It’s been over 100 days since Donald Trump’s return to the presidency. Most NGOs to the right of the Heritage Foundation are alarmed about his confrontational international posture and related erosion of the rule of law.
Human Rights Watch (HRW), a supposedly liberal organization, is also concerned. But their problem is that the president hasn’t gone far enough – at least in the case of Venezuela. HRW’s latest report on Venezuela calls for intensified illegal measures that cause misery and death, outflanking Trump from the right.
Ignoring the US hybrid war
At issue for HRW is last July’s Venezuelan presidential election that saw Nicolás Maduro declared the winner. Beyond issues with supposed electoral irregularities lies the elephant in the room that is utterly disregarded by HRW. The US hybrid war against Venezuela was the biggest obstacle to free and fair elections. Venezuelans were under economic siege with coercive measures aimed at pressuring them into backing the US-backed opposition.
Also telling is the opposition’s refusal to submit their electoral records to the Venezuelan supreme court, when summoned to do so because they do not recognize the constitutional order in Venezuela. Legally, there was no way for them to claim victory even if they had legitimately won.
Post-election protest demonstrations were predictable. The opposition, which has a long history of anti-democratic street violence, threatened them if it lost. HRW characterizes the riots as mostly peaceful, while accusing the government of responding with a “brutal crackdown.”
Yet the widespread damage of public property such as health clinics, government offices, schools, and transportation facilities – along with murders of government security personnel and party members – were inconvenient facts entirely ignored in HRW’s over 100-page report. Such actions can hardly be called peaceful, nor blamed on the government.
A cure worse than the disease
For argument’s sake, let’s not contest HRW’s claim that the books were cooked in Venezuela’s presidential election in order to examine the NGO’s solution.
On April 29, the US State Department celebrated 100 days of “America first” accomplishments, highlighting the revocation of oil importing licenses and the establishment of potential secondary tariffs on countries that still dare to import Venezuelan oil.
The next day, HRW’s report demanded even harsher punishment. Frustrated that the “Trump administration appears to be prioritizing cooperation” with Venezuela, HRW called for expanding sanctions and deepening pressure. And this is despite Washington’s plans to further maximize its maximum pressure campaign to achieve regime change in Caracas.
Specifically, HRW urged the US and other states to “counter Maduro’s domestic carrot-and-stick incentives that reward abusive authorities and security forces, making them loyal to the government” by imposing even more “targeted sanctions.”
Further compounding the impact of individual targeted sanctions is the reality of overcompliance. Even individualsanctions end up contributing to collective punishment. A 2019 statement by HRW recognized that “despite language excluding transactions to purchase food and medicines, these sanctions could exacerbate the already dire humanitarian situation in Venezuela due to the risk of overcompliance.”
But now the 1,028 existing unilateral coercive measures (the correct term for sanctions) on Venezuela by the US and its allies apparently aren’t enough for these sadists.
HRW admits that these coercive measures have “failed to make a dent” in correcting what they see as bad behavior. Why then persist if ineffective? Perhaps, because they’re very effective in punishing errant states and warning others.
HRW also lobbied for yet more foreign intervention in Venezuela’s internal affairs: “Foreign governments should expand support for Venezuelan civil society groups… a sustained and principled international response is crucial.”
Selective sanctimony on sanctions
HRW criticized the Trump administration’s sanctions targeting the International Criminal Court (ICC) because they might potentially “chill” the tribunal’s ardor to go after Venezuela.
Revealingly, this particular HRW report shows no concern that Trump’s sanctions might stifle the court’s prosecution of the US/Zionist genocide in Palestine. What HRW is instead focused on is having the court “prioritize its investigation” of Venezuela.
HRW never mentions in this report that the US does not accept the ICC’s jurisdiction over itself. In other words, this report fails to criticize Washington’s evading accountability as long as the ICC can be weaponized against Venezuela.
The ICC has, in fact, been blatantly politicized regarding Venezuela. Caracas has requested in vain that the ICC investigate US coercive measures that have caused over 100,000 civilian deaths in Venezuela, constituting a crime against humanity.
The HRW report is sanctimonious about the “brave efforts of [opposition] Venezuelans who risked—and often suffered,” but is callously unsympathetic regarding the devastating effects on the population at large of the very measures it is advocating.
HRW laments the US administration’s cutting funding to astroturf “humanitarian and human rights groups” promoting regime change in Venezuela. But it does not express sympathy for ordinary Venezuelans suffering economic hardship, food insecurity, or lack of medicine due to broader US sanctions. Notably absent from this report is acknowledgement of the humanitarian consequences of Washington’s unilateral coercive measures.
The human rights organization’s primary critique of the enormous humanitarian toll of the unilateral coercive measures is that they have “failed to produce a transition.”
Sanctions kill
The HRW report frames US sanctions as supposedly justified efforts to enforce imperial restrictions on Venezuela and not as part of a regime-change hybrid war.
As Venezuelanalysisreported: “US economic sanctions against Venezuela are a violent and illegal form of coercion, seeking regime change through collective punishment of the civilian population.” Investigations by the UN’s high commissioner for human rights found “sanctions that threaten people’s lives and health need to be halted.”
Even HRW’s own World Report 2022 cited UN findings that sanctions had exacerbated Venezuela’s economic and social crises. Yet HRW apparently considers the burden warranted, which invokes Madeleine Albright’s infamous defense of Iraq sanctions: “we think the price is worth it.”
Follow-the-flag humanitarianism
HRW has long maintained a “revolving door” relationship with the US government personnel. The organization is also significantly associated with George Soros and his Open Society Foundations. UN Independent Expert and human rights scholar Alfred de Zayas describes how HRW and similar NGOs have become part of what he calls the “human rights industry,” instrumentalizing human rights for geopolitical agendas.
Unilateral coercive measures are a major component of the US imperial tool kit. But HRW opportunistically fails to note that such sanctions are illegal under international law. In fact, Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits collective penalties against protected persons.
As Mark Weisbrot with the Center for Economic and Policy Research observes, HRW has “ignored or paid little attention to terrible crimes that are committed in collaboration with the US government in this hemisphere,” while it “has repeatedly and summarily dismissed or ignored sincere and thoroughly documented criticisms of its conflicts of interest.”
HRW recognizes that the coercive measures against Venezuela, which impact the general populace, have not succeeded in imposing an administration subservient to Washington – what they euphemistically call “restoration of democracy.” So why continue advocating more sanctions and support for Venezuela’s far-right opposition? The answer is that Washington’s NGO epigones talk “reform” but aim at fomenting insurrectionary regime change.
Photograph Source: Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street – OGL
In England last week, in addition to a byelection for a parliamentary seat in Runcorn, Cheshire, there were 6 mayoral elections, elections for 24 local councils. and 1,641 seats in these 24 councils. All seats on 14 county councils and eight unitary authorities in England were up for election. Most of these seats were last contested at the 2021 local elections. The 2025 local elections were the first to follow the general election 10 months ago.
The Runcorn byelection was caused by the resignation of its Labour MP, Mike Amesbury, who quit after receiving a suspended prison sentence for punching a constituent to the ground when drunk, and following up the initial assault with 5 further punches (according to CCTV video of the incident).
Labour lost the Runcorn byelection to Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform party by a mere 6 votes, surrendering its previous majority of 14,700 votes in one of its safest seats. Many customary Labour voters– vexed by having to go to the polls on account of the fisticuffs of their bibulous ex-MP— stayed at home this time and thus made all the difference. Moreover, Starmer’s decision not to visit Runcorn in the run-up to the byelection was an obvious contrast to Farage who visited the constituency 3-4 times and knocked on doors on polling day. Labour was largely passive while Reform turned out its electoral machine.
Overall, Labour lost two-thirds of the seats it was defending– its vote fell on average by as much as 19 points.
The Labour postmortem indicated clearly that its lacklustre record after 10 months in office has had a chilling effect on many of its core supporters. There have been constant rows over Labour’s failure to eliminate the two child benefit cap imposed by the Tories when they were in power; as well as the closing-down of the winter fuel supplementary payment given to pensioners, the slashing of disability benefits, the backtracking on policies dealing with the climate crisis, the party’s much-publicized thirst for freebies from donors, and the refusal to take a firm stance against Israel over Gaza. The Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer/finance minister, Rachel Reeves, has also warned of further cuts to public services.
Starmer’s rigidity on these issues (some have called it his “tin ear” or emotional illiteracy) alienates progressive voters, many of whom can’t discern a sliver of socialism in Labour’s policies.
Starmer and his team have chosen to address the UK’s economic ailments by pursuing growth, not by introducing taxes on the wealthy and increasing public expenditures, but by creating a financial climate supposed to encourage the private sector to make the requisite investments in growth-inducing economic activities. This approach will not be easy—for one thing, the private sector is struggling with the Brexit drag on production, as costs increase and supply chains get disrupted. Starmer refuses to talk about Brexit, for fear of firing up those who voted Leave in the 2016 referendum. Labour optimists however remind us that the next election is not for another 4 years, and that Labour will have its huge parliamentary majority until then, giving it the time needed to prime the economy for improvement.
In addition to picking up a parliamentary seat and gaining control of 10 councils, Reform also performed well in other areas, especially by winning 674 council seats. Reform are now in second place in most Labour and Lib Dem seats giving them a headstart as putative change candidates in the future. Reform’s advance was especially devastating for the Conservatives, who lost more to Reform than Labour did. The Tories lost 674 councillors, and their uninspiring leader, Kemi Badenoch, had to apologize for this “bloodbath”.
The centrist Lib Dems also picked up seats from the Tories. Clearly a major realignment is occurring on the UK’s political right, though it’s much too early to say what its final forms will be. The Tories have decided to play “catch up” with Reform, and tacked towards Nigel Farage, albeit with little success. An ersatz move to the populist right is no match for Farage’s genuine item.
Labour has also tacked towards Reform, with the outcome that there are 3 parties now vying for the same rightwing spot. The Lib Dems, typically viewed as a centrist party, is now more to the left than Labour. But further twists lie ahead.
Reform, committed to a Trumpist agenda, will rein-in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), back-pedal on measures to tackle climate change, adopt lower rates of taxation, as well as ending working from home. How congenial will this be for erstwhile Labour supporters now backing Reform?
An Apella poll conducted after the elections found Reform voters to be in favour of a sturdily interventionist, leftwing economic prospectus, including nationalizing utilities, raised taxes on corporations, a well-funded NHS, and for Britain to adopt protectionist measures in order to shield local industries from foreign competition. The primary common ground between these voters and their party leadership is of course immigration, as well as the nationalization of utility companies. Apart from that, viewpoints start to diverge. For instance, Farage favours an insurance-based healthcare system using vouchers, lower corporate taxes, and reduced government spending. The biggest shift will be in climate policy– Reform will abandon existing carbon emission targets, accelerate North Sea oil and gas licences, scrap annual green energy subsidies, and speed up “clean” nuclear power. Defence spending will be increased.
None of this has been costed. For instance, it is already being asked how increased defence spending will be paid for when taxation is being reduced at the same time?
The other question concerns Farage’s leadership. It has been said he has several qualities in common with Trump—narcissism, vanity, petulance, the ability to bullshit, grifting, and fickleness, to name a few. As a result he treats the Reform party as a personal fiefdom, which could become an issue when it expands its membership and increases its representation on electoral bodies. Reform will then have to become more than a one-man show.
The Tory party having imploded, Labour will be waiting to see if the same happens to Reform.
A Marine from 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines, moves a Vietnamese peasant during a search and clear operation 15 miles west of Da Nang Air Base, 1965. Photo: PFC G. Durbin, US Marine Corps.
“The Vietnamese national character is rapidly changing. Our value system is falling apart. Gangsters are making incredible fortunes on the black market.”
–Professor Hoang Ngoc Hien, Hanoi intellectual, 1995
“We’re getting wonderful cooperation from the Communist Party. What we need now is more accountability on the part of the Vietnamese.”
–Bradely Babson, Director, World Bank, Hanoi office, 1995.
The War in Vietnam pushed me out of academia, turned me into an anti-imperialist and cast a long shadow on my life. The March on the Pentagon, the 1968 Tet Offensive, May Day in 1971, and helicopters hovering above Saigon— all of them seem like yesterday. For my parents and for members of their generation who survived the Depression of the 1930s and the Red Scare of the 1950s, “the” war was World War II when fascism was defeated and the atomic age began with the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For my generation and at least two generations that followed it, “the” war was Vietnam, which lasted more than a decade and brought about the loss of millions of lives, both Vietnamese and Americans.
I never served in the military and was never drafted. A lucky bastard. Along with tens of millions of people around the world I protested against the war beginning in 1964 and until the war’s end in 1975. I wrote and distributed leaflets, marched, rioted, burned my draft card and went to jail. The war in Vietnam, which the Vietnamese call “the American war” — to distinguish it from the wars against the French and the Japanese—divided American society between pro-war “hawks” and militarists and anti-war “doves” and pacifists.
I remember when Che Guevara called for “Two, Three, Many Vietnams.” I remember he went to the Congo and to Bolivia to foment guerrilla warfare that he hoped would provoke and overextend the US militarily and lead to the end of American hegemony. With help from the CIA, Bolivian troops captured and assassinated him; his dream of a global anti-imperialist revolution driven by the Third World fizzled. What’s difficult to conjure is the zeitgeist, the sense of being permanently on the edge and on fire.
Didn’t the U.S. teeter on the brink of a civil war. I was sure it did and that was prompted by rise of Black Power, bloody riots in big cities like Detroit, the assassinations of Malcolm and Martin, the Kennedys and more, the women’s and the gay liberation movements, young men who went into exile in Canada and France rather than go to Vietnam, and a counterculture that lured a generation or two away from white American values and into the world of sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and rebellion.
For a time it seemed to me and to my circle of self-proclaimed revolutionaries, and to the circles beyond that circle, as though the American Empire, like the Roman and British empires before it, was destined to decline and fall. We were waiting for an end that never came. Maybe imperialism wasn’t the highest stage of capitalism.
Maybe Lenin was wrong, and maybe Mao was also wrong. After the US military defeat in Vietnam, the Empire struck back. George Lucas was right about that. Imperial America rebounded slowly and steadily and the flowers of decadence blossomed from Hollywood to Wall Street, the Hamptons to Miami Beach and beyond. Society is rotten to the core. Where are the barbarians and when will they arrive to upend the empire?
Now, in 2025 the policies and politics of the Trump administration tell me that the American Empire still has fangs and can still frighten ministers and presidents from Mexico City to Manila. Though for how much longer remains to be seen. It’s only a matter of time. Empires can take decades to fall apart.
I remember meeting the American anti-war novelist, Kurt Vonnegut, the author of Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle, and SlaughterHouse Five, which is set during WWII but wasn’t published until the Vietnam War when it became a bestseller.
As an American soldier Vonnegut was captured by the Germans and imprisoned in a slaughterhouse in Dresden which the Allies bombed and nearly destroyed. “Our side did terrible things during WWII,” the British novelist and Nobel Prize Winner Doris Lessing told me. I had assumed “we” were the “good” guys and didn’t commit the kinds of atrocities the Germans committed in World War II. Vietnam lifted the veil and revealed American barbarism.
In Vietnam in 1995, two decades after the end of the war, when I was a tourist, I came to the sobering conclusion that Lessing was correct about “our side,” and also that no one “wins” a war today; there are only losers. Lessing introduced me to Vonnegut’s fiction and it was Vonnegut who insisted that the pen is not always mightier than the sword. Indeed, while many wonderful anti-war books have been written and widely read, including Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, (1895) Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) and Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun (1939), anti-war novels have not ended war.
Still, it seems likely that antiwar novels will continue to be written and read. My favorite is The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, who was born in Vietnam in 1971 and who came to the US in 1975. He’s also the author of The Committed. In The Sympathizer, Nguyen dissects American culture, and lampoons Americans who “pretend they are eternally innocent no matter how many times they lose their innocence.” Fuck American innocence. In The Committed, the novel explores the brutalities behind the veneer of French culture. “Everything sounded better in French,” the narrator explains, “including rape, murder, and pillage!” The author describes the baguette as the “symbol of France and hence the symbol of French colonization!” Nearly everything in his world triggers his reflections about empire, invasion, occupation and liberation. He advises readers to take revolutions seriously but not revolutionaries.
