Lenny Bruce’s booking, following his arrest in 1961. Photo: Examiner Press. Public Domain.

“Lenny Bruce is not afraid”

—“It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” R.E.M.

Lenny Bruce, born Leonard Schneider on October 13, 1925, died on August 3, 1966. Officially, Bruce died from a drug overdose. Unofficially, he was murdered by the New York County District Attorney’s office.

The Trump Reich is not the first era in U.S. history in which local, state, or federal government has attempted to abolish free speech and destroy opposition; for example, Woodrow Wilson threw Eugene Debs in prison for speaking out against capitalism and World War I. What makes the current era different is that a U.S. president is not only acting like a dictator, he is doing everything possible to ensure the world views him as one, getting these headlines: “Trump Pulls From Dictator Playbook and Hangs Giant Banner of His Face.” Today, one risks imprisonment or having a career derailed not simply for challenging obscenity laws, as did Bruce, or speaking out against a capitalist war, as did Debs, but for hurting a president’s feelings. So, it’s an especially good time to celebrate Lenny Bruce.

At the time of his death, Bruce was blacklisted by almost every venue in the United States, as owners feared that they too would be arrested for obscenity. One of the New York district attorneys who prosecuted Bruce’s last 1964 obscenity case, Assistant District Attorney Vincent Cuccia, later admitted, “We drove him into poverty and bankruptcy and then murdered him. I watched him gradually fall apart. . . . We all knew what we were doing. We used the law to kill him.”

 “As a child,” Bruce recounted, “I loved confusion: a freezing blizzard that would stop all traffic and mail; toilets that would get stopped up and overflow and run down the halls; electrical failures—anything that would stop the flow and make it back up and find a new direction.” At age 16, Lenny ran away from home and boarded with the Dengler family, working on their Long Island farm in the 1940s. The Denglers had a roadside stand, and city and suburban folks loved the idea of fresh farm eggs, but the Denglers didn’t have enough chickens to meet the demand, so they would buy eggs wholesale, and a teenage Lenny repackaged them in Dengler cartons; and he would later recount, “With my philanthropic sense of humor, I would add a little mud and straw and chicken droppings to give them an authentic pastoral touch.”

Bruce’s rebellions against authority, on stage and off, remain legendary among comics. Fed up with the navy in 1945, Bruce told medical officers he was overwhelmed with homosexual urges, and this tactic worked to get him discharged. He then fell in love with Honey, a stripper at the time, and they married in 1951. To raise money so that Honey could leave her profession, Lenny created the “Brother Mathias Foundation,” in which he impersonated a priest and solicited donations. Bruce was arrested for that scam but was lucky and found not guilty.

On stage, Bruce was fearless. He worked as an MC at strip clubs, and following one performer, he himself came on stage completely naked and said, “Let’s give the little girl a big hand.” In Bruce’s time, it was still common for some Christians to accuse Jews of killing Jesus, and this would put most Jews on the defensive—but not Lenny. In his act, Lenny would “fess up” that not only did the Jews kill Jesus but that it was his Uncle Morty who did it. In one variation of this bit, he said that what in fact Jews really had covered up was that his Uncle Morty had killed Jesus with an electric chair, but that Jews thought that Christian women wouldn’t be as attractive wearing necklaces with Jesus in an electric chair dangling over their chests, so Jews made up the crucifixion story.

However, as Bruce became more famous for his risk-taking humor that fearlessly mocked authorities, his luck eventually ran out. He was arrested multiple times for obscenity during his stand-up act as well as for drug possession. Bruce believed that authorities went after him mostly because he made fun of organized religion, and his friend George Carlin agreed, “Lenny wasn’t being arrested for obscenity. He was being arrested for being funny about religion and in particular Catholicism. A lot of big city cops . . . tend to be Irish Catholic,” noted the Irish Catholic Carlin.

In the years before his death, Bruce became increasingly preoccupied by how to prevent his arrest for drug use. In his autobiography, Bruce wrote, “For self-protection, I now carry with me at all times a small bound booklet consisting of photostats of statements made by physicians, and prescriptions and bottle labels.”

+++

In 1964, Bruce was arrested in New York on obscenity charges, and despite petitions and protests from many renowned people, he was convicted and sentenced in December 1964 to four months in a workhouse. 

In July 1966, free on bail during the lengthy appeals process, Bruce got a visit from Carlin and his wife. Carlin recalled, “He was completely immersed in his legal battles. . . . He didn’t appear in clubs anymore—the Irish cops and judges had indeed shut him the fuck up. He was just about bankrupt, having spent all his income and intellect trying to vindicate himself. We visited for a while and he was as affectionate and lovable as ever. That was the last time we saw him alive.” Twelve days after their visit, Lenny Bruce died of a drug overdose.

Lenny Bruce may not have been the funniest comedian in U.S. history, but his anti-authoritarian defiance is unsurpassed among comedians, many of whom to this day honor him for his trailblazing free speech advocacy. In Resisting Illegitimate Authority (2018), to illustrate the diversity among anti-authoritarians, I profile twenty U.S. anti-authoritarians, including Lenny, with an emphasis on what can be gleaned from their lives, including lessons about survival, triumph, and tragedy.

Sometimes it is luck that makes the difference between anti-authoritarians having a triumphant or tragic life, and Lenny did not have the luck of coming to prominence in a more anti-authoritarian era, as was the case with his friend George Carlin, whom I also profile. In a more anti-authoritarian era, Carlin’s 1972 Milwaukee disorderly conduct-profanity arrest for his “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television” bit was dismissed by a laughing judge, and it actually helped Carlin’s career, even getting an invitation from Johnny Carson to discuss it and promote his album on national television.

+++

Another luckier U.S. anti-authoritarian is Noam Chomsky who, in the early 1960s, challenged and resisted the U.S. government’s war in Vietnam at a time when very few Americans were doing so. He refused to pay a portion of his taxes, supported draft resisters, got arrested several times, and was on Richard Nixon’s official enemies list. Chomsky anticipated going to prison, and he later recounted how only luck and a changing era saved him from prison, “That is just what would have happened except for two unexpected events: (1) the utter (and rather typical) incompetence of the intelligence services. . . . [and] (2) the Tet Offensive, which convinced American business that the game wasn’t worth the candle and led to the dropping of prosecutions.” 

Lenny Bruce was often referred to as a “sick comedian,” but he famously said, “I’m not a comedian. And I’m not sick. The world is sick and I’m the doctor. I’m a surgeon with a scalpel for false values. I don’t have an act. I just talk. I’m just Lenny Bruce.”

Today, it is an understatement to say that mainstream U.S. society is sick with what Lenny called “false values.” Tip-of-the-iceberg evidence of how a sick U.S. society has gotten even sicker? In 2024, an in-your-face scumbag bully was elected president—this time with the popular vote, a majority of American voters who were either blind to what he is all about, or saw what he is all about and were unbothered by him being a scumbag bully because he is their scumbag bully. 

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Image by Ash Hayes.

The history of Zionism is fundamentally one of deception. This assertion is critically relevant today, as it contextualizes the so-called ‘Trump Gaza proposal,’ which appears to be little more than a veiled strategy to defeat the Palestinians and facilitate the ethnic cleansing of a significant portion of Gaza’s population.

Since the start of the current conflict, the United States has been Israel’s staunchest ally, going as far as framing the outright slaughter of Palestinian civilians as Israel’s “right to defend itself.” This position is defined by the wholesale criminalization of all Palestinians—civilians and combatants, women, children, and men alike.

Any naive hope that the Trump administration might restrain Israel proved unfounded. Both the Democratic administration of Joe Biden and the Republican administration of his successor have been enthusiastic partners in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s messianic mission. The difference has been primarily rhetorical. While Biden wraps his staunch support in liberal discourse, Trump is more direct, using the language of overt threats.

Both administrations pursued strategies to hand Netanyahu a victory, even when his war failed to achieve its strategic objectives. Biden used his Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, as an emissary to broker a ceasefire fully tailored to Israeli priorities. Similarly, Trump utilized his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, among others, to concoct a parallel ploy.

Netanyahu deftly exploited both administrations. The Trump era, however, saw the US lobby and Israel seemingly dictating American foreign policy. A clear sign of this dynamic was the famous scene last April, during Netanyahu’s White House visit, when the ‘America First’ President pulled out a chair for him. The summoning of Blair, who once headed the US-controlled Quartet for Peace, to the White House alongside Kushner in August, was another foreboding signal. It was evident that Israel and the US were planning a much larger scheme: one not only to crush Gaza but to prevent any attempt at resurrecting the Palestinian cause altogether.

While ten countries were declaring recognition of the state of Palestine to applause at the UN General Assembly between September 21 and 23, the US and Israel were preparing to reveal their grand strategy, with critical contributions from Ron Dermer, then Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs.

The Trump Gaza proposal was announced on September 29. Almost immediately, several countries, including strong supporters of Palestine, declared their backing. This support was given without realizing that the latest iteration of the plan was substantially altered from what had been discussed between Trump and representatives of the Arab and Muslim world in New York on September 24.

Trump announced that the proposal was accepted by Israel and threatened Hamas that, if it does not accept it within “three or four days”, then “ it’s going to be a very sad end.” Still, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who, along with the UN, has largely failed to hold Israel accountable, declared his support for the Trump proposal, stating that “it is now crucial that all parties commit to an agreement and its implementation.”

Netanyahu felt a newfound elation, believing the weight of international pressure was finally lifting, and the onus was shifting to the Palestinians. He reportedly said that “now the whole world, including the Arab and Muslim world, is pressuring Hamas to accept the conditions.” Comfortable that the pendulum had swung in his favor, he openly restated his objectives in Gaza on September 30: “To release all our hostages, both the living and the deceased, while the IDF remains in most of the Strip.” Even when Arab and Muslim nations protested the amendments to the initial Trump plan, neither Netanyahu nor Trump relented, the former continuing the massacres, while the latter repeating his threats.

The implication is stark: regardless of the Palestinian position, Israel will continue to push for the ethnic cleansing of the Strip using both military and non-military means. The plan envisions Gaza and the West Bank being administered as two separate entities, with the Strip falling under the direct control of Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace”, thus effectively turning Blair and Kushner into the new colonial rulers of Palestine.

History is most critical here, particularly the history of Israeli deception. From its onset, Zionist colonialism justified its rule over Palestine based on a series of fabrications: that European settlers held essential historical links to the land; the erroneous claim that Palestine was a “land without a people”; the assertion that indigenous natives were intruders; and the stereotype that Arabs are inherently anti-Semitic. Consequently, the state of Israel, built on ethnically cleansed Palestinian land, was falsely marketed as a ‘beacon’ of peace and democracy.

This web of falsehoods deepened and became more accentuated after every massacre and war. When Israel faltered in managing its military efforts or its propaganda war, the United States invariably intervened. A prime example is the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, where a ‘peace deal’ was imposed on the PLO under US pressure. Thanks to US envoy Philip Habib’s efforts, Palestinian fighters left Beirut for exile, on the understanding that this step would spare thousands of civilian lives. Tragically, the opposite occurred, directly paving the way for the Sabra and Shatila massacre and a prolonged Israeli occupation of Lebanon until 2000.

This historical pattern is repeating itself in Gaza today, though the options are now more stark. Palestinians face a choice between the guaranteed defeat of Gaza — accompanied by a non-guaranteed, temporary slowdown of the genocide — and the continuation of mass slaughter. Unlike the Israeli deception in Lebanon four decades ago, however, Netanyahu makes no effort to mask his vile intentions this time. Will the world allow him to get away with this deception and genocide?

The post A History of Deception: US-Israeli Pacts and the Gaza Proposal appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

People ask me all the time, “Kamau, things are so bad, what do we do, what do we do? Things are so bad!” First of all, there’s a lot of things you can do. But the very first thing you can do is Call it Fascism. Don’t say “Trump’s gone too far.” Don’t say “he’s overstepping.” Don’t say “we’ve never seen this before.” Nope, it’s fascism. Call it fascism.” – Comedian W. Kamau Bell

Chicago is now ground zero in the Trump fascist regime’s assault on democracy, the rule of law, social justice, decency, and the common good. Recent events here (I am writing from the Loop) include a horrifying militarized ICE, FBI, and Border Patrol attack on an apartment complex in the predominantly Black South Side neighborhood of South Shore. Last week, just after 2 a.m., military Black Hawk Attack Helicopters descended on an apartment complex in the Black South Side Chicago neighborhood of South Shore:

“Federal agents rappelled onto the roof while U-Hauls and Budget rental vans unloaded hundreds of gendarmes in combat gear. They carried military-grade rifles fitted with mounted flashlights designed to disorient enemy combatants. They kicked in doors, shattered windows, and ransacked apartments. Inside were Black Chicagoans, Latino migrants, U.S. citizens, elders, and terrified children. Everyone, including a naked baby, was dragged into the night. Residents described being zip-tied and herded into vans where they were detained for hours while agents checked IDs, citizenship status, and for arrest-warrants. ‘They just treated us like we were nothing,’ said resident Pertissue Fisher, speaking to CBS News.”

Following this terrifying event, the so-called Department of Homeland Security sent out a slick action video celebrating the savage racist attack.

That’s just the most graphic and terrible example of the racist terror the Trump regime and its masked gendarmes are unleashing across the Chicago area. Other recent incidents:

+ The shooting of a woman by ICE in the Southwest Side neighborhood of Brighton Park, followed by a protest that ICE attacked with tear gas and tactical military vehicles.

+ The unprovoked tear-gassing of residents in the North Side neighborhood of Logan Square, sending a two-year-old child to the hospital in respiratory distress.

+ The brutal handcuffing of 26th Ward Chicago alderperson Jessie Fuentes after she asked to see a warrant for the arrest of a hospitalized man injured by ICE agents

+ The ongoing violent ICE and Border Patrol attacks on protesters at ICE’s immigrant “processing” (really detention and torture) center in the predominantly Black western Broadview.

+ A chemical attack on a Chicago CBS2 reporter while she sat in her car near the Broadview facility.

Now Trump and his fellow fascist “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth have sent hundreds of Texas National Guard troops for deployment in and around Chicago, falsely claiming that Chicago is a “war zone.” Trump is doing this over and against the protests of Illinois governor JB Pritzker and Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, both of whom Mein Trumpf says, “belong in jail.”

Think about the dark neo-Confederate symbolism of dispatching troops from Republifascist-ruled former slave state of Texas to Chicago, the city where Abraham Lincoln was nominated for president in 1860 and a leading stronghold of the Union during the Civil War. Fifty thousand people lined the streets of Chicago’s Michigan Avenue to mourn Lincoln following his assassination by a Confederate sympathizer six days after the Slave Confederacy surrendered and six weeks after Lincoln said this in his second Inaugural Address:

“Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

Make no mistake: the virulent white supremacists Trump and Hegseth would love to see the re-establishment of Black chattel slavery in the United States.

In a preliminary ruling that attempts to temporarily restrain Trump’s military occupation of Portland, Oregon, federal district Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, found that protests outside the ICE facility there failed to meet the definition of a “rebellion against the federal government” and pose no “danger of a rebellion.

“This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law,” Immergut wrote in her opinion. “Defendants [the Trump administration] have made a range of arguments that, if accepted, risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power — to the detriment of this nation.”

Immergut was right to suggest that Trump’s hoped-for destination is martial law. Two weeks ago, Trump told 800 generals and admirals he called into Virginia from across the world that American cities should become “training grounds for our military.”

Between Hegseth and Trump’s speeches to the stone-faced brass in Quantico, Virginia, the message was clear: American troops should be “unleashed” (top fascist White House operative Stephen Miller’s term) to kill what Trump calls “the enemy within,” including American citizens, on American soil.

Trump responded to Immergut’s initial ruling by sending 101 California National Guard members to Oregon – an action Immergut called unconstitutional and contrary to existing federal statutes. The judge has also temporarily blocked this action.

Like his counterpart in Oregon, Illinois governor JB Pritzker is suing the Trump administration in federal district court to block the military invasion of his state and Chicago.

As I write on Thursday afternoon (October 9, 2025), Oregon’s suit is being heard by a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Two of the three judges on this panel are Trump appointees. The Illinois hearing is ongoing in a federal district court in Chicago.

If Trump does not get what he wants he will “if necessary” take his case to the far-right US Supreme Court, which has become a blunt instrument of fascist power that routinely cancels well-reasoned lower federal rulings with unexplained “shadow docket” judgements that do not bother to substantively engage the legal/constitutional issues at question.

In an afternoon press conference last Monday, Pritzker said that the White House’s “plan all along has been to cause chaos, and then they can use that chaos to consolidate Donald Trump’s power.” Pritzker also thinks Trump’s real destination is martial law across the nation.

In other fascist news, US government phone systems and websites have been enlisted in open violation of the Hatch Act by blaming the current Trump government shut down on “the Radical Left” Democrats – this despite the facts that (a) there isn’t a single “radical leftist” in the Democratic Party and (b) there’s nothing “radical Left” about the Democrats’ requirements for signing on to a budget deal (keeping alive the health insurance subsidies granted by the Affordable Care Act and blocking massive cuts to Medicaid). The fascist political playbook requires a “radical left” “enemy within” even when no such “enemy” exists.

The antifascist Rutgers history professor Mark Bray is attempting to leave the United States for Spain after receiving numerous death threats in the wake of the assassination of the fascist Amerikaner youth leader Charlie Kirk. The Guardian reports that Bray and his family were prevented from flying out of the country two nights ago:

“Mark Bray, an historian who published the 2017 book Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, and has taught courses on anti-fascism at the New Jersey university, was attempting to board a plane at Newark airport bound for Europe when he was informed at the boarding gate that the reservations for him and his family had been cancelled. The professor, nicknamed “Dr Antifa” by a group of students, had said he was moving to Europe after receiving death threats. Turning Point USA activists have claimed he is a “financier” for the leftwing movement. ‘Someone’ cancelled my family’s flight out of the country at the last second,’ Bray posted on Bluesky social media. ‘We got our boarding passes. We checked our bags. Went through security. Then at our gate our reservation disappeared.’”

Are we moving to a point where dissenters can’t leave, consistent with the practices of the SS in Nazi Germany?

A wise reflection posted on social media by the literature professor Benjamin Balthasar:

“At the peak of the red scare, it was common for radicals to have their passports revoked: most famously Paul Robeson’s career was ended by taking away his ability to travel abroad (and equally famous, his attempt to give a concert over the Canadian border thru a megaphone). Richard Wright who famously said that he left the US to not bring up his daughter in a racist society, also more quietly said he had better leave while he still had a passport. Leonard Bernstein and Herbert Aptheker also had their passports revoked. Many other less famous radicals had their ability to travel taken away (or were deported like CLR James and Claudia Jones). Supposedly this part of the McCarren Walter Act was successfully challenged in court in the late 1950s, ironically by the odious sectarian anti-communist troll Max Shachtman (who notoriously tried to derail the early days of SDS by having the new group ban communists), but who nonetheless was placed on the ‘subversives’ list by the state dept. In any case, as with many things, let us hope the blocking of travel for ‘subversives’ is not coming back. Either way the story is truly alarming.”

Another wise reflection, from the Black comedian W Kamau Bell: “People ask me all the time, ‘Kamau, things are so bad, what do we do, what do we do? Things are so bad. First of all, there’s a lot of things you can do. But the very first thing you can do is Call it Fascism. Don’t say ‘Trump’s gone too far.’ Don’t say ‘he’s overstepping.’ Don’t say ‘we’ve never seen this before.’ Nope, it’s fascism. Call it fascism.”

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Sue Coe, Terrible things are happening outside, 2025. Courtesy, the artist.

“First they came”

I always scoffed at “First They Came,” the often quoted, 1946 poem by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller. There are several versions of it, but the best-known starts “First they came for the communists/And I did not speak out because I was not a communist.” Each of the following three verses names another target — socialists, trade unionists and Jews, until concluding: “Then they came for me/And there was no one left/To speak out for me.” 

The poem suggests, wrongly, that “they” – the unmentioned Nazis – targeted everyone, not just communists, socialists, trade unionists and Jews. (Niemöller should have added to the list queers, Roma, Slavs, and the disabled.) In fact, the Nazi regime made great efforts to placate the broad, middle and lower-middle class populace and increase its size. Nazism was aggressively pro-natalist, rewarding families that had many children, so long as they were the right kind. In addition, the secret Lebensborn (“fount of life”) program, established by SS chief Heinrich Himmler, supported unwed, supposedly “Aryan” mothers through their pregnancies and distributed the children to similarly racially elite, SS parents. The goals of these initiatives were eugenicist and militarist: the creation of a racially superior population and enough soldiers to forge and sustain a thousand-year Reich. 

The Nazis, in other words, knew very well who they wanted to imprison or kill and who they wanted to protect or nurture, and the idea that they would inevitably “come for” someone not on their targeted list is mistaken. Niemöller’s poem is harmful because it suggests that anyone could be a victim of fascism when in fact only some are; protecting those in danger requires solidarity and entails risk. To the pastor’s credit, he openly opposed Nazification of the Protestant Church and was consequently cast into Sachsenhausen and then Dachau concentration camps. Much later, long after the Nazi defeat, pastor Niemöller was active in the anti-Vietnam War and anti-nuclear movements. His poem is therefore belied by his own life; he understood very well who were and who were not the likely victims of fascism and embraced the role of anti-fascist or “antifa” to use the shorthand beloved of Reichkanzler Trump, Reichsmarschall Hegseth, and Reichsministers Miller, Bondi, Patel, Holman, Noem, and Kennedy. 

Carefully selected targets

Until about two weeks ago, the Trump administration carefully followed the script of “First They Came.” One by one, it targeted groups and individuals who might challenge the kleptocratic, neofascist state, confident that it could do so without significant resistance. First it was the special counsels and ombudsmen who policed federal agencies for corruption. Then it was the U.S. Attorneys and prosecutors whose job is to ensure that federal laws are faithfully executed, and violators punished.  Following that, was the regulatory state. Even junior employees were fired if they worked for agencies – including EPA, Education, Justice, Treasury, HUD, Interior, and HHS – who might object to privatization, deregulation, and sleaze. 

Then came the attacks on individuals and institutions of civil society. University presidents were dressed down by Republicans at congressional show trials. (It didn’t help that these leaders conceded error of which they were innocent.) Around a dozen college and university presidents have resigned in the face of administration, congressional Republican, or state Republican pressure. Other universities were forced to accept limitations on their institutional freedom or make cash payments (aka bribes) to continue to receive federal grants.  Columbia coughed up $200 million. Many colleges and universities pro-actively limited student and faculty free-speech rights in the hope of avoiding government or conservative trustee sanction.

Law firms too have been targeted. Despite court rulings consistently affirming the right of attorneys to choose their own clients without fear of federal retribution, at least eight major firms – most notably Paul Weiss — acceded to Trump’s demands that they pay money or provide pro bono services in exchange for continuing access to lucrative U.S. government contracts. Other civil society organizations, including non-profits focused on women’s health, the environment, civil rights, immigration law, and fair housing, have had grants cancelled or awards rescinded. Many have changed their rhetoric and programs so as not to attract Trump administration ire.  Entertainment companies and sports franchises have also bowed to Trumpian pressure to change programming or limit outreach to targeted communities, especially immigrants. The German word for such a coordinated pressure campaign, first used in 1933, is Gleichschaltung:  bringing all institutions of state and civil society into conformity with Nazi ideology and practice. 

By attacking each group — universities, law firms, non-profits, media companies — separately and in succession, the Trump administration has succeeded in keeping them isolated, unable to marshal the solidarity and collective strength available to them. To be sure, many of the richest and most powerful corporate heads and tech entrepreneurs – Elon Musk at Tesla, Larry Ellison at Oracle, Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, Sam Altman at Open AI, Tim Cook at Apple, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Peter Thiel, and others – have welcomed Trump’s strong-armed interventions. They support technocratic Caesarism – rule by one or several tech and finance billionaires beholden to no one, and believe Trump is sympathetic to their goal, despite the president’s claim to speak for a broad, working-class MAGA base. Indeed, low-income Republicans have been assaulted by tariffs, elimination of green energy subsidies, and soon, cuts to Medicaid and the ACA, but their congressional representatives have registered no protest. They remain fully in Trump’s thrall. Small business leaders and professionals, harmed by the president’s tariff, deregulation, and immigration policies, have similarly remained quiet out of fear of reprisal.  

Larger goals

Trump’s dismantling of democracy has been methodical and effective and has served his primary goal: self-aggrandizement. But the president’s most influential courtiers, including Stephen Miller, Russell Vought and J.D. Vance  as well as the ideologues of the Heritage Foundation and Claremont Institute, have other ambitions, broadly consonant with the fascism of interwar Europe. Their goals are to:

1) Purify the body politic by the deportation or exclusion of non-whites. 

2) Embed Christian nationalist ideology in government and educational institutions. 

3) Broadcast and promote American exceptionalism.  

4) Reject feminism, invigorate patriarchy, and denounce non-binary models of gender. 

5) Insulate or protect the corporate elite from regulation, taxation, and organized labor. 

6) End competitive elections. Vance whisperer Curtis Yarvin supports a monarchy. Marco Rubio’s former Director of Policy Planning, Michael Anton, prefers a Caesar. 

7) Destroy the disinterested, professional, government bureaucracy, and slash spending on health, food, education, housing and environmental protection.  

