself.

For Moshe Dayan, commander of the Jerusalem front in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, “Israel must be seen as a mad dog; too dangerous to bother”. With this principle as a guide, racism and cruelty won the day. For a while, military superiority sustained the illusion of invulnerability, but Hamas changed that on 7 October 2023. Israel was warned of the attack three days before it happened. Netanyahu declined to act, maybe because of fantasies of invincibility, or perhaps a massacre provided the “self-defence” justification for genocide. This denial of reality, this waiting in fear or omnipotence for the Hamas attack to happen, has had enormously devastating and destabilising consequences, not least among them the present flagrant display of the politics of hate, lying, political blackmail, and despicable interests.

The other view, about the need for hope, comes from Ami Ayalon, former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s secret service and commander-in-chief of the Navy, when he sums up what he learned when combatting terrorism. A soldier in training only sees enemies as “objectives” to be shot, tortured, stabbed, or killed by missiles but, when you fight terrorists, you must know everything about them and their daily lives, and you discover they are human beings. Then you no longer fear them, so your way of understanding the war changes. The “equation” Ami Ayalon learned is that, “We Israelis will have security only when they, Palestinians, will have hope.” Knowledge, he says, can save us. For us, as psychoanalysts, understanding who we are cohabiting with is what characterises sapiens life. It also applies to the smallest cell in its setting through to nations with their neighbours in the international realm.

Such understanding isn’t easy. What is seen, and what is believed must be questioned. This is a crisis of identity and loyalty which means either clinging to the illusion of having total control like the omnipotent fantasy of the newborn child who must learn how to be sapiens, or courageously acknowledging a feared, unknown reality on which, in fact, we depend. Sapiens must learn to recognise everything angry and undesirable that humans unconsciously project onto and identify in others, and which is inseparable from the harm and barbarism they cause. For demens, depression and guilt become persecutory. Any criticism is demonised and past persecution justifies present persecuting. Only the voice of power speaks the truth. Trump’s recent “explosive” attack on Zelenskyy in the White House is a demonstration of this at the highest levels of power, and also of Bion’s insight that a corroded mental apparatus corroded by lies is incapable of good judgement. The wars in Ukraine and Palestine—not to mention mostly untold accounts of genocide against Indigenous peoples in many parts of the world, which could end up being ecocide for all of us—are blatantly demonstrating the predominance of demens in action in ways that are so brutal that written and filmed testimony are making fictional stories of war look like nursery tales.

If this brutality is to be prevented, there must be a change of mentality. We need concepts that are able to “contain” (like the mother of the distressed baby) the barbaric actions of demens, offering instead a model of respect for and commitment to essential human needs. From the earliest societies there has been a constant quest to contain the excesses of demens, for example from Hammurabi (1755 – 1750 BCE) through to today’s laws and conventions. Related ideas like universal basic income which would guarantee the most basic right of all, that of material existence, have not yet consolidated. We must demand observance of the laws and conventions—promises of a future of peaceful coexistence—we already have, and new ideas if we are to impede the drive to exterminate, and if we are to evolve towards solidarity with the members of our own and other species, and maybe become a better one if Homo sapiens demens hasn’t already self-destructed.

To conclude, we believe that the designation Homo sapiens sapiens should be changed to Homo sapiens demensas a pedagogical principle so that we can have a new, more realistic awareness of our true human condition and, on that basis, proceed to improve it. This won’t be easy in the present hubristic milieu.

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Image by Raghavendra V. Konkathi.

The website of a certain pan-Arab media organization seems fixated on translating, commenting, or briefing its audience on everything that US and Israeli officials say about the Middle East.

Every threat made by US President Donald Trump, every tweet by an American official, however insignificant or inconsequential, somehow becomes a ‘breaking news’ story, worthy of follow-up and heated discussions, as if what Americans say, or fail to say, is the only factor that determines outcomes in our region.

The same thing applies to Israeli officials or media: an unsubstantiated Jerusalem Post report, a mere analysis by ‘Israel Hayom’, an opinion piece by an unknown writer in Maariv, Haaretz, or any other publication, are somehow inflated to become facts, or serve as a representation of Israeli politics and society.