In the late 1960s, I learned about the war in Vietnam from American soldiers, some of them wounded in action, others suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and some of them baby-faced 19- and 20-year -olds who were students in the literature classes I taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. John Brown, an officer from a wealthy family, had pursued an “enemy” soldier down a foxhole only to have a grenade go off in his face, which doctors stitched back together and with visible scars. When he slept at my apartment he’d wake with nightmares.
Sad to say there will be no end to wounded veterans of wars, no end to civilian casualties and surely no end to anti-war movies. My favorites include Grand Illusion, Paths of Glory, The Human Condition, Apocalypse Now!, and Full Metal Jacket. During the War in Vietnam I read dozens of articles by the Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett and half a dozen or so books about the war, mostly non-fiction, including Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake, and Michael Herr’s Dispatches, plus the poems in Ho Chi Minh’s Prison Diary, which he wrote in Chinese characters while he was a prisoner of the Chinese in 1942 and 1943.
Ho’s Diary was not published in English in the US until near the height of the War in Vietnam, when it became widely read and appreciated. Since its initial publication it has been translated into 37 languages. Ho’s immortal line still haunts me. “When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out,” he wrote. My favorite non-fiction book, Giai Phong! The Fall and Liberation of Saigon (1976), is by the Italian journalist Tiziano Terzani. It belongs on a bookshelf alongside John Reed’sTen Days that Shook the World that chronicles the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
In 1971, when I published The Mythology of Imperialism, a study of British literature and the British Empire, I dedicated it to Ho Chi Minh, the founder of the Vietnamese Communist Party and the President of Vietnam who was born in 1890 and who died in 1969. When I wrote about Conrad’s novella 1899, Heart of Darkness, which is set in the Belgian Congo, the war in Vietnam was never far from my thoughts. Kurtz, Conrad’s anti-hero was the quintessential imperialist. “Exterminate all the brutes,” he writes.
Of all the 20th century communists, Ho is in my book the most likeable, the least horrific. The Declaration of Independence had inspired him. In Hanoi in 1995, on the 20th-anniversary of the end of the war, I visited Ho’s mausoleum which was guarded by soldiers with guns. I met Vietnamese men a decade older than I who had fought in the 1950s against the French who were decisively defeated at the battle of Dien Bien Phu.
I also met Vietnamese who were too young to have fought against the French or the Americans. Nguyễn Huy Thiệp was the only Vietnamese man I met who belonged to the same generation as I did. We bonded at his home, which had been in his family, he said, for 700 years, and at his restaurant on the banks of the Red River in Hanoi where we talked about his short stories, including “The General Comes Home,” an anti-war classic in which a general goes home from a war and no one pays him any attention.
When Thiệp learned that I had friends in Hollywood he wanted me to connect him to them. At his restaurant, which specialized in “jungle food,” I ate snake and “paddy” rat which apparently only eats rice. In my hotel, I disliked the clouds of cigarette smoke that filled the air nor did I appreciate the playing of the International on loudspeakers in the streets which woke me at 7 a.m. every morning. The veterans of the war against the French sat in cafes, sipped green tea and smoked cigarettes all day long. I sat in one of the cafés with them and read Graham Greene’s prophetic novel, The Quiet American about an undercover CIA agent. It was the perfect novel to read there and then.
Professor Hoang Ngoc Hien, one of Hanoi’s leading intellectuals, told me in my hotel room: “The Vietnamese national character is rapidly changing.” He added, “Gangsters are making incredible fortunes on the black market.” On the other side of town Bradley Babson, the director of the World Bank’s Hanoi office told me when I visited him in his office, “We’re getting wonderful cooperation from the Communist Party. What we need now is more accountability on the part of the Vietnamese.”
After a month of talking and touring, looking, listening and learning, Hanoi was tattooed in my heart, Vietnam tattooed in my soul. I will never forget the streets which were swept clean every evening by a battalion of women armed with brooms and shovels, or the young Vietnamese men who took me to see Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and wanted me to explain “special effects.” They had lived in Moscow and had learned Russian. Now they wanted me to teach them English. I was happy to oblige. If they had anti-American sentiments I never heard them or saw them.
I was in Hanoi during Tet, which a Vietnamese translator explained was a combination of The Fourth of July, Christmas and New Years. I never saw so much shopping and so many buoyant people in the streets. I met members of General Giap’s family, ate food specially prepared for Tet and drank Scotch with a former Vietnamese diplomat who had translated into Vietnamese Gone With the Wind and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Oddly enough he identified with the defeated South in Margaret Mitchell’s epic about the American Civil War.
Out of favor with the Communist Party, the former translator complained that the Hanoi government was selling state-owned enterprises to private companies and taking the capitalist road. No imperial power was forcing it to do that, but investors and entrepreneurs were seizing the opportunity to make money. I met a financier with the World War newly arrived in Hanoi with high hopes for profitable ventures. Vietnam was an independent nation, choosing its own future. Isn’t that why we had opposed the American invasion and occupation and the long brutal war against the Vietnamese. So, Vietnam could decide its own future independent of the USA? Yes, I thought so. When Tiziano Terzani wrote his book about the fall and liberation of Saigon, one of his translators told him, “Inside every Vietnamese there’s a mandarin, a thief, a liar who sleeps—but there’s also a dreamer.” That sounds about right. To that list I would add, “and a survivor.”
Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain
Ever since Trump’s electoral victory in November 2024 I have been receiving multiple daily solicitations for funds to support the Democratic Party, individual Democratic candidates for Congress or State Offices, and notification of worthy campaigns on public issues such as the protection of Social Security, Medicare, and reproductive rights, as well as on voter protection in various forms. I am personally sympathetic with resistance to this perverse Republican effort to dismantle democracy and constitutional governance in the United States by taking giant steps toward legitimating autocratic rule with fascist features.
I expect many will be critical of what I write here as a diversion from attacking the main targets of concern: a White House dangerously out of control, a subjugated Republican Congressional presence, and a Supreme Court that subscribes to the subversive Trump ethos 90% of the time and is due to be further ‘packed’ in coming years. My response: failure calls for self-criticism, and criticism from an ally can be restorative, at least indirectly.
Funding Entrapment Techniques
Against this background, I find myself increasingly alienated by procedural and substantive aspects of the chosen approach being taken by the Democratic Party leadership to oppose such an undesirable and dangerous set of developments in the governance of the country. On procedural issues, besides crudely reducing electoral politics to matters of raising money for electoral campaigns, giving the impression that democratic politics is little more than a continuous funding appeal. This is the overt posture of the Democratic Party establishment. I find this turn from ideas to money deeply distressing.
It lends itself to ultra-manipulative fundraising tactics. This outlook employs a variety of techniques to induce presumed liberal voters to take an opinion survey by responding to simplistic, almost rhetorical, questions about the Trump agenda and a preferred Democratic alternative. Not a word is mentioned that the survey is a sleeper leadup to a mandatory monetary contribution in which the survey respondent is given only a choice of what amount will be contributed. Clearly a funding entrapment mechanism. After taking time to answer a series of questions, there is no way to submit a completed survey without committing to a specific campaign contribution.
The choice foisted upon an innocent respondent is to pay or abort the survey. This technique exhibits a mentality of deception that more and more dominates bipartisan relations of the two political parties with their own followers, and of course with the citizenry as a whole. And not only in relation to electoral politics but across the board of public concerns. To restore trust and animate robust activism the Democratic Party needs to cultivate reasoned honesty, however radical, and abandon its present style of hysterical rhetoric pretending either that all is won or everything lost by outcomes in the political sphere. Political prospects are bleak enough without resorting to hollow exaggerations that annoy rather than motivate.
An Escapist Nationalist Policy Agenda
If anything, my substantive objections are more serious and raise my concerns to such a level of disillusionment that I am teetering on the brink of withdrawing support, financial and otherwise, from the Democratic Party. I am appalled that the Democratic establishment continues to adopt a posture of total silence with regard to US foreign policy, which encourages an interpretation of implied unconditional support for Israel despite its transparent and prolonged Gaza genocide. Such criminality itself thinly disguises Israel’s territorial objectives that depend upon coerced ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s censure of those who stayed on the sidelines in the struggle against South African apartheid is surely applicable here: “It is my conviction that if we are neutral in situations of injustice, we have chosen the side of the oppressor.” To be silent is more morally tone deaf than to be neutral. It was Kamala Harris’s silence on hot issues, including but not limited to Gaza, that quite likely led to Trump’s victory last November and certainly undermined her leadership credibility for the future. To play it safe to avoid controversy amounts to the self-neutering of political identity that has long plagued liberal politics by being shamelessly pragmatic rather than principled when it comes to the hard issues that have arisen over the years in US foreign policy. If Harris had expressed either measured and informed opposition to Israel’s policies or even venture her own Biden-free rationale for continuity of US policy in the Middle East, she would have earned respect rather than scorn. If she had not distanced herself from controversy during her campaign for the presidency, she might now be heading a revitalized opposition rather than feebly mending fences with a stunned public helplessly watching de-democratization proceed daily without an energizing sense of credibly fighting back.
This unseemly silence by the Democratic Party leadership and liberal media on Israel/Palestine extends to foreign policy in general. Outsiders perceive an America that wants to run the world and is willing to pay the price of doing so but is indifferent to how or why. To be disappointed by Trump only because of his wrecking ball approach to a liberal domestic agenda while overlooking global issues is beyond misleading – it verges on insanity given the nature of the global challenges. It means indifference to the UN, the diplomacy of war and peace, foreign aid, relations with China, nuclear disarmament, and support for international law. Its willed blindness considerably outdoes the monkey that sees no evil!
If Trump is subtly attacked for building walls, not bridges, the Democrats are not far behind. It is hard to reconcile this inward turn with their overwhelming support for a huge ‘peacetime’ budget to fund the military while the poor at home suffer and the infrastructure rots. It is hard to explain the disparity between this huge investment in the world that the global imperialists in Washington of both political parties dream about and pursuit of humane forms of sustainable governance that the leaders of the Democratic Party should be championing to meet 21st century challenges at home and internationally. Among the mistakes being made is to suppose that a costly hegemonic foreign policy can be divorced from a supposed dedication to domestic priorities. The Democratic Party seems intent on promoting such a divorce, which invites a deep misunderstanding of the linkages between disappointment at home and running the world by reliance on a militarized geopolitics.
To explain my discomfort with this presumed disinterest of US voters in anything beyond their borders and to show that I was not overstating this mood of apparent contentment with a walled in America, I list the issues selected in a typical recent funding appeal by the Democratic Party that polls Democrats about their main concerns as a prelude to a funding appeal. The only issue on this list that might justify inclusion in a foreign policy agenda is ‘addressing the climate crisis.’ Even climate concerns so described might be understood as no less domestic than the others given its wording, differing from Trump only with respect to not dismissing global warming as a hoax. The list below is in the exact language used in official Democratic Party appeal text:
Which of the following best describes why you support Democrats? (Select all that apply.)
I believe in addressing the climate crisis.
I believe in creating more good-paying jobs and supporting unions.
I believe in reproductive freedom.
I believe in affordable health care.
I believe in protecting and expanding rights for the LGBTQ+ community.
I believe in protecting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
I believe in protecting democracy and the right to vote.
I believe in moving our country forward, not backward.
I believe in protecting critical federal services for working people, veterans, children, and the elderly.
I believe in strong, stable leadership.
All of the above
Other
Concluding Remark
My final assessment of this recipe for despair is that without a revitalized internationalism, America’s prospects are dismal at home as well in the world. Unless the Democratic Party reconstitutes itself with a sense of urgency the nation’s future will remain under a darkening sky. To restore hope that is not a cover for ‘wishful thinking’ requires reconnecting what we wish for at home with what we do abroad. Without adding demilitarization and denuclearization to the policy agenda the challenges facing the country and the world will continue to be misconceived. Without dedication to the prevention of and opposition to genocide, apartheid, and ecocide, prospects for cooperative problem-solving in multilateral venues will not be forthcoming. As well, without a stronger United Nations that rejects the primacy of geopolitics, any hopes for humane global governance, let alone war prevention, will be in vain.
Perhaps it is too much to wish, but in the spirit of ‘a politics of impossibility’ I would like to believe that the leaders of the Democratic Party are still capable of listening to voices of disillusionment. Revisions of messaging to the faithful is only the tip of the iceberg. The underlying challenge is to make opposition to Trump turn on a transformational vision of how to frame political and economic agendas for a brighter future at home and abroad.
The USS Abraham Lincoln Battle Group off the coast of Hawai’i. Official U.S. Navy photo by: PH2 Gabriel Wilson
The United States is a national security state. Over the past half-century, it has unnecessarily conducted “forever wars” in Vietnam (1960s-1970s), Iraq (2000s-the present), Afghanistan (2000s-2020), and now possibly in Yemen. Not one of these costly ventures has advanced our national security, and—with the exception of Yemen—have been costly in terms of blood and resources. Even the Yemen war is getting costly as well.
The United States is a national security state in terms of defense and intelligence funding, which is equal to the defense spending of the rest of the world combined. Most importantly, only the United States can project power the world over. U.S. air power dominates the global arena, although we are learning that air power is far less powerful than we thought. U.S. sea power is also more formidable than that of any other nation, but has not contributed to any significant military success in these “forever wars.”
Most of our recent presidents have been engaged as commanders-in-chief in managing conflict in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, and Southwest Asia, although we proclaim that China is the number one security challenge. The military budget continues to climb, and Donald Trump wants to increase the Pentagon budget to more than $1 trillion, while virtually every other aspect of the overall budget faces cost cutting. Our infrastructure is crumbling but funds are not available to remedy the situation, largely due to the bloated defense budget. The Congress has given bipartisan support to increased defense spending, including the modernization of nuclear weapons that have no military utility, and in some cases Congress has allocated more funding than the White House or the Pentagon requested.
We now have two incompetent individuals in charge of the national security community. The first is Marco Rubio, who is secretary of state, acting national security adviser, acting administrator of the Agency for International Development, which now only exists on paper, and acting National Archivist. The Archivist should never be held by a non-professional, particularly a bureaucrat such as Rubio, who will certainly politicize the essential records of the United States regarding diplomacy and international relations.
Rubio’s fealty to Donald Trump has been expressed almost daily, and one of the most stunning examples took place last week. Rubio was asked if the Department of State had been in touch with El Salvador about the release of Abrego Garcia. “I would never tell you that,” Rubio said. “And you know who else I would never tell? A judge. Because the conduct of our foreign policy belongs to the president and the executives branch. Not some judge.”
The only precedent for an individual to be both secretary of state and national security adviser would by Henry A. Kissinger, who held both posts in the 1970s until Gerald Ford became president and his key advisers—Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—cut him down to size. In any event, Rubio is no Kissinger. As for Mike Waltz, we can only say that he lasted two months longer than the national security adviser in Trump’s first term—Michael Flynn.
Little needs to be said about the other key member of the national security team—Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—because it is universally accepted that Hegseth never should have been appointed, let alone confirmed, as secretary. It’s ironic that it was national security adviser Mike Waltz who was fired from his important post and downgraded to UN Ambassador, because it was Hegseth who compromised the security and safety of our fighting forces with his persistent use of insecure lines of communication to discuss sensitive military plans. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D/CT) correctly noted that Waltz became the “fall guy” for the administration’s mistakes on national security, and it was Hegseth who irresponsibly discussed sensitive military plans with communications technology that was easily intercepted.
Since the United States has placed so much importance on the tattoo designs of so-called illegal aliens, perhaps it should be noted that Trump’s candidate to head the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, has the word “PANZER” tattooed down his left arm, according to Mother Jone’s David Corn. Kent is a white supremacist and has had dealings with a member of the Proud Boys. In Kent’s case, the tattoo does describe the man—a white supremacist.
These personnel moves at the highest level of the national security ladder weaken U.S. credibility and influence abroad, but tell us little about Trump’s real concerns. After all, Waltz has not carried water for Trump over the past three months, and Rubio has spent most of his time cancelling the visas of international students. Meanwhile, Trump has placed the most sensitive foreign policy negotiations on the Russia-Ukraine war, the Israel-Palestine war, and the resumption of the Iran nuclear agreement in the hands of an amateur, Steve Witkoff, a billionaire real estate developer, who has no background or competence in any of these international matters. Witkoff’s few public interviews have revealed a stunning lack of knowledge on sensitive matters, and we’ve learned virtually nothing about Witkoff’s briefings to the president on his talks with global leaders.