8) Revive the American empire by alignment with Russia (a racial comrade) and antagonism to China (a racial foe).

9) Buttress the Leadership cult: Trump als Führer. (This is Trump’s personal favorite.)

10)  Welcome environmental catastrophe. Umberto Eco wrote: “The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he frequently sends other people to death.”

Anybody who opposes these ten goals is anti-fascist or antifa; they are enemies of the regime.

Coordination interruptus

Buoyed by success, the Trump administration decided to press its advantage; Niemöller’s final stage of political capture — “then they came for me/And there was no one left” — is the order of the day. Having begun the work of Gleichschaltung mere months ago, the Trump regime now wants to foreclose democracy altogether — if not for a thousand years, at least beyond the 2026 midterm elections.  

But the necessary work of coordination remains unfinished. Unlike Germany in 1933-34, the administration lacks SA or SS enforcers. ICE, FBI, and other federal forces – abusive and violent as they are — remain constrained by custom and law. The judicial branch of government is not yet fully co-opted, as indicated by the succession of lower court rulings barring immigrant expulsions, executive branch dismissals, and placement of federal troops in cities. While many of these decisions have been reversed by the Supreme Court, every defeat – even temporary — exposes administration weakness and invites resistance. Legislative opposition exists too, just not from Republicans. Democrats in Congress may be feckless, but they are large in number. Their size has prevented Trump from passing anything like the Enabling Act of 1933 that provided Hitler an easy glide path to authoritarianism.  Civil society organizations, including wealthy, liberal-left foundations are also still functioning. Counter-hegemonic non-profits remain active and, in some cases, more energized than before. Most colleges and universities, and most law firms have not (so far) yielded to Trump’s threats. 

While the mass media have long been colonized by conservative and even fascist provocateurs – Steve Banon, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Candace Owen, Jesse Wattters, Joe Rogan and many others – their reach is less extensive than it seems. Even the biggest outlet is small by historical standards. At the height of its popularity in the early 1960s, Walter Cronkite’s “CBS Evening News” had 30 million viewers, or about 15% of the U.S. population. Today, Fox’s most popular conservative talk show, “The Five” has 3.5 million viewers, or just 1% of the population. Steve Bannon’s WarRoom podcast has 85,000 listeners per month. (Counterpunch has more than five times that number of monthly readers.) So far, the right has been unable to dismantle the left ecosystem of magazines, podcasts, and broadcasts. Mainstream TV hosts Stephen Colbert, John Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel and the rest may not be very “left,” but they are certainly oppositional. Colbert and Kimmel each have about 2 million nightly viewers.  Given this ideologically fractured environment, the question arises: Has Trump’s effort at fascist coordination reached its apogee, and will it now begin to recede?  Is this a case of coordination interruptus?

Whither NSPM-7?

On September 25, 2025, the White House issued a memorandum, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence”.  The document falsely asserts that there has been a dramatic upsurge in “violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described anti-fascism.”   The directive goes on to state: “This ‘anti-fascist’ lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties.” A previous Executive Order designated “antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization,” even though no such group exists, and there is no legal category “domestic terrorist organization.”

Memorandum NSPM-7 then directs the National Joint Terrorism Task Force (established in 1980 and led by the FBI) to investigate and prosecute political violence and its institutional or individual funders, as well as identify “any behaviors, fact patterns, recurrent motivations, or other indicia common to organizations and entities that coordinate these acts in order to direct efforts to identify and prevent potential violent activity.”  Poor writing masks the author’s intentions here, but the memorandum proceeds to designate troubling “indicia”:  

“anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” 

The vagueness of the targeting is breathtaking; it would be hard to find anybody who isn’t hostile – sometimes or always — to “traditional American values on family, religion and morality.”  Isn’t that the topic of conversation or at least the undercurrent at most family dinner tables?  

Though the memorandum doesn’t specifically target Democrats, Trump, Miller and others have elsewhere called them “vermin,” “an enemy within”, “gnats” and the “party of hate, evil and Satan.”  Simply being a Democrat thus makes you a subject for investigation.  About 45 million people in the U.S. are registered Democrats. (37 million are Republicans.) Kamala Harris gained 75 million votes; Biden got 81 million in 2020. Are we all antifa now?  

With the federal government shutdown, prices rising, employment falling, health insurance set to increase (in many cases double) for millions of Americans, a recession likely, and an enemies list as large as half the U.S. population, Trump may finally succeed in forging solidarity among his enemies, thereby creating the very bogey he imagined, a genuine antifa movement. And if that happens, there will be an army of people ready to “speak out for me.”

Great American anti-fascists 

The following is a list of famous or notable anti-fascists, or antifas. They are not all radicals, socialists, liberals, or even Democrats — but they are anti-fascist. Trump would sic ICE on them if he could. Feel free to add names to the list and send them to me: 

Thomas Paine, Benjamin Rush, Aaron Burr (not for shooting Hamilton), William Lloyd Garrison, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglas, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Henry Ward Beecher, Sojourner Truth, Abraham Lincoln, the Union Army, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Louisa May Walcott, Henry David Thoreau, William Dean Howells, Edward Bellamy, Margaret Fuller, Thorstein Veblen, Eugene V. Debs, Emma Goldman, Lincoln Steffens, John Reed, Upton Sinclair, Jane Addams, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Georgia O’Keefe, Helen Keller, Franklin Roosevelt, George S. Patton, 2.5 million U.S. troops in the European theatre of war in World War II, Clifford Odets, Eleonor Roosevelt, John Garfield, Humphrey Bogart, Dashiell Hammett, Edward G. Robinson, Dorothy Parker, Orson Welles, Billie Holiday, Robert Ryan, Lillian Hellman, Henry Fonda, the Marx brothers, Meyer Schapiro, Barnett Newman, Philip Guston, Norman Lewis, Ad Reinhardt, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Frank Sinatra (for a while), Woodie Guthrie, Theodore Bikel, Joan Baez, Jackson Pollock, John Coltrane, Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller, Bob Dylan, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Philip Roth, Benjamin Spock, Allen Ginsberg, William Kunstler, Louis Armstong, Malcolm X, Betty Friedan, Martin Luther King, Muhammed Ali, Angela Davis, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Sam Cooke, Phil Ochs, Gil Scott-Heron, Pete Seeger, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Max Roach, Mahalia Jackson, Stanley Kubrick, Zero Mostel, Norman Lear, Spike Lee, Jane Fonda, LeBron James, Billie Eilish, Tom Hanks, AOC, Jamelle Bouie, Joaquin Phoenix, Bernie…

Illustration by Sue Coe.

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Image by Chad Stembridge.

I argue in my book, Liberal White Supremacy: How Progressives Silence Racial and Class Oppression, that the divides among the political left can be understood through an analysis of four factors: Perspectives on capitalism, tactics (confrontational versus non-confrontational), approach to racism, and approach to working-class issues. This book extended the analysis I put forward in my 2016 CounterPunch article that criticized Hillary Clinton’s inability or unwillingness to emotionally connect with working-class people.

Like many others, I have argued that the Democratic Party has lost touch with the working class. However, unlike some critics, I do not believe prioritizing working-class people requires abandoning so-called “cultural” issues, such as transgender rights and racism. Labeling these systems of oppression as “identity” or “culture wars” is a reductive silencing tactic. Working-class people deal with multiple oppressions, including transphobia, ableism, racism, and sexism. Being “working class” is also an identity, one that is often defined through a white lens. That is why in my book I call for an intersectionality that does not whitewash racism or deny class elitism.

These core issues underlie the recent conversation between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates. On September 28, they discussed “how the left should think about the work of politics and persuasion in this moment,” in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder. In this conversation, Klein addressed Hillary Clinton’s statement on the “basket of deplorables,” which he viewed as dehumanizing. This piqued my interest because I used this statement in my book as the point of departure for my analysis of the Democratic Party’s class elitism. I state, “Many have noted that Trump’s behavior emboldened white supremacists, giving them national permission to be more forthright in their racism. We could make a similar claim about HRC and the liberal class. Her condemnation of Trump supporters gave liberals permission to openly denigrate the group of people they had long despised, working-class European Americans and so-called rednecks.” In his conversation with Coates, Klein referenced Clinton’s statement, using it to highlight two points about politics and the Democratic Party: 1. Working-class people in red states feel disliked by Democrats, and 2. The Democratic Party must focus on “big-tent politics” and coalitions that can build power.

In Liberal White Supremacy, I write about my childhood in the “red” part of Southwestern Pennsylvania. Many people in this community, including my late father, did not care about being liked. The anger they felt toward liberals was fueled by frustrating interactions with people they saw as elitist, self-righteous bureaucrats, who enforced rules that made no sense to them and did not benefit them (e.g., in public assistance and public schools).

My book shows these frustrations toward liberals exist not only among working-class people in red states but also among radical progressives who liberals shamed for being disruptive to the process, while fighting injustices in their public school system. When I saw children, including my own, being harmed by overly authoritarian educational approaches or subjected to queerphobic and racist comments, I was not concerned with being liked, keeping friends, or following inadequate procedures to address these issues.

On Klein’s second point, I agree that the Democratic Party and liberals should build bridges and coalitions. However, those bridges must be maintained rather than exploited to further careers and empires, abandoning the working-class once Democrats regain control. I suspect that some wealthy liberals advocating for coalitions to grow Democratic power are driven mainly by a desire to return to the civil discourse, comfort, and safety they experienced under Barack Obama’s presidency, one that allowed them to quietly pursue their careerist ambitions rather than continuing the fight for the working class, people of color who sustained them. In my book, I  stated, “Donald Trump and Barack Obama, ironically, serve the same psychological purpose for European American liberals. They simplify the world of racists into easy-to-compartmentalize, dichotomous groups of good and bad people. By loving Barack Obama and hating Donald Trump, liberals can prove that they belong on the good, nonracist side. Trump’s persistent refusal to play along with liberal rhetoric of colorblindness and unity was a rude awakening for many progressives who were in a ‘post-racial’ slumber during the presidency of Barack Obama.” They are now ill-equipped to face openly racist politicians in power.

Furthermore, in response to Ezra Klein’s position that Charlie Kirk practiced politics the right way, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, “The reduction of Black people to serfdom was the unfortunate price of white unity…the hard question must be asked: If you would look away from the words of Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?” I see this as the central point we should consider when thinking about “big-tent” politics for the Democratic Party. To what extent is this about building white solidarity? After all, the history of constructing whiteness involved sacrificing class solidarity for racial (white) solidarity. We can honestly engage with this criticism while simultaneously recognizing the need for the Democratic Party to build power through coalitions.

Reverend William Barber II, Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, criticized Democrats, such as Obama, for centering the middle class. The language Obama used did not humanize poor and working-class people. As we call on Democrats to talk to people across the political divide, we must ask: Who is being included in the tent? Whose voices will be privileged? How will the most vulnerable and marginalized communities in these coalitions be supported and uplifted after democrats use them to gain control?

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Image by Sandra Seitamaa.

One strangely hot November afternoon, I waited for my elementary-school-aged kids to arrive at their bus stop. The quiet in our rural area was eerie. It captured the mood in the days after a national election that no one in my little community yet knew exactly how to respond to.

In my rush out the door, I’d grabbed my baseball cap, with the logo for my preferred presidential candidate on it, to shield my eyes from the sun’s glare.

The bus arrived and left. I collected my charges and, just as we were preparing to walk home, a tall young man leapt from the passenger seat of a battered Chevy pickup truck parked at the side of the road. He shook one sunburned finger at my hat and yelled, “Traitor! Traitor!” his face red with rage, or possibly alcohol — who knew? I gripped the pepper spray I carry in my pocket and told my kids to run home. They disappeared into the woods.

Luckily, the man scuttled back into his vehicle and drove off as soon as I looked him in the eye and sized him up. (Maybe word hadn’t yet spread that masks could do more than protect from illness. They could also let a man harass families without the moral weight of the act landing on him. How little we understood, just months ago!)

Once his truck disappeared, I walked home, rattled, not sure how to explain what had happened to my kids. But in the foyer, they explained the whole scene for me in their own satirical way.

One child shook a finger and yelled, in a mockingly deep voice, “Traitor!” Another pretended to swoon in response. “Oh no! I am so scared! What a big, brave man!” They collapsed in giggles.

This is the sort of anti-bully cosplay I’ve come to see often in recent months: kids I know strutting around with their chests puffed out like roosters, imitating a neighborhood bully who insults immigrants. Expressions of fake awe about motorcycle gangs that pass by displaying Confederate flags and other racist symbols of the old South and revving their engines for attention. (“Wow! They are so strong and tough! I want to shake their hands!”)

As private as this mockery tends to be, lest (sadly) someone retaliate with violence, it gives us a way to express our sorrow at what is happening to the American value of peaceful coexistence, while lightening the mood. Such laughter diminishes the bullies among us, at least in our hearts. As leaders like California Governor Gavin Newsom and comedian Jimmy Kimmel show so well, it can diminish them publicly by holding up a mirror to their bluster and overreach.

Humor as Resistance

The use of parody against authoritarian leaders is nothing new. Among my favorite models is Serbian activist Srdja Popovic’s book Blueprint for Revolution. Recounting his own experiences with the student movement that, in the 1990s, resisted then-dictator Slobodan Milosevic, Popovic explains how jokes about ruling elites can make them look less invincible, while also puncturing widespread fear. And better yet, leaders who try to suppress such humor tend to look ridiculous. For example, Serbian police arrested (so to speak) a barrel with Milosevic’s face painted on it after Popovic and his fellow activists encouraged citizens to line up and hit it with a bat.

We in the mid-Atlantic region got a taste of how such mundane gestures can goad leaders into buffoonery when then-Justice Department employee Sean Charles Dunn threw his sandwich at one of the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers Trump recently deployed in Washington, D.C. The Department of Justice tried to charge Dunn with assaulting a federal officer, a felony, but a grand jury declined to bring such charges against him. Whether or not Dunn actually meant to be funny, that incident reminds me of how a seemingly small act of resistance can indeed expose executive overreach.

As I walked in a September protest against President Trump’s National Guard occupation of Washington, I watched leaders of the tens of thousands of marchers hoist a banner depicting Dunn with his sandwich and felt strangely encouraged by the raucous cheering that echoed through the capital. He has, in fact, become a potent symbol of the anti-Trump resistance.

Men and Rage

I guess there’s nothing new about angry men, either — at least not in my neighborhood. My home sits in a valley, and the nearby rural highway often feels to me like a repository of White male road rage. I moved here in 2020 and, just in that first year, I watched two drivers at two different moments plow, purposefully or not, into the vehicles in front of them. In one case, the driver got out and began hurling racial slurs at the group of Latino farmworkers he had slammed into.

If you’re unlucky enough to be standing by the side of that road, you’d better believe that you could get hurt, even if it’s just by someone speeding. The battered guardrails at the valley’s nadir attest to that. Once, a cop pulled me over when I was walking home along that very road after my car broke down to warn me that I could get hurt by the reckless drivers there. Safe in my White suburban mom identity, while pointing at the dimpled metal of the rails along that stretch of road, I replied, “No kidding. Why don’t you pull more of them over instead of me?” He blushed and actually agreed before letting me go home.

And mind you, those guys on my road are anything but aberrations. Many signs these days point to a scourge of anger and despair among American men, who all too often don’t seem to have been raised to express a wide range of emotions. A Pew Research study from early 2025 found that 57% of U.S. adults think children’s caretakers place far too little focus on teaching boys to talk about their feelings when they’re sad or upset. Less than a third said the same about girls. In another survey, at least two-thirds of parents felt that boys were uncomfortable expressing feelings of fear, sadness, loneliness, and insecurity. Nearly half of those parents also felt that boys were uncomfortable expressing feelings of love. By and large, while women and men might feel anger in similar numbers, men are significantly more likely to act out their anger using verbal or physical aggression.

Though laughter offers a wonderful way to respond to stress, it turns out that it, too, is remarkably gendered. Women are more likely to laugh in social settings, while we as a society tend to expect men to make other people laugh through jokes and humor. Right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan is a notably popular exception to such a generalization in his ability to express vulnerability and laugh at himself. An analysis by Industry Leaders Magazine argues that his largely male audience does indeed value his willingness to admit he’s been wrong and his openness to laughing at himself. As one example, in an interview with English comedian Russell Brand, Rogan poked fun at himself as a child, a kid then learning martial arts, calling himself “so weird” and laughing.

When we express ourselves peaceably rather than by being accusatory, threatening, or violent, we connect with others, as Rogan shows so well (regardless of what you or I may think of his politics). And the ability to connect that he has — a trait conservative activist Charlie Kirk arguably had as well — may otherwise be in short supply among today’s male adults, especially on the political right. About a third of Americans report that they are lonely at least some of the time, though women tend to reach out more often to friends or loved ones when they feel that way. It’s probably no accident that men in this country are four times more likely than women to die by suicide.

If a certain prevalent strain of MAGA masculinity feeds on anger and hate — just look at “he who hates his political opponents” (a.k.a. our president!) and his speech at Kirk’s funeral — it’s not an easy persona to sustain. Just consider all the mourners who showed up at Kirk’s memorial service in genuine grief. Perhaps what most unnerved the Trump administration, when comedian Jimmy Kimmel flashed that clip of the president redirecting a question about Kirk’s death to the subject of his new White House ballroom, was confronting how alone he was in his indifference.

After Charlie Kirk

Given all the hostile rhetoric of Trump and his party toward their political foes, I find it easy to blame him and his followers for the uptick of political violence in this country over the past decade. After all, the vast majority of domestic extremist attacks have been perpetrated by individuals professing right-wing ideologies. Yet, as Jia Lynn Yang of the New York Times points out, this year’s spate of violence against public figures did not map as clearly onto the political spectrum as in earlier eras. Today, the attacker tends to be a “lone individual, lost in a conversation with an online void.” After all, Charlie Kirk’s shooter didn’t even vote in the last election. In a text exchange, he referred to the engravings he had made on his bullets, which included words like “catch, fascist,” as “mostly a big meme.”

While it would be reductionist to blame violence on video games and other nihilistic online spaces, it’s worth considering that the current generation of young people do, of course, spend more time online than any previous generation. If popular war games form part of their immersive environments, we as a society would do well to look more closely not just at the political leanings of shooters, but the contexts within which political violence flourishes in contemporary America.

What makes a gun feel like the solution to any political disagreement for some individuals? And if people like Kirk’s alleged killer Tyler Robinson, don’t see it as a solution, then what does it mean to shoot someone? If political assassination is a crime of despair, what series of events leads a person to such a feeling and such an act? Psychology tells us that anger makes us feel more powerful because of the adrenaline that courses through our bodies prior to acting out. But what causes a young man who, unlike Donald Trump, professes to be tired of hate to kill?

A New American Way?

I’m at a loss. And I think many of us may be. But what we can do (and by we here, I mean those of us who write stuff) is call attention to the forms of nonviolent resistance that challenge our prevalent culture of rage and alienation. The people participating in the “We Are All D.C.” march that I mentioned earlier held homemade signs like “D.C. crime wave” (with a picture of President Trump waving from the White House), played music, and sang. Though arguably comparable in size to the D.C. Women’s March of 2017, this demonstration warranted exactly zero articles in the New York Times. Somehow, in the age of Donald Trump, such legacy media outfits tend to prefer to amplify angry male voices rather than those of resistance, which, I think, is a genuine problem, explain it as you will.

If you think that a focus on resistance, humor, and joy is a losing path, as Kamala Harris’s “joy-based campaign” turned out to be, maybe you should remember that being with others in person does materially change the chemistry of our bodies. When we laugh or cry, especially in community, our bodies can release dopamine, serotonin, and other chemicals that support empathy, communication, and a sense of hope for the future.

Perhaps with a greater sense of community, we would also take in more of our disturbing world and not, for instance, forget the two Minnesota lawmakers another extremist shot and killed in June or the young Black student recently found hanging from a tree in Mississippi. They received remarkably less attention than Charlie Kirk.

Unfortunately, our field of vision remains narrow indeed and, like the road I stood on that day last November, it contains a disproportionate number of angry White men. And no less unfortunately, we’re speeding down it quickly with a maniac in the driver’s seat, and it lacks the guardrails of a law-abiding Supreme Court and a constitutionally aware Secretary of Defense.

Unless we start talking to one another, that road seems to be leading nowhere good. In the meantime, you might try a little humor or mockery to get through the day. If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend it.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

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Timeline of Operation Midnight Hammer – Public Domain

With the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites at Natanz, Isfahan, and Fordow, the United States risked becoming “plugged … into some of the fiercest conflicts in the world,” according to veteran Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn. The ceaseless refrain—repeated by Prime Minister Netanyahu in his latest tirade at the UN General Assembly, “the curse of Iran’s terror axis”—“constitutes the most awesome threat not only to Israel, but to U.S. interests in the region, means that Trump is now directly involved “not only against Iran, but in interlinked conflicts” against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and various Shiite paramilitary groups aligned with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Iraq. Should the Islamic Republic choose to retaliate against American troops stationed in the vicinity of its reach, the U.S. will not interpret it as an overdue moment of reckoning for its years of nihilistic endeavors—it will treat it as yet another unprovoked offensive. Key to the expansion of their power and territory, violent states are largely in the business of exploiting pretexts, manipulating or even fabricating threats that justify intervention and subjugation. The new phase of the conflict against Iran thus carries all the foul trappings of a “forever war,” in which the stated objectives admittedly cannot be attained, and withdrawal is considered a humiliating capitulation that haunts electoral success. Trump’s patented volatility could prevent this outcome, but that would require a decoupling of Iran from the conflicts raging in the Arab states.

The timing was telling. As Iran’s Foreign Minster Araghchi met with European leaders in Geneva, who counseled the Islamic Republic to call off the bombing of Israel and accept U.S. demands to relinquish all uranium enrichment, Israel was pummeling Tehran. Pressure was being exerted on all fronts, but the professed goal of preventing the Iranian regime from developing nuclear weapons suffers from a fundamental incoherence: the more violent these preventive efforts become, the more likely it is that Iran will move to weaponize its nuclear energy. Although current assessments, from the IAEA to Tulsi Gabbard, conclude that it has been over two decades since Iran pursued such a program, figures in both Israel and the U.S. insist on a repetition of previous debacles. “The world has witnessed how the United States attacked Iraq for, as it turned out, no reason at all,” wrote Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld in August 2004. “Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy.” A 2012 article by the late Kenneth Waltz that caused quite a stir proposed that, “Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, Iranian policy is not made by ‘mad mullahs’ but by perfectly sane ayatollahs who want to survive just like any other leaders.” If the regime “desires nuclear weapons, it is for the purpose of providing for its own security, not to improve its offensive capabilities (or destroy itself).”

“Iran doesn’t want to speak to Europe,” Trump said during the Geneva proceedings. “They want to speak to us. Europe is not going to be able to help on this one.” Consistent with U.S. positions taken in the past, European involvement in this region can serve only two purposes: one, to effectively communicate U.S. demands in its stead; and two, to provide a veneer of multilateral legitimacy, assuaging the world community whenever it feels that the U.S. is exercising outsized influence in negotiations. One 1999 EU resolution following the Wye Memorandum negotiations, for example, lamented that “despite the fact that it continues to be the leading supplier of economic and financial assistance to the region, the European Union was not involved in the political discussions which led to the resumption of dialogue nor in the undertakings entered into”—a historical pattern that a handful of European states profess to have put behind them by recognizing the State of Palestine.

Iran’s exchange with Israel was largely a predictable culmination of the events stimulated by October 7, when Israel, in league with its ascendant American backers, seized upon “the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust (Jonathan Greenblatt)” and began implementing their contingency plans for Gaza. From the U.S. and Israel’s point of view, Tehran constitutes the final domino required to fall in a series of four: first, the leadership of Hamas, having orchestrated the bloody 2023 break-out from the Gaza Strip, what senior Israeli national security official Giora Eiland labeled in 2004 as a “huge concentration camp,” the kill-list of Deif, Haniyeh, and Sinwar graciously prepared by the International Criminal Court in the form of arrest warrants; second, the leadership of Hezbollah, whose subsequent intervention on behalf of the Palestinians led to the decimation of its own leadership and command structure, while producing a deep trepidation among fellow Lebanese to become embroiled in more war with Israel; third, the rapid undoing of the Assad regime in Syria, ending not only the gross depredations of that family’s dynasty, but also the primary land-route through which Iran could militarily bolster its Arab allies.

Posing as the arbiter of maturity and wisdom, The New York Times’ editors recently opined that, before “being dragged into another war in the Middle East,” which would entail “committing American blood and treasure,” Trump and his retinue of extraordinary legal scholars mustn’t forget to “put the issue to a vote in Congress,” so as not to violate the canons of domestic checks and balances and hence repeat the mistakes of our past. After all, “Our laws are explicit on this point.” To declare war “is not the decision of Mr. Netanyahu or Mr. Trump. Under the Constitution, Congress alone has that power.” With this prudent admonition, the editors confess that, of course, “Iran’s government is a malevolent force in the world and that it has made substantial progress toward acquiring a nuclear weapon,” but “thanks partly to Israel’s humbling of Iranian proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah,” there may be another way by which the beast can be subdued. No mention is made, as part of this liberal civics review, of the flagrant illegality of Israel’s bombing of Iran, its ongoing genocidal project in Gaza, the conduct of its “humbling” of Arab foes, or of U.S. complicity in it all, the last of which proceeds with a multi-dimensional criminality designated only for the most powerful international gangsters.