Writers like Thomas Friedman, of the New York Times, whose influence within the mainstream intellectual strata in the US is nowhere near what it used to be at the start of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, remain important figures for many Arab media outlets, thus shaping their understanding of US politics. It matters little that Friedman’s credibility has suffered through years of faulty analyses and that numerous other media outlets have collectively marginalized the once domineering role of America’s so-called ‘newspaper of record.’

This is not an ailment of a specific newspaper, TV channel, or website. It is a widespread culture that reflects the prevalent inferiority that continues to define many mainstream circles in the Arab world and the Middle East at large.

One can attribute this persistent reliance on the West for information to the lack of trust in the region’s own media, and in the belief, however erroneous, that freedom in western media makes it far more reliable in terms of accuracy and objectivity, among other reasons.

Nothing could be further from the truth, however, as western reporting on Middle East issues, even decades before the devastating war on Gaza, has been sharply biased, or, at best, selective and untrustworthy.

In fact, the Gaza war, where reporting from the ground took place by Gaza’s own youth, many of whom have been educated in local universities, or were even still students of journalism, shifted global public opinion on Palestine like never before in history.

This shift happened through mutual solidarity with Gaza by Arab and global youth on social media platforms, and also due to the amplification of Palestinian voices through independent media worldwide.

This fundamental change in how stories are told should inspire a seismic shift in the region’s approach to media creation, where the mic is finally given to local reporters, writers, and bloggers to address their own struggles directly to the world.

Unfortunately, that transformative change is yet to happen. To the contrary, there seems to be a growing demand for western views, commentary, analysis, even entertainment, and such.

This is particularly disturbing when the Middle East itself is in a political, social, and intellectual flux: yielding new schools of thought and a fascinating array of intellectuals who are far more familiar with the region than a detached American journalist, or a European columnist.

The problem is often compounded by the near complete absence of voices from the Global South, as if Middle Eastern media are simply duplicating the western media marginalization of all voices that operate outside their political hegemony.

This is how the West’s ruling class’s worldview becomes the “common sense” in many non-western societies, per the logic of Antonio Gramsci, who developed the concept of cultural hegemony.

Hegemony, in that sense, is not the imposition of power through direct military or political control, but through cultural dominance. This is why Friedman continues to matter for the Arabs, far more than a Tunisian intellectual, an Emirati opinion maker, or an Egyptian journalist.

The pioneering Arab sociologist, philosopher, and historian Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) addressed such issues in his ‘Muqaddimah’ hundreds of years earlier when he linked cultural dominance to political and military powers. The ruling elites always impose their values, language, customs and cultures on subordinate groups, according to Ibn Khaldun.

Both Gramsci and Ibn Khaldun recognized the importance of ‘consent’ in maintaining power and discussed the process through which hegemons are undone.

As the world continues to experience massive and historical shifts towards new centers of power, the Middle East, like other regions in the global ‘peripheries,’ should take advantage of the ample opportunities created by the shifts to discover its own energies and reassert its relevance to the global discourse.

Our media must focus on local conversations by engaging journalists, intellectuals, academics, artists, and poets, so that, over time, authentic cultural projects can emerge, reflecting the realities of our region based on the priorities of those who live here.

We can no longer live in the shadows of others’ views or outsource our opinions to those thousands of miles away, as even if genuine, they can never truly reflect, let alone address, our challenges in an authentic and meaningful way.

For this transformative experience to occur, we must start by genuinely respecting our own people and having confidence in our ability to think independently, without relying on cues from Western analysts or newspapers.

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On 18 March 2025, Israel unilaterally broke the ceasefire agreement and bombed several sites in Gaza. It is estimated that at least 400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, died by Israeli bombs. Journalists in Gaza report that of those dead, 174 are children. Once more, entire families have been wiped out. The head of the United Nations organisation for Palestine (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, said that the Israelis have fuelled ‘hell on earth’. Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnès Callamard described the situation as ‘the hellish nightmare of intense bombardment’. The word ‘hell’ is on everyone’s lips. It defines the situation in Gaza at present.