In sum, Rubio is now occupying two important positions because he has demonstrated total fealty to the president. However, the national security adviser needs to be at home at the side of the president, while the secretary of state typically needs to be abroad dealing with immediate problems. Rubio certainly cannot do both, and the fact that India and Pakistan may be headed for another war without any involvement from the Department of States indicates the decline of diplomacy in the United States. When these two countries were headed for war in 1999, it was the Department of State that led the way to a diplomatic settlement.
There has never been a president with so little understanding of U.S. national security, and there has never been a national security team with so little competence. U.S. standing in the global arena has declined in terms of influence, credibility, and power unlike any other time in U.S. history. There is no indication that Trump has any understanding of our global security or that Rubio or Hegseth know what to do about it. I see no prospect for turning the corner as long as Donald Trump remains our commander-in-chief, and that the only requirement for participating in his administration is the demonstration of total fealty.
May 5 is International Day of the Midwife, but Ricardo Jones, a doctor and midwife, is spending it under house arrest after recently being sentenced to 14 years prison for assisting with a home birth in which the baby later died of congenital pneumonia. He says the sentence is the same had he gone “into a hospital and shot a baby in the head.” The case comes as health systems globally push towards unnecessary cesarean-sections and foster obstetric violence that disregards pregnant people’s agency.
The International Confederation of Midwives established May 5 as a day for celebrating and raising awareness of the midwifery profession. They stress that midwives “can provide up to 90% of sexual, reproductive, maternal, newborn, and adolescent health services.” Further, various studies have demonstrated that home births with midwives see better obstetric and neonatal outcomes for low-risk pregnancies than hospital births, and spontaneous births are 3.4 times more likely at home with a midwife.
However, Jones’ sentence appears to be a deliberate attempt to delegitimize midwifery, as part of a concerted push towards profitable hospitalizations. Jones, a Brazilian gynecologist and obstetrician, was found guilty of homicide in the first degree (i.e. intentional murder) on 28 March. He told me he was imprisoned for three weeks, before being released into house arrest.
The incident took place 15 years ago. He described helping to deliver a 30-week-old baby. “It was a very normal labor, but the baby was breathing too fast,” he said. He and his wife, a midwife nurse who received an 11-year sentence, encouraged the mother to go to hospital two hours after the birth – standard procedure – and though the mother was initially reluctant, they did so. Overnight in the hospital, the baby had a lot of problems, and she died 24 hours after birth. It is estimated that pneumonia contributes to between 750,000 to 1.2 million neonatal deaths annually.
“The first doses of antibiotics the baby received occurred four and half hours after she arrived at the hospital,” Jones said, stressing that antibiotics were key to the baby having a chance of surviving. “But there were a lot of problems at the hospital.”
A year later, Jones was summoned by the medical council and prosecuted, despite having followed protocols. His medical license was canceled six years later. The criminal prosecution then followed and argued that he had murdered the baby because he used a humanized childbirth protocol and, according to the prosecution, his “ideology” caused the baby’s death. “They basically decided that a doctor who abides by the protocols of the World Health Organization and … the Ministry of Health of Brazil is a criminal,” Jones said.
Massive increase in C-sections
Brazil has the second-highest C-section rate, at 56%, reaching almost 90% of births in private clinics. The rate is 33.5% in Australia and New Zealand and 32% in the US, but the WHO recommends rates should be closer to 15%. In the UK, only 15% of women say they would prefer a C-section, but in England, 42% of deliveries are by cesarean – up from 29% just five years ago. Of current cesareans in the UK, 67% were elective, meaning they were planned, rather than based on an emergency or health concerns.
The huge increase in the UK corresponds to an increase there in maternal and neonatal deaths, and increasing numbers of women or people giving birth reporting traumatic birth experiences. In the US, maternal mortality has more than doubled over the past century, and even after controlling for risk factors that might have made a C-section more likely, the risk of death after the procedure is 3.6 times higher than after vaginal birth.
On the other hand, it has been demonstrated that pregnancy and birth care approaches that prioritize human relationships, collaborative multidisciplinary teamwork, and midwife-led care are associated with safer outcomes, physiological births (spontaneous, minimal intervention), and lower health-care costs.
According to the Lancet, pregnant people are having C-sections that aren’t medically indicated due to fear of labor pain, fear of pelvic floor damage and urinary incontinence, concern about impact on sexual relationships, and a belief that they are safer. Prior negative experiences with a vaginal birth, including sub-optimal care, can also be a factor, as well as the media presenting C-sections as controllable, convenient, and modern.
In the US, a cesarean section in the hospital for someone without insurance costs US$8,000-71,000, while a home birth and delivery with midwife is US$1,500-$5000. In Canada, delivery costs US$3,195 on average, and a C-section US$5,980. A meta-analysis on ResearchGate found that for-profit hospitals are more likely to perform C-sections than non-profit hospitals.
Jones stressed that while a vaginal birth can take a day, a C-section is “20 minutes and then it’s over, and … hospitals prefer C-sections because they can organize staff to work at a specific time, they can schedule the day, choose if it’s before Christmas or after it.”
Doctors performing C-sections often get paid more, with one researcher finding that doctors will prescribe them for non-medical reasons, “selling” the cesarean to the pregnant person by saying that the labor is too slow, their pelvis isn’t wide enough or the baby too large. In India, a surge in C-sections has been blamed on their profitability, convenience (including a hospital preference for day surgeries over late-night births), and doctor performance targets.
Obstetric violence and dehumanizing women
Prioritizing profits or efficiency over women’s well being goes beyond C-sections. There is a global prevalence of 60% for obstetric violence, with the most identified category being non-consented care (37%).
Jones said that in Brazil, common types of of violence include abuse of or overuse of drugs, not allowing the father or other parent to be present, use of the Kristeller maneuver (pressure to the top of the uterus), episiotomy (a surgical incision made in the perineum; routine ones are not recommended), excessive light or noise in hospital rooms, and not allowing women or people to choose the position they give birth in. “In Brazil, 90% of births are lying down, rather than squatting or vertical,” he said.
Such violence represents a loss of autonomy for women and increases the risk of postpartum depression, obstetric injury, and pregnancy-related morbidity and mortality.
“Women in childbirth are transformed (by many hospital systems) into children, and children have no voice, they are submissive, they just obey. Further, birth is part of a woman’s sexual life, ” Jones said, arguing that women’s sexual life is controlled. He added, “That’s why (many) doctors don’t accept women making choices (about where they’ll give birth, in what position, in what conditions, who will be present). In a patriarchy, men won’t want women to be free. So we control women’s sexuality and we control birth.”
There is now a campaign to support Jones, and it goes beyond his case to demanding support for women’s autonomy and dignity.
“Something must be done to prevent other doctors in Brazil from going to prison just for protecting the wishes of their clients and women. People understand that in Brazil, there is a push to try to criminalize spontaneous birth and out-of-hospital birth,” said Jones.
Alger Hiss testifying before Congress in 1948. Library of Congress. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection.
Although the details of the case would be lost on him (don’t forget, presidential aides had to explain the historical rudiments of Pearl Harbor when Tropical Storm Donald made landfall in Hawaii), Trump’s assault on democracy and the Bill of Rights has its antecedents in the 1949 persecution of former State Department official Alger Hiss, who was sent to a federal penitentiary for forty-four months for denying under oath that he had seen Whittaker Chambers after January 1, 1937.
Hiss’s conviction, less than a month later, led to Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s 1950 proclamation that he had in his hand the names of 205 Communist subversives buried deep within the State Department. The Hiss case also assured Richard Nixon’s political ascendency—Nixon was a young member of Congress when Hiss was ensnared by the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC)—and he rode Hiss’s conviction to the vice-presidency and later the presidency on the assertion that there were probably many Communists hiding under innocent American beds.
Then in 1984, after Ronald Reagan became the corporate sponsor in the White House of an angry right-wing agenda, the celluloid president conferred political sainthood upon the same Whittaker Chambers, Hiss’s nemesis and accuser who leveraged histrionics, lies, prosecutorial misconduct, and FBI duplicity to attack Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. (In the 1930s Hiss had been with FDR in the Agriculture Department and later went with him to Yalta.)
Reagan wasn’t the only president to deify the creepy Chambers (when he worked at Time magazine, Chambers kept a loaded gun in his desk). In 2001, the dark circle that schemed George W. Bush into the presidency held a secret, almost voodoo-like ceremony in the White House to celebrate the centenary of Chambers’ birth, to make the point that his underground journey from Communist errand boy to conservative icon was the inspirational story of America itself.
Finally, in 2017 and then again in 2025, when Trump restored his rackets to American politics, the legacies of the Hiss case and the subsequent McCarthy era of witch-hunting were re-inshrined in the White House. The consigliere who instilled in Trump the idea of American politics as a hate-crime was the Army-McCarthy hearing chief counsel, Roy Cohn Esq., who also railroaded Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the gas chamber. Cohn was not one of the prosecutors who sent Hiss up the river, except in spirit, but if you are looking for a connection between McCarthyite injustice and Trump’s current assault on individual freedom, Cohn is one of the lynchpins.
In the same way, an understanding of the Hiss case, distant as it is in our political memory, is crucial to understanding the extent to which the modern Republican Party sees its mission to conduct government as one endless show trial (now with Trump as the only judge and juror).
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By good fortune, the University Press of Kansas has just published Jeff Kisseloff’s excellent Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss, which is both a fresh examination of the campaign to clear Hiss’s name and overturn his convictions, and a deep dive into the Hiss archives and related papers. Unlike many previous writers on the subject, Kisseloff has run down every suspicion and lead, consulting the trial transcripts, the grand jury testimony, the vast FBI files on the case, and the many papers and documents he was able to study during his fifty years as a Hiss researcher. (His rebuttal of the theory that Priscilla Hiss typed the so-called Baltimore documents is a masterclass in investigative journalism.)
The result isn’t so much a blockbuster as a calm recitation of the facts in the case, along with profiles of the major players (many of whom Kisseloff met), and descriptions of the trials that are trenchant and often humorous. Here, for example, is how he describes the first public testimony that Chambers gave against Hiss, which gives an excellent example of the extent to which Richard Nixon and his HUAC accomplices used their Hiss allegations to form the basis of the broad political attack on the New Deal (just in time for the 1948 presidential election):
It was Nixon’s unique theory that if Hiss was lying about his relationship with Chambers, then he must also be lying when he denied being a Communist. Since Hiss said he didn’t know anyone “by the name” of Chambers, the committee could pretend he was denying that he had known him, which Nixon and Mandel knew to be untrue.
According to Chambers, Mandel came up with the plan to call Chambers before the committee again, but this time in executive session. They would ask him questions about the Hisses’ home furnishings or their hobbies with the intention of proving that Chambers had known them. The committee would then subpoena Hiss and ask him the same questions, so he would inadvertently confirm Chambers’s story. While technically this proved nothing, since Hiss had known Chambers, the opening was there for HUAC to leak Chambers’s testimony and Hiss’s testimony selectively to give a false impression that Chambers was telling the truth and Hiss wasn’t.
Chambers testified on August 7 for four hours of friendly questioning about the Hisses and still botched most of it. His testimony about the Hisses was so frequently and incredibly wrong that it was clear he hardly knew them. If one were to follow Nixon’s reasoning, that would have meant that Hiss was not a Communist.
But from that early hearing, the suspicion has lingered that Hiss might have “done something” for the Russians.
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For those too young to recognize the name Alger Hiss, let me provide a libretto to the case that divided American politics after World War II and the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945.
Born in 1904, Hiss grew up in Baltimore and on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. His father’s death when Alger was age two created a void in his childhood. Still, Hiss managed to attend Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Law School, and after graduating he was chosen to clerk for the legendary justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
In the Depression of the 1930s, Hiss answered the New Deal’s call to service , and from 1933 to 1947 he occupied positions of increasing responsibility in the Agriculture, Justice, and State departments and on the Nye committee—always with the goal of promoting Franklin Roosevelt’s policies.
Hiss’s accusers would later say he was a closet Communist in the 1930s, but no evidence of that exists. He was a New Deal Democrat who wanted to alleviate the widespread unemployment of the Depression, but his tastes in literature ran to Victor Hugo, not Karl Marx, and his persona was that of a Harvard-trained civil servant ready to throw downfield blocks for the causes of the New Deal. This, to be sure, made him enemies around Washington, including the likes of the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and the wealthy investor Bernard Baruch. Kisseloff writes:
In the fifteen years between 1933 and 1948, beginning with Fuller, Alger earned the enmity of five influential people, Leonore Fuller, Ray Murphy, James Byrnes, Ben Mandel, and John Cronin, all of whom contributed to his downfall. Fuller’s comments were still a prominent part of the FBI’s case.
When World War II broke out on December 7, 1941, Hiss was assigned to the Far Eastern division of the State Department, where he was among those (including most of the U.S. government) who missed the warning signs of a pending Japanese attack on American outposts.
During the war years, his responsibilities shifted to international organizations, including the nascent United Nations, and it was Hiss who was the secretary of its first meeting in San Francisco in April 1945. Before that, he was a junior aide in the presidential delegation that met Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin at Yalta (but he was more a notetaker than someone whispering in FDR’s ear).
Later on, when the American right-wing came to the conclusion that Yalta had been a sell-out to Stalin’s Russia, Hiss became a convenient scapegoat to charge with espionage (even though the charges against him related to passing documents to Chambers in 1937-38, something Hiss denied).
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So who or what brought down Alger Hiss and turned him into a symbol, in the minds of many, of Communist subversion of the American government at its highest levels?
Technically, the charges brought against Hiss were for perjury: for lying under oath that he had never seen Chambers (whom he knew as George Crosley) after January 1, 1937. More broadly, however, Hiss was alleged to have passed State Department documents to his courier, Chambers, who had them photographed and passed on to other Moscow agents. But by 1948 the statute of limitations had run out on any charge of espionage (besides, in 1938 the United States was not at war with Russia). So Hiss’s tormentors (notably Richard Nixon) had him frogmarched on perjury charges, which are a prosecutorial catch-all when you want to “get” someone.
From the beginning and through his two trials for perjury, the only real accuser Hiss ever had was Whittaker Chambers, although over the course of ten years (roughly 1939 – 1949) the witch-hunting Chambers picked up right-wing fellow travelers who found it politically expedient to attack the New Deal by charging that all sorts of men and women in Roosevelt’s administration had been closet Communists.
Mind you, during World War II, the Soviet Union was a close American ally, and if you were looking for American officials who aided and abetted the Russians, you need not look any further than President Franklin Roosevelt, who almost single-handedly kept the Soviets alive at Stalingrad in 1942 with American aid. (During the war, when told by an aide that there were suspicions about Hiss being a Communist, FDR just laughed.)
In the 1930s, Russia was not an American ally, but the U.S. domestic political spectrum included many parties promoting socialism, labor, communism, and other collectives. (Ironically, Hiss was not involved in any these flirtations, despite Chambers’ later accusations.)
In 1948, when Harry Truman was running (in effect, for Roosevelt’s fourth term), and the Soviet Union was seizing eastern and central Europe for its sphere of influence, it made for good retail Republican politics to make the point that the New Deal Democrats were nothing more than the dupes and stooges of Stalin’s darkness at noon.
FDR himself was dead, but there were lots of junior ministers (including Alger Hiss) who might well turn out Republican votes if they could be tarred-and-feathered in the smear of an illicit Communist past.
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To make the charges against a fifth column buried deep within the Roosevelt administration, no one played the part better than Whittaker Chambers, whose troubled childhood on Long Island, New York, turned him into a chameleon who could change to the color of whatever powerful man wanted him to do their bidding.
Although he dressed like an unmade bed, Chambers was intelligent, well read, good at languages, and a facile writer. But the truth wasn’t in him. He lived his life as if a character in a fabulist novel, assuming a series of names, identities and professions. In one such fictional pose, he was freelance magazine writer George Crosley who professed interest in writing articles about the Nye Committee, for which Alger Hiss served as the general counsel in 1935.
During this period (a difficult time in the Depression, when Chambers was struggling to feed his family), Hiss and Crosley were friendly; Hiss even sublet him an apartment for a few months, and gave him a car and some money.
But when Crosley showed Hiss his true colors as a swindler, Hiss cut him off, which may later explain why Chambers bore a ten-year grudge against the more successful, well-connected Hiss, whose picture appeared routinely in newspaper articles about Dumbarton Oaks, Yalta or the United Nations.
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During the 1930s, one of the personas that Chambers adopted—for which there is no proof other, again, than his own word—was that of a Soviet intelligence courier in the Communist underground. (In all likelihood his alleged handlers were characters in Dostoevsky novels.)