Sentiments such as this, rich in both entitlement and fatuity, elicit ridicule in other, civilized intellectual cultures better acquainted with the injurious nature of Washington’s aggressions. Even in countries on the immediate periphery of those discussed above, having been (by and large) spared the tonnage of F-35 payloads and Abrams tanks, observers perceive new waves of U.S. bombing as little more than another stage in a trite imperial pattern, with perhaps still more devastating consequences than its previous incarnations. Aasim Sajjad Akhtar writes in Pakistan’s leading daily, Dawn, that, “There is no secret to what the Empire and its Israeli outpost want—to eliminate the one challenger to their power in the Muslim world,” all others having been effectively cut down or coopted. “If today the argument is that the repressive, theocratic regime that rules Iran must be removed, yesterday the same was said about the Afghan Taliban, Saddam Hussein, the Assad dynasty and Muammar Qadhafi.” Incidentally, at least three of those governments were destroyed under concocted pretexts that metamorphosed into loftier concerns over state repression. In the case of Pakistan, Akhtar explains, “Ziaul Haq and Pervez Musharraf immensely damaged Pakistani society by aligning with Washington to prosecute wars in Afghanistan,” the “enduring legacies” of which are “wide-spread influence of the militant right-wing, and the ‘Kalashnikov culture’” that has fueled Islamist insurgencies in the Balochistan region. Discussion of this prevailing maelstrom will remain vexingly absent from Western arguments favoring Iran’s destruction.

News reports claim that both Hezbollah and the Houthis have been ordered by their paymaster in Tehran to stand down for the time being, to be reactivated in the event of another U.S. escalation. Parties to the Axis of Resistance, however, understand well the illusory nature of such a stasis. Should Israel find itself itching for a fix, it will simply provoke a conflict with a target of its choosing, confident in the ability of the great revisionists of chronology in Western media to properly assign blame. Already, the media are warning of Iranian efforts to rearm its Axis, with numerous shipments of weapons reportedly intercepted en route to Lebanon and Yemen. All the while, Prime Minister Netanyahu has accused the al-Sharaa regime in Syria of crossing “red lines,” that is, inside Syria, one of which is sending troops to areas on the outskirts of the Golan Heights, illegally annexed to Israel. The utterly laughable pretext is the protection of the Druze minority of Syria, as if Israel has suddenly decided to balance its genocidal impulses in Gaza with purely altruistic ones in Syria. In fact, this “pledge to defend the group is giving [Israel] an opportunity to display military dominance over its weaker neighbor and assert more control over their shared border,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

President Obama’s special envoy to Iran, Robert Malley, summarized Israel’s current strategy to Adam Shatz as “the regionalisation of the ‘mow the lawn’ strategy practised in Gaza and Lebanon.” In Syria, he added, “it has gone beyond ‘mowing the lawn’ – it’s ‘mow the hell out of whatever dirt may still be there.’ Even without any evidence of a Syrian intent to attack, even in the presence of clear conciliatory signals from the al-Sharaa government, Israel has continued to go after supposed weapons caches and to occupy parts of southern Syria. They did this because they could, because Syria was in no position to lift a finger in response.” In this respect, Syria is the ideal punching bag, enduring abuse while clamoring for legitimacy.

This drive to provoke is tendentious in Israeli strategic operations, and the associated apologetics that define mainstream commentary likely affect the measurement and care with which rivals conduct their retaliatory maneuvers. In other words, in a thoroughly captured media environment, unprovoked strikes can be sold as acts of defense. A Chatham House analysis of last April’s Iranian bombing of Israel, retaliation for the latter’s attack on Iran’s embassy in Damascus that killed a senior commander of the IRGC, along with 15 others, found that, “Had Iran’s intent been to hurt Israel, it wouldn’t have violated a core principle of military operations – the element of surprise. But it did. It telegraphed its intentions to Washington and several Arab and European capitals, and assured them that its strike would be relatively limited,” resulting in minimal damage. Efforts to sell Iran’s later bombing of Tel Aviv and Haifa as more unprovoked aggression have fallen flat in most of the world, resulting in a worrying deficit of sympathy for Israel.

Historically, widely publicized atrocities have prompted Israel’s most ardent supporters to greatly accelerate their white-washing efforts. The first major debacle with which the lobby contended was the Qibya massacre of October 1953, when David Ben Gurion’s forces, led by a young Ariel Sharon, killed some 70 Palestinian civilians. The fallout was unexpectedly difficult, drawing rebuke from Washington. Isaiah Kemen, the Abraham Foxman of his day, conceded privately that the killings “undermined the moral position of the Jewish people … discredited the premises of our propaganda and has given the color of truth to Arab propaganda.” Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and, later, Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9 resulted in similar international isolation.

Israel’s image as a blameless sanctuary for the Jewish people, surrounded by “human animals,” in the forthright phrase of Israel’s former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, once benefited from a buoyancy rarely seen in world affairs, certainly for a state of its size. This was not achieved through standard techniques of Congressional lobbying. What cannot be denied is that the operative networks of the “Israeli Lobby” extend far beyond AIPAC, the ADL, or even the Christian Broadcasting Network. In fact, they encompass practically the whole spectrum of elite Western institutions, including the news media, scholarship, politics, the corporate sector, high-tech, entertainment, and finance. So awesome and reflexive are their defenses (and promotions, in the case of the American Evangelical community) of Israeli violence that widespread cynicism thrives as to whose bidding the U.S. government is actually doing.

Horrifying images of mothers holding withered children and mobs of incalculable Gazans struggling for food aid has evidently turned the tide of public opinion against Israel, once again. A July 2025 Gallup poll shows that, by now, only a minority of Americans approve of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, and a majority disapprove of its bombing of nuclear sites in Iran. The time is now ripe for the kind of reappraisal required to extend this disapproval. We need not accept the notion that U.S.-Israeli terror is the sole determinant in the remaking of the Middle East. Its obvious unpopularity can help give rise to an educational restructuring, in which all roads no longer lead to Iran. The task, of course, is a tall one.

Iran as Boogeyman

Svante Cornell, a Swedish scholar long known for his predilections for the Azeri dictatorship, bemoans the Iranian “arc of domination” in the neighboring Arab World, as it takes advantage of what he feels are the honest miscalculations of the U.S., particularly in Iraq. He alleges that the Bush administration, for example, bet on the wrong horse, falsely expecting that empowering its Shia majority would translate into democratic dividends and gratitude for having toppled its chief enemy, Saddam Hussein. “But,” Cornell says, “the U.S. Iraq war did not go according to plan, and the missteps of the U.S. opened an opportunity for Iran to step in and work not only to counter the U.S. presence in Iraq, but to assert its own influence in the vacuum created by the United States.” How utterly nonplussed Bush and his planners must have been at the frigid welcome they received in Iraq, one of many dramatic twists in the epic, Why Do They Hate Us? The real story of our “failure” in Iraq is therefore the industrious cunning of the mullahs, who thwarted another democratization effort. Bone-headed accounts such as this read much like the internal assessments of the Reagan era, couched in the purity and virtue of its own foreign policy. A 1983 intelligence memo declared that “Moscow has chosen to allow its relationship with three successive US Administrations to deteriorate in substantial measure because of its refusal to moderate its aggressive pursuit of Third World opportunities.” Like Russia before it, Iran today is not to cultivate allies, only obedience, and fold whenever the legitimacy of its power projection comes into doubt.

In one of the few in-depth studies of the event, Ervand Abrahamian writes in his history of the U.S. and Britain’s 1953 overthrow of Iran’s parliamentary regime that “the coup left a deep imprint on the country—not only on its polity and economy but also on its popular culture and what some would call mentality.” Governments the world over suffered similar fates throughout the 20^th century, many of whom are yet to fully recover even after obtaining a degree of independence. Materially, continues Abrahamian, “the coup set back by at least two decades the whole process of oil nationalization throughout the world—especially in the Middle East and North Africa.” Along with converting the country into a vicious dictatorship that amassed one of the worst records of torture and political repression in the world, Iranians were not granted reprieve from the scramble for its oil resources. Eventually, the era of decolonization saw one victim after another begin to retake, or at least reorient the control of, its foreign-owned resources. Major producers slowly “took over their oil resources, and, having learned from the past, took precautions to make sure the oil companies would not return victorious.”

In the wake of the October 1973 war between Egypt and Israel, and the ensuing oil embargo, Henry Kissinger pioneered the method by which the excess petrodollars of the region’s major oil producers would be recycled into expensive capital-intensive projects procured by the West. The aim was to establish a multinational counter to the price-setting powers of the producers by setting up what analyst David Spiro called an “oligopsony,” or a “cartel of consumers.” “Large scale development projects and other projects will put the Shah, for example, in a position where he must sell oil in order to sustain the commitments he has made,” Kissinger told a group of congressmen in June 1975. Diplomatic historian Jacob Darwin Hamblin’s review of the record finds that “Nuclear power generation became a key part of that petroleum strategy” primarily to free up oil for lucrative sales on the international market. Assistance from Western institutions was crucial. Eager to begin feeding from the trough, “French negotiators convinced Iran to build its enrichment facility in France, and the decision turned out to be a serious blunder for Iran, tying up considerable sums of capital.” It ultimately proved “particularly good for France, which was able to secure its own enrichment future with external money, and have the facility at home, in the southern provincial village of Pierrelatte. Most importantly, the project absorbed an enormous amount of Iranian capital and gave France some leverage in its negotiations with Iran in any future oil crisis.” The arrangement quickly bore fruit. “We may have broken OPEC,” Kissinger positively reported to President Ford in March 1975.

Before long, Iranian authorities grew skeptical of this scheme and sought more independence in its quest for peaceful nuclear energy. Having ratified the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1970, Iran was legally entitled to produce on its own soil, access, and dispose of its nuclear energy as it saw fit, granted that it was for peaceful purposes. Breaking free of external control became a key rallying cry for the young protestors who eventually spearheaded the removal of the Shah. “The behavior of the United States reinforced Iranian desires for diversification in partnership,” says Hamblin, and, since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, to no one’s surprise, “Russia has been particularly helpful in picking up where Europeans left off,” providing technology and know-how on drastically different terms. In light of other changes in international political alignment, China has also become the primary purchaser of Iranian oil, particularly worrying because it “is too big for Trump to bully now,” as Bloomberg Businessweek has recently noted.

Little wonder why editors in the business press seem to want nothing more than to restore the pre-1979 system. Trump has wondered aloud why Iran would want to produce nuclear energy while in possession of so much oil, and many commentators now look forward to an agreement which would see it again import its enriched uranium, ostensibly from Western sources. Put differently, Iranian energy-independence would prove disastrous for U.S. control.

Throughout the 1990s, the reformist government of President Khatami suggested a track for negotiations aiming to resolve all the most pressing areas of antagonism, including “weapons of mass destruction, a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the future of Lebanon’s Hizbullah organisation and cooperation with the UN nuclear safeguards agency [IAEA],” as reported in the Financial Times in 2006. The EU urged that it be pursued, but was forced by the Clinton administration to fall in line and retreat. A similar situation followed the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq in 2003, when the U.S. similarly rebuffed Iran-EU efforts. In May 2010, with encouragement of the Obama administration, Turkey and Brazil offered to help mediate the growing impasse, proposing that Iran would export close to 1,2000 kg of its low-enriched uranium to France and Russia for conversion into civilian-grade fuel, after which it would be returned for its domestic industries. The next month, the U.S. killed it at the Security Council in the form of Resolution 1929, opting for more sanctions.

In a 2013 profile on the current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, specialist Akbar Ganji outlines a solid rationale that Iran could easily adopt, in light of the preceding 46 years of antipathy towards the Islamic Republic: “Khamenei suspects that even if all of Iran’s nuclear facilities were closed down, or opened up to inspections and monitoring, Western governments would simply pocket the concessions and raise other issues—such as terrorism, human rights, or Israel—as excuses for maintaining their pressure and pursuing regime change,” citing Libya’s Qaddafi and Saddam’s Iraq, who were still invaded after having relinquished their weapons of mass destruction. The regime still chose the path of negotiations, concluding with the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, subject to the most rigorous sanctions regime in the world, hopeful sign for anyone worried about a threat from Iran. The E3, flouting Russian and Chinese efforts to salvage diplomacy, reimposed severe “snapback” sanctions in September that will further strangle the Iranian economy, in what is billed psychotically as another effort to kickstart negotiations. As the documentary record reveals, Iran ought to be praised for the supreme restraint and patience it has exercised in the face of these absurd machinations, wherein threats, sanctions, cyberattacks, and outright bombings are marketed as peace inducements.

The power wielded by the U.S. in certain areas has since grown significantly since the pre-revolutionary period, particularly in the sphere of economic warfare, otherwise known as international finance. Authors of a 2022 article in the American Journal of Sociology find that the financialization of U.S. warfare has greatly expanded its ability to instill submission to its commercial designs abroad. They argue that the policy “works like a virus by requiring infected corporate giants in high-risk countries to act as if they were U.S. legal persons and therefore to always follow U.S. law over other rules,” subordinating them to a U.S.-dominated “surveillance capitalism.” In the case of Iran, the U.S. began by targeting smaller, defenseless firms, then gradually enlarged its bullying operation to include several juggernauts of global capital. “[S]tarting with a few nondescript companies dealing with Iran’s shadow economy, now the largest European banks, the world’s largest telecom equipment providers, the world’s largest aircraft manufacturer, the world’s largest oil companies, and the world’s largest rolling stock manufacturers have all seen their inner rules reconfigured by U.S. sanctions law, forcing them to pull out of global markets if not complying with U.S. sanctions law.” Keeping Iran’s economy dependent on oil sales operating in an international market would therefore keep it in a realm in which the U.S. still wields tremendous leverage.

Much the way during the Cold War the USSR was the ubiquitous specter used to justify U.S. intervention throughout the world—invoking political and military links, both real and fabricated—Iran has been assigned a similar role in the Middle East, presented as a near omnipotent boogeyman that has implanted its links deep in Arab states. This presentation greatly benefits U.S.-Israeli efforts to expand its warmaking in a region still considered critical for international power. October 7, it can be argued, handed Israel its own 9/11—an act of terrorism so severe that it can implement its most wide-ranging contingency plans while above suspicion.

In 2009, Anthony Cordesman wrote that during previous, bloody sojourns in Gaza, dignified as “operations” in Israeli parlance, the IDF “did not go to war with plans to conduct a sustained occupation [of Gaza], to try to destroy Hamas or all of its forces, or to reintroduce the Palestinian Authority and Fatah, although such contingency plans and exercises may have existed.” The past 24 months reveal that they certainly did exist, and would be implemented if given an adequate pretext. Internal plans likely stretch back much further, but one of the early articulations came from dovish Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who famously admitted to reporters in 1992, “I wish the Gaza Strip would sink into the water, but I cannot find for it such a solution.” His extremist statement did not spare him from the bullets of an even more extreme assassin three years later, but the depth of the sentiment he expressed endured in Israeli politics across a wide spectrum. In July 2014, the ultra-right Knesset member Moshe Feiglin wrote a seven-point prescription for Gaza, which reads like an exact playbook of what Israel has implemented since October 7. After issuing one official “ultimatum,” Israel’s army will seek to destroy the “enemy population” of Gaza, allowing those who wish to leave an outlet into the Sinai, hence Israel’s current need to control the Rafah. “Sinai is not far from Gaza and they can leave. This will be the limit of Israel’s humanitarian efforts,” he asserts. “All the military and infrastructural targets will be attacked with no consideration for ‘human shields’ or ‘environmental damage,’” he continues, after which the IDF will oversee a complete siege of the enclave. Then, “the IDF will conquer the entire Gaza, using all the means necessary to minimize any harm to our soldiers, with no other considerations.” Occupied Gaza will finally be absorbed into Greater Israel, as it is “part of our Land and we will remain there forever,” also helping to ease the burgeoning housing crisis in Israel. Feiglin is confident that the few wretched Arabs that remain can be paid to leave, or accept the supremacy of their new Israeli wardens.

The Arab delegations assembled in Cairo know full well that their efforts amount to political theater. A trivial point, worth reiterating, the U.S. and Israel have not spent the last two years destroying Gaza to simply institute a ceasefire, allow in massive humanitarian aid, rid it—somehow—of Hamas, spend upwards of $100 billion to rebuild an entire civilization, and then return it to the Palestinians, all of whom are still cut off from the West Bank. No, the infinite credit line required for such an effort is earmarked to convert the area into another province of Israel. Capitalizing on the recent killing of six Israelis in Jerusalem, Smotrich also announced his plan to annex 82% of the West Bank, in the process slandering the Palestinian Authority with the same hysterical rhetoric typically reserved for Hamas. In other words, there are no more “good Arabs” anywhere, and Israel must exert its control directly. He added that “the villages from which the terrorists came should look like Rafah and Beit Hanoun,” i.e., completely flattened and emptied of its current residents, paving the way for Israeli seizure.

Soon, the Egyptians will come to realize that the only appropriate humanitarian act left is to begin accepting droves of hapless Palestinians through the Rafah. The refusal to comply with Israel’s ethnic cleansing will therefore be superseded by the need to ensure that all Gazans do not simply die off amidst the rubble of their former environs. September’s Israeli bombing of Doha, meant to murder more of Hamas’s leadership as it considered peace proposals, was yet another stark warning to negotiating parties: Try as you might, our plan is already in full swing. Qatar responded: “As has happened before, the Israelis sabotaged hopes for peace, further prolonging the war and complicating efforts to bring back the hostages.” Cairo would surely be next, pending U.S. willingness to completely scrap the 1978 Camp David Accords, but Israel’s alleged discovery of new tunnels underneath the Philadelphi Corridor have not proven a sufficient ploy. Given that the members allegedly killed in the attack had arrived in from Turkey, with whom Israel does not have a security treaty, Ankara should also be on high alert.

Breach of the Genocide Convention aside, the lesser crime of targeted assassination is hardly discussed. Six UN special rapporteurs condemned the Doha strike, saying it “violates the human right to life, the UN Charter prohibition on excessive use of force, and Qatar’s sovereignty.” In response to the killing of Saleh Al-Arouri just south of Beirut in January, two of the same UN special rapporteurs observed that, “Israel was not exercising self-defence because it presented no evidence that the victims were committing an armed attack on Israel from Lebanese territory,” a key requirement of the UN Charter. One would be hard-pressed to find an Israeli assassination that is not befitting of such a characterization.

Relief for Gazans

After the April 2024 murder of seven aid workers working with the World Central Kitchen, B’Tselem published a report entitled Manufacturing Famine: Israel is committing the war crime of starvation in the Gaza Strip, finding that Israel’s begrudging permission of paltry international aid into the enclave is “clearly too little, too late, and attests to Israel being chiefly responsible for the humanitarian crisis that has, since the war began about six months ago, spiraled into the catastrophe we are witnessing now.” Israel is waging war not only on Gaza’s physical infrastructure, having destroyed cement factories, religious institutions, schools, hospitals, agricultural land, and sewage treatment facilities, but on the future of the very civilization that occupies it. Systematic starvation, when employed as a method of war, is doubly devastating; it not only consumes its immediate victims, like the ill and the elderly, it also severely impairs the development of children, particularly in their first two years of life. As is well-known, half of Gaza is composed of children, ensuring that, long after the current assault has ceased, Palestinians will continue to mire in its hideous effects.

At the end of last February, for example, Israel made its first foray into overseeing direct aid administration in Gaza since the October 7^th attacks, in a context Amnesty International characterized as an “already catastrophic humanitarian situation in the entire Gaza strip.” After escorting up to 30 aid trucks to the Nabulsi Roundabout, just southwest of Gaza City, “The events illustrate how a power vacuum in the Gaza Strip, particularly in its bombed-out biggest city in the north [Gaza City], has created a combustible mix of starving people, soldiers and militants that humanitarian experts and military analysts said was destined to blow up sooner or later.” Israel then decided to partake in the aid distribution process more directly, but not without its patented murderous touch, somewhat placating citizens who had worked to disrupt the dispatch of any aid. Instead, crowds of recipients were shot at indiscriminately, and aid workers, by mere virtue of aiding the intended prey, truly court their own demise. “The U.N. and international aid groups have scaled back their missions to the north in recent weeks because of the intensity of the conflict and widespread lawlessness,” The Wall Street Journal reported, resulting in conditions that resemble an archetypal Haitian disaster. More recently, when hospital beds, medical equipment, and medicines dried up, parallels were drawn to famines seen in Darfur and Somalia.

The so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a nonprofit registered in two of the most notorious tax-havens in the world—Switzerland and the State of Delaware—skirts altogether a system of international aid distribution managed by the UN, the World Food Programme, UNRWA, and others, in favor of one run by former intelligence and defense officials hailing from the U.S. and Israel, executing their orders via private military contractors at the direction of the IDF. Desperate recipients are forced to travel hours to one of only four announced distribution hubs, endure another crawl under the scorching sunlight while in overcrowded lines, and then, just before they are delivered their 24-pound portions, must subject themselves to biometric scanning (including facial recognition), feeding an already immense corpus of personal data readily used for the profiling and targeting of entire Gazan families. The aid scheme, which came under fire even internally, leading to the resignation of its own executive director on the grounds that it was not in accordance with “humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence,” is the latest mechanism by which Israel intends to further centralize its annihilation of Gaza. With Gaza City currently under cleansing, the remaining three sites in the Rafah will serve as the final staging ground for Israel’s expulsion of Gazans into the Sinai.

International aid agencies have expressed unanimous disdain for GHF, on the grounds that an organization so thoroughly militarized could not possibly be fulfilling a humanitarian role, seeing it instead as a means by which Israel can further weaponize food against an area “where you have the entire population at risk of famine; 100 percent of the population at risk of famine,” in the words of Jens Laerke, a high spokesman for the UN’s OCHA. Israel is fully cognizant of  how the GHF is viewed by established international agencies, but it is not driven by a quest for popularity.

Restraints on Israel?

The Biden administration made no effort to hide its commitment to Israel’s “right to defend itself.” The reasons adduced in commentary are the usual ones, most prominently the alleged puppeteering by the American Jewish donor class as the president entered a sensitive election year. But he knew well that Israel, up to its head of state, can be defied for the sake of core U.S. interests, should they differ. As President Obama’s vice president in 2015, Biden, along with the rest of the administration, watched with indifference as Prime Minster Netanyahu squealed incessantly, decrying the “historic mistake” that was the JCPOA with Iran, which, he warned during his unsolicited lecture to Congress, would only embolden “Iran’s march of conquest, subjugation and terror.” A year earlier, he watched as Secretary of State John Kerry signed off the Fatah-Hamas unity government forged in 2014, while Netanyahu was making it “absolutely clear” that PA President Abbas’s “pact with Hamas, a terrorist organisation that seeks Israel’s liquidation, is simply unacceptable.” At the heart of Israel’s rage was Hamas’s management of what Sara Roy had called “an enormous building boom” in Gaza, and economic growth fueled by investments from the Gulf states. It was only after a rogue Palestinian faction kidnapped and killed three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank in June that Netanyahu had his pretext to destroy the unity government, launching Operation Protective Edge.

Later, from October 2023 to November 2024, Biden vetoed four Security Council resolutions calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. Trump has now cast his second on September 18^th, indicating the continuity in dedication, and ensuring that “the dirty work Israel is doing for all of us” can continue, in German Chancellor Merz’s words. While many analogies are drawn between Israeli apartheid and White-minority rule in South Africa, perhaps the most germane is the fact that, so long as the U.S. continued to bankroll and support the latter’s murderous imperial incursions into neighboring states like Namibia and Angola, its continuation seemed utterly inveterate. A November 1958 telegram sent from the U.S. embassy in Pretoria to the State Department, for example, communicated precisely this understanding. Ambassador Henry Byroade recalled the explanation of South Africa’s Foreign Minister, who, having earlier expressed concern about some mild U.S. criticisms of the growing apartheid regime at the General Assembly, nevertheless recognized that the definitive international power dynamics remained favorable to White nationalists: “A specific and strong resolution against South Africa voted for by a majority of nations in [the] UN,” Foreign Minister Eric Louw said, “did not matter so much as this was to be expected. What mattered perhaps more than all other votes put together was that of [the] U.S. in view [of] its predominant position of leadership in [the] Western world.” Likewise, only a radical change in U.S. policy can set a path towards liberation for the Middle East.

Occasionally, reacting to enormous domestic and international pressure, U.S. calls for humanitarian pauses or brief ceasefires breed hysteria inside the Israeli government. Deal after deal has been vetoed, opposed most vehemently by ultra-right coalition members of Netanyahu’s own government. Ben-Gvir of the Jewish Power Party threatened this last January to withdraw from the government should the IDF leave Gaza, with Smotrich panning such “reckless deals,” which constitute a “severe betrayal of the soldiers and the families who sacrificed what is most precious to them.” Punishment from the U.S. has been non-existent: the Biden administration suspended one shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, and later resumed deliveries of 500-pound ones; Trump has proposed ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s inhabitants to Egypt and Jordan, a prelude to the either the Gaza Riviera, or the “New Gaza” outlined in Trump’s 20-point plan. If there is still no daylight between the U.S. and Israel, a similar darkness characterizes the difference in Democratic and Republican treatments of Israeli intransigence.