Israel’s Attack

Why did the Israelis break the ceasefire? There is no good reason. There was nothing done on the ground by the Palestinians that provoked this return to deadly violence. The prisoner exchange went as smoothly as possible and the process of verification of the ceasefire was intact. There are, however, three points of interest that could have drawn the Israelis back to the violence.

First, the Palestinians embarrassed the Israeli government on at least two issues: by marching northwards in the hundreds of thousands to reclaim northern Gaza on 27 January, and by allowing the Israeli prisoners to show empathy with their captors when they were released (to the point of Israeli soldiers kissing Hamas gunmen who had held them hostage).

Second, the Israeli government broke the ceasefire and then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed back to his cabinet three members of the far-right wing Otzma Yehudit (Itamar Ben-Gvir, Amichai Eliyahu, and Yitzhak Vassirulov) who had resigned because of the ceasefire. Their return cements Netanyahu’s government. It is within the character of Netanyahu to murder Palestinians to maintain his own political power.

Finally, US President Donald Trump’s authorisation to attack Yemen’s government in retaliation for its defence of the Palestinians shined a green light to Israel for a resumption of hostilities. Yemen’s Ansar Allah was the only remaining group that continued to attack Israel because of its genocide (Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Syrian factions have been largely silenced).

Pregnant Palestinians

According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNPFA), there are 50,000 pregnant Palestinian women in Gaza, with 4,000 ready to give birth next month (more than 130 per day). Currently, these women have no adequate medical care. The Israeli government has blocked for two weeks the delivery of fifty-four ultrasound machines and nine portable incubators (essential for premature babies). The cuts in electricity and water on top of the destroyed medical centres and hospitals have placed an inordinate burden on medical workers and therefore on the pregnant women.

Dr. Yacoub (name changed), a doctor at Kuwait Hospital in Gaza recounted two stories of importance as the bombs fell once more. A thirty-year-old woman who was twenty-two weeks pregnant came to the hospital from al-Mawasi in Khan Younis with a head injury caused by an Israeli airstrike. She died in the hospital. When the doctor examined her, he found that her baby was also dead. A second woman, in her twelfth week of pregnancy, suffered a miscarriage. She was in terrible pain when she arrived. Her mother told the doctor: ‘We barely managed to get to this hospital. We barely found transportation. The situation is unstable, with shelling and fear. We came here scared’. One of the two women died. Both of their babies are dead. ‘In times of war’, Dr. Yacoub said, ‘the devastation extends beyond the battlefield, affecting innocent lives, including those of expectant mothers and their unborn children’.

Reopening Gaza

Against all odds, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society reopened the al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City’s Tal al-Hawa neighbourhood. The hospital had been bombed by the Israelis and closed since November 2023. The North Gaza Emergency Committee, set up by civilians three years ago, met to decide on the absolute necessity of trying to provide some medical care despite the dire context. They have been able to reestablish two operating rooms, an emergency department, and outpatient clinics.

It is important to remind readers that during this genocide, Israel targeted the Palestinians who had been leaders of the Emergency Committees and who had been involved in the entry of humanitarian aid. For instance, in March 2024, Israeli aircraft targeted and killed Amjad Hathat, a popular leader of an Emergency Committee in western Gaza, and Brigadier General Fayeq al-Mabhouh, the policeman who coordinated the entry of humanitarian aid through the UN Palestinian agency (UNRWA). The murder of people such as Hathat and al-Mabhouh has left the Palestinians in northern Gaza without those with the expertise to bring aid into Gaza and then distribute it amongst the Palestinians. Despite their loss, others have stepped into the breach, including the beleaguered UNRWA officials.

During the ceasefire, UNRWA opened 130 temporary learning spaces across Gaza to enrol a remarkable 270,000 boys and girls. As UNRWA head, Lazzarini, wrote, ‘Education for children restores some hope. It helps them help and slowly reconnect with their childhood’. But he wrote this on 15 March. Israel began its bombardment again three days later.