Previously Chambers had been a member of the open Communist Party USA, and a contributing editor to various left-wing publications, including the Daily Worker and New Masses, but now he added “secret agent” to his portfolio, although his clownish public antics gave him more the appearance of Maxwell Smart than James Bond. (Among his college friends it was a great joke that the eccentric Chambers had taken up “spying,” and they wondered what the Kremlin thought of the postcards that he sent in from the cold.)
The other underground that attracted Chambers in the 1930s was cruising homosexuality, which perhaps more than his efforts for the Comintern might explain why he spent so much of his time meeting strange men while standing in the back of dark movie theaters. Kisseloff writes of his duplex personality:
I’m not a psychiatrist, psychologist, or social worker. I’m in no position to diagnose anyone, but as an observer of people and their actions, I believe a sympathetic person can make judgments without formal training. In this case, Whittaker Chambers was not a well man psychologically. Thanks in part to a brutal home life as a young boy, and to societal pressures that led him to believe he should only feel shame about his sexuality, he had no self-esteem, and his natural tendency toward paranoia took root. In later years, it manifested itself in a variety of ways, whether it was thinking that people who had no such intention were out to do him harm and that he needed to act first before he was victimized, a feeling that cost too many people the happiness and success they so deserved. Though he was comfortable financially, he had a compulsion to borrow and steal money, and it was that—not the fear of reprisal from his spy bosses (if he had any)—that caused him to flee the Communist Party.
After the trials in the 1950s, Chambers published a memoir, Witness, which to this day the Reagan/Trump right-wing hails as a definitive account of “the enemy within.” (In both his presidential campaigns Trump harangued “the enemy from within” and spoke of deploying the U.S. military to root out such evil.)
I have read Witness, which is absurd as a political narrative of the “Communist underground” and the threat it posed to American life. (Think of it as world’s longest Time magazine cover story on “The Communist Conspiracy,” written by Time rewrite man Whittaker Chambers.) But if you were to change the word “Communist” to “homosexual” at each instance it appears in the book, Witness could be read as an early gay novel. As a treatise about American politics it is as fatuous as Forrest Gump.
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Hiss’s two show trials for perjury were held in federal court in New York in 1949, and at the zenith of the Cold War he didn’t have a chance. Although the first trial ended in a hung jury, he was convicted in the second, and delivered to Lewisburg penitentiary for his five-year sentence (he ended up serving three years and eight months). He survived in the joint by befriending some influential mobsters, including Frank Costello. (By contrast, despite his consecration as the patron saint of William F Buckley, Jr.’s National Review, Chambers lived out the rest of his life in apparent misery, dying in 1960, but not before failing at several suicide attempts.)
After his release from prison, Hiss returned to New York in 1954, eked out a living as a stationery salesman, and spent the rest of his life (he died in 1996) campaigning to have his guilty verdicts overturned in the courts. He never succeeded. In many other ways, Hiss led a rich and rewarding life, and had strong family ties, despite his marriage failing over his case. He made many friends, spoke on college campuses, and even had his law license restored after Richard Nixon’s fall from grace in 1974. But his hopes for judicial exoneration ended in 1983, when the Supreme Court declined to hear his petition for coram nobis, which would have “set aside” his convictions based on prosecutorial misconduct during the two trials (essentially, the FBI and the prosecution withheld from Hiss’s defense damning evidence it had collected about Chambers).
Instead, the fight for Hiss’s innocence (or continuing guilt, depending on your views) has turned into competing schools of literature, in which authors on both sides of the case weigh in for or against Hiss’s claims.
Around the time of Richard Nixon’s duplicity and presidential resignation, many people were inclined to believe that Hiss was innocent and had been railroaded. Later on, when the United States began lurching to the McCarthyite right (in which the canonization of Whittaker Chambers was an important article of faith), there appeared a series of books and articles, all of which asserted that Hiss was guilty as charged. The most famous book about Hiss’s presumed guilt was Allen Weinstein’s Perjury, which came out in 1978.
Weinstein’s claim to fame (other than riding the tide of neoconservatism into a Reagan administration sinecure) was his assertion that he began his research assuming that Hiss was innocent, but that once he had dug into to archives he found him to be guilty.
Having read Perjury carefully, I can report that Weinstein rewrote Witness (adding in self-serving footnotes, so that he could cite Chambers to…confirm Chambers), and Witness itself is a rewrite of the many FBI field reports that J. Edgar Hoover commissioned to prove that his detractor, Alger Hiss, was a Communist. Hence for 70 years all we have ever had is an endless loop of The Whittaker Chambers Story.
Yes, there are books that take Hiss’s side of the argument, notably John Chabot Smith’s Alger Hiss: The True Story and Meyer A. Zeligs Friendship and Fratricide: An Analysis of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss. But in the last twenty years there has mostly been an onslaught of books proclaiming that Hiss was America’s Kim Philby, in the pay of the Kremlin and operating as a mole within the administration of Franklin Roosevelt.
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To redress this imbalance we now have Rewriting Hisstory, a book that goes directly to all the controversies in the case.
Kisseloff is in his early seventies and as a undergraduate at Clark College in Wooster, Massachusetts, in the late 1970s, he got an internship in New York City to help the Hiss legal team review all of the documents (some 150,000 pages) that had come their way via the Freedom of Information Act.
As an intern, he got to know Alger Hiss, all of his lawyers, and many of writers and authors who had an interest in the case. He also developed a talent for archival research that mixed well with his passion for gumshoe journalistic reporting. Hence, his new book includes many sentences like this one: “I eventually found [Felix] Inslerman’s widow in a nursing home, and she was enormously helpful.”
You name the allegation against Hiss—those of Chambers, Weinstein, Hede Massing, the Fields, Elizabeth Bentley, Venona, et al.—and in his book Kisseloff has searched the massive Hiss archive to verify who said what about it in FBI reports, to the grand jury, at trial, or in witness statements.
It can make for some complicated paragraphs, but at least, finally, someone has dug into every archive (including Weinstein’s own papers), and he quotes fully from the transcripts. Kisseloff’s conclusion? He writes:
My belief that Hiss was not a spy was an easy call, confirmed by years of careful research into the government and defense files and the simple, straightforward logic that too often has been absent from writing on the Hiss case. Leftists commit political crimes. Alger just wasn’t one of them.
That’s my take, too.
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What’s great about Rewriting Hisstory is that from now on, anyone wishing to write about the Hiss case will have to put in more time than Kisseloff’s fifty years’ of research and interviews. No longer will it be enough in proclaiming Hiss guilty to say, “Well, Weinstein looked into it, and he thought he was guilty.”
When Weinstein’s book was published in 1978, one of the headlines it produced was his report of a dinner party in Vermont at which he alleged that Priscilla Hiss (married to Alger until 1959) announced to the other guests that her former husband had been guilty. For the headline-hunting Weinstein, it was “case closed”—at least against Alger—although as Kisseloff writes:
What she [Priscilla] didn’t know was that Weinstein had a story that he must have thought would clinch the case for him. It involved Priscilla, and it was devastating. It was also untrue, something he must have suspected because he never asked her about it before recklessly putting it into Perjury. The subsequent uproar caused the book’s publication to be delayed.
Later on in his book, Kisseloff adds a postscript to this story:
When the galleys were released, Priscilla was informed of the story and furiously insisted that it was a lie. In Alger’s defense and as a rebuke to Weinstein, she wrote a brief but powerful letter to the editor in the New York Times, quoted here in its entirety:
“For more than a quarter of a century, I have kept silence amid the clamor concerning the conviction of Alger Hiss. Recently, statements have appeared in print to the effect that I have made remarks indicating that Alger Hiss was guilty. I fear that if I do not now speak out, my silence will be interpreted as confirming these statements.
“At all times, and with my every fiber, I have believed in the innocence of Alger Hiss. I have never spoken a word to the contrary. To me the conviction of Alger Hiss represents a cruel miscarriage of justice.
“I do not intend to make any further statements concerning this painful subject.”
Years later, I [Kisseloff] asked Tony [Hiss, Alger’s son] if anyone might still be alive who was at that lunch, and he said that the senator’s daughter, Ellen Flanders, was. I got her number and called. She told me that she had no memory of Priscilla saying any such thing, and that if she had said something as momentous as that, she certainly would have recalled it. Most important, Weinstein never contacted her to check whether the story was true.
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Needless to say, Priscilla Hiss wasn’t the only person that Weinstein abused or misquoted. Several sources sued him and forced retractions. All this should have discredited Weinstein’s book, but now, almost fifty years later, I still see it quoted in the literature as the “final word” on the Hiss case.
Then in 2005 the George W. Bush White House (after conducting its seance with the departed spirit of Whittaker Chambers in 2001) appointed Weinstein as the Archivist of the United States, crowning his career as America’s greatest researcher. Too bad no one consulted Kisseloff about the appointment, as he writes in his book:
At the National Archives, though, he [Weinstein] became even more physically aggressive against women. His behavior was documented in a 2018 exposé by a historian, Dr. Anthony Clark. Clark found that Weinstein was a serial predator who sexually harassed, and at least in one case sexually assaulted, women. The behavior was even conceded by Weinstein’s children—who attributed it to his Parkinson’s. The behavior cost him one job and then a second when he targeted another woman.
Too bad Weinstein died in 2015. He would have fit right into the two Trump administrations, with their institutionalized McCarthyism and use of the Big Lie to attack an endless list of imagined enemies for political gain.
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For newcomers to the Hiss case, it’s possible that Kisseloff’s book might come with too many names and too much detail (although his writing is confident and excellent). I met Hiss in the 1970s (about the same time that Kisseloff began his interning for the defense team) and have been reading about and following the case since then. So I can digest the complicated paragraphs about the serial number of the Woodstock typewriter or the contents of the Pumpkin Papers (in Nixon’s hands, agitation propaganda, straight from a Stalinist show trial, but nothing that passed remotely near Hiss’s desk in the State Department). I can imagine someone without any case background finding Kisseloff’s detail, initially anyway, to be daunting.
For someone wanting to dip their toes in Hiss case history, I recommend starting with John Lowenthal’s 1979 film, The Trials of Alger Hiss. Kisseloff is mentioned in the credits, although he confesses in Rewriting Hisstory that he had a complicated relationship with Lowenthal (who in 2003 won a London court case over his denial that Hiss was the Russian asset code-named ALES, as is hinted at in Venona intercepts).
The film is a three-hour viewing on YouTube, but is worth that time, as you see the key figures in the case. The film includes many long interviews with Hiss himself, who candidly answers hard questions about how he lost in court or whether the homosexual Chambers ever made a pass at him (he says he did not).
From the Lowenthal film, I would move on to either the Chabot Smith biography or Friendship and Fratricide, and also a booklet published on the Alger Hiss website entitled Two Foolish Men by William Howard Moore, which explains, in accessible language, how someone with Hiss’s sophistication and intelligence could have found himself entangled with the clearly erratic Whittaker Chambers.
Finally, because it is so well written, I might add to your reading list The Earl Jowitt’s The Strange Case of Alger Hiss, which the English parliamentarian and legal scholar published in 1953, based entirely on the trial transcripts. Then, at long last, I would move on to Kisseloff’s new book, as it answers every lingering question in the case, and includes, in the last section, his take on who framed Hiss and why.
+++
Kisseloff’s thesis is that neither Whittaker Chambers nor Hoover’s FBI (my usual suspects, along with Richard Nixon) decided to take Hiss down, but that two men in particular—right-wing journalist Issac Don Levine and HUAC staffer Benjamin Mandel—had the motivation and means over many years to denounce Hiss within the government and later to fabricate the evidence against him. (Mandel had known Chambers since the 1920s, when both were members of the USA Communist Party—until each saw the light.)
In fingering this axis of evil, Kisseloff eases up a bit on blaming Chambers, presenting him more as a dupe of a powerful faction that wanted to win the 1948 election (if not to dominate American politics as Trump is now doing).
Here’s how Kisseloff describes witness Chambers’ pliability:
The question about why Hiss was targeted becomes even more of a mystery when you consider that until the late 1940s, neither Levine nor Mandel had ever met Hiss, yet there they were dedicating themselves to destroying his life. They both had the same motive—bringing about the end of the Roosevelt administration with the allegations against Hiss acting like poison-tipped arrows. As always with the Hiss case, the answer is there and it’s clear, but to find it you have to navigate through a lot of sludge. To work my way through it, I pulled out a notepad and began making lists of subsets of accusers who led Levine and Mandel to Hiss, the reasons for their animosity toward him, and how they all fit in with each other. I also added Mandel and Levine to the diagram to see where they fit in. Very quickly, my lines and arrows began to make sense, especially when I placed them onto a timeline where they suddenly all fit into place, each with a different role in the conspiracy. Apparently, as with raising children, creating a successful frame-up also takes a village.
But it wasn’t just that they were targeting Hiss to the exclusion of other New Dealers.
Hiss became the the focus of the take-down when instead of pleading the Fifth Amendment or refusing to appear before the HUAC (as many of those falsely-accused did), he walked into the lions’ den and tried to engage the likes of congressmen Nixon and Karl Mundt in Socratic dialogue (when all that interested them was executing a drive-by shooting). As Kisseloff writes: “Like a junkyard dog, Mandel was vicious toward his enemies and fanatically loyal to anyone who petted him, none more so than Chambers, to whom he was devoted.”
In searching for a motive for these crimes, Kisseloff asks:
The one question that Alger Hiss always struggled with was: What was Chambers’s motive? Hiss thought maybe it was because he cut Chambers off personally and financially. Others thought the reason was Hiss had rebuffed Chambers’s sexual advances.
I think both are wrong. It has almost always been assumed that Chambers was the driving force behind the case. I’ve come to believe that was not true at all. Make no mistake, he made his own choices when it came to Hiss, but he did so at the behest of people who knew which buttons to push. The people who framed Hiss hoped to build up his notoriety and then use it to bury the liberal New Deal coalition. They would get help on that end from Chambers and his allies on HUAC and Joseph McCarthy, Wisconsin’s junior senator, who saw in Hiss’s troubles a way to get reelected. Together, they rocked this country so powerfully that the seismic impact is still being felt more than seventy years later.
+++
As much as I admire Hiss, I can acknowledge that for a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former Supreme Court clerk, he was terrible at defending his own legal interests. At one point he attended a critical HUAC meeting without counsel (actually, he never should have turned up at all), and his decision to sue Chambers’ for libel—while admirable for those who believe in truth—did nothing but bring down on his head every spurious allegation from the likes of Issac Don Levine and Ben Mandel (later backed up by hundreds of FBI agents who combed the country looking for dirt on Hiss).
Hiss should have known that the Woodstock typewriter dragged into court as evidence against him wasn’t the one his wife’s family had owned in the 1920s. (Alas, Hiss wasn’t a typewriter man). Finally, at the two perjury trials, he had the chance to destroy Chambers on the witness stand (for his many perjuries, factual inventions, and fictional lives), but somehow let him appear credible to the jury.
Not only did the FBI hide Chambers’ penchant for thievery, assumed names, and homosexuality from the defense, it also infiltrated the Hiss defense team with several moles, including Horace Schmahl and Francis Sayre. It also managed to cover up the fact that much of Chambers’ mysterious “party” activities in the 1930 can best be understood as part of his obsession for grifting.
Intriguingly, Kisseloff raises the possibility that Chambers’s life in the underground was nothing more than an elaborate hoax to pad his party expense account or scam his so-called comrades—agents “running in the field” as fictional cost centers. (At one point Chambers and his wife attempted credit card fraud at some Washington, D.C. department stores, when they figured out that there was a wealthier family named “Chambers” shopping in their neighborhood.)
But at the two perjury trials, the FBI’s front man, Whittaker Chambers, came across as an unfrocked Communist who had seen the light on the road to Moscow and sought nothing more than to purify the poisoned American soul (for which thirty years later Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded him the Medal of Freedom). And now in the White House we have a president who is the spiritual heir of McCarthyite lawyer Roy Cohn and someone who lies with the same facility as Whittaker Chambers, only in Trump’s case it is to mislead the public on his own affiliations as a Kremlin asset.
“St. George’s Kermis with the Dance Around the Maypole,” Pieter Breughel the Younger, 1627.
The dominant culture of the world teaches us that The Other is a threat, that our fellow human beings are a danger. We will all continue to be exiles in one form or another as long as we continue to accept the paradigm that the world is a racetrack or a battlefield.