In his memoirs, Henry Kissinger, who authorized Israel’s policy of expansion over peace with Egypt in 1971, leading to the U.S. becoming the éminence grise of the conflict, elucidates why the White House seldom loses sleep over its client’s myriad tantrums. On the inherent imbalance of power between the allies, he writes: “Israel is dependent on the United States as no other country is on a friendly power. Increasingly, Washington is the sole capital to stand by Israel in international forums.” On Israel’s recurring “bullying” of Washington, “Israel sees in intransigence the sole hope for preserving its dignity in a one-sided relationship. It feels instinctively that one admission of weakness, one concession granted without a struggle, will lead to an endless catalogue of demands as every country seeks to escape its problems at Israel’s expense.” The U.S. occasionally plays this game, too. For example, Netanyahu’s “surprise” attack on Doha was reported to have initially angered Trump, until he privately phoned his Israeli counterpart to inquire about its success.

Regarding the role of American Evangelicals, now the chief driving force of the Republicans, the late Amy Kaplan observed the following: “When the Christian Right,” embodied in the GOP, “started to flex its muscles in American politics, the dispensationalists in the movement did not sit back passively to watch for signs of the impending apocalypse in the Middle East. They started working to hasten God’s design through political organizing on behalf of Israel’s most far-right policies,” seeing the region as “God’s original gift to Abraham and as the final setting for the battle of Armageddon.” The lobby looking to influence Congress, having regenerated itself in the targeted country, began to work outward from the U.S., exerting its pressure on Israeli reactionaries to accelerate their plans. Following a private video conference last March with Prime Minister Netanyahu, the Washington Post reported that “congressional Republicans are seeking to amplify their party’s unconditional loyalty to the Jewish state, in contrast with the party that has long attracted the most Jewish voters.” And what better way than to collectively provoke the Final Battle with, say, Iran, than putting Minister Mike Huckabee at the helm of ambassadorship?

Realities and Prospects

In a June 2024 article, two Israeli historians, David Ohana and Oded Heilbronner, reveal the grave similarities between the violent Israeli activists who attacked Palestinians in the Old City on Jerusalem Day and the mobilization of fascism in 1920s Europe. Their actions serve as a kind of microcosm for Israeli state policies, more generally. “It was hard to distinguish between the thugs and the representatives of the state in the form of the Border Police; each of them had a well-defined role in imposing terror and fear on Old City residents in the annual fascistic ritual.” But the disturbing ascent of the right on the global stage means that these distinctions have disappeared across continents. From Narendra Modi’s anti-Muslim incitements, to Viktor Orban’s strangulation of press freedoms in Hungary, to continued repression in Paul Kagame’s Rwanda, to Javier Milei’s stuffing of the country’s judiciary by presidential decree, right-wing dictatorships are emboldened everywhere by a kind of Fascintern, headquartered in Washington, D.C., but sustained by an increasingly venomous citizenry reeling from the neoliberal onslaught. Although the authors recognize that this “analogy is not a one-on-one comparison between now and then,” the “civil war” raging within Israeli society finds release in preying on both the vulnerable at home and abroad, much the way crazed European ethno-chauvinists did in the decade preceding the Second World War. The current moment in the U.S. is not as Trotsky described, a fascism that counters large-scale working-class agitation, arising during crises of capital. The caricature of leftism concocted for the same purposes, linking the struggle for trans rights with creeping Sharia law, while casting university professors as the vanguard of the whole plot—the defilade to the virtuous, white, Christian enfilade—has proven more than sufficient, especially in a media environment increasingly reflective of the handful of mad men that lead them. The Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy is therefore swapped with the Iranian, draped in all the ignorance and racism incumbent on political cultures premised in insularity.

As was sometimes argued at the start of his first term in office, Trump’s contempt for established norms and institutions is neither unique nor without precedent. He routinely reenacts the thuggery of his more fondly remembered predecessors. That is, if his administration can be characterized as another kind of Enron-at-the-helm-of-the-presidency, it is because there had to have been an Enron-state fusion from which the analogy could be drawn. This seems to have finally dawned on many subsequent observers since the inauguration of his second term, but the awakening seems to be catalyzed only by domestic concerns of economic hardship and suppression of legal and political rights. At least the former grievance emanates from Trump’s treatment of governments abroad, a potential starting point. Should Americans learn the truth of the conditions driving the enmity between them and their advertised foes, an entire edifice of bipartisan propaganda will lose its scaffolding.

Paltry are examples in history in which an imperial power understands how to break its own self-perpetuating cycle of first attributing violent, terroristic designs to weaker enemies, then intervening violently to extinguish them, resulting in the armed resistance it claimed to oppose at the beginning. The declassified record is filled with examples of top-level planners correctly identifying the legitimate objections of the peoples they subjugate. This does not, in turn, constructively inform their approaches to the hostility that so concerns them. In one recently published document dated November 1979, President Carter’s National Security Council discussed various proposals on how to deal with both the Iranian hostage crisis, and how to undercut the new regime at its knees. “The Iranian revolution,” read one assessment, “was a true expression of deep-seated national will, and the anti-Americanism we are seeing is a true expression of national outrage at U.S. actions over the past 26 years. To support the overthrow of Khomeini will be seen in Iran as an attempted replay of 1953 and the return of the Shah.” Still toying with the possibility of either directly overthrowing the new government, or stimulating its collapse from within, planners cautioned that “we must prepare for the worst. The oil fields are what count in the final analysis. We should focus our attention on the south and prepare to hold it no matter what.” The theory, evidently, did not guide the praxis, to borrow a term of academic jargon, and the rather astute diagnosis of the revolt’s root causes influenced not the subsequent policy.

The same, quintessential doublethink holds strong sway in contemporary planning. Absent a declassified record available for today, we can safely ascertain that U.S. intelligence reads publicly available opinion polls of Iranians, perhaps the most comprehensive of which are produced by the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. Its May 2025 report sets the context: “Israel’s war in Gaza, assassinations of militia leaders close to Iran, and audacious attacks on Iranian territory have greatly heightened the Iranian public’s sense of insecurity. It should not be surprising, therefore, that public support for Iran acquiring nuclear weapons has grown steadily since the war in Gaza began.” Sixty-three percent of respondents support expanding Iran’s current nuclear activities in the event of a direct U.S. attack, and an additional 17% supported rebuilding it to current levels, totaling 80%. Three-quarters still believed that a restoration of the JCPOA would alleviate many of their economic hardships, though few expected it to happen. Seventy-one percent also felt that the cause of the Palestinians is an international responsibility, not simply one for the Arabs. Planners are as unfazed by the glaring data as they were 40 years ago, speaking to the consistency of their project, though their pretexts are gradually shrouding in untenability.

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Photograph SourcE: Zeev Barkan – CC BY 2.0

The Washington Post and its leading national security columnist, David Ignatius, have labeled the so-called “peace plan” for Gaza the “real deal.”  Ignatius’ view of the plan, which is essentially an ultimatum to Hamas that would amount to an unconditional surrender to Israel, is the latest example of Ignatius finding “light at the end of the tunnel” regarding U.S. initiatives on behalf of Israel or the impact of U.S. military weaponry in Ukraine’s war with Russia.  In 2023, Ignatius wrote that the “thing about tunnels is that you keep moving through them, darkness eventually gives way to light.”  In the meantime, the Russian and Israeli killing machines continue their genocidal warfare.

Donald Trump’s “peace plan” was carefully constructed to benefit Israeli interests with regard to ending the war and releasing the hostages.  All matters of interest to the Palestinians were either ignored or obfuscated to create the illusion of future stability and security in a “new Gaza.”  The plan is not the “comprehensive vision” that the mainstream media has concluded.  In actual fact, the plan is ambiguous about every detail that could bring stability, let alone peace, to the region.  Trump’s refusal to provide visas to the Palestinian Authority to attend last month’s UN General Assembly, including the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, does not augur well for his administration’s willingness to protect Palestinian rights.

The so-called peace plan states that the end of Hamas rule in Gaza would be replaced by a “technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” to be overseen by a supervisory “Board of Peace” led by Trump as Chairman.  However, the leadership role will be in the hands of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has long been a villain to Arab states.  Blair has been trying to insert himself into the the peace process for years in order to compensate for his complicity with President George W. Bush’s deceitful war with Iraq two decades ago.  The Israelis have never been willing to work closely with Blair, and the Arab states have not forgotten his indecent role in Iraq on behalf of Bush.

In any event, Israel has never indicated it would work with Palestinians on any “technocratic” or “apolitical” basis to stabilize Gaza, and the plan contains no clear line or timing for actual Israeli withdrawal.  The plan makes no mention of the nations that will finance the work that needs to be done and who would actually perform the work that will take decades.  Nevertheless, Ignatius calls the proposed Board of Peace a “game changer.”

The first version of Trump’s “peace plan” stated that the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority would eventually govern Gaze, but Netanyahu resisted a role for the Palestinian Authority and that language was removed.  Netanyahu has always referred to the Authority as a “terrorist state.”  It is difficult to imagine that Netanyahu would not insist on a security role in Gaza or would allow an international force to provide security.

In any event, it is difficult to imagine any stability without an active U.S. role in reconstruction and development, but there is no indication that Trump is willing to pursue any long-term U.S.  involvement.  There are references in the plan to an International Stabilization Force that would involve the United States, Egypt, and Jordan, but Israel has never committed to working with its Arab neighbors to stabilize Gaza.  Egypt and Jordan are also cited for the training of Palestinian security services in Gaza, but once again there is no Israeli commitment to allow Arab participation in the security arena.

The  only time there has been effective training of Palestinian security services was nearly thirty years ago, when the Clinton administration involved the Central Intelligence Agency in training Palestinian security forces for the West Bank.  Israel currently is involved in destroying security for Palestinians on the West Bank, paying no attention to the well-trained Palestinian security force.

The Palestinian force has never been effective against the Jewish settlers on the West Bank, let alone the Israeli Defense Forces.

Ignatius concludes that Trump has “laid a strong foundation” for Israeli-Palestinian peace, ignoring the fact that the Trump administration has weakened or destroyed the very agencies of the U.S. government—such as the Department of State and the Agency for International Development—that would have to play a role in reconstructing and developing Gaza.  He credits Trump with giving up “his initial ideas for forced relocation of Gazan Palestinians,” but fails to note that Prime Minister Netanyahu and his right-wing government haven’t given up on such displacement, which would represent Nakba 2.0.

Finally, Ignatius finds that Trump “deserves the credit he craves” for opening the “door to something different” regarding Gaza.  What Trump has done is to outline in very broad and simplistic strokes what is needed to be done.  Furthermore, he has done so in a way that allows him to walk away from the struggle, just as he has walked away from the war between Russia and Ukraine.  It appears that the wars that he said he would end in 24 hours have a long and horrific way to go.

The one dispositive comment that Trump made, which Ignatius conveniently ignored, is to tell Netanyahu that”you can do what you want” in Gaza if Hamas rejects the peace plan.  The Arab states fully recognize that only a month ago, the Trump administration imposed strict sanctions on the four Palestinian human rights organizations that would have an important role to play in any attempt to actually find stability and security in Gaza and the West Bank.  These steps not only undermined the global rule of law, but indicated that the United States is not serous about securing Palestinian rights.

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Photograph Source: Speaker Mike Johnson – Public Domain

On 23 September 2025, US President Donald Trump delivered a dramatic address, explicitly threatening those allegedly involved in drug trafficking to the United States with being blown “out of existence”. This statement, taken as a blatant disregard for international law and due process, made reference to the latest escalation in the decades-long US War on Drugs, a campaign historically used to justify US foreign intervention in Latin America, and now, prominently aimed at Venezuela.

For the last 26 years, Venezuela has undergone a profound political transformation successfully asserting sovereignty over the world’s largest proven oil reserves primarily by using revenues to attack decades of poverty and social exclusion through social programs. It also embarked on ending Washington’s historical political influence.

Venezuela has crafted an independent foreign policy aimed at building a multipolar world, forging closer ties with countries like Iran, Russia(with whom it has just approved a strategic partnership) and China, with an “All-Weather Partnership” signed in 2023. It has also promoted regional alliances free of US dominance such as the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA); promoting South-South cooperation with renewed participation in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the Non-Aligned Movement; and leading the formation of the Group of Friends of the United Nations Charter.

These shifts prompted the US to declare Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” in 2015. This opened the door for a comprehensive campaign of unilateral sanctions —rather, coercive measures— that has continued across the Obama, Biden, and both Trump Administrations. This campaign has damaged the Venezuelan economy, contributed to the loss of lives, and fueled migration to the US and to neighboring countries.

As the US seeks to reassert its influence in the region in its global competition with adversaries like China, this policy on Venezuela represents not just as a tool to modify conduct but as an instrument of a broader, sustained regime change operation —a goal that has remained unsuccessful.

This objective is reinforced by domestic pressures, particularly from Latin American ultra-right factions with close ties to the Venezuelan American community. According to the Pew Research Center, there are approximately 120,000 US registered voters of Venezuelan descent, with the largest concentration —about 57,000— in Florida. where in 2018, less than 32,000 thousand votes decided the 2018 Governor’s race. In a state where the 2018 Governor’s race was decided by fewer than 35,000 votes, the political weight of this community is considered significant.

The current US military posture is a continuation of Trump’s earlier “maximum pressure” campaign. Recent weeks have seen a significant deployment of US naval assets to the Caribbean Sea, including a nuclear submarine, a squadron of F-35 planes, 7 warships, and at least 4,500 marines. The real intention of this deployment is not to curb drug trafficking but to destabilize the Venezuelan government.

To justify the military presence, the US has undertaken operations against alleged drug-trafficking. However, available data, including from sources such as the United Nations and even the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), indicates that approximately 87 percentof drugs reaching the US pass through the Pacific Ocean, while only about 5 percent attempt to pass through the Caribbean Sea, where the entire Venezuelan coast lies.

On September 2, President Trump publicly announced a lethal attack on a boat allegedly carrying drugs and tied to the Tren de Aragua, an extinct Venezuelan criminal gang that the US government claims is still active and operating on US soil. The US Intelligence Community reportedly denied ties between President Nicolas Maduro and these claims. Nonetheless, these allegations have been used to justify the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 for the third time in history  —the first during the War of 1812 and the second during World War II, now targeting Venezuelans living in the US during peacetime. This led to the deportation of 252 Venezuelans, without due process, and to their imprisonment and torture in a concentration camp in El Salvador. Some were even separated from their children.

Trump’s rhetoric has also linked Venezuelan immigrants to criminality and mental illness, aligning with the nativist agenda in his own base. Driven by his policy of immigrant expulsion, the US migrant population dropped by 1.4 million between January and June of 2025,according to the Pew Research Center, causing the immigrant share of the population to decrease from 15.8 to 15.4 percent. After breakingdiplomatic and consular ties in 2019 over the recognition of a self-proclaimed President, direct deportations were halted until February 2025, when the US allowed Venezuelan planes to repatriate migrants. Venezuela had already been implementing its Return to the Homeland (Vuelta a la Patria) program since the pandemic, but its airline was banned from the US by sanctions. The Trump Administration also increased its internal persecution of Venezuelans by ending temporary migratory measures set under the Biden Administration.

In the weeks leading up to the UN address, Trump claimed that at least two more lethal attacks on boats were carried out, posting videos that only showed people being killed by aerial bombardment, with no independent verification of the drug trafficking claims or the victims’ nationality. The Venezuelan government has also denounced the harassment of Venezuelan fishermen by US military officers. During his UN speech, Trump boasted that “there aren’t too many boats that are traveling on the seas by Venezuela,” suggesting that all sea vessels are now under threat. Furthermore, he also openly claimed that President Maduro was leading “terrorist and trafficking networks”, without presenting any evidence. In August, the bounty for Maduro’s capture was raised to $50 million despite earlier intelligence community reports reportedly disregarding the claim.

Venezuela, its government, and its citizens are currently under threat from the most powerful military power in the world. Yet Venezuela has continued to seek a peaceful resolution. President Maduro sent a letterto Trump in the first week of September via an intermediary, calling for dialogue and refuting the drug-trafficking claims. The historical precedent of Operation Brother Sam in 1964  —where the deployment of US warships near Brazil catalyzed the military overthrow of democratically-elected president João Goulart is a parallel that hints at a regime change operation. The difference is that this time, there have been no anti-government defections.

The Tricontinental Institute’s study Addicted to Imperialism argues that for over 50 years, the War on Drugs has been a mechanism to promote US military expansion, the forced displacement of rural communities, the criminalization of popular organizations, and further political interventionism. In contrast, despite massive military spending, US drug consumption has not declined; conversely, the US remains, both the main consumer of drugs, and the main provider of weapons to the drug cartels.

Minister Diosdado Cabello denounced a DEA coordinated false flag operation seeking to provoke the Venezuelan Bolivarian Armed Force into direct confrontation with the US military. But the Venezuelan government has established a National Council for Sovereignty and Peace where the unlikely combination of pro-government and opposition forces have joined in rejecting foreign intervention. Many Venezuelans even enlisted in the national militias and are ready to act in defense of the nation in the case of US invasion or a targeted attack such as those carried out months earlier against Iran.

What is being carried out against Venezuela, is not an operation against drug trafficking but rather, a regime change operation. Yet Venezuelan morale is high. People continue to carry on with their daily lives in a state of caution, and enthusiastically defend of their national project by reminding anyone that Venezuela is spelled with a V —like Vietnam— and that the national liberator, Simon Bolívar once wrote to a US diplomat: “Fortunately, we have often seen a handful of free men defeat powerful empires!”

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“To this day, when I watch the videos of what happened and seeing me get thrown to the ground by police, I can’t process that I’m looking at myself,” said Simón, a 23-year-old student at Purchase College using an alias for safety concerns. 

Simón was one of 68 students and faculty members violently attacked and arrested by riot police at a Gaza solidarity encampment at Purchase College on May 2, 2024. 

He was never given a reason for his arrest. 

“I had no idea what RTC was until that day,” he said, referring to Raise the Consciousness, the student divestment organization demanding Purchase College and the greater SUNY system “divest from companies with ties to the Zionist entity”, boycott Israeli academic institutions, fully acknowledge the “genocide taking place in Gaza” and more. 

At the time of this report, over 3,100 students and faculty at American universities have been arrested at protests since October 7 in support of Palestinian liberation and opposing U.S. involvement in Israel’s assault on Gaza and the West Bank which has been defined as a genocide according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and other prominent international human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. 

“It was almost like one of those outdoor music festivals in a way,” Simón said describing the encampment prior to police interference. 

Students played games and music between teach-ins and other advocacy activities across the grassy quad between Purchase’s main dorm buildings – one of which was formerly named ‘Big Haus’ before students successfully protested in past years to change it, as the campus was built on the estate grounds of a small plantation (the building is now simply called ‘Central’).

As finals were approaching, the university alerted students of a customary “quiet hours” to take place starting at 10 p.m. which the university had repeatedly used as a tool to prevent protests from occurring, although quiet hours only referred to reducing noise level in the code of conduct. 

Approaching 10 p.m. that evening, university police officers began closing in around the encampment, blocking pathways towards the encampment to prevent students both from joining or leaving the quad.

The university police chief, Dayton Tucker, warned protesters they would be arrested if they didn’t disperse. 

“Quiet hours had nothing to do with being outside and at that point, we were just sitting silently in a circle on the quad and linking our arms,” said Simón. 

Drones and helicopters began flying overhead. Outside police officers dressed in full riot gear arrived at the encampment and quickly advanced towards the students to make arrests. 

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“Two officers slammed me into the table with the food for protesters. I remember falling to the ground on top of crushed oranges,” Simón said. 

One officer dug his knee into Simón’s lower back and leaned with his full body weight to hold Simón down. “It was a surreal experience. My brain couldn’t process what was happening.”

Simón was then handcuffed and dragged towards the nearby parking lot where he waited for nearly an hour alongside other students for a police van to take him to one of six precincts across Westchester County where they sporadically detained protesters. 

“I kept asking why I was being arrested. They never answered. I didn’t find out until after I was released,” he said. 

“I had bruises all over my body and wore long clothes to hide them afterward,” he said. 

“I couldn’t eat an orange for two months.”

The Palestine Exception

As a new academic year begins, attacks on students, academic freedom and free speech have exponentially increased. Within its first 100 days, critics of the Trump administration argue that his second term has brought on an incremental rise in authoritarianism by withholding federal funding from universities across the nation.

The Trump administration has cracked down on international students at US universities protesting against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and attacks on neighboring countries. In August 2025, the State Department confirmed it had revoked over 6,000 student visas since January as part of his immigration agenda and countless other executive orders that test the limits of presidential power. 

In the name of combatting antisemitism, Trump and his allies have used the growing support of Palestinian liberation on college campuses to usher in a wave of policies that experts have argued harkens back to a McCarthy-era erosion of basic civil liberties and public integrity in a rules-based order. 

Scholars and legal experts note that while aggressive suppression of free speech and criticism towards U.S. foreign policy (particularly in the Middle East) has grown less emboldened to mask any fascist or racist undertones, it’s far from the first time that students have been aggressively targeted in advocating for Palestinian rights. 

“There was always a kind of injunction applied for Palestine,” said Dr. Fawzia Afzal Khan, professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University and the former director of the Women and Gender Studies department at Montclair State University. 

 Arriving from Pakistan to study at Tufts University in 1979, Khan was struck by the extent of misinformation and indoctrination within American media and academic institutions regarding Palestine, the Middle East, and South Asia. Along with a few other students, she created the Committee for Palestine – one of the first Palestinian advocacy groups of its kind at an American university. 

“We had speakers including Edward Said and one of the right-hand people to Yasser Arafat,” she recalled. “There were no Muslim or Palestinian organizations at the time, so Hillel went really hard after us.” 

“All of our answering machines were filled with death threats…and just as now, the school didn’t seem to give a damn.”

 At the same university this March, Turkish graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk was abducted by plainclothes ICE agents after a pro-Israel group targeted her for an op-ed she wrote criticizing the university’s response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

A surveillance video documenting her capture sparked worldwide shock and outrage, turning her and other targeted university students into symbols of the Trump administration’s deportation agenda.   

“I just couldn’t believe it,” Khan said regarding Öztürk, “…especially because Tufts’ reputation rests on being this welcoming bastion of liberal and progressive education for foreign students.”

Öztürk was returned to Massachusetts on May 9, six weeks after her detainment, after an appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s deportation appeal, ruling that she must be released on bail from immigration detention. 

For Simón, who became a U.S. citizen in 2022, the targeting of international students only reinforces his commitment to speaking up. “As an immigrant, the idea that we come together through our shared struggles is truer than ever before,” he says. 

Born in Venezuela and orphaned before starting college, Simón described that he had grown accommodated to staying calm in stressful situations like his arrest. He was used to being accountable for and protecting himself. For him, there’s a deep resonation with the tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza who’ve had one or both parents martyred in what is now described as the “largest orphan crisis in modern history” by human rights organizations.

“When I look at what’s happening [to international students] or at what’s happening in Gaza, I keep thinking to myself if they can do it to them, they can do it to anyone who looks like them,” said Simón. “None of us are safe.”  

A Litmus Test for Democracy

“Palestine is not just a single issue. It’s the issue that connects all other progressive causes,” says Khan.

“And [universities] silencing people or refusing to acknowledge this horrible genocide is going to affect every other kind of issue that academics hold dear.” 

In addition to Öztürk, the Trump administration used similar tactics to abduct several other visa students who expressed support for Palestinian liberation including Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, two prominent figures in student organizing at Columbia University whose divestment campaign inspired similar student-led solidarity campaigns on college campuses across the world. 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio personally authorized Khalil’s detainment using a provision of Section 237 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which grants the Secretary of State power to deport non-citizens if they meet the threshold of reasonable ground for having “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the U.S.

Dima Khalidi, founder and director of Palestine Legal, an organization dedicated to protecting the rights of people in the US advocating for Palestine, characterized Khalil’s unlawful arrest as a “red alert” for universities. 

“Universities should embrace their role as facilitators of those shifts rather than being the authors of their own ruin by serving as handmaidens of a Trumpian agenda,” she wrote in an op-ed for The Nation.

The Trump administration has since continued invoking old legislations as part of their immigration campaign including the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 wartime law, to deport Venezuelan migrants accused of gang membership to CECOT, El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison. 

“Whether you’re an immigrant or not, these cases really highlight the extent to which this administration is willing to shut down dissent to punish people. And it’s further than we’ve ever seen an administration go before,” said Vera Eidelman, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

The Beginning of the End

Returning back to Purchase the following semester for his senior year, Simón’s only goal is to get out. 

“It feels very bizarre…the idea that I’m supposed to walk across the stage at graduation and shake hands with the people who had me arrested.” 

“I’m excited to graduate,” he says. “I’m not looking at it as an accomplishment, but more like now I get to leave and never have to come back.” 

Following the violent arrests and dispersal of the encampment at Simón’s university, faculty members signed a joint statement to Purchase College President Milagros Peña condemning the “violent and disproportionate actions” and urging all charges against those arrested to be dropped. The letter also called for an independent investigation of the incident and the “resignations of those culpable for the infringement of student and faculty civil liberties and rights.” 