The rubble will grow. The despair will increase. The genocide continues.

This article was produced by Globetrotter and No Cold War.

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Peter Hegseth, Image via Wikipedia

Peter Hegseth is charging forward on the promise to De-Woke The Military, codified in Trump’s executive order to purge “DEI” from the ranks. Among their targets are Black soldiers, who have been a center–and many times a catalyst–of the broader anti-racist struggle for well over a century.

Some of Hegseth’s orders so far have left little doubt that “DEI” is a code word:

*Banning all Black History Month activities and recognitions the day before it began (while notably allowing military-wide St. Patrick’s Day celebrations)

*Firing African American “DEI General” CQ Brown from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, after lamenting how “our generals are hunting for racists in our ranks that they know do not exist” (they do)

*Banning Black student groups at military academies

*Bringing back the name “Fort Bragg” to the recently renamed Army post that had honored a Confederate general

*Ordering recruiters to stop attending the Black Engineer of the Year Awards, which one recruiter described as the “most talent-dense event we do”

It has gotten a bit more overt, deleting from the DoD website their only “Medal of Honor Monday” profile of a Black soldier given the award. A slip in the new URL code laid bare the new attitude: three letters were added so the web path would read “DEI Medal of Honor…”

DEI policies did not exist during the Vietnam War; in fact it was much harder for Black soldiers to get recognition. Charles Rogers–who won the award as he was wounded three different times leading a doomed defense of his outpost–was marked “DEI” simply because he was Black.

But the latest stuck out to me as the real shock.

On March 13, Hegseth ordered a review of military standards; and specifically, of beards.

This will likely elude non-veterans but every vet will know that this primarily impacts Black troops, who are commonly exempt from standard shaving requirements due to a skin condition (pseudofolliculitis barbae) which afflicts 45% of Black servicemen.

In other words, Hegseth has found a way to potentially purge thousands of Black servicemen. The Marine Corps has already announced they would do so. The other branches will decide soon.

Hegseth has a very public rationale for all these measures: it is actually about promoting unity! Increasing cohesion by emphasizing what we have in common!

The hallmark of this cohort has been “don’t believe your eyes.” But we all can see what this is.

We’re expected to ignore the context: that Hegseth is deep in a Christian nationalist community led by far-right theologian Doug Wilson, who wrote an entire book defending slavery in the American South. Hegseth bears tattoos associated with white supremacists. He has a long history of rhetoric clearly tapped into the far-right internet ecosphere, dominated by anti-Black content. Hegseth even took known neo-Nazi collaborator Jack Posobiec along with him on his first international trip as Secretary of Defense.

His reforms are not exactly popular in the armed forces, either, nor do they have a significant base among military leadership or academia. They stem primarily from white nationalist attitudes, obsessed with “Critical Race Theory” and now the updated term “DEI.” Their fantasies of purging Black soldiers trace back 160 years.

Black Troops Become the Nucleus of the Freedom Struggle

One of the earliest civil rights struggles in America revolved around Black soldiers.

First it was a struggle for African Americans to have the right to join the Union Army. Many died in those first units just to prove their worth, finally winning federal authorization of Black recruitment.

As predicted by Fredrick Douglass, their heroism in the Civil War would be key to advancing their cause for equality in the North. Once in the military, Black troops waged campaigns (and even mutinies) throughout the war against racist officers and unequal pay, which electrified the freedom struggle everywhere.

The Confederates, of course, would never allow Black men in the rebel uniform. But they could not accept Black men in any uniform. It drove them insane.

They instituted a policy of executing Black POWs, ignoring the decorum afforded to white POWs. Many massacres of Black troops line the war’s history; at Fort Pillow, around 200 Black soldiers who had surrendered were executed. “Remember Fort Pillow” became a rallying cry across the country, with many wearing the slogan pinned to their uniforms while they defeated their former enslavers in battle.

The Confederates would continue to be driven insane as those Black soldiers became their overseers. Black infantrymen occupied southern towns and cities after the war to keep the defeated in check and to carry out the project of Radical Reconstruction. Considering the way the world looked less than a decade prior, it was truly an unimaginable scenario.