– Eduardo Galeano
+ What if the remarkable string of federal court decisions against Trump’s policies (several rendered by his own appointees) isn’t evidence of an inept, blundering executive, but the intended result, where in the ultimate goal isn’t just to execute mass deportations, but to consolidate executive power by villifying and impugning the federal judiciary as an impediment to the popular will.
+ Indeed, this has long been the strategy advocated for years by Trump’s malevolent amanuensis Stephen Miller.As detailed in Jonathan Blitzer’s excellent book on the recent history of immigration from Central America, Everyone Who is Gone Is Here, during the first Trump administration Miller pushed for intentionally breaking federal laws and regulations and forcing the courts to rule against the administration, then ignoring the court rulings in the confident that the Trump-majority Supreme Court would ultimately rule in your favor.
+ But now Miller and his cohort are willing to go even further, by jailing members of the federal judiciary who stand in the way. This week, White House spokesperson Kathleen Leavitt even refused to rule out arresting Supreme Court justices who attempt to hold the Trump administration to account for constitutional violations.
+ Here’s a sample from MAGA Central…
+ JD Vance (like John Yoo, a Yale Law School Grad); “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power…If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general on how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal.”
+ Vance: “When the courts stop you, stand before the country like [early US president] Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
+ Vance on the jailing of judges: “What we are really doing is fixing 40 years of accumulated bogus bureaucratic BS. We’re fixing 40 years of judges thinking they rule the country instead of the American people. We’re fixing 40 years of judges telling the American president what to do… It had to happen and thankfully, we’re getting it done.”
+ AG Pam Bondi: “What has happened to our judiciary is beyond me. I think some of these judges think they are beyond and above the law. And they are not.”
+ Fox News Sandra Smith asked Bondi, “So when you see these judges trying to obstruct your efforts to make this country safer, what is your message to them?”
“We are going to prosecute you, and we are prosecuting you,” Bondi vowed.
+ Fox News’ Steve Doocy asked White House spokesperson Kathleen Leavitt: “You guys arrested a Milwaukee County Circuit judge for allegedly helping illegal immigrants get away. As you guys look at other judges, would you ever arrest somebody higher up on the judicial food chain, like a federal judge or even a Supreme Court justice?”
Leavitt: “That’s a hypothetical question, again I defer you to the Department of Justice for individuals that they are looking at or individual cases. But let’s be clear about what this judge did: She obstructed federal law enforcement who were looking for an illegal alien in her courthouse. She showed that illegal alien the door to evade law enforcement officials. That is a clear-cut case of obstruction. And so anyone who is breaking the law or obstructing federal law enforcement officials from doing their jobs is putting themselves at risk of being prosecuted, absolutely.”
+ Stephen Miller: “This is the choice facing every American: Either we all side, and get behind President Trump to remove these terrorists from our communities, or we let a rogue, radical left judiciary shut down the machinery of our national security apparatus.”
+ Then there’s the popgun Congressman from New Orleans, Clay Higgins…
+++
+ In a May Day ruling, Trump-appointed Federal Judge Fernando Rodriguez, Jr, of the Southern District of Texas, will permit those targeted by the Alien Enemies Act in South Texas to proceed with a class action against the government.
+ Two weeks after a family from Maryland moved into a new rental house in Oklahoma City, 20 armed ICE agents burst into their home. “I didn’t know who they were,” the mother later said. “It was dark. All the lights were off. I kept asking them, ‘Who are you? What are you doing here? What’s happening? And they said, ‘We have a warrant for the house, a search warrant.’”
+ “You can’t just walk up to people with brown skin and say, ‘Show me your papers,” said U.S. District Court Judge Jennifer L. Thurston, before issuing a preliminary injunction forbidding the Border Patrol from conducting warrantless immigration stops throughout a wide swath of California.
+ Federal Judge Brian Murphy has barred DHS from transferring migrants to other agencies (like DOD) in a backdoor effort to evade due process guarantees before deportation.
On Tuesday, a DHS official told a federal court that agency leadership diverted 10-20 employees to run 1.3 million names of international students through a database that tracks criminal charges. It took 2-3 weeks. There were fewer than 6,400 hits (0.004%). But thousands of those were for charges that never led to convictions or were dropped. These are the students who had their F1 status revoked by ICE, many of whom also had their State Department visas revoked. ICE put the blame on Rubio and the State Department.
+ As the New York Times reported this week, Trump’s original deal with Bukele was that El Salvador would only accept deportees with criminal convictions, whom he was willing to take for a fee in order to help subsidize his massive prison complex. Bukele told Trump that he couldn’t spin holding non-criminal deportees as being in the best interest of El Salvador. But after the first three shipments of deportees, it became clear to Bukele that 90 percent of the people deported by ICE to El Salvador had no criminal records at all.
+ Other than money, why was Bukele so eager to get MS-13 gang members out of the US court system and back to El Salvador? Because he feared they might expose his own deals with MS-13 before he imposed the State of Exception: “Both the Treasury Department and Justice Department have accused Mr. Bukele’s government of making a secret pact with MS-13, offering its leaders behind bars special privileges to keep homicides down in El Salvador.”
+ The deportation process was so disorganized and sloppy that eight women were among those flown to be incarcerated in the all-male Salvadoran prison…
+ Two weeks after a family from Maryland moved into a new rental house in Oklahoma City, 20 armed ICE agents burst into their home. “I didn’t know who they were,” the mother later said. “It was dark. All the lights were off. I kept asking them, ‘Who are you? What are you doing here? What’s happening? And they said, ‘We have a warrant for the house, a search warrant.’”
Flashing the warrant, ICE raided the house, seizing cellphones, computers, and the family’s life savings. While ICE agents ransacked the house, they forced the mother and three daughters to stand outside in their underwear. “We are citizens!” the mother screamed at the ICE officers. “You have guns pointed in our faces. Can you just reprogram yourself and see us as humans, as women?”
When she was allowed to read the warrant, the mother noticed that it referred to the house’s previous tenants. She pointed this out to the agents: “They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless,” she said. “I kept pleading. I kept telling them we weren’t criminals. They were treating us like criminals. We were here by ourselves. We didn’t do anything. One of them said, ‘I know it was a little rough this morning.’ It was so denigrating. That you do all of this to a family, to women, your fellow citizens. And it was ‘a little rough?’ You literally traumatized me and my daughters for life. We’re going to have to go get help or get over this somehow. I asked, ‘When are we going to get our stuff back?’ They said it could be days or it could be months.”
They didn’t even leave a contact card.
+ Defense attorney Andrew Fleischman: “It would be unfair to say that all ICE agents are dumb, thieving, perverts. But [in this case] they did break into an American home, steal everything that wasn’t nailed down, and force the daughters to stand outside in their underwear due to gross negligence and rank incompetence.”
+ A Trump administration memo disclosed this week urged ICE to break into homes in search of noncitizens to kidnap without a warrant. The memo stated that ICE can curb the “proactive procedures” put in place to obtain a warrant, since they “will not always be realistic or effective in swiftly identifying and removing alien enemies.”
+ The Guardian reported this week on internal ICE documents showing that the agency is seeking out unaccompanied immigrant children in operations nationwide with the intent of deporting them or pursuing criminal cases against them or their guardians.
+ ICE is luring noncitizens who are trying to follow the law into traps. Take the case of Rosmery Alvarado, the wife of a naturalized US citizen, and mother of a daughter who is also a US citizen. Alvardo, a native of Guatemala who lives in Pittsburg, Kansas, had applied for a green card as the wife of a US citizen. A couple of weeks ago, Rosmery received a summons from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) office to come to Kansas City for her spousal interview. When Rosmery arrived for her interview, she was immediately taken into custody by ICE and told she would be deported to Guatemala. The summons was a ruse. Rosmery had no criminal record. Alvardo’s daughter, Carina Moran: “My father was then approached by an ICE officer, and he was told, ‘We arrested your wife and she’s going to be deported. We didn’t get any kind of warning. They didn’t let us say goodbye.”
+ Last year, a family of three turned themselves in to immigration after crossing the border in Texas and were separated by ICE. The father, Maiker Espinoza Escalona, was sent to a men’s detention prison, and the mother, Yorely Bernal Inciarte, was detained in a women’s prison, as their asylum claim was being processed. Their two-year-old daughter was sent into government custody. After a few months, the couple rescinded their asylum claim and asked to be deported so that they could be reunited with their daughter. Instead, Maiker was sent first to Guantanamo, then deported to Bukele’s concentration camp in El Salvador. Meanwhile, Yorely was put on a deportation flight to Venezuela without her daughter, who remained in ICE custody: “I started yelling at the officers asking where my baby was, but ICE officers ignored me.”
When the Venezuelan government protested the kidnapping of the couple’s daughter, the Trump administration responded by smearing Maiker and Yorely with the dubious charge of being leaders of the Tren De Aragua gang. “The child’s father, Maiker Espinoza-Escalona, is a lieutenant of Tren De Aragua who oversees homicides, drug sales, kidnappings, extortion, sex trafficking, and operates a torture house,” DHS said in a statement. ”The child’s mother, Yorely Escarleth Bernal Inciarte, oversees recruitment of young women for drug smuggling and prostitution.”
Neither Maiker nor Yorely has a criminal record in the US or Venezuela. However, they do both have tattoos. Maiker is a barber and tattoo artist who inked the birthdates of Yorely’s mother and father, the name of her son, and some flowers on her chest. Neither has any gang tattoos.
Yorely, who has no way of contacting her 2-year-old daughter, told ABCNews: “I wouldn’t wish this on any mother.”,
+ Cliona Ward, a 54-year-old Irish woman who has been living legally in the United States for decades, was taken into detention by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after a trip to Ireland to visit her sick father. Ward moved to the US in her early teens and is the sole carer for a son with special needs. She is being held in an ICE facility in Tacoma, Washington.
+ Harvard cancer researcher Kseniia Petrova on being kidnapped and locked up in an ICE prison:“I would call it a grinding machine. We are in this machine, and it doesn’t care if you have a visa, a green card, or any particular story… It just keeps going.”
+ Jack Herrera: “When Texas started arresting migrants for trespassing in ‘21, many paid hefty bail to get out of jail. But instead of releasing them, Texas handed them over to ICE.I spent over a year investigating: One county has made over $1 million by taking bail from deported migrants.”
+ Marco Rubio: “We are actively searching for other countries to take people from third countries. Not just El Salvador. We are working with other countries to say, ‘We want to send some of the most despicable to your countries. Will you do that as a favor to us?’ And the further from the US the better.”
+ Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi walked out of ICE detention on Wednesday, freed by federal judge Geoffrey Crawford in Vermont, who referred to the Trump administration’s deportation of pro-Palestinian students as similar to the Red Scare: “Legal residents–not charged with crimes or misconduct–are being arrested and threatened with deportation for stating their views on the political issues of the day.”
+ In front of a large crowd singing “We Shall Overcome” outside the ICE detention center, Mohsen Mahdawi said: “To my people in Palestine: I feel your pain, I see your suffering; and I see freedom and it is very very soon.”
Judge Crawford said: “Yes, Mohsen’s a peaceful figure—but he has rights even if he were a firebrand.”
+++
+ 45% of Americans give Trump’s first 100 days an “F.” That’s higher than:
Obama: 11%
Biden: 26%
And Trump’s first term: 32%
+ Jim Naureckas: “I would give Trump’s first term an F. This term gets a grade of ‘Call 911–there’s an active shooter in the building.’”
+ According to the courtier scribes at Axios, Trump has been “lashing out” at “fake polls” depicting his plunging approval ratings and raging that news outlets that publish them should be “investigated for election fraud.” So he’s running again?
+ Even with his failing grades, Trump’s still less loathed than his opponents.
Who’d do a better job as president?
Trump 45%
Harris 43%
Who can better deal with the main U.S. problems?
Trump 40%
Dems in Congress’ 32%
– CNN Poll
+ Kamala Harris: “And folks, what we are experiencing right now is exactly what they envision for America. Right now, we are living in their vision for America. But this is not a vision that Americans want.”
+ Fortunately, Harris is so bad at the politics thing that she could never be elected. But if she is elected through some nationwide glitch in electronic voting machines, the blacklash will whip us back to the early Pleistocene…
+ DemAnon: So authentic and believable they wouldn’t even put their name to the sentiment…
+ When Strom Thurmond filibustered against the Civil Rights Act of 1957 for 25 hours, he didn’t turn around two weeks later and vote to approve Ike’s nominee to run the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department…
+ The Bulwark reports that Democratic Minority Leader in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, wants Democratic members of Congress to stop making trips to check on the status and well-being of deported constituents. This, after Trump’s poll numbers have finally shifted into reverse on his signature issue. It’s hard to imagine the Democrats could have hand-picked two more incompetent and spineless leaders than Schumer and Jeffries. A top staffer, Jeffries, said: “One trip was sufficient; it made sense that Van Hollen went, but when the safest possible members go, it gives fodder for the National Republican Campaign Committee to start using it against other Democrats. They should understand what they’re doing is going to be hurting us in the long run.”
+++
+ Trump on China: “They made a trillion dollars with Biden selling us stuff. Much of it we don’t need. Somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are gonna be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more.”
Less stuff (including made-in-China MAGA caps), but more expensive. What a bargain!
+ Expected price increase of Apple products to cover the cost of Trump’s tariffs
+ Bloomberg News reports that Chinese purchases of American oil are down 90% year-over-year, while Chinese purchases of Canadian oil are up +700% year-over-year.
+ Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to Fox Business:“I’m told that in parts of Florida, gasoline is $1.93, and that’s an automatic tax cut for the American people. We’re probably gonna see a lot more car travel this summer. So I think things are in good shape.”
The average price of regular gas in Florida is nowhere near $1.93 per gallon and has increased over the last week:
Current Ave. $3.179.
Yesterday Ave. $3.148.
Week Ago Ave. $3.123…
+ On Monday, Trump said Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are “great” and billionaires like them “hold me in a higher level of respect.”
+ On Tuesday morning, after Amazon announced it would post the cost of tariffs included in the price of each item, the White House responded by calling it a “hostile political act” by a “China-aligned” company….
+ I thought they were proud of their tariffs and would appreciate it if Bezos showed them how they would replace the income tax.
+ By Tuesday afternoon, Amazon had folded, going from Ben & Jerry’s-like defiance to IG Farben-like compliance in less than two hours! And Trump was back to calling Bezos a “smart guy.”
+ David Warrick, CEO of Overhaul, is sticking to his guns, calling the display of tariffs costs “transparency” in retail sales: “Consumers should understand that this is what you’re paying for, and what the cost of trade policy is and how it’s uplifting prices. It’s useful, and a good demonstration of how tariffs are impacting daily spending.”
+ Since April 30, the online swimwear company Triangle has been displaying tariff charges on its items, including a one-piece swimsuit that retails for $119, but after taxes and costs $362.46.
+ In a new letter to shareholders, General Motors has cut its profit guidance and said that tariffs could cost the automaker up to $5 billion.
+ Bjørn Gulden, CEO of Adidas: “Since we currently cannot produce almost any of our products in the U.S., these higher tariffs will eventually cause higher costs for all our products for the U.S. market.”
+ One reason Trump declared a national energy emergency was to keep his non-stop gaslighting fueled…
+ US GDP for Q1 contracted by -0.3%, below estimates of +0.2%, pushing the odds of a recession in 2025 to 64%.
+ Looks like the tariffed are kicking the ass of the tariffer…
Q1 GDP data
+0.6% Spain
+0.4% Eurozone
+0.32% Ireland
+0.3% Italy
+0.2% Germany
+0.2% Austria
+0.1% France
+0.2% Mexico
-0.3% U.S.
+ According to the Financial Times,Trump’s top economic adviser, Stephen Miran, met with top bond investors last week, and he was described as incoherent” and “out of his depth.”
+ The amount most Americans believe they’ll need to retire comfortably:$1.26 million.
+ Median amount of savings for most Americans at retirement age (65-70): $200,000
+ But many millions of Americans have almost no retirement savings at all. In fact, an AARP survey from last year found that 20% of adults ages 50+ have no retirement savings, and nearly have no savings in retirement accounts.
+ The federal minimum wage is now officially a “poverty wage.” A single adult working full-time all year round at $7.25 an hour would fall beneath the poverty line of $15,650 a year.
+ I’m sure ChatGPT is as good as any Freudian analyst. Unfortunately, most Gen Zers can’t afford a couch…
+++
+ Elon Musk has packed up his stuff and left the White House. Now, who will run what remains of the government?