President Peña is expected to resign this May at the end of the semester. 

On the anniversary of the encampment attacks, many of Simón’s fellow demonstrators who were arrested took to social media recalling their experience and sharing the impact it has had on them since. 

“Since then, all I’ve been met with is apathy,” one student posted. “People really only care as long as they never have to put themselves on the line. And I don’t know if I can live with that.” 

In the days after his arrest, Simón was unable to meet with a doctor to check his bruises as he did not have insurance. He suffered from lower back pain in the spot where police pinned him down for weeks later. 

As a Maryland resident, Simón had to take off work over the summer to drive up to New York for his court hearing. He had a clean record and wasn’t familiar with court proceedings. He was assigned a public lawyer and even while hearing his case decided, was still unclear about the terms of his arrest. 

“The hearing took only a few minutes,” he recalls. The judge simply glanced at his file and decided an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal (ACD) where if Simón wasn’t arrested in the next two months, the charges would be dropped and his record would remain clean. 

Simón’s arrest made him hyper observant in checking for security cameras and concerned for being identified and targeted again. “I didn’t realize how surveilled campus was until now.”

He carries an extra set of clothes with him everywhere out of concern for being tracked. 

Like Simón, many of Dr. Khan’s students have also expressed fear and anxiety about being on campus, particularly her Muslim, Jewish, and international students.

“We’re at a historical moment where everywhere you turn, the right wing, extremist forms of thinking, and authoritarian leaders and governments are on the rise. So, I think people are feeling disheartened… I hear that especially with students from countries like Pakistan and others in the global south. They don’t want to come here anymore.”

“It’s going to end any kind of dominance this country once had,” she said in regard to American universities and institutions setting an inherent global standard on everything from education to diplomacy.

“In a way, we’re watching the end of an empire. And maybe that’s a good thing.” 

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The promise of a green transition has become a key narrative of our time. Despite persistent climate denialism, governments, corporations, and multilateral institutions present themselves as champions of sustainability, climate action, and environmental protection. In the Americas, this discourse has taken root with force, rebranding old forms of extractivism and accumulation under the guise of “green” development. But beneath the surface, the reality is stark: the transition being promoted today is not a break from fossil capitalism—it is its reinvention as a kind of fossil gattopardismo, in which energy demand expands and the extraction of hydrocarbons intensifies as part of the approach to energy transition, under the illusory umbrella of “net zero” policies. As Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote in his 1958 novel Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

In this special issue of the NACLA Report on the Americas, we critically examine the rise of green capitalism in the region. We analyze how its logics and instruments are shaping policy and territory, enabling new forms of dispossession, and deepening historical inequalities. We expose the traps of a corporate-led transition that claims to be clean and just, but in practice reinforces systems of exploitation and domination. And we highlight the movements, communities, and visions from below that challenge these false solutions and point the way toward just ecosocial transitions.

The idea that capitalism can solve the climate and ecological crisis it has created is not only misleading but also dangerous. Today’s green capitalism extends the reach of markets under the banner of sustainability, expanding profit frontiers while coopting environmental narratives under a new capitalist “decarbonization consensus.” Under this framework, nature is positioned as a financial asset, territories as green sacrifice zones, and Indigenous and traditional communities, once again, as obstacles to development. The result is a green colonialism that naturalizes dispossession, often in the name of climate justice, creating new dynamics of extraction and appropriation of raw materials, natural goods, and labor, all in service of a so-called “green” energy transition.

In this context, COP30—set to take place in Belém, in the Brazilian Amazon, in November 2025—is both a symbolic milestone and a political paradox. While grassroots organizations prepare to bring local demands and climate justice agendas to the global stage, corporate actors and states continue to define the rules of the game. As gina cortés valderrama and Isadora Cardoso remind us in this issue, the dominant frameworks of climate policy reproduce colonial and racist logics, marginalizing decolonial and intersectional approaches that center justice, autonomy, and care.

The Corporate Transition and the New Face of Extractivism

Green capitalism thrives on rebranding. Across the Americas, extractivism is being painted green to fit into the transition discourse. In Brazil, for example, the so-called “Lithium Valley” exemplifies this shift: a region marked by water scarcity, community resistance, and environmental degradation is now being promoted as a hub for sustainable development and climate leadership. As Bárbara Magalhães Teixeira and Marina Paula Oliveira demonstrate in their contribution, the violence of extractivism persists, even when disguised as energy transition.

A similar dynamic unfolds in Chile, where lithium extraction and green hydrogen initiatives are creating new modalities of sacrifice zones in Antofagasta and the Atacama Desert. In their article, Gabriela Cabaña and Ramón Balcázar Morales reveal how these projects reproduce patterns of territorial appropriation and environmental racism under the guise of decarbonization. The Caribbean, too, is facing new forms of green colonization, as Colin Bogle details in his article on the controversial push for deep-sea mining. This modality absorbs critiques of social conflict connected to mining to recast the ocean as the ultimate “conflict-free zone”—a space empty of social struggle where environmental destruction can proceed unchallenged, treating other species and ecosystems as even more disposable in the absence of humans.

The corporate transition is global in scope but deeply rooted in local contexts. Lital Khaikin documents how Canadian mining companies are expanding into the Colombian Amazon, claiming to advance climate goals while displacing Indigenous communities. In the Brazilian Cerrado, Morena Hanbury Lemos and Shanna Hanbury Lemos trace the unchecked advance of eucalyptus monocultures—another example of greenwashed agribusiness that rarely receives the scrutiny it deserves. Indeed, agribusiness often slips through the cracks in debates on climate and extractivism. Yet it is a key driver of emissions through animal exploitation, soil degradation, deforestation, and land use change. Across the Americas, land grabbing, water depletion, and biodiversity loss are increasingly greenwashed and repackaged under the labels “low carbon agriculture,” “bioeconomy,” and “climate-smart food systems” in a system that continues to perpetrate profound violence against campesino, Indigenous, and other traditional communities.

Debt, Finance, and the Trap of Green Sovereignty Loss

Green capitalism also reshapes the financial architecture of climate action. Beyond traditional loans and structural adjustment programs, new financial instruments are emerging that present themselves as benevolent solutions, including debt-for-nature swaps, green bonds, and climate-related development financing. While often framed as innovative and progressive, these mechanisms often produce new forms of dependency and erode both state and popular sovereignty. Nonetheless, they have been embraced by governments on both the right and the left.

Sophia Boddenberg’s piece on the Galápagos Islands provides a striking example. There, the largest debt-for-nature swap in history has introduced a form of green militarization, further restricting the autonomy of local communities while aligning conservation efforts with the interests of international creditors. In Honduras, as Jennifer Moore, Aldo Orellana, Karen Spring, and Luciana Ghiotto demonstrate, corporate lawfare is being used to suppress community resistance and secure green energy concessions, threatening the right to self-determination. Similar dynamics can be observed in Pará, Brazil, where Claudia Horn and Carlos Ramos examine how green infrastructure and carbon market schemes undermine democratic participation and perpetuate existing inequalities.

It is important to recognize that green capitalism does not always rely on new political actors. More often than not, the very corporations, elites, and institutions that fueled the fossil economy are now at the helm of the so-called green transition. In Brazil, the federal government continues to support offshore oil exploration even as it champions renewables and green hydrogen. In Colombia, despite some advances, President Gustavo Petro’s bold stance against new oil exploration has also opened space for new forms of megaprojects, including controversial energy ventures. In Jamaica, official support for deep-sea mining contradicts the island’s image as a climate-vulnerable nation. And while tourism is often touted as a cleaner source of income and even an opportunity to protect ecosystems, it is increasingly being used to justify land dispossession, loss of sovereignty, and the creation of green enclaves—as seen in the Galápagos and parts of Jamaica and Honduras.

Between Resistance and Ecosocial Transformation

Despite the aggressive expansion of green capitalism across the Americas, the story is not one of dispossession and false solutions alone. Across the region, powerful struggles and alternatives are taking root. Communities are resisting land grabs, denouncing the greenwashing of extractivist violence, and organizing to reclaim autonomy over energy, food, territory, and ways of life. These movements not only expose the cracks in the dominant transition model—they also offer grounded, collective visions of real alternatives.

In Puerto Rico, for instance, we find one of the most concrete and inspiring proposals for energy justice in the region. After years of corruption, blackouts, and the failures of utility privatizations that have deepened energy poverty, local communities have developed concrete plans and infrastructure projects towards a decentralized, community-based solar energy transition—one less tied to commodification. As Jesse Kornbluth shows in this issue, these struggles go beyond renewables: they constitute an anti-colonial fight for democracy and a people-centered model for energy futures across the Global South.

This spirit is echoed in the social movements and urban actors organizing for the right to the city in Belém, the host of COP30. Mariana Guimarães and Rosaly Brito document how grassroots resistance in Belém confronts the contradictions of a green summit hosted in a city marked by environmental injustice, deep inequality, precarious housing, and the marginalization of Black and Indigenous residents. In parallel, Claudia Horn and Carlos Ramos expose how carbon markets and green infrastructure projects in the state of Pará are undermining local democracy while concentrating power in the hands of economic and political elites.

In Honduras, the Garífuna struggle is also emblematic of the broader resistance to green capitalism’s territorial ambitions. As Giada Ferrucci details, Garífuna communities are defending their ancestral lands not only against tourism expansion and agroindustrial projects, but also against new green investment schemes that present themselves as sustainable while continuing to perpetuate dispossession. Their resistance is rooted in a long tradition of autonomy, cultural identity, and territorial defense that offers valuable lessons for other struggles across the Americas.

What unites these movements is more than opposition—they are building visions of collective life that reject extractivist paradigms altogether. These alternatives are grounded in diverse worldviews but share some key features: a commitment to relational understandings of nature, the defense of territorial sovereignty, and a belief in transitions that emerge from below rather than being imposed from above.

In this sense, resistance and the construction of alternatives are not separate processes. They are two sides of the same struggle: rejecting the commodification of life while creating other ways of organizing energy, food, land, and political power. These are not abstract utopias, but rather concrete and situated practices that emerge from lived experience, historical memory, and political experimentation. Many of the contributions in this issue illuminate this dual process of resistance and renewal. The testimony of activists in Pará, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Putumayo, and the Brazilian Cerrado speak to the creativity and persistence of popular struggles under immense pressure. Some fight in courts—others in assemblies, in the streets, and on occupied lands. They cultivate new forms of cooperation, revive ancestral practices, and build bridges across struggles—from Indigenous self-determination to feminist economies of care.

Importantly, these movements also raise fundamental questions about power that we center in this issue of the NACLA Report: Who controls the means of transition? Who defines what sustainability means? Who decides which territories are sacrificed and which are protected? These are not just technical or economic questions—they are political and ethical ones. Although these initiatives begin locally, they form the seeds of what we identify as an emerging eco-territorial internationalism.

Looking Ahead to COP30 and Beyond

As COP30 approaches, the Amazon will become a global stage for climate discourse. This moment brings both opportunity and danger. On the one hand, it offers renewed visibility for grassroots movements and highlights the region’s ecological importance. On the other, it risks becoming yet another green spectacle that deploys symbolic imagery of nature and Indigenous cultures while legitimizing false solutions, corporate capture, and new rounds of green extractivist investment—a growing trend at the COP meetings.

We must be alert to both dynamics. The Amazon cannot be reduced to a carbon sink for the Global North or a marketplace for green finance. It is home to vibrant societies, cultures, and ecosystems whose futures cannot be dictated by boardrooms or summit declarations. The same holds true for lithium-rich deserts, bioeconomy zones, and energy corridors across the region. These are not “resources”—they are territories of life, struggle, and possibility. This issue of the NACLA Report aims to contribute to this broader political debate. By documenting the mechanisms, impacts, and contradictions of green capitalism in the Americas, we seek to equip readers with critical tools to understand and challenge dominant transition narratives. At the same time, by lifting up the voices of those who are resisting and reimagining transitions on their own terms, we hope to amplify pathways toward truly just, democratic, and sustainable futures. Transitions will happen. The question is: whose transitions—and toward what kind of world?

The following article is syndicated in partnership with the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA). This piece appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of NACLA’s quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report.

Sabrina Fernandes is a Brazilian sociologist and political economist, currently the Head of Research at the Alameda Institute. She is part of the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South, a member of NACLA’s editorial committee, and a Senior Research Advisor to the Oxford Technology & Industrialisation for Development (TIDE) centre. Her research is focused on just transitions, Latin America, and internationalism.

Breno Bringel is a professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro and Senior Fellow at the Complutense University of Madrid, where he coordinates the Observatory of Geopolitics and Ecosocial Transitions. He is a member of the Ecosocial Pact of the South and co-editor of The Geopolitics of Green Colonialism (Pluto Press, 2024). His research focuses on critical geopolitics, social movements, and socio-ecological transitions.

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Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.

Following the revolt of the besieged against their jailors on October 7, 2023, the Zionist hasbara machine mobilized across the world to impose a false narrative. Its goal was clear: erase history, distort reality, and present Israel as the eternal victim. According to this framing, Israel was a peaceful entity blindsided by an unprovoked attack that supposedly emerged out of nowhere.

October 7 did not fall from the sky. It was the culmination of decades of dispossession, siege, and systematic dehumanization. Long before October 2023, Gaza was described by international observers as the world’s largest open-air prison. It was subjected to a starvation diet blockade for more than 16 years, or 5,800 days. Long before that, its 2.3 million inhabitants, of whom 1.3 million are refugees or their descendants, were driven from their homes and villages in 1948 during the Nakba, a catastrophe created by Zionist terror militias who ethnically cleansed the native Palestinians to create a state for Jews escaping European hatred.

To understand October 7, one must place it within the continuum of Palestinian suffering. That single day was not an aberration. It was one out of nearly 28,000 days since 1948 of Zionist hate and Israeli oppression. Each day carried the weight of exile, siege, humiliation, poverty, and hopelessness. Yet hasbara wants to delete those decades from recorded memories, 28,000 days of Palestinian statelessness, and reduce history to a single day divorced from context.

The “first October 7” was not in 2023; it was in 1948, when Zionist terrorist militias, transformed into today’s Israeli army, committed massacres, razed villages, and expelled Palestinians en masse. That foundational act of ethnic cleansing continues today. The daily bombardment, the starvation, the denial of basic human dignity to the people of Gaza are extensions of that original Zionist sin.

The hasbara’s greatest weapon is controlling the media, reframing narrative and selective memory. It seeks to decontextualize memory and conceal the structural violence that made October 7, inevitable. To remember the 28,000 days that preceded it is to expose the ongoing injustice at the heart of this so-called war: a colonized, besieged people struggling for survival against an occupying power that insists on their permanent subjugation.

Two years have passed since Israel unleashed its genocide plan. A strategy of systematic destruction, of homes, hospitals, schools, infrastructure and of life itself. Gaza today is not a war zone. It is a graveyard of a people suffocated before the eyes of a world that lost its humanity.

Two years, twenty-four months, seven hundred and thirty days more than that one October 7 day. However measured, life since October 2023 has been an eternity of suffering for the people of Gaza. A chronicle of genocide streamed live on TV. The most fundamental measure of this holocaust is the destruction and staggering loss of life. Gaza today stands as the most ruthlessly bombarded place in history: measured by explosives per square meter, Israel has dropped nearly seventy times more bombs on Gaza than the Allies did on Germany in World War II, and one hundred times more than the U.S. dropped on North Vietnam during Operation Rolling Thunder.

As of September 2025, more than 66,000 people have been murdered, among them at least 19,424 children. Thousands more are “missing,” buried anonymously under the rubble of their own homes. Young lives have been erased; thousands of stories have ended before they began. The total number of injured has surpassed 167,500, leaving an overwhelming number of survivors with life-changing injuries. Since Israel broke a ceasefire in March 2025 alone, 12,956 souls have been lost. Altogether, the injured and dead, represents more than 10 percent of Gaza’s population. These are not collateral casualties; they are the intended victims of a deliberate campaign of erasure of the Palestinian existence.

Beyond bombs and bullets, another insidious weapon is claiming lives: starvation. A Zionist-engineered famine, declared by the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). Over 500,000 people are living under Phase 5 conditions—the highest level, characterized by “starvation, destitution, and death.” At least 440 people have died from starvation, including 147 children, with hundreds of thousands more lacking food or clean water. The International Rescue Committee reports that one in three young children have gone at least 24 hours without food.

Every one of Gaza’s 625,000 students has been out of school for two years. More than 18,000 students and 972 teachers have been killed. Nearly 92% of schools are damaged or destroyed, all universities lie in complete ruins. The WHO reports over 2300 health and aid workers have been killed, and out of Gaza’s 36 hospitals, just 14 partially function.

To cover its crimes, Israel closed Gaza to the international media and targeted local journalists working inside Gaza. According to Brown University, Israel has killed more journalists in Gaza since October 2023, than in the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Vietnam War, the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan – combined. Israel murdered 278 with little to no protest from the “free world” or the “free press.” By refusing to confront Israel’s censorship of reporting from Gaza, they betray the very principles of truth and freedom they claim to champion.

This is not war; it’s a premeditated genocide by the letter of the law. The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as acts committed with “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Article II lists five acts:

1. Killing members of the group: 66,000 and counting.

2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm: thousands of child amputees.

3. Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction: blocking food aid, destroying farmland, 92% of homes destroyed.

4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births: targeting fertility clinics.

5. Forcibly transferring children.

Israel has committed at least the first four—indisputably, systematically, and publicly. The mass killings, the maiming of tens of thousands, and the starving of civilians fall squarely within the Convention’s threshold.

The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) announced on 31 August 2025, that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the definition of genocide under the UN Convention. Article III of the Convention extends responsibility not only to perpetrators but also the enablers of the genocide. That means Washington, London, Berlin, and Paris. Following the International Criminal Court indictment of Israeli leaders, any country that finances and arms indicted war criminals is responsible under Article III and could be brought before the ICC.

In its last phase of the holocaust in Gaza city, on October 1, the Zionist war minister, Israel Katz authorized, or koshered, the targeting of the remaining 250,000 civilians in the city when he classified them all as “terrorist.” Civilians who lacked the physical or financial means, or those who refused to leave their homes and not become refugee statistics in a new Israeli-made Nakba.

This genocide isn’t Israel’s alone; it’s the collective moral failure of the so-called Western civilization. By enabling indicted war criminals, providing them the genocide tools, and diplomatic protection, Western governments have exposed the selective value system they uphold. Their conspicuous silence, even as a war minister labels 250,000 civilians “terrorists,” reveals “Western values” as nothing but a cynical façade masking their hypocrisy and racial hierarchy.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Much has been written and debated since Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu jointly unveiled Trump’s 20-point ‘peace plan’ earlier this week. As of this writing, Hamas has not yet decided whether to accept it. (Israel hasn’t accepted it, either, although you wouldn’t know that by following US media.)

One point has been neglected, however: the terms of the deal are themselves a form of war crime.

The Hidden Hostages

Parts of the plan are uncontroversial. All sane people want the war to end quickly. And few would object to point 18, which calls for  “an interfaith dialogue …based on the values of tolerance and peaceful co-existence.”

And yet, I wonder how many Americans noticed that #5 calls on Israel to release the 1,700 people it has seized from Gaza since 2023, “including all women and children …” 

How many Americans even knew that Israel routinely imprisons children before they saw that sentence? Our media doesn’t mention it much. For background, a 2013 report from UNICEF found that:

Each year approximately 700 Palestinian children aged 12 to 17, the great majority of them boys, are arrested, interrogated and detained by Israeli army, police and security agents.

Investigators found that “ill-treatment of children who come in contact with the military detention system appears to be widespread, systematic and institutionalized.” They estimated than some 7,000 children had been imprisoned and mistreated over the preceding decade and concluded:

“The pattern of ill-treatment includes the arrests of children at their homes between midnight and 5:00 am by heavily armed soldiers; the practice of blindfolding children and tying their hands with plastic ties; physical and verbal abuse during transfer to an interrogation site, including the use of painful restraints; lack of access to water, food, toilet facilities and medical care; interrogation using physical violence and threats; coerced confessions; and lack of access to lawyers or family members during interrogation.”

Bear in mind that this report was written a full ten years before the events of October 7. Its authors find that Israel’s treatment of these children systematically violated both the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

Under international law, the United States and other countries should condemn this child abuse and demand that the children be released. however, the Trump plan uses this longstanding criminal practice as leverage, saying that the children will only be released when Hamas accedes to the demands in this proposal.

Genocide as Leverage

Paragraph #7 of the Trump proposal is even worse. It reads:

Upon acceptance of this agreement, full aid will be immediately sent into the Gaza Strip. At a minimum, aid quantities will be consistent with what was included in the 19 January 2025 agreement regarding humanitarian aid, including rehabilitation of infrastructure (water, electricity, sewage), rehabilitation of hospitals and bakeries, and entry of necessary equipment to remove rubble and open roads.

It is a war crime to withhold humanitarian aid under any circumstances, include both a state of war and the occupation of outside territory. Again, however, this plan rewards the war crime. Worse, it actively uses both this crime and the criminal abuse of children to advance its own ends. 

That is immoral and wrong. It uses children, and the entire population of Gaza, as hostages. And threatening to withhold aid in this way is probably an additional war crime. The Geneva Conventions (Additional Protocol I, Article 54, 1) states unequivocally:

Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited.

Article 54, 2 states:

It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive.

“Whatever the motive” in the above paragraph presumably includes, “for the purpose of getting them to sign the agreement I want them to sign.”

The United States is a signatory to these conventions, and these principles were reaffirmed in 2018 with the passage of UN Security Council resolution 2417. (They are also upheld in the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court, which the United States has not signed.)

Summary

This isn’t about the merits of the Trump deal (which in my view aren’t much, since it’s extremely-one sided). It’s about the criminal tactics being used to advance it. There’s an extensive body of law and research documenting the principles it violates.

The law isn’t ambiguous. Lawyers may argue the finer points, but the principle is simple: civilian lives are not pawns, whether for military or diplomatic purposes. It’s illegal to use their survival as leverage. Doing so isn’t just morally reprehensible; it is, in all probability, yet another prosecutable war crime. 

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Image by Allec Gomes.

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Thoreau Daguerrotype – Public Domain

Watching Donald Trump’s disjointed, narcissistic ramble at the United Nations, I kept thinking: “Why don’t the delegates walk out?” After all, he insulted many of their countries. “You’re destroying your countries. Your countries are going to hell,” he shouted. Walking out on speakers at the U.N. during the annual General Assembly meeting has precedents: U.S. diplomats walked out on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speeches from 2009 to 2012. And this year, after Trump’s muddled 57-minute performance, more than 100 diplomats from over 50 countries walked out when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to the podium. Why didn’t any delegate walk out on Trump? And outside the U.N., where is civil disobedience in the United States today?

The 19th-century American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) is considered the father of civil disobedience. His 1849 essay On Resistance to Civil Government – later retitled Civil Disobedience – has inspired generations to challenge unjust government policies. Thoreau refused to pay the state poll tax to protest the Mexican-American War and slavery. More than a century later, folk singer and activist Joan Baez followed his example, refusing to pay a portion of her federal income tax. She justified her refusal, saying: “This country has gone mad. But I will not go mad with it. I will not pay for organized murder. I will not pay for the war in Vietnam.” Other non-taxpaying protesters against the Vietnam War included Nobel Prize winners George Wald and Salvador Luria.

Refusing to pay taxes in protest of government policy is an example of civil disobedience. Following Thoreau’s model, the disobeying person accepts that citizens have an obligation to pay taxes and respects the general authority of government. The refusal to pay taxes targets specific policies, not the state itself. Thoreau, Baez, Wald, and Luria were not revolutionaries seeking to overthrow the government.

In that sense, civil disobedience is an act of conscience rather than a political rebellion. Thoreau opposed the government only insofar as it carried out specific policies he could not accept. He was not an anarchist. As he famously wrote: “That government is best which governs least.” He believed in some government.

As for other possible acts of dissent, Thoreau never renounced his citizenship nor did he call for the overthrow of the United States government. “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, which would not be a violent and bloody measure… This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution…” he wrote, in words that later inspired Mahatma Gandhi in the nonviolent struggle for India’s independence from British rule, as well as Martin Luther King Jr.’s peaceful advocacy for racial equality in the United States.

The delegates’ walkout at the United Nations in protest of Netanyahu and Israel took place within a proper institutional framework, under the established rules of the U.N. General Assembly. The protesting delegates accepted Netanyahu’s right to speak;  they simply chose not to listen because of Israel’s policies. In essence, the walkout was merely a violation of diplomatic protocol.

There was no major disruption during the General Assembly meeting in New York because of the walkout. Had there been a question about Netanyahu’s legitimacy as Israel’s representative or about Israel’s legitimacy as a member state, that would have been different. (The International Criminal Court’s warrants against Netanyahu did not prevent his visit since the United States is not a party to the Court and prime ministers have diplomatic immunity at the U.N.)