Despite intense racism inside the armed forces, and it’s often totally unjustifiable missions, many in the Black Freedom movement saw military service as a way to challenge racist tropes about Black intelligence and humanity through unquestionable bravery.

Black soldiers also often put their training, guns, and the authority of their uniforms to use in challenging Jim Crow racism, including significant uprisings by garrisoned soldiers in cities like Tampa (1898), Houston (1917), and beyond.

Black infantry units in WWI also earned high prestige for bravery, such as the Harlem Hellfighters. More importantly, they returned to the racist US as skilled, battle-tested combatants. During the wave of white violence in Red Summer of 1919, Black WWI veterans were both the targets of mob violence, and the backbone of defense in battlegrounds like Tulsa. In Washington D.C., Black snipers atop the Howard Theater successfully held off the advance of lynch mobs.

White militiaman confronts Black soldier in Chicago

Preceding Red Summer was the lynching of WWI veteran Wilbur Little, murdered for refusing to take off his Army uniform. At least 16 veterans would be lynched that year.

They were targeted because Black men with guns was an outrage, even symbolically, since what they did with those weapons actually advanced the reputation and esteem of the Black community. And it was a practical barrier against white violence.

Their ability to achieve that status and expertise was gradually eroded. Increasingly kept out of combat arms and leadership roles, they were pushed into dirty work like shoveling coal, digging ditches and working the kitchens.

This rise of Jim Crow turned the military itself into an arena of struggle.

In 1940, 15 Black sailors aboard the USS Philadelphia publicly signed a letter detailing racial discrimination and abuse. After it was published in a newspaper, all were kicked out of the Navy and the struggle for the rights of “The Philadelphia 15” became a rallying cause for the NAACP, socialist parties and others.

Pamphlet distributed by the Socialist Workers Party, 1940

Through World War II, the Black struggle launched the Double V campaign (Victory Abroad, Victory At Home) which demanded: if Black men and women could fight for freedom abroad, they deserve freedom in the United States.

Black soldiers and sailors were known to carve the Double V symbol onto their chests. It is considered an opening salvo of the Civil Rights movement.

Mass rallies began demanding the desegregation of the military. Various organizations were formed: Committee to End Segregation in the Armed Forces; the League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation and more. With the help of W.E.B. DuBois, they joined into coalition under the name Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service.

Inside the military, an even hotter struggle was waging. In 1942, 600 Black troops stationed in Australia mutinied, taking over the base and killing racist officers.

The 1944 Port Chicago disaster left around 300 Black sailors dead from loading ammunition under unsafe, overworked conditions by white officers. It led to the largest mutiny in US Navy history. The trial for 50 Black sailors who led the strike became a nationwide campaign for their exoneration.

The following year, over 1000 Black sailors went on hunger strike over the policy of only promoting whites.

The demands for equality within the ranks claimed victory with a 1948 Executive Order by Truman, officially desegregating the armed forces.

This became an important part of the framework for civil rights legislation more broadly–not just on paper, but in the movement, as the victory of the military desegregation movement pushed forward equality in all areas of life. On its heels was the Brown v. Board of Education victory, and later the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.

Into Our Era

Over the next 70 years, the military would remain relevant to the anti-racist struggle nationwide. From mutinies during Vietnam to police violence against Black service members in today’s era, it has remained a trigger point.

The new direction of the DoD, under the leadership of obvious racists, sets the stage for a revival.

The 2020 nationwide rebellion against racism was quelled with repression from Trump and lies from Democrats. Those tensions remain very real and unresolved, simmering beneath the surface.

The racist agenda of the Trump Administration, in all aspects of American life, are creating sparks that could catch at any moment. His military agenda is one of those sparks.

Their attitudes flow directly from that of the Confederacy. By that same measure we can reach back into history to draw on the lessons of Black service members, and how they gave momentum and strength to the broader anti-racist struggle.

This piece first appeared on Empire Files.

The post Hegseth’s Attacks on Black Troops Evoke Long History of Anti-Racist Struggle appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.