+ Despite DOGE’s cut-and-run assault on the federal workforce and social welfare programs, the federal government spent nearly $220 billion more than in Trump’s first 100 days than it did last year.
+ Finally, someone Americans dislike more intensely than Trump, the GOP and the Democrats: Elon Musk: 34% favorable, 54% unfavorable. (NPR poll)
+ The House GOP wants to spend another $45 billion to extend the Trump border wall–four times as much as the cost of the original wall. In four years under Trump, the existing border wall was breached at least 3,200 times. How’s that for efficiency in government?
+ On April 8th, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, bought stock in Palantir. On April 17th, ICE announced a $30 million deal with Palantir. Palantir’s stock price has now risen 48% in the three weeks since its purchase.
+ Jacob Silverman explains why the Trump family’s crypto venture may be the biggest financial scandal in presidential history, even though it’s happening right before our eyes.
+ I won’t be convinced AOC means it, until I see “Against Oligarchy” hand-stitched by Haitian seamstresses in a Port-au-Prince sweatshop onto her $100,000 gown at the next Met Gala.
+ A Morgan Stanley estimate of the number of human workers expected to be replaced by humanoid robots in the US…
2030: 40 thousand
2035: 500 thousand
2040: 8.4 million
2045: 26.7 million
2050: 62.7 million
+ Duolingo, the language program, announced it’s going “AI-first” and plans to replace contract workers with AI. The company also plans to utilize AI in its hiring process and performance reviews. “Duolingo will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees,” said Duolingo’s CEO, Luis von Ahn. He didn’t clarify whether he meant human or cyber.
+ Mark Zuckerberg claims that Meta is creating personalized AI “friends” to supplement your real ones: “The average American has three friends, but has a demand for 15.”
Sam Stein: “This sounds more like a confession than a business plan.”
+ According to a study by the Getulio Vargas Foundation, Brazil experienced a historic drop in income inequality in 2024.Income for the nation’s poorest quintile increased by 10.7% compared to a 6.7% increase for the wealthiest 10%. This resulted in a 2.9-point drop in the GINI Coefficient’s measure of income inequality.
+++
+ Trump’s National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and his deputy Alex Wong are out. Did Trump’s Cromwell, Laura Loomer, wield the axe again? Or was there just too much winning?
+ Trump says Waltz’s role will be filled on an “interim basis” by Marco Rubio, which means that Rubio’s portfolio will now include: Secretary of State, interim National Security Advisor, acting administrator of USAID, acting Archivist of the United States, and personal revoker of student visas for pro-Palestinian international students. Either Rubio’s a remarkable multitasker (for which there’s no empirical evidence; indeed, he had one of the worst attendance records in the US Senate) or his job just isn’t that demanding.
+ Move over, Alger Hiss! According to a piece in The Daily Beast: “Marco Rubio’s State Department has launched a dystopian hunt for staff who spoke ill of Trump, Elon Musk, Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and mentioned keywords like Black Lives Matter, January 6, Q-Anon, immigration, and anti-vaxx.”
+ Travis Akers: “Since hiring Kristina Wong from Breitbart News as the Secretary of the Navy Communications Director this week, the Secretary of the Navy’s Twitter account has twice posted the incorrect date of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, ‘a date which will live in infamy.’”
+ Northwestern, one of the universities Trump has threatened to withhold federal money from unless it bends the knee to him, reported this week, “As of this writing, we have received 98 stop-work orders, mostly for Department of Defense-funded research projects.” So not all bad, right?
+ Paramount owner Shari Redstone asked Paramount/CBS CEO George Cheeks to delay sensitive ’60 Minutes’ stories about Trump or his policies, especially one on Gaza, until after she had closed the Skydance deal. Redstone’s meddling prompted the resignation of 60 Minutes’ executive producer, Bill Owens.
+ Of course! The ultimate blood libel gets an exemption, but then it was never about protecting Jews but shielding Israeli atrocities from public opprobrium…
+ A British doctor who returned from Gaza speaks on amputating the limbs of children gravely wounded by Israeli airstrikes.
Dr.: I had with me, because I’m prepared for these mass casualty events, I had some Ketamine. I had two syringes of ketamine and that was my sedation. And I had to pick and choose who to give the sedation to and who not to give the sedation to. Ketamine can also be used as a painkiller as well as a sedative.
Interviewer: How do you even make that decision? What’s the thought process?
Dr.: I was just very pragmatic, right? The thought process was: if I knew this child was going to die, even if they’re in agony and in pain, I wouldn’t give them the ketamine. And the reason was because the children that could live, I didn’t want them traumatized for the rest of their lives with what I was about to do to them (amputations), so I would sedate them. And I would leave those other children to die. Those are the decisions you have to make every day when you’re in Gaza.
+ Raviv Drucker, former Israeli ambassador: “God did the state of Israel a favor that Biden was president during this period, because it could have been much worse. We fought in Gaza for over a year, and the administration never came to us and said, ‘Ceasefire now.’ It never did. And that’s not to be taken for granted.”
+ I seem to recall someone telling us team Biden was “working tirelessly for a ceasefire.”
+ The Observer reports “members of [Columbia’s] board of trustees were in direct communication with Republicans in Congress and… the Trump administration, offering information and advice on what demands to make and how to present them.” Columbia wasn’t so much negotiating or caving to Trump, as using Trump as an excuse for what they wanted to do on their own.
+ Massive Attack’s defense of Kneecap…
+ In the last two weeks, Kneecap has soared from 100,000 listeners on Spotify to more than 1.1 million.
+ Albert Pinto and Kate Mackenzie, April is the Cruelest Month: “In international relations, trade, security and capital markets, the themes are the same: in place of decades of reliance on the US and its assets, the rest of the world is now seeing to diversify, decarbonize, defend and dedollarize….[while the US] has decided that it now needs to engage in full-scale demolition of the same system it created….The US is becoming weaker as it dismantles the very system it once built.”
+ The US military apparently took the coordinates of an alleged Houthi bunker from a public Twitter account (VleckieHond)and then programmed a drone strike on the supposed “base,” killing eight innocent people. The command-and-control base was actually a … quarry.
+ Who could Nazi this coming? Trump’s DC attorney nominee Ed Martin “apologized” for praising convicted Capitol rioter and white supremacist, Timothy Hale-Cusanelli. Martin said he didn’t know about the alleged Nazi sympathizer’s views that he repeatedly praised on his podcast. Martin called Hale “an extraordinary man, and an extraordinary leader” and presented him with an honorary award last August from Martin’s nonprofit groupat Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. In July of 2020, Martin told Hale: “In your case, they used your phone and took a photo and leaked a photo to say, ‘Ah, look … MAGA people are antisemitic. You had like a mustache shaved in such a way that you looked vaguely like Hitler and making jokes about it. Again, you know, not your best moment, but not illegal.”
+++
+ David Geir, the man RFK Jr. tapped to help run his autism study, was penalized by the Maryland State Medical Board for injecting autistic children with puberty blockers. He has no medical degree or license to practice medicine, though he was cited for doing so without one.
+ RFK Jr on the measles vaccine: “The MMR vaccine contains a lot of aborted fetus debris…parents should do their own research.”
+ Because like climate change, cancer’s no longer a thing in America…
+ Eric Reinhart, social psychologist and political anthropologist: “There’s a scary, superficial paradox at the heart of Trump and RFK Jr’s calls to reopen asylums and ship off people with mental illnesses and substance use disorders to cells and work camps: the asylum model of care hinges on psychiatric authority, but RFK Jr is adamantly anti-psychiatry, undermining its diagnoses and treatments at every turn. Why is this so frightening? Because the paradox dissolves when we realize that what Kennedy wants is even worse than asylums: he wants just prisons and concentration camps without any pretense of treatment.”
+ RFK, Jr. told Dr. Phil this week, he may appoint a “Chemtrails Czar“: “I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it, or bring on somebody who’s going to think only about that, find out who’s doing it, and holding them accountable.”
+ The National Institute of Health is now prohibiting the awarding of new grants to any institutions that boycott Israeli companies. Boycotts of companies from other countries are perfectly okay.
+ 53: number of Palestinian children starved to death in Gaza while food waits just meters away behind a fence, blocked by Israel.
+++
+ The worst of the living neoliberals, Tony Blair, continues to make even Bill Clinton look good by comparison. Here he is fronting for dubious carbon capture scams, that will further enrich fossil fuel companies and do almost nothing to reduce atmospheric CO2: “Any strategy based on either ‘phasing out’ fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail.”
+ Stephen Miller: “Children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots. Children will be taught civic values for schools that want federal taxpayer funding. So as we close the Department of Education and provide funding to states, we’re going to make sure these funds are not being used to promote communist ideology.”
+ I don’t know, Stephen, this sounds kind of Maoist to me…
+ Doug Henwood on the scabrous turncoat, professional hysteric and academic witch hunter David Horowitz, who died this week:
“Now that the evil David Horowitz is dead, I can tell a story that my late friend Bob Fitch, who worked with him at Ramparts in the late 60s before his turn to the right, told me years ago; Horowitz would commission three articles on the same subject, plagiarize the best bits of each, and publish the resulting bricolage under his own name. Oh, a footnote: By the end of Ramparts’s run, they’d burned every printer in North America and were looking to Italy to get the last issue printed. Horowitz thought it was cool not to pay your printing bills.”
+ But his predacious progeny lives on, as the (Ben) Horowitz of the $42 billion Trump-backing Andreesen Horowitz venture capital firm in Menlo Park, a primary underwriter in the AI scourge.
“Now, in contemporary industrialized democracies, the legitimate administration of violence is turned over to what is euphemistically referred to as ‘law enforcement’–particularly to police officers, whose real role, as police sociologists have repeatedly demonstrated, has much less to do with enforcing cimrinal law than with the scientific application of physical force to aid in the resolution of administrative problems. Police are, essentially, bureaucrats with weapons.”
How important are voices? President Trump officially fired the head Archivist of the United States, the director of an agency considered the nation’s recordkeeper. Historical records are the voice of a country. Trump’s potential altering of history could change the national voice. The death of Pope Francis is another example of the importance of voice. “Francis’ death silences voice for the voiceless,” headlined an article by Jason Horowitz in the New York Times. “The least among us have lost their voice,” a soup kitchen manager in Rome was quoted in the same article.
Besides changing or losing voice, there is also fear to use one’s voice to describe what is taking place in the United States. Senator Lisa Murkowski, one of the few Republican dissenting voices in Washington, recently told a gathering of non-profit leaders in her home state of Alaska; “We are all afraid,” Murkowski said. “It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell ya, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real.” Wesleyan University President Michael Roth made a similar comment about why more university leaders are not signing a statement opposing Trump’s assault on academic freedom; “I asked a lot of people to sign, and many people said: ‘I can’t sign. I’m afraid.’”
Faced with changing history, lack of voice and fear, one looks for a different perspective on sound and voice. An unusual exhibit at the International Committee of the Red Cross’ (ICRC) Museum in Geneva highlights the diverse roles of disparate sounds and voices. “Sounds…maybe something passed into the background compared to the visual,” the curator Elisa Rusca explained to me, “But that doesn’t mean they have as much strength, on the contrary, sometimes it’s because of the sound that an image takes on its full power.”
The exhibit “Tuning In – Acoustics of Emotion” focuses on tuning in to non-traditional sounds and voices. “Methodologically,” Rusca said, “the exhibition is indeed an Atlas where the audience can move freely and enter all these different worlds I created, and each world is a different frequence.” Included in the different frequencies are sections on voice and memory, sound at the Museum, emotions and voice, and voice and engagement.
The interdisciplinary exhibition is a welcome relief for those tired of or overwhelmed by current events and too much noise who wish to hear other voices, other sounds. It uses the ICRC’s and IFRC’s audio archives as well as contemporary artists to deal with emotions and sound in an innovative manner; “[M]y wish was to avoid the noise, and to celebrate the richness of diversity,” Rusca wrote. The curator prepared the exhibit with the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences (CISA) at the University of Geneva.
By linking sound and voices with humanitarian action, the exhibit highlights the role of emotions, something that is far from obvious in a traditionally visual museum dedicated to humanitarian action. “These are voices, official speeches, but also delegates’ reports, briefings after missions,” Rusca explained. “These are direct shots during situations, crises, but also emergency messages or health radio broadcasts created by national societies.”
Sounds and voices appeal to our emotions. But is there a role for emotions in our intellectual reasoning? How important are emotions in our decision-making process? The eminent philosopher Martha Nussbaum thinks they are very important. She wrote in her 2001 book Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions: “Instead of viewing morality as a system of principles to be grasped by the detached intellect, and emotions as motivations that either support or subvert our choice to act according to principle, we will have to consider emotions as part and parcel of the system of ethical reasoning.”
What questions about our “ethical reasoning” are raised in the “Tuning-In” exhibit? For example, one part of the exhibit shows songs being recorded in response to the 1983-1985 Ethiopian famine. Musicians and celebrities recorded “humanitarian songs” such as Do They Know It’s Christmas? (Band Aid, United Kingdom), We Are the World (USA for Africa, United States of America), Éthiopie (Chanteurs sans frontières, France), Nackt im Wind (Band für Afrika, Germany) and Les yeux de la faim (Fondation Québec Afrique, Canada). What is striking is how quickly the recordings were organized because of the sudden famine as well as the dichotomy between the professional recording studios and the actual situation of the famine victims in Ethiopia.
Several contemporary artists are also featured, such as Dana Whabira and Suzana Sousa. Their conversation on the connection between Ubuntu, African philosophy and love started when Whabira discovered that the word love was not found in the ICRC data base. There is even a soundless exhibit about sign language. Christine Sun Kim’s series of videos produced in collaboration with Thomas Mader, explores the expressiveness of American Sign Language, combining facial expressions and hand gestures.
The Director of the ICRC Museum, Pascal Hufschmid, observed that “Sound is something that penetrates us, it’s something that completely takes us. All of a sudden, if we take this step aside, and look at sound critically and question what the sound conveys and carries with it, it really allows us to better understand the issues and the complexity of humanitarian action.”
More than just allowing us “to better understand the issues and complexity of humanity action,” an exhibit about sound and voice allows us to step back from the enormous noise that now clutters our thinking. Trump and Company are omnipresent to such an extent that we must constantly struggle to find the right descriptive words to accompany our emotional revulsion.
The political has become the psychological. We are living through a national if not international mental health crisis. Nussbaum was spot on; “we will have to consider emotions as part and parcel of the system of ethical reasoning.” Trump is more than a threat to democracy and the Constitution; he is psychologically disruptive, destabilizing and distracting. Historical allies become enemies, yesterday’s executive order is put on pause, what was said before is no longer valid today. Even historical records in the National Archives can be altered. The traditionally dependable Uncle Sam can no longer be trusted. Our “system of ethical reasoning” needs serious updating.
The ICRC Museum exhibit “Tuning In – Acoustics of Emotion” is a welcome reminder of the importance of sound, voice and emotions. Murkowski’s and Roth’s comments are chilling indications of where we are heading and the necessity of finding new voices and new sounds to replace the deafening noise and sounds that engulf us. The exhibit suggests it’s imperative to tune in to different sounds and voices to find our way out of this emotional tsunami; and that you don’t have to turn on to tune in, nor drop out after tuning in.
The question of whether the United States is an oligarchy has come to the fore, as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez draw major crowds around the country to their Fighting Oligarchy Tour. Their message of combatting the outsized influence of rich and powerful corporate interests has resonated with thousands of Americans. But even as it is clear to so many that something is amiss, the idea of oligarchy can seem ill-defined and opaque. What is oligarchy in concrete terms and how would we know if we were living under one? To answer these questions requires an understanding of the relationship between the state and capital—and between both and the social body.
Martin Buber said, “The State is a homunculus sucking the blood from the veins of communities.” This picture of government as a form of parasitic subordination and control echoes several of the modern period’s most famous descriptions not only of the state, but of the role of capital within the economic order. The image of the vampire—dead yet alive, sustained by the life of humans, possessed of otherworldly power—has long been deployed as a metaphor for the capitalist. Perhaps the most famous example comes from Karl Marx, in Volume I of Capital, which was first published in 1867. Marx writes, “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Later, he describes capital’s “vampire thirst for the living blood of labor.” In both Buber’s image of the state and Marx’s conception of capital, we find the idea of a ruling class that does not need to produce in order to live, but enjoys a privileged position to live off of the work and wealth of others. Marx relies frequently and to dramatic effect on the image of vampires and bloodthirst, for example writing that the “capitalized blood of children” underwrites the power of American capital. But Marx’s was not the first time the owning and employing class had been compared to the undead blood-suckers of folklore.