The Netanyahu walkout fits within the spirit of civil disobedience; it was symbolic, peaceful, and within institutional rules. Similarly, Thoreau accepted the consequences of his refusal to pay taxes by going to jail without protest. For him, imprisonment was not a shame but an honorable outcome of resisting injustice. As he wrote in Civil Disobedience: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less despondent spirits, is in her prisons…”

Civil disobedience cannot be separated from civility. Neither Joan Baez, George Wald, nor Salvador Luria gave up their American citizenship, as many dual nationals living overseas have done. They all respected the United States’ legal and political system. After leaving Walden Pond, for example, Thoreau returned to Concord, where he worked in his family’s pencil-making business and became a surveyor – a rather bourgeois life despite how many memorialize him.

The question of opposing Trump through traditional civil disobedience is harder to unpack. There is no question that fear exists within the United States, as was undoubtedly the case with the delegates in New York who opposed Trump’s policies but feared recriminations if they walked out. There are so many Trumpian actions that merit specific protest. Thoreau opposed the Mexican War and slavery. Baez, Wald, and Luria protested the Vietnam War. Where does one even begin with Trump? Undermining the balance of power between the three branches of government? Personal corruption? Threatening traditional alliances while weakening the U.S.’s global image? Overriding the rule of law domestically and internationally? Challenging freedom of speech? 

Being civil in the face of overwhelming incivility is not easy. Is Thoreau-style civil disobedience against Trump possible today? What should be protested, and how? What would be the consequences? Trump defies the very civility that gives civil disobedience its moral force. His crude behavior undermines whatever civility underpins civil disobedience. 

The following legendary anecdote about opposition, Thoreau, and civil disobedience is intriguing. In 1848, Thoreau spent one night in jail for failing to pay his taxes. When his friend, the poet and fellow Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, came to bail him out, Emerson asked: “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau quickly replied with a blunt question: “Ralph, what are you doing out there?”

As long as Trump remains in power in the White House, we are all, somehow, “out there.”

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Lately, I’ve had lyrics to ‘I’ve Got No Idols,’ by 1990s indie-darling Juliana Hatfield running through my head, particularly the line, “But I am a liar, that’s the truth, go home and think it through.” Why is this song, especially that particular lyric, taking up so much space in my brain these days?

I think it is because of JD Vance and his gift at being honest about being a liar.

Just about one year ago, during the presidential debate, when then-candidate Trump ranted about Haitian immigrants eating other people’s pets, it sounded like more of his bluster. In a rambling response to a question about immigration—arguably, one of his strongest and most popular campaign topics—Trump pounced on a rumor spread on the internet, “They’re eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats … They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”

Then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance swiftly came his future boss’s defense, defending the debunked rumors, stating, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” 

One year later, cut to the aftermath of the killing of Charlie Kirk and we see that Vance is following through on his promise. Weaving the beginnings of a baseless conspiracy, Vance announced, “We know Joe Biden’s FBI was investigating Charlie Kirk. Maybe they should have been investigating the networks that motivated, inspired, and maybe even funded Charlie Kirk’s murder. If they had, Charlie Kirk might be alive today.” Discussing this comment on his podcast The Bulwark, Tim Miller was shocked that no news organization picked up this thread or remembered Vance’s statement from just one year ago. The ignorance of Vance’s comment about “networks” may be because the legacy press are no longer able to do their jobs as watchdogs of the government when their corporate owners are more interested in protecting their mergers.  

As of this writing, all the information the public has about the alleged killer of Kirk is that he acted alone, drove his own car, used his grandfather’s rifle, and was turned in to law enforcement by his family. What network, then, “motivated, inspired” or “funded” the murder? Nearly 10 months into Trump 2.0, it is hard to fathom what threat Joe Biden could still play so that Vance needs to blame him for not protecting Kirk. One year ago, Vance told us clearly and with no equivocation what his role as Vice President would be: Creating stories to advance an agenda. How come we did not believe him? 

In response to the baseless—and frankly: racist—rumors about the eating of pets, the legacy press was quick to point out how easy it was for misinformation to spread in the digital environment without taking a frank examination into their own culpability. In response to the baseless—and frankly: cowardly—accusation that there are “networks” that funded an alleged murderer, the legacy press was … nowhere to be found. The words and actions of President Trump, Vice President Vance, and their administration are newsworthy. However, giving their words oxygen without question, without demand for evidence, without any degree of pushback, is the equivalent of giving them free rein to coax whatever falsehoods they desire into the public consciousness. In their desire for profit, the corporate press enable their poor behavior and, in not pushing back, passively allow the false information to become truth.  

Let us heed Juliana Hatfield’s advice and “go home and think it through.” As audiences, we have a lot to think about. I, for one, do not yet know how to live within an autocracy. I do know, however, that I cannot wait for corporate news organizations to catch on to the new playbook being used by Trump 2.0 where they are honest about their lies. 

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Giacometti’s Last Ride: A Novel
by Bart Schneider; Art by Chester Arnold;
Kelly’s Cove Press; 2025; $20.

Artists, Ezra Pound once observed, were “the antennae” of the human race and provided a “warning system” about the future. They have also been keen observers of the present and have described the world without embellishments. In Giacometti’s Last Ride, novelist Bart Schneider and painter Chester Arnold, offer a stunning bookend to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a literary masterpiece which was just what I wanted and needed as a 19-year-old student eager to become an artist.

In Cormack McCarthy’s western and the film based on it, the Texas/Mexico border is “no country for old men.” The opposite is true for Giacometti’s Last Ride. The novel that Schneider and Arnold have assembled with words and images explores a country of old men, white and European, that provides a model for growing old with dignity.

They have also unromantically mapped a crowded corner of the 20^th-century art world that transformed ways of seeing and thinking. Schneider and Arnold surround Giacometti with a cast of aging painters, sculptors, writers and photographers who are beyond their prime. They live and work in Paris and they’re mostly harmonious with one another, though the Picasso who emerges in these pages tends to be competitive with his peers.

In addition to Giacometti and Picasso, the cast includes Giacometti’s brother, Diego, and their contemporaries: Samuel Beckett, known here as “Sam”; and Eli Lotar, a photographer who explains that Giacometti’s work represents “man’s isolation.” Lotar adds that Giacometti’s tall, thin, dramatic figures—which are less than three-inches in height—had a “particular poignancy after the tragedy of the war when so many people wandered through the world lost.” Giacometti’s art reflects the anxieties of the age in which it was born.

As readers of modern literature know, James Joyce offered the quintessential account of the alienated, anxious modern writer in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published at the start of WWI and a classic ever since then. Joyce’s Irish-born protagonist, Stephen Daedalus, observes famously, “The only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning. ” The Giacometti who takes his last ride in these pages is far less defiant, though no less experimental than Joyce or his hero and no less dedicated to the demands of art.

Born in Switzerland in 1901 and influenced by the surrealists and the cubists, Giacometti settled in Paris in 1922. He created some of his best known work, including Grande femme debout I through IV,  in the early 1960s. Grande Femme Debout 1 sold for $14.3 million and Pointing Man for $126 million. Giacometti died in Switzerland in 1966 two decades after the end of WWII when young white male artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning came to the attention of the world.

Giacometti turned to figurative painting in the mid-1950s. His success, which often overshadowed women artists like Helen Frankenthaler, was due in part to the myth that New York not Paris was at the center of the art world. Bye bye Left Bank studios, hello Greenwich Village galleries.

French author, Serge Guilbaut, tells much of that story, which never seems to get old, in his book, How New York Stole the idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War. After 1945 and well into the post-war era, New York art critics persuaded consumers to shell out big bucks, buy works of abstract expressionism and display them on the walls of their homes and apartments. As Schneider knows and shows in his new novel, Giacometti’s career benefitted from the notion that New York replaced Paris as the beating heart of the art world.

In Last Ride, the artist himself explains to a Parisian hoodlum how the New York art world operates. “It doesn’t matter if it’s good or not,” Giacometti says. “The fact that I painted it makes it important and valuable.” He adds, “I think it’s absurd but that’s how the art world is.” To sell art in New York, he must sell himself and his personality which becomes increasingly challenging as he ages.

Giacometti asks the hoodlum, who seems to have stepped directly from the celluloid world of film noir, “Why not become a collector?” He adds, ‘”Once you’re a collector, your status rises in the world,” and you “gain access to a wealthy echelon.” The acquisition of art can turn the criminal who plays his cards right into an accepted member of bourgeois society.

How much of the story that Schneider tells is based on fact and how much is based on fiction , the author doesn’t say. There are no acknowledgments to any of the biographies, including Giacometti: A Life (1997) by James Lord, who knew the artist and his entourage intimately well. Still, Schneider allows that he has ”fabricated some events, minor characters and the dialogue.” Which ones, a reader would like to know. Did his wife, Annette, and his lover, Caroline, really spat like two cats, or was that fabricated?

In a note at the back of the book, Chester Arnold writes that the “masterworks” by Giacometti and his contemporaries “provided inspiration for any child born in the mid-twentieth century with ambitions to be an artist.” He includes himself as one of those ambitious kids. Arnold adds that the great artists were as “recognizable in their persons as in their creations.” That was certainly true of Picasso who turned himself into an iconic figure, albeit less true for Giacometti.

Four women join the cast of the novel’s indelible characters: Giacometti’s wife, Annette, who begins her life as a member of the Swiss bourgeoisie and who is eager to become a bohemian; Caroline, a sex worker who serves as Giacometti’s model; his sister-in-law, Odette; and his mother whose funeral he attends before he embarks on his last ride.

His mother’s death awakens memories of boyhood when he learned from his artist/father to draw things as he sees them and to aim for “authenticity rather than perfection.”

For the most part the women characters revolve in Giacometti’s orbit and don’t have their own autonomous lives. The wives, lovers and models for Picasso and Rodin were often their co-creators. Was that true of Caroline and Annette one wonders? Giacometti’s Last Ride leaves that question unanswered, though the novel offers hints. One would also have liked one or two overtly political figures and perhaps a cameo appearance by Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Schneider dedicates the novel to “Catherine, who drove with me along the winding Giacometti road.” He says that she “opened her French kitchen to him.” Not surprisingly, mouth-watering food and wine are almost as decisive in these pages as art. Giacometti is always ready for champagne and oysters, though his stomach gives him acute pain and sends him to a hospital.

The narrative, which is told effectively through concise dialogue, moves deftly across the landscape of Paris. It slows down long enough to situate the artist in his atelier, where he clashes and conspires with his models.

“I don’t plan to die now,” Giacometti tells Caroline. “I have too

much work to do. And then there’s the problem of loving you.” She responds, “Problem?” He asks, “who’s going to love you if I’m not around?”

A loveable figure in large part because he’s not narcissistic, Schneider’s Giacometti is an artist worth knowing and admiring as a human being with charms galore. Chester Arnold’s sketches bring bits and pieces of bohemian Paris to life: a pack of Gauloises, the trademark French cigarette; Giacometti’s atelier with its detritus and unfinished pieces; café society; and the artist’s “last ride” in a lovable, funky Citroen 2 CV, known as a “deux chevaux.” (Because it only had “two horsepower.”)

In these pages, the ubiquitous car becomes an icon for Giacometti himself and serves as an emblem for Paris before it was displaced by New York as the cosmopolitan capital of the commercial art world. There’s a lot more than two-horse power in the creative engine that drives this well-crafted novel that paints a picture of what the French call “la condition humaine.”

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Image by Onur Burak Akın.

Two years into Israel’s destruction, war crimes, and genocide in Gaza, Donald Trump rolled out a 20-point proposal, hyped as a path to peace. Arab and Muslim leaders rushed to give their unqualified blessing. Standing right next to Trump, however, Benjamin Netanyahu delivered only a “conditional” endorsement, so riddled with caveats it gutted the plan before the ink was dry.

Predictably, the U.S. administration and the managed American media applauded Israel’s supposed acceptance, without any critical review of Netanyahu’s crippling conditions. We’ve seen this script before. Back in 2003, when George W. Bush introduced his “Road Map,” media headlines screamed about Ariel Sharon’s acceptance. What went largely unreported was that Sharon and his cabinet had attached 14 reservations that essentially veered the plan off the road.

The pattern is unmistakable. In every so-called proposal for peace, Israel secures immediate, tangible gains, such as Palestinian recognition of Israel under the Oslo Accord, with a mere promise to recognize Palestine at some vague point in the “foreseeable” future. More than three decades later, that future never arrived.

In my column earlier this week, I warned that Netanyahu would inject “a poison pill to undermine Trump’s plan from within.” It didn’t take long. As Axios reported, Arab leaders were “furious” when Netanyahu rewrote critical clauses, especially on the conditions and timetable for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza.

Here are just a few of those poison pills:

Captive Release vs. Withdrawal

Trump’s Item 3 promised: “If both sides agree to this proposal … Israeli forces will withdraw to the agreed-upon line to prepare for a hostage release.”

Netanyahu retorted:

“Israel will retain security responsibility, including a security perimeter, for the foreseeable future … the first step will be a modest withdrawal.”

Israel’s benefit is instant: the return of all captives. Palestinians, meanwhile, are promised a “modest withdrawal” to an undefined line, all while Israel retains security responsibility, a loophole allowing Israel to re-enter Gaza at will.

Gaza’s Governing Body

Trump’s Item 9 envisioned an international body managing Gaza’s redevelopment until the Palestinian Authority (PA) reformed and could govern. Netanyahu clarified Israel’s position:

“Gaza will have a peaceful civilian administration that is run neither by Hamas nor by the Palestinian Authority.”

Trump gave Israel the right to dictate who governs Gaza, while Palestinians told they are not ready to govern themselves, not even by the submissive PA.

Statehood Illusions

Trump’s Item 19 suggested a “credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood” if (PA) reforms were carried out. Netanyahu dismissed the very premise:

“Israelis have no faith that the PA leopard will change its spots … Gaza will not be administered by the Palestinian Authority.”

He then redefined the PA “reforms” as ending Palestinian appeals to the ICC and ICJ, recognizing Israel as a “Jewish state,” and accepting “many, many other reforms.”

New conditions that have nothing to do with governance or effective administration. They are political pretexts, crafted to sabotage Trump’s 20-point plan or to render the PA irrelevant should it “reform” on Israel’s terms.

Occupation

Trump’s Item 16 declared: “Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza.” Netanyahu replied:

“Israel … will remain in the security perimeter for the foreseeable future.”

Translation: Israel will occupy Gaza.

Further to the above clear rebuttals undermining Trump’s Plan, still even more telling is Item 8: Neutral Aid Distribution—it calls for “aid in the Gaza Strip will proceed without interference from the two parties through the United Nations and its agencies, and the Red Crescent…”

Unwittingly, Trump’s Plan acknowledges that the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was not “neutral” but a tool using food as a weapon against a captive population.

Trump stood silently as Netanyahu gutted his plan, offering no objection but showering Netanyahu with praise as a “warrior.” The plan offers Israel everything in advance, by contrast, Palestinians receive conditional promises, vague timelines in the “foreseeable” future. Even that, according to Netanyahu, is contingent on Palestinian compliance and “good behavior.”

This is not a new playbook. In 2003, Bush’s Road Map tumbled into a ditch under Israel’s 14 reservations. Now, Trump’s plan faces the same fate because the structure is identical: Israel collects its benefits immediately, while Palestinians are left with empty promises. I must confess, though, Netanyahu was generous, offering only four conditions, enough, nonetheless, to bury Trump’s Plan into oblivion.

Should Palestinians dare to request clarifications or attach conditions of their own, the managed U.S. media would instantly brand them as “rejectionist,” while Israel’s sweeping conditions are politely ignored.

Irrespective of how Palestinians will respond, Trump’s 20-point Plan is destined to join Bush’s “Road Map.” Neither plan was ever about justice or reconciliation. The Road Map gave Sharon cover to accelerate the expansion of the Jewish-only colonies and build the apartheid wall on stolen Palestinian land. Today, Trump’s blueprint functions as a veneer for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, while offering Palestinians little more than equivocal promises.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

On Sept 23, 2025, the Foreign Policy Association and the Committee of 100 hosted a debate on the topic “Is Deglobalization Inevitable?,” with Walden Bello, co-chair of the Board of Focus on the Global South, and Edward Ashbee of the Copenhagen Business School, with Bello defending the affirmative side, after a fireside chat with Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz.  The audience judged Bello’s position the more persuasive of the two sides.

In the 1990s, we were told that we were entering an era, known as globalization, that, owing to free trade and unobstructed capital flows in a borderless global economy, would lead to the best of all possible worlds. Most of the West’s economic, political, and intellectual elites bought into this vision. I still remember how the venerable Thomas Friedman of The New York Timeslampooned those of us who resisted this vision as “flat-earthers,” or believers in a flat earth. I still recall the equally venerable Economist magazine singling me out as coining the word “deglobalization,” not with the aim of hailing me as a prophet but as a fool preaching a return to a Jurassic past.

Thirty years on, this flat-earther takes no pride in having forecast the mess we are in, to which unfettered globalization has been a central contributor: the highest rates of inequality in decades, growing poverty in both the Global North and the Global South, deindustrialization in the United States and many other countries, massive indebtedness of consumers in the Global North and whole countries in the Global South, financial crisis after financial crisis, the rise of the far right, and intensifying geopolitical conflict.

Globalization did not lead to a new world order but to the Brave New World.

Snapshots of a Dreary Era

Let me present three snapshots of that era of globalization that we are now leaving:

Snapshot No 1:  Apple was one of the main beneficiaries of globalization. Apple led the escape away from the confines of the national economy to create global supply chains propped up by cheap labor. Let me just quote The New York Times in this regard:

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

Apple, of course, was not alone in the drive to deindustrialize America. It was accompanied by fellow IT corporations Microsoft, Intel, and Invidia; automakers GM, Ford, and Tesla; pharmaceutical giants Johnson and Johnson and Pfizer; and other leaders in other industries and services, such as Procter and Gamble, Coca Cola, Walmart, and Amazon, to name just a few. The favorite destination was China, where wages were 3-5 percent of wages of workers in the United States. The “China Shock” is estimated, conservatively, to have led to the loss of 2.4 million U.S. jobs. Employment in manufacturing dropped to 11.7 million in October 2009, a loss of 5.5 million or 32 percent of all manufacturing jobs since October 2000. The last time fewer than 12 million people worked in the manufacturing sector was before World War II, in 1941.

Snapshot 2:  The removal of the barriers to the free flow of capital globally led to the Third World Debt Crisis in the early 1980s, which almost brought down the Citibank and other U.S. financial institutions, and the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, which brought down the so-called Asian miracle economies. Removing global capital controls was accompanied by the deregulation of the U.S. financial system, which led to the creation of massive profit-making scams through the so-called magic of financial engineering like the frenzied trading in sub-prime mortgages. Not only were millions bankrupted and lost their homes when the subprime securities were exposed as rotten, but the whole global system stood on the brink of collapse in 2008, and it was saved only by the bailout of U.S. banks, with U.S. taxpayers money, to the tune of over $1 trillion.

Snapshot 3 is the famous French economist Thomas Piketty’s summing up of the U.S. economic tragedy of the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

[I] want to stress that the word “collapse” [in the case of the United States] is no exaggeration. The bottom 50 percent of the income distribution claimed around 20 percent of national income from 1950 to 1980; but that share has been divided almost in half, falling to just 12 per cent in 2010–2015. The top centile’s share has moved in the opposite direction, from barely 11 per cent to more than 20 percent.

Accompanying this massive increase in inequality in the United States has been an increase in poverty. Globally, according to available data, since the financial crises of 2007-08, wealth inequality has risen, and now the top one percent owns half the world’s total household wealth.

Let me turn from this nostalgic recounting of the past, and once more, let me focus on our good friend Apple. It is now leading the so-called reshoring process. It has read the handwriting on the wall and, though this will negatively affect its bottom line and scramble its operations, to protect the remainder of its super profits, it is leading the reshoring of its supply chains, with a planned $600 billion investment in the manufacture within the United States of its iPhone, iPad, MacBook, as well as in the fabrication of semi-conductor chips. Boasting that Apple manufacturing plans will create 450,000 jobs in the United States, CEO Tim Cook admitted to being a hostage to Trump’s push to deglobalize the operations of American firms, saying, “The president has said he wants more in the United States…so we want more in the United States.”  Where Apple goes, others follow, among them U.S. chipmakers Intel and Nvidia, automotive leader Tesla, and pharmaceutical giant Johnson and Johnson.

But American firms are not the only hostages to politics. Among the foreign firms that have bowed to Trump’s ultra-protectionist push via unilateral tariff increases by regionalizing or nationalizing their supply lines are Hyundai Motors, Honda Motors, Samsung electronics, Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC, and pharmaceutical firm Sanofi.

Although reshoring or relocation has proceeded by fits and starts over the last decade, under the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, it is likely to accelerate over the next few years, despite constraints and inefficiencies, as economic nationalism rises in the United States and the West. In 2023, an exhaustive study of North American firms showed that that more than 90 percent of manufacturing companies in the region had moved at least some of their production or supply chain in the past five years. Another study conducted at the same time showed that by 2026, 65 percent of surveyed companies would be buying most key items from regional suppliers, compared to just 38 percent in 2023. With Trump imposing unilateral tariffs on Mexico and Canada, companies are realizing that relocating to the NAFTA partners may not appease Trump; they will have to relocate to the United States itself, despite the disruption and chaos that might accompany that process, such as that which saw 300 workers vital to the Hyundai facility in Georgia arrested by ICE and deported to Korea.

Rage: Triggered by the Left, Expropriated by the Right

The tremendous global anger and resentment at the dystopia to which corporate-driven globalization has led us is perhaps the biggest reason why deglobalization will be the trend for a long, long while. That rage first came from the left, which inflicted a reversal from which corporate-driven globalization never recovered during the historic Battle of Seattle in December 1999. But it was Donald Trump and other forces of the far right that successfully rode that anger to political triumph in the United States and Europe in the coming decades.

In other words, the politics of rage, not the economics of narrow efficiency in the service of corporate profitability is now in command.  In the United States, globalization created two antagonistic communities, one that benefited from it due to their superior education and incomes, the other that suffered from it owing to their lack of both economic and educational advantages. The latter is the vast sector of the population that Hillary Clinton called the “deplorables,” but is better known as the “Make America Great Again” folks or MAGA base. That community will not easily forget either the sufferings brought about by the deindustrialization spearheaded by Apple and other well-known TNCs or the slights they endured from Hillary, whom they regard as being in the pocket of Wall Street.

A second reason for the strength of the deglobalization wave is that the multilateral order that served as the political canopy or system of governance for free trade and unobstructed capital flows is on the brink of collapse. The World Trade Organization, which was once described as the jewel in the crown of multilateralism, no longer functions as a system for governing world trade, partly owing to sabotage by the United States, when under Obama and later Trump and Biden, Washington could no longer rely on favorable rulings in trade disputes. The International Monetary Fund has not recovered from its reputation of promoting austerity in developing countries and its push for unfettered capital flows that brought down the Asian tiger economies. The World Bank also is discredited for its complicity in imposing austerity measures as well as for the wrong-headed policy of export-oriented industrialization for Global North markets that the Bank prescribed as the route to prosperity for developing countries—one that is now especially fatal for those who followed it given the ultra-protectionism sweeping the United States.

Third, national security, both economic security and military security, has displaced prosperity through trade and investment as the principal consideration in relations among countries. Both the Biden and Trump administrations have banned the transfer of advanced computer chips to China, and more such measures will follow. Reorganizing and regionalizing, if not nationalizing, access to and supply lines for key resources for advanced technologies like lithium, rare earth, copper, cobalt, and nickel is now an overriding concern, the aim being not only to monopolize these sensitive commodities but to prevent competitors from getting hold of them.

Two Routes to a Deglobalized World

The issue is not the inevitability of deglobalization but what form deglobalization will take. Deglobalization marked by ultra-protectionism in trade relations, unilateralism and isolationism in economic and military relations, and the creation of a domestic market geared principally towards the interests of the racial and ethnic majority is one way to deglobalize. That is indeed where Trump is leading the United States.

But there is another way to deglobalize, the key elements of which I laid out in my book Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy 25 years ago.

One, we do not demand a withdrawal into autarky but continued participation in the international economy, but in a way that ensures that instead of swamping it, international market forces are harnessed to assist in building the capacity to sustain a vibrant domestic economy.

Two, we propose that via a judicious combination of equality-enhancing redistributive measures and reasonable tariffs and quotas, the internal market will again become the engine of a healthy economy instead of being an appendage of an export-oriented economy.

Third, we promote participation in a plurality of economic groupings–those that allow countries to maintain policy space for development, instead of imprisoning them in a single global body, the World Trade Organization, with a uniform set of rules, one that favors the interests of transnational corporations instead of the interests of their citizens.

Fourth, inspired by the work of Karl Polanyi, we advocate the re-embedding of the market in the community, so that instead of driving the latter, as in global capitalism, the market is subject to the values and rhythms of the community.

And finally, in contrast to the far right, we uphold the notion of community as one where membership is not determined by blood or ethnicity but by a shared belief in democratic values.

That is the alternative we offered a quarter of a century ago. This fluid system of international trade that allows especially the economies of the Global South the space to pursue sustainable development is not far from the flexible global trading system before the takeoff of globalization in the late eighties, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Twenty five years ago, we were promoting and we continue to promote a route of progressive deglobalization, one that avoids the extreme of the doctrinaire dystopia of corporate-driven globalization, on the one hand, and, on the other, savage unilateralism and protectionism.  This route to deglobalization is not new, nor, some would claim, particularly radical. Keynes’ common sense advice, addressing the global situation in the 1930s, is very relevant to our times, “Let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national.”

Had we taken this route, I dare say, the chances are great that we would not be in the terrible mess the world is in today, with the threat not only of trade war but of real war at its doorsteps. There is still time to take this route, but the window of opportunity is closing fast.

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Photograph Source: Fred Schilling – Public Domain

October 6 is the first Monday of the month. It is the traditional start of the U.S. Supreme Court term. It is also the twentieth year with John Roberts as Chief Justice. While American democracy faces many challenges—economic inequality, racial divisions, and rampant polarization—another corrosive force too often overlooked sits at the very top of the judicial hierarchy. The Roberts Court may be the most aggressively anti-democratic Supreme Court in U.S. history.

By design the Court is inherently insulated from democracy. Justices are unelected, serve for life, and wield the power to strike down laws passed by elected representatives. The Constitution envisions this insulation as a safeguard: the Court should resist majoritarian pressures and protect vulnerable minorities. In United States v. Carolene Products Co., 304 US. 144 (1938), the famous footnote four laid out this vision of the judiciary as the guardian of political participation, tasked with keeping the channels of democratic change open. But under Roberts, the Court has abandoned this role. Instead of defending democracy, the Court has shut doors, tilted the playing field, and entrenched power in the hands of the wealthy, white, and well-connected.

Consider the record. Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 553 U.S. 181 (2008), upheld Indiana’s strict voter ID law. The state could not point to a single example of the voter fraud it claimed to be preventing. What the law actually did was burden poor, elderly, and minority voters—those least likely to have government-issued identification. With this decision, the Roberts Court put its seal of approval on voter suppression, encouraging states to pass laws that systematically exclude inconvenient voters. Far from protecting the right to vote, the Court became an accomplice in undermining it.

Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013), was a body blow to voting rights. The Court gutted the preclearance regime of the Voting Rights Act, one of the most effective civil rights tools in American history. Roberts claimed the formula was outdated, ignoring the ongoing evidence of racial discrimination in voting. Within hours, states rolled out new restrictions: voter ID laws, polling place closures, and voter purges. The Court unleashed a wave of suppression that disproportionately targeted minority communities. This was not colorblind constitutionalism; it was willful blindness to racism in the political system.

Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, 594 U.S. 647 (2021), continued the demolition of the Voting Rights Act. By upholding Arizona’s restrictive voting laws and adopting a narrow test for discrimination claims, the Court all but neutered Section 2 of the Act. Even laws with obvious racial disparities now stand a better chance of surviving. Roberts and his majority did not just interpret the statute narrowly; they rewrote its purpose, leaving voters of color with diminished protection.

In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), the Roberts Court struck down restrictions on corporate and union spending in elections. By equating money with speech, the Court created a plutocrat’s playground. Elections became less about ideas and more about dollars. Super PACs, dark money groups, and billionaires now dominate the airwaves, drowning out the voices of ordinary citizens. This was not judicial restraint; it was judicial activism of the worst kind—an activist Court rewriting the rules of democracy to empower corporations and the wealthy few.

The attack continued in Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett, 564 U.S. 721 (2011). Roberts himself wrote the opinion striking down Arizona’s system of matching funds for publicly financed candidates. This was a program designed to reduce corruption and give ordinary citizens a fair shot against entrenched money. By invalidating it, the Court told states they could not even experiment with reforms to clean up politics. The message was unmistakable: the Roberts Court is not a neutral umpire but a battering ram against any effort to curb the power of money in politics.

Meanwhile, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, 572 U.S. 185 (2014), doubled down on the assault on campaign finance. By striking down aggregate contribution limits, the Court opened another pipeline for the wealthy to buy influence. Combined with Citizens United, the result is an electoral system increasingly controlled by the donor class. For Roberts and his colleagues, the problem was not that money distorts democracy, but that wealthy donors weren’t free enough to spend more.

The Court then washed its hands of partisan gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684 (2019). By declaring the issue nonjusticiable, the Court effectively gave politicians a green light to draw maps that lock in their own power such as they are doing in Texas and other states. Gerrymanders now allow minority parties to dominate legislatures and insulate themselves from electoral accountability. Roberts’s claim that courts lack a standard to judge gerrymandering was disingenuous. Standards had been proposed; the Court simply lacked the will. By abdicating, it entrenched minority rule and undermined representative democracy.

In Trump v. Mazars USA, LLP, 591 U.S. ___, 140 S. Ct. 2019 (2020), the Court weakened Congress’s ability to investigate the president. Oversight is a cornerstone of checks and balances, yet the Roberts Court imposed a burdensome test that made it far harder to obtain crucial information. In effect, it shielded presidential misconduct from scrutiny, tilting power further toward the executive.

In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. ___ (2024), the Court toppled Chevron deference, stripping federal agencies of their ability to reasonably interpret ambiguous statutes. This was a long-standing conservative goal, and Roberts delivered. The decision shifts policymaking away from agencies answerable to elected officials and hands it to unelected judges. The result is paralysis in regulation and a judiciary empowered to thwart democratic governance in environmental protection, labor standards, and consumer rights.

Perhaps most alarming, Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. ___ (2024), granted sweeping presidential immunity for “official acts.” This decision elevates the president above the law, a status the Constitution never contemplated. If the president cannot be held criminally accountable for abusing power, democracy itself is at risk. By insulating the office from accountability, Roberts and his Court invited authoritarianism.

Finally, Trump v. CASA, Inc., 606 U.S. ___ (2025), curtailed federal courts’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions. In the context of an executive order limiting birthright citizenship, the Court limited remedies to only the named plaintiffs. The broader public, even if equally harmed, received no immediate protection. This ruling stripped the judiciary of one of its most effective tools for checking executive overreach, making it harder to stop unconstitutional actions before they spread nationwide.

The pattern is unmistakable. The Roberts Court has dismantled campaign finance protections, gutted voting rights, legitimized gerrymandering, weakened congressional oversight, kneecapped the administrative state, and placed the president above the law. Far from defending democracy, it has been one of its most consistent adversaries . Every chance the Roberts Court has had to come to the aid of  democracy and limiting abuses of power, it has turned away.

This is not judicial modesty. This is not principled restraint. It is a project: to entrench minority rule, empower moneyed interests, and protect executive power from accountability. John Roberts, who once sold himself as an umpire calling balls and strikes, has instead led a team of partisan players rewriting the rulebook of American democracy to favor the wealthy, the powerful, and the entrenched.

As the Court begins its twenty-first year under Roberts’s leadership, the outlook is grim. Those who once hoped the Supreme Court would serve as the final firewall against authoritarianism must confront the reality that the Roberts Court has been an accelerant of democratic decline. God help this honorable Court and American Democracy—because under John Roberts, it has done little to help democracy itself.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In the summer of 2020, during the protests in Minneapolis following the brutal murder of George Floyd, Donald Trump and his senior aides discussed the invocation of the Insurrection Act of 1807 in order to deploy active-duty military personnel to quell the unrest.  Fortunately, Trump’s most senior advisers—Attorney General William Barr, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley—were strongly opposed to sending military personnel to an American city.

There is reason to believe that the invocation of the Insurrection Act is once again on the table in the White House, and there is little likelihood that Attorney General Pam Bondi or Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth would object; in fact, it is reasonable to assume that Bondi and Hegseth, who are consumed with exaggerated fears of domestic instability, would favor such a move.  The unknown in the group, of course, is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Dan Caine, who is already facing a great deal of pressure to politicize the professional military.

Trump was furious about the protests in Minneapolis and reportedly wanted to send thousands of active-duty forces to the city.  He had significant support from White House aides, presumably led by Stephen Miller, the current deputy chief of staff who is shepherding the harsh domestic crackdown against sanctuary cities and immigrants in general.  In June 2020, Trump repeatedly urged General Milley to use the military to confront protesters in Washington, and ranted about the unrest in such cities as New York, Chicago, and Portland.  Currently, National Guard troops are in place in Chicago and Portland, where there are no signs of unrest.  Trump’s targets are typically blue states where there are mayors of color in key cities.

Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s unprecedented summoning of hundreds of U.S. generals and admirals to Washington to announce the reordering of U.S. military priorities, centering on perceived threats to the homeland, suggests that the Insurrection Act is high on Trump’s agenda.  If there is a major power in the world that faces little threat to the homeland, it is the United States.  No other major power in the global community can claim the geographic safety and security from oceans to the east and west, and stable border relations to the north and south.  The homeland threat is being exaggerated for a reason, and that reason could well include the invocation of the Insurrection Act.

Trump’s highly partisan and bellicose remarks to the assembled generals and admirals called for using America’s “dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”  He painted a picture of the United States under attack “from within,” which could presage the use of the Insurrection Act ultimately.  His attacks on Joe Biden were met with silence, unlike his remarks at Ft. Bragg several months ago that elicited anti-Biden boos from American soldiers.  Hegseth used the meeting to criticize “fat generals and admirals,” and announced mandatory personal fitness tests on a semi-annual basis.

The loosely worded Insurrection Act of 1807 empowers the president to deploy the U.S. military and to federalize National Guard units of individual states in specific circumstances.  It was last used in 1992 to deal with the riots in Los Angeles following the riots that erupted after the acquittal of police officers who had beaten Rodney King.  Ironically, the Senate voted 57-43 to convict Trump of inciting insurrection to stop the counting of the votes in January 2021, but the vote was ten votes short of the required two-thirds majority required by the Constitution.

In addition to Trump ordering troops in Portland to use “full force if necessary, there are other worrisome developments.  Secretary of Defense Hegseth recently issued a warning to journalists and implemented strict new rules that limit press access to the Pentagon.  He warned reporters that the “press does not run the Pentagon—the people do, and that reporters should “wear a badge and follow the rules—or go home.”  The Trump’s administration’s current challenges to free speech and free press point to a mindset that could justify invocation of the Insurrection Act.

In recent years, several Democratic senators, including Richard Blumenthal, Alex Padilla, and Adam Schiff, have tried without success to introduce legislation to restrict the president’s broad and vague authority to deploy troops—either with or without the request of a state—to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”  Harvard Professor Steven Levitsky warned several years ago that American exceptionalism has created a complacency about the strength of the rule of law and constitutional safeguards that are now under attack.

Trump clearly has the ability and the inclination to escalate tensions in U.S. cities, rather than to legitimately restore order.  Trump and Hegseth appear  driven to politicize the professional military and turn it into a political tool.  The fact that major protests are scheduled to take place in cities all over the country in less than three weeks could provide the opportunity that the Trump administration is seeking to deploy more force in U.S. cities.  The invocation of the Insurrection Act would allow Donald Trump to act with impunity.

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Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump. Image Wikipedia.

Since Charlie Kirk was killed on September 10, amongst the obfuscation and outright misrepresentation of his politics, and the weaponisation of his death by Trump and his cronies – with the support of establishment Democrats – to push the United States deeper into the depths of MAGA’s fascist dystopia, the Left has been caught off-guard. Some have been quick to condemn his killing and decry political violence, while others criticise the former for misrepresenting the life, politics and legacy of a heinous far-right figure. But among these divisions, an alternate perspective has emerged within segments of the global Left, one that is growing increasingly popular every passing day: Charlie Kirk was killed by Israel.

It’s not too surprising that this view has emerged. Over the last two years, during its genocide in Gaza, Israel has bombed sovereign countries, targeted journalists and activists, and unleashed a pervasive, all-reaching hasbara (propaganda) campaign to salvage its perpetually withering international standing. And Israel has, over the course of decades, also unleashed an assassination campaign that makes even the CIA’s pale in comparison – as is explored in extensive detail in Ronen Bergman’s book Rise and Kill First.

So, the presumption that Israel, which only two weeks ago killed 31 Yemeni journalists in a targeted attack – the second-deadliest recorded against journalists ever – would carry out a political assassination of an American citizen, even on US soil, is not far-fetched. Not least because Benjamin Netanyahu has, on multiple occasions, made statements explicitly saying that Israel did not kill Kirk, only fueling the flames for this theory among anti-Zionists the world over.

The words coming out of the mouth of Israel’s war-criminal prime minister must always be taken with scepticism; however, it is important to be critical in our justified criticism of Israel and the impunity with which it acts. Netanyahu is many things. He is a genocidaire, a racist Islamophobe, and a repulsive war criminal who has no regard for human life. But one thing he is not is stupid. The fact that he has, quite needlessly, made repeated statements regarding Kirk’s killing is telling, indicating that he sees a pragmatic purpose in keeping the rumour going. This was also pointed out by Drop Site News, whose September 18 newsletter stated: “Netanyahu’s decision to once again publicly deny the allegations gives oxygen to the storyline, suggesting Netanyahu paradoxically sees some public-relations benefit to it.”

The public-relations benefit is that it offers Israel another opportunity to misrepresent the anti-Zionist movement by making baseless accusations of blood libel and anti-semitism for its criticisms of Israel and Zionism for the horrors it continues to unleash on the people of Gaza and beyond. Simultaneously, giving this theory oxygen keeps the anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine movement fractured, and it also keeps the lid on the actual covert assassination operations that Israel continues to conduct with impunity.

At a time when perpetually increasing numbers of people, including those politically detached, are opening their eyes to the malicious weaponisation of anti-semitism by Israel to mask its genocidal lust, Israel has found itself determined to push harder to obfuscate and confuse. This has taken the form of a significantly increased propaganda budget, which has undoubtedly been at the core of the bile it continues to disseminate through advertising, including by working directly with Google.

Here, amidst its international standing falling to previously unfathomable lows, especially in the West, Israel seeks to manufacture victimhood and play to both imagined and real fears. The fears of the mostly liberal voices, to echo the concern that, as a result of Israel’s policies, Jews will be blamed for any and everything – a sentiment that makes people uncomfortable, especially as there has been an increase in incidents of anti-semitism as a result of Israel’s malicious conflation of Judaism with Zionism for its ethno-supremacist project. Fuelling the conspiracy theory that Israel killed Kirk does just that: it further weaponises anti-semitism to create rifts within the broad coalition of people around the world who are appalled by the genocide.

Indeed, to illustrate the absurdity of this theory, one need only reflect on the circumstances that led to its development. If Israel really wanted to eliminate the online personalities and content creators seriously committed to worsening its already ruined reputation and standing, why would it choose to assassinate one of its most fervent defenders?

Some point towards a seemingly mysterious change in Kirk’s attitudes regarding Israel, even though, until the moment he was killed, he spoke candidly, often with joy, about his contentment at the destruction of Gaza and the killing of Palestinian civilians.

“I used to say: ‘If you, as a gay person, would go to Gaza, they would throw you off of tall buildings.’ Now they don’t have any tall buildings left,” he gleefully exclaimed at an event, not long before he was killed. He quickly followed that comment up with: “Maybe you shouldn’t kill Jews, stupid Muslims.” Is this the behaviour of someone so “anti-Israel” that they must be taken out?

Let’s consider, as some claim, that in spite of all of this, Kirk was on the brink of a complete reversal – turning his unwavering support and loyalty to the state and government of Israel into indifference. Even in such a scenario, it would be imprudent for Israel to assassinate Kirk, and not the countless other online personalities who have already been outspoken in their criticisms of Israel, including on the far-right, for almost two years now, some of whom command larger platforms than Kirk did.

Any serious credence one may want to attach to the theory that Israel killed Kirk falls apart the moment one looks at the events and the political context surrounding this killing, with the backbone of the claim being little more than Netanyahu’s constant and seemingly unnecessary denials.

Again, Netanyahu is not stupid. He recognises that the weaponisation of this claim, its potential to create divisions within the anti-Zionist movement, and its capacity to mask Israel’s sophisticated killing machine all benefit Israel. In fact, when one is sceptical and critical of the assertion that Israel killed Kirk, unless they are already well-versed with Israel’s covert assassination machine, this may only make it likelier for them to assume that other claims of Israeli assassinations are unsubstantiated, even though that is far from the truth.

Lastly, it is frustrating to see so many who are rightly appalled by and enraged by Israel’s genocide have chosen to hyper-fixate on Kirk’s killing, with some even misrepresenting Kirk’s politics and legacy, and elevating him to the status of martyrdom. Not least because the horrors that Israel has subjected Gaza and the world in only the time since Kirk was killed are infinitely more important to focus on.

On the day Kirk was killed, Israel bombed the sixth sovereign country in a period of 72 hours. In the days since, it carried out brutal targeted strikes on Yemeni newspaper offices and has marked individuals on the boats that are a part of the Global Sumud Flotilla – a humanitarian non-violent mission to provide aid to the besieged people in Gaza – which includes activists, actors, and sitting members of parliament, including Greta Thunberg, Adèle Haenel, Mariana Mortágua and Rima Hassan, among others, as terrorists. All of this while it continues to kill and starve everyone in Gaza, with some estimates emerging now that Israel’s assault may have killed a third of Gaza’s pre-October 7 population.

Our focus should not move away from these realities, not least in the defence of the death of one of Israel’s most committed defenders, who never let any opportunity to be racist or Islamophobic slide. Fixating on tying Kirk’s death to Israel does little beyond taking focus away from the genocide and playing into the traps of Israel’s withering propaganda machine.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Noem Scheiber, the New York Times’ generally excellent labor reporter, had a lengthy background piece that really hit a nerve. The piece sought to answer why top executives at major corporations are so quickly caving into Donald Trump’s lunacy rather than banding together and fighting it.

Scheiber puts the root cause as a shift from a focus on stakeholder capitalism, where top executives sought to serve not just the company’s bottom line, but also the company’s workers and the communities in which they operated, to an exclusive focus on maximizing shareholder value. This is seriously wrong, and it is important to point out why it is wrong.

First and foremost, it is wrong to say that CEOs have an exclusive focus on maximizing shareholder wealth. There is very solid evidence that they are more focused on maximizing their own pay rather than corporate earnings. Much research shows that CEO pay does not closely reflect returns to shareholders. Lucien Bebchuk and Jesse Fried presented this case in their book, Pay Without Performance, two decades ago.

There are any number of CEOs who have walked away with tens of millions of dollars after doing serious damage to their companies and their shareholders. Most recently we saw the CEO from Boeing walk away from the company with over $60 million after bringing it to the edge of bankruptcy, that’s really maximizing shareholder value.

 The Bebchuk and Fried argument is that the corporate boards that ultimately determine CEO pay owe their positions largely to top management. (I made a modest contribution to this literature in a paper with Jessica Schieder. We examined CEO pay in the health insurance industry after the ACA took away deductibility in 2011. This change unambiguously raised the cost of CEO pay to companies, but no matter how much we beat up the data, we could not find any evidence it lowered pay, even after controlling for revenue, profits, share value, and everything else imaginable.)

As long as they maintain the support of their fellow board members, they can be almost certain of maintaining their seat. More than 99 percent of board members who are recommended for re-election win shareholder elections. Asking questions like, “can we pay our CEO a lot less money?” is not likely to endear a board member to their colleagues, so it seems this question is rarely asked. That means there is no effective check on CEO pay.

Since being on a corporate board is a very cushy job, typically paying several hundred thousand dollars a year for a few hundred hours of work, board members generally want to keep their jobs. Steven Clifford, a former CEO and corporate board member, outlines this case from the inside in his book The CEO Pay Machine.

This distinction matters for several reasons. First, most of the upward redistribution of the last four decades has been to high-end wage earners, not corporate profits. In fact, the bulk of the upward redistribution had already taken place by 2000, a point at which the corporate profit share was the same as its 1960s level.

The excessive pay of CEOs, by itself, may be a small part of that story, but if a CEO is getting $25 million or $30 million, then odds are the other people in the C-suite are getting $10-$15 million, and the third layer of corporate execs are likely pocketing several million a year. This is a very different world from one where the CEO might get $3-$4 million, as would be the case if the ratio of CEO to worker pay had remained at its levels of a half century ago. And more money for those at the top means less for everyone else.

And the change in rules and norms that allow CEO pay to explode also allowed for top end pay to rise in other contexts. Longer and stronger patent and copyright monopolies made many STEM workers millionaires or even billionaires. The abuse of bankruptcy laws by private equity companies, also created many millionaires and billionaires. This is a mix of wages and profits, since the private equity partners who get the big bucks are ostensibly working for their money. The bloated financial sector more generally has also made for many big paychecks.

This is my usual schpiel, but it is important to distinguish it from the line that Scheiber gives in his piece. According to Scheiber, there were benefits to the alleged shift to a focus on shareholder value:

“The economy became more efficient and dynamic. Consumers often benefited and American firms became the most innovative on the planet.”

These benefits are far more difficult to find in the world than in policy discussions. Here is what productivity growth looked like in the period of stakeholder capitalism compared with the period where corporations were ostensibly maximizing shareholder value.

The average annual rate of productivity growth was 1.3 percentage points higher in the former period. There are technical reasons, like the lower depreciation share in output in the earlier period, that would make the gap even larger. I left the seventies slump as a separate period since we can argue where it belongs. It was a period in which the economy was hugely shaken by two massive oil price hikes at a time when the U.S. economy was far dependent on oil than is the case today. In any case, putting it with the earlier period would not change the picture.

If we look at the international comparisons, contrary to Scheiber, we don’t get a story for the obvious superiority of the U.S. economy in the last 45 years. According to the I.M.F., in 1980, France’s per capita GDP was 85.7 percent of the U.S. per capita GDP. It had fallen to 74.3 percent by 2024. The ratio for Germany was 95.3 percent in 1980 but had declined to 85.6 percent by 2024.

However, before anyone sees this as a victory for U.S. capitalism, consider that average annual hours worked declined by 17.4 percent over this period in France and 23.8 percent in Germany. That compares to a fall of just 3.4 percent in the United States. The rest of the world chose to take the gains of productivity growth in longer vacations and shorter workweeks. That doesn’t make for a victory of U.S. capitalism, it just means workers who put in more hours get higher annual wages.

A full international comparison is more complicated, but the vigorous handwaving by Scheiber and others is not convincing. The U.S. economy is obviously ahead in some ways, but the fuller picture is far more ambiguous.

The distinctions here matter in terms of how we view the legitimacy of a system that has shifted a massive amount of income upward. There is some amount of integrity in saying that we just want to leave things to the market. There is much less integrity in saying we are rigging the deck to give all the money to the rich. We have done the latter, it is understandable that the beneficiaries of this upward redistribution want to conceal this fact, but it is mindboggling that people opposed to the upward redistribution also conceal the reality.

The rationale that there has been a payoff in better economic performance also needs to be attacked. At best we can say by some measures the U.S. economy has performed better than its peers over the last forty-five years, but it is far from a slam dunk case, and it is easy to show statistics, like gains in life expectancy, where it has done far worse.

Why the CEOs Genuflect to Donald Trump

If we don’t buy Scheiber’s story for the mass capitulation to Trump, then we need an alternative. To my mind the story is a lack of an institutional structure that supports a challenge to Trump. The most important part of the story here is the reduced power or organized labor. In the fifties and sixties, one-third of the workforce was in unions. Today, the figure is just 10.0 percent overall and only slightly over 6.0 percent in the private sector.

Unions were a serious part of the national dialogue in the fifties and sixties, with leaders of unions being a regular part of major policy debates. Today they are an after-thought even for the Democrats and largely an enemy to Republicans. They still have some clout, especially in states where they represent a substantial share of the workforce, but their political power is radically diminished compared to a half-century ago. That was not an accident, the Republicans, and some Democrats, deliberately pushed policies to weaken unions.

The media also provided an effective check to the sort of authoritarian nonsense being pushed by Trump in a way that is no longer the case. We shouldn’t idealize the media of the early post-war decades, they helped to conceal the reality of U.S. interventions in places like Iran, Guatemala, and Vietnam, although eventually their truth-telling helped to bring an end to the war. But the key point is that they were a major institutional voice prepared to intervene on the side of reality in way that is no longer true.

Back in the 1960s, nearly 30 million people watched Walter Conkrite on CBS news every night in a country with half the current U.S. population. Today the combinedviewership of the network news shows is less than 18 million. And that viewership tilts hugely older, less than 3 million are under age 55.

This means that insofar as the television news outlets could be counted on to be truth tellers who would expose lies from politicians and their allies, they are much less effective today. Relatively few people are paying attention. And even this limited truth-teller role is being put into question as the networks are taken over by far-right wing billionaires who are happy to go along with whatever nonsense Donald Trump says. The story with newspapers is even worse, as the Internet, as well as the dominance of Facebook and Google, has devasted the ad revenue that was their primary means of support.

While the Internet does offer low-cost means of communication there is virtually no institutional support for a progressive presence on it. The broad liberal-left has largely ignored the media even as traditional mainstream outlets were collapsing and the right was openly building up Fox News and other alternatives. This includes taking over huge platforms like Twitter and now TikTok, and bringing over Facebook now that Mark Zuckerberg has joined the team.

This means that a corporate CEO, who might have been ridiculed into retirement by endorsing some of Donald Trump’s deranged comments, can freely push utter nonsense and know that in most cases it will not matter to them personally or the companies they run. The checks that existed forty or fifty years ago are gone.

There were and hopefully still are alternative routes that the center and left could have taken. In addition to the broad economic issues that I discuss in Rigged (it’s free), it could have pushed for alternative support mechanisms for the media, such as individual vouchers or tax credits. It also could have tried to structure the rules for social media so as to make it less conducive to the sort of concentration we see with the huge platforms like X or Facebook, most importantly by not granting them special protection with Section 230.