In his Philosophical Dictionary, published in 1764, more than a century before Capital, Voltaire wrote, “We never heard a word of vampires in London, nor even at Paris. I confess that in both these cities there were stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of business, who sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight; but they were not dead, though corrupted. These true suckers lived not in cemeteries, but in very agreeable palaces.”
A more immediate reference point for Marx’s use of the metaphor comes from his friend and frequent collaborator Frederick Engels. The vampire appears in Engels’ 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in England, in which he discusses the role of religion in subduing the working class: “[N]ecessity will force the working-men to abandon the remnants of a belief which, as they will more and more clearly perceive, serves only to make them weak and resigned to their fate, obedient and faithful to the vampire property-holding class.” But historian of political thought William Clare Roberts argues that Marx’s use of this metaphor “may be yet another détournement of Proudhon.”
In The System of Economic Contradictions, Proudhon describes the employer as “like the vampire of the fable, exploiting the degraded wage-worker … the idler devouring the substance of the laborer.” Proudhon developed the argument that it is not the abstract principle of private property that is the problem—it is rather that this legal privilege is not open and available to everyone; it therefore becomes an instrument used by a small ruling class to exclude and thus to expropriate value. Much like his American counterpart, the anarchist trailblazer Josiah Warren, Proudhon “wanted to extend to every individual the freedom exercised by the capitalists.” The challenge to the oligarchy today is Warren’s and Proudhon’s: if you believe in private property and free trade, then extend such privileges to everyone. As practiced, private property as a social relationship is profoundly freedom-limiting.
Another famous anarchist, Benjamin Tucker, said that the state “gives idle capital the power of increase, and, through interest, rent, profit, and taxes, robs industrious labor of its products.” Within the system, capital enjoys this right or power of increase, its owners’ ability to increase their wealth using their wealth, growing ever richer without work. In Capital, Marx observes similarly that capital “has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself.” How does capital accomplish this? In this apparently “occult” power, the mysterious ability to generate wealth from wealth, is something very real and tangible. This alchemy is achieved through a relationship between people, in which one, the superior, extracts from the other, the inferior. This is a deeply unfree relationship, within its context, but the economists provide their assurances that it is free and voluntary. Capitalism’s vampiric social relationships put one’s body at the disposal of another for the private gain of the more powerful party. This is not a purely or even primarily economic phenomenon—it is political control and confinement of the corporeal, and it requires a system of government that limits, through the force of law, the workers’ range of movement and activity in the literal sense.
The dominated worker is no longer a full human being, but an appendage of capital, an instrument in capital’s self-recreation. Capital is alive and primary, the human host a mere means. Freedom from the reign of capital thus involves the reclamation of bodily autonomy; it is a matter principally of individual freedom, the ability to direct the control of one’s physical body. Political theorist Bruno Leipold argues that “Marx’s central political value is freedom.” His book Citizen Marx encourages us to see Marx as first and foremost “a thinker of freedom”—freedom from arbitrary power and domination. Citizen Marx reconsiders Marx’s thought in light of his early Republicanism, contending that Marx is concerned with freedom as the “absence of dominating control by others,” which so pervades the modern world, but is nonetheless obscured by the liberal conception of freedom as citizenship, formal rights, and the ability to freely buy and sell within the capitalist system. The book explores at least three types of domination: there is the domination of the individual boss or capitalist, of the entire capitalist class within economic life, and of the imperatives of the capitalist market system over all of society. The formalities of liberal citizenship and legal rights serve to naturalize and neutralize these overlapping forms of domination and unfreedom.
These formalities cover and hide the character of the economic system, its compulsory limitations of movement and activity. The state-enforced immobility of labor institutes the preconditions for unequal exchange. It is worthy of note that no labor, cost, or other theory of value is necessary to achieve this relationship of inequality; it is based not on theoretical ideas about the sources of economic value, but on the actual tools of physical control. The state transfers land, gives subsidies, injects credit, guarantees loans, grants licenses and special monopolies, and holds wages down through manipulation of the labor market. Though it enjoys “relative autonomy,” the state is not neutral in class relations; at a given moment, it both represents the relationship between the ruling class and the rest of society and mediates between the ruling class and society’s lower tiers.
Within this system, true freedom cannot be described merely by pointing to formal rights. It instead requires the capacity and opportunity to act within one’s embodied life. This idea of freedom is in the direct lineage of Thomas Hodgskin’s idea of nature vs. artifice, freedom as conceived and contemplated in the law vs. as practiced and lived. We enter the realm of true freedom only after we have left the realm of bare necessity. In Hodgskin’s thought, “profit and rent were seen as legal robbery.” The state (and with it legislators and laws) are responsible for the maintenance of the environment of domination and unfreedom. Exchanges of labor for pay within such an environment are not voluntary trades of equal values. Labor is sold at a discount, because other options have been foreclosed by force of law. The unequalness of the labor-for-wages exchange is the defining feature of capitalism and the wage relationship: the worker must be reconfigured, adjusted to a reality in which she is under a contractual obligation to produce more value than what she costs to the capitalist, to become something different, a host for the capitalist. This process is reinitiated and reiterated, the value generated by the worker becoming the capital that drains the life of the worker.
Within this framework, capitalists, the idle rich, are only able to profit from the labors of the industrious because they are protected by unfair advantages, embodied in law, that allow them to escape the natural outcomes and pressures of genuine, full-fledged competition. The complex of monopolistic rights and privileges both prevent labor from capitalizing on what little it does possess in the way of wealth, and allows an idle privileged class to profit without work and at no cost whatsoever. Today, the rich ruling classes are arguably more idle and socially useless than at any point in human history. Distance from political power and rapidly-growing divides of income and wealth have given rise to what is arguably the most hierarchical society in the history of the planet.
Though political scientists and journalists are paying more attention to whether the United States is an oligarchy, more scholarly attention is needed on the question of how to define and describe elite capture and control of our institutions in formal, quantitative terms. A Class Hierarchy Index might attempt to measure the degree to which power, wealth, and decision-making discretion are concentrated in a ruling class. Such an index should factor in and aggregate more specific measures such as, for example, the levels of (1) individual wealth concentration and disparity; (2) corporate consolidation and overlapping ownership interests within asset management firms and particular favored sectors; (3) funding and credit favoritism to certain firms and sectors; (4) proximity or identity of senior government officials and favored firms and sectors (a “revolving door” index); (5) sources of campaign contributions and funding; (6) policy responsiveness, as the relationship between ruling class public policy preferences and objectives and state enactments and legislation; (7) penetration of and control over elite cultural and educational institutions; and (8) land ownership concentration among states and major corporations. This is a tentative, non-exhaustive list, with some of the sub-indices overlapping one another (as well as the Cultural Uniformity Index discussed below).
Relatedly, the twenty-first century world exhibits levels of global cultural convergence and homogeneity that are without historical precedent. Scholarly efforts to quantify ruling class power within society, in the U.S. and globally, will need a Cultural Uniformity Index, representing the extent to which the members of society share the same language, norms, and cultural beliefs and practices. Cultural uniformity is in some ways harder to probe, as it must often inquire as to the subjective values and beliefs of individuals. Still, there are several ways that we can measure this in more objective terms by examining the levels of (1) the global dominance of English as the language of commerce, culture, and higher education; (2) ownership concentration of major media outlets; (3) narrative homogeneity and standardization of news and entertainment content; (4) consumption pattern similarities and the geographic penetration of major multinational retailers of food, clothing, and household items; (5) uptake of the major social media platforms; (6) standardization of education practices, curricula, and goals (and, relatedly, the share of elite scholarship concentrated in certain Western universities and journals); (7) adoption of global model legal frameworks (for example, from international organizations like the WTO); (8) proliferation of globally recognized “best practices” for internal corporate governance; and (9) salience of universalist values shared across regions and international boundaries. Again, this is hardly a complete list and better empirical analysis will aid in the identification of cognizable domains to study and include in these indices.
Better empirical categories and grounding can help contemporary critics of oligarchy explain the unfree nature of our political and economic system: capital accumulates by dispossessing, channeling the energy and resources of others into itself in a positive feedback cycle. The current conversation about America as an oligarchy reminds us of something important: if his occult capacities are strictly imaginary, the vampire nevertheless holds real and superhuman power. As critical theory and political economy scholar Mark Neocleous points out, when Marx is discussing the exploitative forced labor imposed by the Wallachian boyars, he is talking about “none other than Vlad the Impaler: Vlad Dracula.” The thinkers discussed here knew that governmental power and economic power are connected. They understood that, its relative autonomy notwithstanding, the state reflects and reinforces society’s class dynamics. When we see that with clarity and empirical grounding, we will understand the mechanism of domination, and we will finally be able to stop its gears.
This May Day, as I march with my union, the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, I will thank them for their role in making Berkeley Unified a sanctuary school district and Berkely, a sanctuary city, but above all, I would like to thank you.
It’s been over 18 years since your last day in our second grade class—a heartbreaking Valentine’s Day in 2007-–just before your family succumbed to a deportation order forcing you to leave the country, despite your US citizenship.
This year, convicted felon and twice-impeached President Donald Trump’s Valentine’s Day present was to threaten all public schools and universities to desist in teaching about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) or lose funding. He also issued executive orders illegally revoking visas, work permits and even the arrest and detention of immigrants and their allies.
Do you remember the now-censored “DEI” book about Cesar Chavez that I read to your class, Harvesting Hope by Kathleen Krull? She told the story of how the huge Chavez family lost their farm to the depression and drought that scourged Arizona in 1937. Some of you cried when you learned that the Chavez family was forced to trade their productive eighty acre finca for the life of migrant farm workers, developing lesions, blisters, knotted backs and burning eyes and lungs.
But I reassured you: “No hay mal que por bien no venga.—There is nothing so bad that good can’t come of it.” Were it not for the Cesar family’s displacement, he might not have co-founded the United Farm Workers, a union that has saved countless farm workers’ lives, improved working conditions and inspired multitudes internationally. Similarly, your family’s suffering gave birth to change and hope in the city you were forced to abandon and beyond.
For years I’ve waited until you were old enough to understand my recounting of the resistance leading to the safeguards you inspired. After you left, your classmates and I would tear up looking at your name on your mailbox and your empty seat. I fought against tears every time we said the Rosa Parks Pledge: “to make this world a better place for ALL people to enjoy freedom,’’ because ALL didn’t include you.
Your mother wrote from Mexico that you had transformed from my cheerful, round cheeked model student into a sullen malnourished child who refused to do his school work or eat. I could not stop crying.
“…how can I go on teaching about equal rights and freedom of speech and all the things our constitution is supposed to defend, and that the very name of our school is supposed to represent, when the father of my students is deported simply because his skin is darker? Both my Latine and white students are U.S. citizens. So how do I explain to the class that one has the right to a family in the United States and the other citizen does not?”
The letterwentviral. A community faith organization called BOCA helped my student teacher and me organize an informational event April 26 with cafeteria tables full of lawyers offering free advice. Rosa Parks’ families pressured the superintendent and police to protect immigrant students. With BOCA’s assistance, as a BFT union representative, I wrote and presented a resolution to the BFT executive board to make BUSD a sanctuary district and it passed overwhelmingly.
Meanwhile your classmates heroically transformed their grief into actions by writing their own “Without You” poems based on Los Panchos’ “Sin Ti” song and read them on an Univision TV special about you.
Next, my spouse and I pulled the best elements of sanctuary ordinances around the country together into a local ordinance and presented it to Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission. It won unanimous support and was recommended to the City Council. On May 22, 2007 we organized a rally outside city hall in favor of our beefed up sanctuary ordinance. Aided by the BFT, many of BFT’s Spanish two-way immersion teachers, KPFA host Larry Bensky, LeConte’s principal and the Berkeley community, the rally reverberated through the city council chambers. Berkeley Resolution City of Refuge 63711-N.S. was adopted that night (5-22-07) giving a previously symbolic resolution the teeth of law. Berkeley’s spark of an example ignited other cities that adopted similar ordinances throughout the nation. Months later, BFT president Cathy Campbell got our School Board to adopt our sanctuary District resolution as Board policy.
Over the years, this work has only gained strength.This January 21st, Berkeley School Board Member Jen Corn submitted an even stronger resolution to the City Council reaffirming Berkeley’s status as a sanctuary city and it passed overwhelmingly again. And in February, teachers, principals, office workers and support staff received a two hour training on how to safeguard the rights of our immigrant students. This whole sequence of events began when you, “Cesar,” my polite, photogenic, straight-A, bilingual seven year-old student, became the poster child of a renewed movement to protect immigrant rights in Berkeley.
So today, as Donald Trump outdoes predecessors in figuratively defiling our Statue of Liberty, Mother of Exiles, thanks to you,“Cesar,” so many more of us are able to defend her call for our “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” ICE tried to banish the family of one seven year old citizen, and the union and community came together in a powerful fist of defiance, protecting hundreds and inspiring other cities that followed our example. Fear feeds tyranny but you and our union showed us how community and courage can construct democracy. And no matter what challenges we may face now, there is no going back.
As Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) said,
Once social change begins it cannot be reversed.
One cannot make illiterate those who have learned to read.
One cannot uneducate those who have learned to think.
One cannot humiliate those who feel pride.
One cannot oppress those who are no longer are afraid.
Photograph Source: Frank Schwichtenberg – CC BY-SA 4.0
Once the darling of the left for championing electric vehicles, even with a hefty $44,000-plus sticker price on a range of best-selling “S3XY” models, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was regularly pilloried by the right for his presumed eco-friendly stance and generous government loans. Back then, the Chinese carmaker BYD was barely a twinkle in Warren Buffet’s investment eye, but now tops Tesla at over $100 billion in annual sales thanks to lower prices, faster charging times, and Musk’s far-right political conversion. As consumers scramble to keep pace in a fast-changing and uncertain world, the fight for motor supremacy ramps up – more than the increased market share of 100 million cars sold each year is at stake.
Tesla Motors began in 2003 in California, becoming Tesla Inc. in 2010 with the largest-ever initial public offering in auto-making history and in 2017 the highest-valued American carmaker at $50 billion, despite building only 76,000 cars the previous year (compared to GM’s 7.5 million and Ford’s 6.4 million). The brave new electric world belonged to its brash young CEO Musk, who boasted, “When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars, people said, ‘Nah, what’s wrong with the horse?’ That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.” Musk promised a new world for a new millennium, propelled via electricity and magnetic induction rather than burnt gasoline and reciprocating pistons, planning to finance a clean green future for the masses via high-end sales, or so he claimed in his 2006 Master Plan. Today, 20% of new car sales are electric and increasing, not least because of Tesla’s pioneering push.
There is no comparison between an electric vehicle (EV) and a gasmobile. As calculated by Martin Eberhard, Tesla’s first CEO and one of five co-founders, an all-electric car can travel 110 miles using the equivalent energy in one gallon of gas. A no-brainer, without including the reduced fuel costs of electricity, minimal maintenance for a leaner, meaner electric engine, or the environmental benefit of no burnt hydrocarbons (e.g., octane).
Taking on the car industry is another story. Back when Ford took on the horse-drawn carriage, manure was the main bugaboo, piling up everywhere on our overcrowded streets. Smelly to be sure but minimal compared to today’s carbon-induced anthropomorphic global warming. In effect, one must take on the oil industry and all of Western civilization. “Drill, baby drill” means “Vroom, baby vroom” and the United States isn’t planning on braking.
EVs can slow the warming, but as the naysayers are keen to point out, if the electric grid runs on fossil fuels EVs will still warm the world and pollute the air, albeit in someone else’s backyard. The dirty grid argument is losing its lustre, however, as renewable energy sources continue to grow – 40% and counting. Likely crossing the 2 ºC (3.6 ºF) thresholdwithin two decades – in what the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states “would pose large and escalating risks to human life as we know it” – global warming is still increasing, but at least one can buy an EV now for more than the eco-vibes if the price is right.
True, the same naysayers don’t believe in global warming, seemingly a MAGA win-win – clean streets and more domestic coal, oil, and gas – piped, trucked, and shipped to all corners of the globe from the number-one petroleum-producing nation ever. Oil not democracy made America great the moment it gushed from a Titusville, Pennsylvania, well in 1859, the original “liberation day.” Global warming may be an existential threat, but the United States has even more to lose from diminished market share and waning influence. Bottom lines matter more to American transactionalists than any downstream damage.