Unfortunately, the center and left largely ignored the media world changing around them, adopting a strategy of “we have been losing for fifty years, why change now?” It is very late in the game at this point, who knows if democracy can be saved. But maybe, maybe, maybe, we can get some people to look at the situation with clear eyes and not just keep repeating the same nonsense that passes for wisdom in policy debates.

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

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Our freedom of speech should be guided by how we respect and live together as human beings, how we share and protect the bounty of creation, and the many other things of worth and dignity. Image by Mike Newbry.

The debates over the protection of free speech have been raging since before the killing of Charles Kirk. The killing of Charles Kirk has taken this discussion into another realm. Jimmy Kimmel was a high-profile casualty of the skirmish. He was suspended from his show and returned recently to record audiences, even though the companies on the political right, Sinclair and Nexstar, refused to air his show on the stations they owned. It has been demanded of Kimmel that he offer a full-throated apology to the family, and contribute to Turning Point USA, the organization that Kirk founded, as an act of contrition before he can really be forgiven. The premise is that short of that it would be doubtful whether he was actually remorseful. But while the corporate media focused on Jimmy Kimmel and his suspension, other people lost their positions because they exposed the racist things that Kirk uttered regularly on his podcast and in public forums. Jimmy Kimmel returned to TV after a brief suspension due to public pressure.

However, there are still a number of people without jobs because, like Kimmel, they exercised their First Amendment right and expressed outrage, disagreement, and concern over this Kirk moment in the country’s political life. Some questioned the way that the MAGA/Trump base was gathering around the spirit of Charles Kirk, canonizing and deifying him, and using him as the litmus test of whether people were aligned with the political right and the MAGA/Trump agenda or not. The MAGA/Trump white supremacist agenda was emboldened in their right-wing Onward Christian Soldier march to win new ground and to increase their abilities to conquer the left. Criticism of what Kirk said in life could not be submitted for examination of the words and intent, but according to the political right, to do so it was a celebration of the killing of Kirk. This was a calculated stretch, but worked as corporate America fired workers who felt sorry for his death but questioned his words and the words intent.

Karen Attiah, the last full-time Black opinion writer and editor of Global Opinions at the Washington Post, was let go in the midst of the Charles Kirk storm, but unlike Kimmel, she did not get her job back. MSNBC analyst Matthew Dowd was also let go. People know of the high profile people, but there are numbers of people that we do not learn from educators in the high schools and colleges, lawyers, doctors, first responders, people working in a variety of businesses, government workers, and many other professionals who have been shown the door because employers felt that their comments on social media was too raw, not remorseful enough, and had crossed the line as far as free speech was concerned. This is like a monster that have been let out of its cave where the mantra of advancing free speech is utilized, weaponized, and targeted toward “wokeness”, “critical race theory”, Diversity Equity and Inclusion, college admissions, voting rights, women, LGBTQIA, and every other group and person that is non-white and not in the fold of the MAGA/Trump and the white supremacist agenda.

Someone needs to explain to me this new set of rules concerning free speech. This week at Tennessee State University a MAGA group wearing those offensive red hats breached the safety of that HBCU with signs that said, “DEI should be illegal” and “deport all illegals now.” They called themselves the “Fearless Debaters,” and they claimed that this was their first stop on a tour. They argued they were exercising their First Amendment right. They were escorted off campus by security. But this demonstrates how the right has raised the ante on free speech from something that should be revered but now is being used in hateful and destructive ways.

The First Amendment is noble and is an expression of a free and open society where debate and discussion are welcomed. But freedom of speech for the political right has little to do with worthy ideas and valued discussion and debate, and it has nothing to do with advancing the dignity of the world or of the human race, but it has everything to do with advancing racist and hateful ideology under the guise of the First Amendment. The First Amendment is being used as a litmus test to distinguish between those on the right and those on the left. The right interprets freedom of speech as the right to say anything they want with all of the disrespect and hatefulness that they can. The idea that you can say anything you wish disrespectfully to anyone you want is what the political right means by freedom of speech. They mean to offer the most demeaning, degrading, insulting, and racist speech into the political and public arena. This is what they want the freedom to do, and are expressing this with a vengeance after their canonization and deification of Charles Kirk.

The political right felt restricted in its ability to speak from the 1980s until recently. During previous decades, racist speech became less acceptable in the public domain. Popular TV shows took on the idea of racist attitudes and speech and comically showed how boorish, foolish, and ill-mannered the practice and people were. All of us know how Archie Bunker, in a comedic way, exposed the subject of racism and bigotry weekly. There were other programs and popular shows that took on the theme, and racist speech was exposed for the virus that it is. It became less and less popular to express racist ideology openly.

But that was then, and this is now. We have taken giant steps backwards. When I listen to the political right, I hear the Klansmen screaming that racial mixing will create a mongrel race. What the political right wants to bring back is the speech of old along with the attitudes and racial restrictions of yesterday. The conservative Trump/MAGA political right wants to freely and publicly utter ideas and present attitudes that were exposed as wrong in the past, and it is just as wrong in the present. They want to talk about how Blacks and women are unqualified for a job. They want to talk about how every Black or Brown person in the job market represents a white person who should have had that job. They want to talk about how Black and Brown people coming into the country will soon out-populate white people unless we remove them from the country and turn them back at the borders. They want to talk about DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives as a threat to qualified white people and offering less competent non-white people the job. And most of all, they want to call me the “N” word in a myriad of free speech ways.

It has been argued that speech is limited in its protections if it creates an imminent danger or causes serious harm. Free speech can be deemed unprotected due to its intent and the threat it causes to others. For example, it is often cited that you can yell fire in a crowded movie theater, and if there is a fire, the speech is protected. Speech, however, that is not true, such as yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater when there is no fire and causing a stampede and injury to others, is not protected because it was intended to cause harm and resulted in bodily injury. I am a preacher and not a lawyer, but the speech that is being pushed by the political MAGA/Trump white supremacist agenda is intended to cause harm and to inflict mental anguish. The words they use, the ideas disguised as simple free speech is metastasizing as a cancer and infecting the country.

It won’t be easy to pull it back. Words will lead to violence as we have been witnessing, and it will get worse unless our ideas of speech edify instead of denigrating, and engage in the weightier things of existence. Our freedom of speech should be guided by how we respect and live together as human beings, how we share and protect the bounty of creation, and the many other things of worth and dignity. Unless the political rhetoric and public discourse become serious and thoughtful, the country’s polarization will persist, and we will become weaker as a nation rather than stronger. The hatred, racist, white supremacy ideology of the present must be put back into the past and made once again boorish and obsolete. We have to find a way to retire hate and harmful speech to the dirt pits of history, where relics lie buried. Unless we can elevate Free Speech to a loftier place, we will be doomed and remain polarized and broken as a people and a country.

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The Washington Post has systematically altered its editorial policies to favor the actions and policies of Donald Trump.  Now there are additional signs that its news division is pulling punches in order to favor the president.  In an Oval Office session with the press last week, Trump was unaware that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had summoned hundreds of U.S. generals and admirals to Washington on short notice and without any reason for the order.  When Trump was asked about the meeting, he clearly was unaware of Hegseth’s order and tried to cover himself by saying that it was a “good idea for the secretary to be meeting with foreign general officers.”  There were no foreign officers involved in Hegseth’s order, of course, and Vice President J.D. Vance immediately jumped in to downplay the meeting, and change the subject.  The Post ignored Trump’s ignorance.

The same day, the Post, in two op-eds, gave false credit to Trump for standing up to President Vladimir Putin on Russia’s war with Ukraine.  Marc Thiessen, a right-wing polemicist, concluded that Putin “will regret treating Trump with such contempt,” and said that “Trump won’t back down in the face of Putin’s escalation.”  Thiessen ignored the fact that Trump and Vance had sandbagged Ukrainian President Zelensky in the White House in February, and that Trump ever since has been washing his hands of the war that he promised to end in 24 hours.  More ominously, he ignored the fact that Trump’s wavering and waffling has enabled Putin to escalate his genocidal actions in Ukraine and threaten members of NATO with provocative overflights.

David Ignatius, a long-time apologist for the U.S. military and intelligence communities, credits Trump’s so-called tougher talk with giving Putin a “red line” in the war.  It’s absurd to believe that Trump has issued red lines in Ukraine or in Gaza for that matter.  Trump’s impulsive outbursts and escalating rhetoric can’t be seen as part of a new strategic path or even an indication of Trump’s future actions.  One thing is clear: every Trump threat and warning has led Putin to intensify military attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and to indulged in more threatening actions in Europe.  Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has similarly exploited Trump’s bluster and, as a result, thousands of innocent Palestinians are being killed or starved to death.

Trump further confuses the issue by crediting President John F. Kennedy with issuing a red line of his own in the Cuban missile crisis by imposing a quarantine in 1962 to stop future Soviet military deliveries.  In actual fact, Kennedy altered the quarantine to give more time for Nikita Khrushchev to retreat and then secretly promised to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey, which was part of the secret diplomacy that ended the confrontation.  Diplomacy was the key to ending the Cuban missile crisis.

As a result of the editorial interference and even censorship of some of its best writers, the Post’s leading journalists are packing their bags (and their Pulitzer Prizes) and heading to more open journalistic enterprises.  Ever since the owner of the Post, Jeff Bezos, killed an editorial in 2024 that endorsed Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, the paper has lost its leading luminaries to rival publications and media outlets.  A former executive editor of the P,ost, Marty Baron, wrote recently that Bezos was :basically fearful” of President Trump.  As a result of Bezos’ actions, hundreds of thousands of subscriptions to the Post have been cancelled.

E. J. Dionne, one of the nation’s best columnists, is now writing for the New York Times.  Ruth Marcus, a leading columnist on judicial matters, is writing for the New Yorker magazine.  Marcus left the post after Bezos killed one of her columns, which immediately ran in the New Yorker.  Carol Leonnig, a leading investigative reporter, has joined the investigative staff of MSNBC.  All three of them had won Pulitzers or were finalists in Pulitzer competitions.  Jennifer Rubin, a Post columnist for 15 years, was one of the first to leave.

The major beneficiaries of these departures have been the Post’s leading rivals, including the New York Times, The Atlantic, and MSNBC.  Jonathan Capehart, another Pulitzer Prize winner, is currently a TV commentator at MSNBC.  Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize cartoonist, left after several of her works were rejected.  David Shipley, the Post’s opinions editor, resigned to protest the change in the editorial direction of the paper under Bezos and the publisher, Will Lewis.  Other luminaries took buyouts to get away from Bezos’ authoritarian dictates, including veteran political reporter Dan Balz as well as excellent reporters such as Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, who joined The Atlantic.

It is particularly disconcerting that the mainstream media, which initially swallowed Washington’s lies about the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan for decades before seeing the truth, is now pulling its punches on Trump’s policies in Ukraine and Gaza.  And now Hegseth has moved to limit journalists reporting from the Pentagon.  Hegseth’s new rules would restrict the reporting of unauthorized material, which would conflict with Supreme Court rulings in years gone by that limited “prior restraints on publication.”  This would represent a direct attack on the First Amendment, which was not tolerated by the Court in the wake of the Pentagon Papers.  Of course, Trump’s 6-3 majority on the court doesn’t provide any protections for the separation of powers or constitutional authority.

Authoritarian leaders such as Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Orban, and Erdogan  have moved quickly to stifle the press, and the media have been slow to retaliate.  The Times’ Frank Bruni and Bret Stephens still believe that “Trump will not retreat.” Meanwhile, there is no better way to stifle democracy than to engage in press censorship, which the Founding Fathers certainly understood 250 years ago.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Historically, the most terrible things war, genocide, and slavery have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.

– Howard Zinn

The irony is unbearable. Trump has saturated public life in lies, turned immigrants and Black citizens into targets of contempt, and made corruption and violence the grammar of governance. He pledges loyalty to dictators, surrounds himself with sycophants and thugs, and uses state power to abduct foreign students, persecute immigrants, and declare war on the so-called left, grotesquely blaming them for Charlie Kirk’s death, even before a suspect was arrested. What should be a moment of grief over Charlie Kirk’s death has been twisted into a weaponized spectacle, with Trump and his allies rushing to frame the assassination as proof of leftist extremism.

As Jeffrey St. Clair observed, “Leaders of the Right didn’t waste much time counseling their ranks to restrict themselves to ‘thoughts and prayers’ over the murder of Charlie Kirk. Even before the assassin had been identified or a motive uncovered, they blamed the ‘violent rhetoric’ of the Left for Kirk’s death.” This is not mourning, it is the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook: accuse first, investigate never, weaponize tragedy to consolidate power.

In this poisonous narrative, the real “enemies within” are not the racists, insurrectionists, corrupt corporations, and right-wing extremists who stormed the Capitol, but the critics of authoritarian power as well as groups designated as “other.” Against them, Trump and his allies wage war on the First Amendment, turning freedom of speech from a cornerstone of democracy into its target. In their framing, freedom of speech is recast not as a bulwark of democracy but as its enemy. 

From comedians and journalists to students, educators, and independent groups, every dissenting voice is branded a conspirator in imagined crimes–their real offense nothing more than speaking against cruelty when silence was demanded. Or committing the crime of not being loyal enough to Donald Trump. As Hannah Arendt once warned, under totalitarianism thinking itself becomes dangerous. Authoritarianism in its many forms arises in part from the failure to think—a prescient warning in the age of manufactured ignorance. The normalization of ignorance, thoughtlessness, and moral blindness in the age of Trump is foundational to creating fascist subjects who cannot tell right from wrong, truth from lies, or justice from evil.

 This warning is even more urgent today, for there is a horrifying ignorance in Trump that unleashes predatory passions, stretching from his embrace of war criminals and historical amnesia to the fatal strikes he ordered on three alleged drug-smuggling vessels. For Trump, the legality of such acts is irrelevant.  Violence coupled with criminalizing dissent is central to the logic of annihilation at the core of fascist politics.

This is fascism’s signature maneuver. Hitler did it in 1933 after the Reichstag fire, blaming communists and invoking emergency powers to suspend civil liberties. Mussolini did it in 1925 after the assassination of Giacomo Matteotti, turning a moment of crisis into a justification for outlawing opposition and silencing presses.  Orbán has perfected the tactic in Hungary, scapegoating “Soros-funded leftists” to dismantle universities, criminalize protest, and eviscerate the press.

Trump is no exception. He exploits Kirk’s death not to grieve but to consolidate power. His message is blunt: dissent is violence, criticism is terrorism, disloyalty is a crime, and free speech itself is a threat to Trump’s ideological panopticon. The vicious amplification of this line of toxic thinking is evident in Elon Musk declaring “The Left is the party of murder,” and Trump’s consigliere Laura Loomer demanding the state “shut down, defund, and prosecute every single Leftist organization…The Left is a national security threat.” It reaches hysterical heights in the anti-communist rhetoric of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, who has likened the left to a “vast domestic terrorist network,” which he vowed to uproot and dismantle. The rhetoric is chilling not only for its cruelty but for its naked embrace of repression and the threat of violence as policy.

The consequences of Trump’s assault on dissent flare like a blazing neon sign in Times Square, impossible to ignore. Under his lawless reign, even satire is recast as treason, branded a ‘hate crime,’ as though laughter itself had become treason. Academic institutions that keep alive the memory of history and the struggles for freedom are stalked with mob-like threats, extortion masquerading as patriotism, intimidation parading as loyalty.  Canadian citizens are being threatened with visa revocation simply for making what Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi, and others defined as critical comments about Kirk’s death. This sends a chilling message: Trump’s authoritarian reach now crosses borders, extending its silencing power beyond U.S. soil. In this twisted logic, simply making a critical remark about Kirk is branded as a ‘celebration’– a perverse distortion far removed from reality. Kirk’s death should be mourned, but that is distinct from condemning his far-right ideological beliefs.

These acts of silencing are never isolated. They are instruments of power that legitimate broader forms of state violence. Censorship, propaganda, and the glorification of cruelty converge to normalize repression as both necessary and inevitable. Corporations and universities bow in fear and greed, sacrificing every shred of public responsibility to feed an unending hunger for power and capital. Nowhere is this surrender more shameful than in higher education, where universities crush dissent and betray their own students by handing over the names of those protesting genocide to the Trump administration. tragically repeating the cowardice of fascist-era campuses. Even worse, Ken Klippenstein reports that “the Trump administration is preparing to designate transgender people as ‘violent extremists’ in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder and are considering compiling a watchlist of Trans people. 

It is a chilling echo of fascist-era complicities, a moral collapse disguised as institutional neutrality. The echo is haunting and has given rise to a new McCarthyism of campus informants, a reprise of the shameful complicities of fascist-era universities. As journalist David French argued on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes show, the current attacks on free speech and dissidents critical of Trump are worse than McCarthyism, because it is “larger and broader in scope. It is more aggressive. It stretches across all  aspects of American society.” This is not merely an institutional failure but a moral collapse, a repudiation of knowledge, conscience, and the very democratic commitments that should define the purpose of the academy. What we are witnessing is McCarthyism reborn with a vengeance–surveillance, informants, blacklists.  Higher education has long unsettled the right, especially since the democratizing struggles of the sixties. Today that fear has hardened into something darker: not merely efforts to weaken its critical role, but the imposition of pedagogical tyranny that turns universities into laboratories of indoctrination.

Trump, Rubio, Miller, Bondi, and their cohort of democracy-haters now threaten to strip dissenting Americans of their passports, revoke citizenship, and criminalize free speech. They howl in outrage at being compared to fascists, even as their actions mirror the same grim playbook: militarizing society, crushing dissent, concentrating power in the hands of a cult leader, and reanimating the legacy of white supremacy and racial cleansing.

Trump hails Netanyahu, a war criminal, as a war hero. With grotesque irony, he denounces the left as the true perpetrators of violence. At home, his vindictiveness is just as corrosive: boasting of pressuring ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel. This petty act of vengeance amounts to his own assault on the First Amendment and is a chilling reminder of how fragile free speech becomes under authoritarian whim. Yet no alarm is sounded when Fox News host Brian Kilmeade casually suggests exterminating the homeless through “involuntary lethal injections.” Nor does outrage rise in the Trump administration, or much of the mainstream press, over the United States’ complicity in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, where, as the Quds News Network reports, “At least 19,424 children have been killed in Israeli attacks over 700 days of genocide in Gaza, the equivalent of one child every 52 minutes. Among the victims are 1,000 infants under the age of one.” Silence here is not neutrality; it is complicity in barbarism.

When the conduct of comedians is criminalized, it is not simply a matter of taste, decorum, or even misplaced moral outrage, it is a direct assault on the principle of free speech. Comedy has always served as a space where hypocrisy is unmasked, abuses of power are ridiculed, and the absurdities of authoritarian politics are laid bare. In fact, when Vladimir Putin first came to power in 2000, one of the early targets of his cultural crackdown was the satirical television show “Kukly” (Куклы, meaning dolls), a puppet show produced by the independent channel NTV. Apparently being called the little Tsar puppet was too much for him to tolerate. This ruthless act of censorship was widely seen as a watershed moment in Putin’s consolidation of power. Of course, the real issue here is that to police or punish comedians for doing what they do is to signal that the state now seeks to control even the spaces of laughter and irony.

This criminalization is more than censorship; it is a canary in the coal mine for gauging the advance of fascism. When jokes are reclassified as crimes, the warning could not be clearer: what begins with comedians will not end with them. It marks the testing of boundaries, the normalization of repression, and the silencing of one of the oldest and most effective forms of dissent. The move reveals the fragility of regimes that cannot tolerate critique, no matter how playful or irreverent, and it signifies a broader project to narrow public space until only official voices remain.

In this sense, the attack on comedy should not be dismissed as a trivial or secondary issue. It is a symbolic and practical escalation of authoritarian politics, one that exposes the contempt fascist movements hold for humor, irony, and dissenting speech. If laughter is made a crime, then resistance itself is already under indictment. Repressing dissent has a long history in the U.S extending from the Red Scare of the 1920s to the domestic repression that followed Bush’s war on terrorism. Today’s attacks on dissent are more widespread, damaging, and unchecked than much of what we have seen in the past. To borrow a phrase from Terry Eagleton, Trump and his MAGA stooges are drunk “on fantasies of omnipotence” and revel in acts of violence, destruction, and the exercise of boundless state power.

The parallels with fascist history could not be more ominous. The Reichstag fire decree suspended civil liberties and imprisoned communists; today, Trump declares dissent worthy of censorship and if Pam Bondi is to be taken at face value will be labeled as hate speech and subject to state repression. Benito Mussolini used  Giacomo Matteotti’s assassination to further consolidate his own power; today, Trump uses Kirk’s death to silence students, educators, and journalists. Orbán dismantled Hungary’s free press and universities by conjuring enemies; today, Trump and Miller invoke “the radical left” as an existential threat. 

Violence in America’s militarized streets now fuses with what John Ganz calls a “sanctimonious hue and cry … over the martyred dead, hysteria is whipped up about terrorism and public disorder [and] the power of the state is brought to bear against public figures who oppose and criticize the regime.” Fear has become the regime’s preferred weapon, wielded alongside a politics of erasure, historical amnesia, and ruthless denial.

Jeffrey St. Clair noted with grim precision that Kirk’s killing is “awful, disgusting and about as American as it gets”, but the hypocrisy lies in Trump’s silence after earlier acts of MAGA violence: “When two Democratic legislators and their spouses were assassinated by a Trump supporter in Minnesota a few weeks ago, Trump said nothing. Nada. Zilch.” Violence committed by the Right elicits no outrage, but a single death weaponized against the Left becomes the justification for a war on dissent. As St. Clair recounts, the ledger of right-wing violence between 2018 and 2025 reads like a requiem: the assault on CDC headquarters, the murder of Officer David Rose, the plot to seize Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the massacre of 23 souls in an El Paso Walmart, and the slaughter of 11 worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. Every act carried the rhythm of cruelty; every atrocity struck like a warning written in fire and blood.

In spite of the nefarious claims by Trump, Miller, Bondi, and other officials that the left bears responsibility for Charlie Kirk’s death, the facts tell a different story. NBC News reports that “the federal investigation into the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has yet to find a link between the alleged shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, and left-wing groups on which President Donald Trump and his administration have pledged to crack down.” The Trump regime refuses to acknowledge this, erasing evidence and fabricating a narrative designed to demonize its critics. This distortion follows a familiar historical pattern, yet what the Trump administration refuses to admit and desperately hide is that, according to the Anti-Defamation League, “since 2002, right-wing ideologies have fueled more than 70% of all extremist attacks and domestic terrorism plots in the United States.”

This is not simply denial but calculated deceit. By inverting reality, blaming dissenters for the violence overwhelmingly fueled by their own ideological allies, the Trump administration wages war on truth itself, weaponizing lies to justify repression. This is the oldest tool of authoritarianism; a script lifted from the fascist playbook in which regimes fabricate internal enemies to mask their own violence.

This is the machinery of fascism: scapegoating, historical amnesia, and the fabrication of a “threat within” to mobilize fear and erase accountability. To remain silent in the face of such lies is to allow history’s darkest patterns to repeat. The ominous rattling of boxcars is no longer mere metaphor; it is rehearsal. The same trains that once ferried enemies of the state, Jews, communists, Roma, and others- to concentration camps echo in today’s discourse of surveillance, detention, and deportation. These echoes abroad make the danger at home impossible to ignore. The first targets are always the vulnerable, immigrants, refugees, students, and the homeless. But the machinery of repression, once primed, sweeps wider. What begins at the margins always moves to the center.

First the masked thugs of state-sponsored terror descended on immigrants, then on student protesters; they occupied neighborhoods, turned cities into militarized staging grounds, and normalized violence as the language of lawless rule. Now the machinery of repression is tightening its grip, moving ever closer to ordinary citizens. A shadow from an authoritarian past has fallen across the republic, and unless it is confronted, the future will echo the grim theaters of repression already unfolding in Hungary, India, and Argentina. 

In all these countries including the United States, leaders of the new fascism speak with vomit in their mouths and blood on their hands. They share a language that Toni Morrison calls “a dead language” It is an “oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence;” Trump and his minions traffic in a repressive language infused with power, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. It offers mass spectacles, a moral somnambulance, and a psychotic infatuation for those who seek refuge in unchecked power. It forges a community built on greed, corruption, and hate, steeped in a scandal of hollow fulfillment.

 In the current historical moment ripe with a politics wedded to revenge, systemic racism, and the building of a police state, language is weaponized, functioning as a powerful force for manufactured ignorance. The Trump administration turns grief into a rallying cry for repression. The radical imagination is now doused in conspiracy theories and civic ignorance. A hollow politics of cruelty now finds its match in the ruthlessness of state terrorism. At home, Trump and his political hacks imagine themselves as victims while they spread violence, misery, cruelty, and moral decay both at home and abroad. The stakes could not be clearer: silence is complicity, and to speak, to talk back, and to engage in non-violent action is now the most urgent precondition for building powerful modes of collective resistance. The lights are going out fast, but there is still time to make justice, equality, and freedom the foundation for a radical democracy; resistance is no longer optional but the urgent political and moral task of our time. 

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