One would think today’s individualist would welcome the independence of making one’s own energy and keeping nature clean – solar power has doubled every three years over the last 12 years to 7%. No longer beholden to outside control, the everyday consumer can easily go it alone thanks to rooftop solar (e.g., 8 kW or 20 400-W panels), meeting all one’s energy needs with photovoltaic (PV) cells and a storage battery, while charging one’s car for free. But after more than a century of oil – safeguarded by the American military – 100 million barrels/day is under threat as demand suffers from growing electrification. No more easy oil profits or taxable revenue. EVs are leading the way to a cleaner future and the end of the US as we know it – on the road was never so liberating. No wonder the Trump administration rolled back EV support and tariffed solar up to 3,500% in a full-throttled fight against change.
There are always jitters as the old gives way to the new until one winner emerges – the heliocentric solar system, steam-powered looms, transistor switching. We are in the midst of even more radical change as gasmobiles lose out to EVs and oil to renewables, despite Trump’s vain attempts to turn back the clock to a presumed former glory via restrictive tariffs.* Seemingly onside with Trump’s great-making revisionism, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni tried to broaden the MAGA scope to “Make the West Great Again,” but as European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen noted, “The West as we knew it no longer exists.” What will emerge is still being worked out as the United States and China duke it out in a thoroughly modern economic spat for new-world supremacy.
For those who measure greatness in GDP, the US is tops at $28 trillion (26%), ahead of the EU $19 trillion (18%), and China $18 trillion (17%) according to the World Bank. But China is in the ascendancy, growing faster and boasting a trillion-dollar positive trade balance compared to the US at minus $1 trillion, the supposed impetus to realign a world economy and $33 trillion in annual trade. Importantly, China holds 90% of rare earths and critical minerals – essential for electronics, satellites, renewables, and AI militaries – now subject to export controls. The US is losing out to a new empire with almost one-sixth of the global population. With feet in both waters, Musk expects the Chinese market to double by 2050.
The EV revolution is safe despite resistance from the usual suspects as the US goes all-in on fossil fuels, cancelling renewable energy projects and even trying to resurrect a long-dead dirty coal industry, now more expensive than all energy sources other than nuclear power. Tesla sales are in free-fall, however, after Musk’s “special government employee” DOGE stint, a.k.a. slasher-flick cameo complete with chainsaw prop. Formerly the world’s top-valued carmaker – having passed Volkswagen in 2019 despite selling one-tenth the number of cars – Tesla’s shares continue to slide, down 50% from a peak value of $1.5 trillion.
The once-vaunted eco-brand may never recover, even as overall global EV sales rise, especially in Europe where both VW and BMW passed the once-dominant Tesla. Tesla’s Q1 sales dropped 13% and profits 71%, showing the depth of displeasure in Musk’s politicking and weak demand for a tired and expensive line-up. At the same time, Volkswagen’s EV sales doubled, GM’s increased 94% (Cadillac 21%), and Ford’s 12%. The car industry is under pressure from the Trump tariffs – jacking up car prices and costing jobs – but Tesla has fared worst, while a growing “Tesla Takedown” includes protests, vandalism, and “I bought this car before Musk went crazy” bumper stickers. Passionate about consumer choices, Germans were particularly outraged by Musk’s support for the far-right and anti-EU Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the most recent federal elections.
The main beneficiary of Musk’s madness is BYD (“Build Your Dreams”), the Chinese carmaker that started out supplying phone batteries for Motorola, Nokia, and Samsung. Co-founded in 1995 by chemist and engineer Wang Chuanfu, BYD benefited from an early infusion of cash from a subsidiary of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, which bought 10% of BYD in 2008 for $230 million, since reduced to 4.4% and now worth $2.4 billion (Yahoo). BYD was soon selling everywhere, including an envious line of electric buses in Shenzhen, the Special Economic Zone created in 1980 to aid a rapidly modernizing China.
All 16,400 buses in Shenzhen are electric BYDs with a range of 380 km. With 99% of the world’s electric buses, China is adding thousands of zero-emission transporters per week, and at the current rate will be 100% electric by 2035, displacing more than 1 million barrels of diesel per day. As part of its quest for a “zero-emissions world,” the former battery maker is helping to rid China of its ghastly urban pollution.
In 2009, China passed the US as the world’s top car market, while in the first quarter of 2025 BYD (430,000) surpassed Tesla (337,000) in global sales. Expanding on its success, BYD built its first foreign manufacturing plant in Lancaster, California, in 2013, where it specializes in electric school buses (ESBs). As of 2024, there were almost 5,000 ESBs operating and 7,000 ordered in the US. BYD’s first European plant is under construction in Hungary and will make 300,000 EVs per year. In Brazil, the world’s sixth-largest car market, BYD is building an EV plant on the site of an abandoned Ford factory – 70% of EVs in Brazil are now BYD and is the top seller in the capital Brasilia for all cars, electric or gas.
Initially slow to the game, legacy car companies have all rolled out their own e-versions, such as Nissan (Leaf), BMW (iX), and Ford (Mach-E). BYD is head of the pack, announcing a five-minute charging time, half that of Tesla’s with a new and improved chemical storage process – essentially liquid-fuel filling time. No need to fill up any more on coffee and donuts while you wait for a roadside e-fill. BYD also offers a free autonomous-driving add-on “God’s Eye” that outperforms Tesla’s vaunted autonomous driving option. With a proven range of lower-priced EVs such as the $10,000 Dolphin Surf, today’s car wars are no longer internal combustion versus electric induction, but EV versus EV, while the decreasing demand for oil adds pressure to a world run on petroleum and American dominance.
The electric revolution is roaring, nowhere more than in China that accounts for 90% of BYD’s sales. The inflection point between the old and new is fast approaching as EVs reach price parity with all gasmobiles. For some, the tipping point has come and gone – a $20,000 EV with a 200-mile range. As BYD breaks into more markets, Western carmaking supremacy will suffer and hasten the change to renewables and from West to East.
Enter the new dragon – the Trump tariffs on imported cars and car parts, supposedly intended to return manufacturing jobs to a high-wage US market. It’s hard to make sense of a coherent American strategy amid the contradictory messaging, regular reality-show taunts, and constant flip-flopping – sold as the oddest of negotiating tools that alienates more than rallies others to the MAGA cause – but despite losing more than 600,000 jobs under NAFTA the tariffs are a ruse designed in part to slow the change from brown to green. Tariffs will not raise revenue, return supply chains to the United States, or “reshore” American manufacturing jobs hollowed out of rusted industrial regions. Billion-dollar factories require planning, investment, and tax breaks over at least a decade, not anarchic policies, market uncertainty, and the loss of investor and consumer confidence.
Targeted tax cuts and subsidies are needed to incentive investment, such as the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that made $369 billion available in green spending and was already creating American jobs in renewable energy, battery manufacturing, and critical mineral processing. But with most Trump antics, the goal is to divide and conquer, inciting chaos to advance an authoritarian agenda that increases corporate control at the expense of consumer protection.
American infrastructure is for sale to the highest bidder, including an eventual state-run TikTok sell-off to Trump’s tax-slashing billionaire tech pals as well as Space-X contracts for First Buddy Musk, whose Starlink company owns 60% of 10,000 earth-orbiting satellites. No surprise that space-launch support was spared the chainsaw in Musk’s DOGE clear-out. Next up, a “free trade zone” designation for his expanding empire in Bastrop, Texas, and relaxed regulation on autonomous driving for Tesla’s long-promised fleet of robotaxis. Insider trading is part of the quid pro quo, as in a “Good time to buy!!! DJT” social-media post hours before Trump announced a 90-day tariff pause using the NASDAQ ticker symbol for his company.
After four decades of outsourcing manufacturing to cheap-labour foreign markets (especially Mexico), Tesla also benefits from the tariffs on non-American-sourced cars, because 60% of the youngest American carmaker’s content is domestically produced. As Bernstein auto analyst Daniel Roeska noted, “Tesla is the clear structural winner” from the Trump tariffs, while Detroit’s Big Three, Japan, Korea, and Germany will suffer more because of larger foreign supply chains. It helps to have the ear and mouth of a salesman president using the White House as a backdrop for a new kind of showroom as Trump’s million-dollar donor is rewarded at the expense of American carmakers and workers.
Stellantis has already announced 900 lost jobs at five US factories, while Volvo plans to axe 800 jobs at three US facilities. At the same time, BYD is not subject to the vagaries of the Trump tariffs because it does not export EVs to the United States, choosing instead to concentrate on foreign markets. As June Yoon of The Financial Times noted, “Because BYD does not sell passenger EVs in the US, it is now insulated from the chaos unleashed by Trump’s latest tariff push.” As for other goods, restrictive barriers to Chinese imports (e.g., 145% tariffs) mostly hurt low-income consumers who buy at Walmart, Home Depot, Target, and other cut-price outlets.
Is it all just ignorance, based on a 40-year obsession with tariffs? We already knew Trump couldn’t count after claiming that he won the 2020 election because he received more votes than any previous president – not hard to do when the population keeps growing – albeit fewer votes than his opponent. Or is it another MAGA ruse to distract from a failed economic policy that purports to rejig the global supply chain in favor of a rusted rural America via blanket tariffs? – what Peterson Institute economist Mary Lovely called “re-industrialization in the most inefficient way possible.” If Trump was serious about workers, he would offer incentives to build domestically and impose penalties on corporations that don’t relocate.
After decades of neoliberal neglect, Trump claims that taxing nations more for goods will return manufacturing to the US, called “nostalgic fantasy” by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. In The Post-American World, Zakaria also likened Western decline to professional tennis, once dominated by American players, though now “everyone is playing the game.” Same for the decline in IPOs, scientific papers, and manufacturing. As noted by the IMF, the US will suffer most as growth slows because of the “supply shock” as other countries divert their trade to cover the depressed demand from the US, which imports 25% of its goods.
No one expects the United States to start making the world’s jeans, shirts, and running shoes nor believes Trump’s obvious lies that “tariffs are making us rich.” In fact, the US has even more to lose as others shun American goods and realign trading relations because of his “unilateral bullying.” Treating China as a “hostile trading partner” in a US-designed trading world pushes China towards a new economic model that excludes American markets and expands ties with Southeast Asia, India, and Europe. A new Silk Road is being established that already exports more to Europe ($570 billion) than to the US. The rules-based order begun after World War II is no longer being directed from Washington.
Rather than resurrecting American manufacturing, the Trump game is to roil the competition, such as the European Union reacting piecemeal. The EU proposed a “zero for zero” deal on industrial goods prior to his April 2 tariff, rejected by Trump as “not good enough.” Musk also called for no tariffs between North America and Europe, even though Tesla benefits from the protectionist American market. European worries about German cars, Spanish olive oil, French and Italian wines, and Irish pharmaceuticals have held, but EU unity could falter with individual tariffs. Another prize is to stop investigations into Google, Meta, X, and Apple under the EU Digital Services Act – Meta and Apple were both fined as unfair “gatekeepers.”
Instead of halting China’s rise by “decoupling” the American economy from China’s vast export market – 15% of goods to the US – decoupling has begun from America as Trump pretends to be “actively negotiating” with others to calm the markets. Started in Canada, an “Anything but America” movement is expanding worldwide as consumers stop buying American-made goods, symbolically turning products upside down on supermarket shelves. The EU, China, and others will benefit from Trump’s protectionist policy, disengagement, and provocation as countries trade more freely in a post-American world – an American own goal as 40% of the world’s 50 largest companies are American and 36% of the world’s largest 100 (based on sales, profits, assets, and market value, Forbes). Trump’s Medicine Show is killing the patient as trade reorganizes without the US.
Trump’s callous advice to “hang tough” is okay for millionaires, but not average consumers as prices rise and jobs are shed (a 25% tariff on a $100,000 car won’t deter a millionaire). The Trump tariffs are expected to hike annual US consumer spending by $5,000, car prices by $5,000, and new house prices by $11,000. Similarly, farmers lose out as China turns to Brazil for soya beans (half supplied by the US), American hotels suffer as Canadians and other foreign travellers vacation elsewhere (US visits already down 40%), and low-income families pay extra for everything. Even Christmas will cost more as Chinese toys are marked up beyond Santa’s meagre means. Same for Apple’s iPhone, Sony’s PlayStation 5, and Dell computers, while China cancelled the sale of 50 Boeing jets at $55 million each.
The Trump tariffs have at least exposed the inherent flaws in unregulated capitalism and executive fiat. Retaliate or Negotiate? – sounds like a fawning reality show. Trump may win more Fox viewers but is losing everyone else in a shameless rebranding of the US as a low-end chop shop. The me-first preacher is at war with the world to advance his own greedy Amexit agenda, one more interested in work than workers, reduced governance, and a tax-slashing oligarchy. The reality-show banter may continue to dazzle those who think Trump’s sub-literate and low-IQ thinking is a solution to what ails the world, including his Republican supporters, who should all know by now that Trump is an elitist libertarian to the bone, Republican in name only, the dreaded RINO moniker he uses to mock GOP critics.
Rather than reform a broken America, the goal is to break more to create a free management hand with limited governance and reduced regulations. It is not America First, but a limited monied class first that exploits others and offers no protection to workers, the environment, or community standards. Trump is chief RINO, pretending to support worker ideals.
Given his friendship with Elon Musk, one might also ask if the US president is an oil and gas man or an EV man? Can Trump’s “Drill, baby drill” coexist with Musk’s “Gasmobiles are so yesterday?” Will the new right-wing Muskies take up the slack of the damaged Tesla and USA brands? No more 50% annual growth in sales as Musk predicted. No more American dominance or petroleum power. At least, demand is dampening.
In the face of increased pollution and global warming, slowing down and decreasing demand for oil is good for the earth. That wasn’t Trump’s intention – just the opposite – but slower growth is good. At his January inauguration, Trump also promised that Americans would “be able to buy the car of your choice.” The choice is becoming easier by the day. California already has more EV chargers than gas pumps. With 1.4 billion people, China’s domestic car market will benefit most from increased control over new technology that will ultimately help foreign consumers purchase cheaper EVs.
When the dust finally settles on the ongoing Trump Follies, we may have Elon Musk to thank for upending the basic tenets of capitalism. Beginning with Tesla and followed by BYD, a new future beckons. Electric bicycles, motorcycles, and scooters are all replacing gasoline vehicles in Asian markets, plagued by pollution and expensive gasoline. As Japan conquered the electronics market in the twentieth century, China is conquering the auto industry in this century. Tesla has lost the race for the low-end vehicle and the US is losing the race to lead the world.
Trump is paving the way to the end of the fossil-fuel industry, long supported by unfair regulations, oversized subsidies, and minimal taxation, while getting a free ride on pollution and global warming. EV to gasmobiles is approaching 50-50 with lower prices and improved charging infrastructure. The batteries are stronger, better, and more efficient. Most charging is still overnight at home, but for those on the go, one doesn’t need to worry any more. When the bi-directional grid is finished and batteries are in every home, we will say goodbye to oil, a win-win for citizens and their pocket books.
Rather than dismantling government with excessive downsizing and shrinking a global economy with counterproductive tariffs, American dominance is being diminished everywhere – more divisive than inclusive, more elitist than egalitarian, more Benedictine than Franciscan. Pretending to protect the world from governmental overreach, Trump’s policies are a libertarian free-for-all, a sell-out and sell-off to enrich the already wealthy. Rather than making anything great, Trump will be remembered as The Man Who Tried to Sell the World (and failed miserably).
Tomorrow’s consumerism will not be shaped by American chaos and uncertainty, but by China’s dominance and the transition to renewables. The next US electoral fair may restore some dignity and consistency to a rogue America, but the United States is already in decline. Happily, tomorrow’s world will be cleaner, greener, and quieter.
* Currently 10% on all imports, 25% on aluminum, cars, and car parts, and 145% on China excluding computers and phones (for now) and oil products. Country-specific “reciprocal” tariffs were paused for 90 days (early July), calculated with a simplistic “trade deficit divided by imported goods divided by 2” formula.
Marco Rubio speaks to the press before departing Paris, France, April 18, 2025. Official State Department photo by Freddie Everett.
There is no more important or prestigious cabinet position than the secretary of state. The first secretaries included such luminaries as Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay. All became presidents or almost reached the presidency. In contemporary times, secretaries of state included Henry Stimson, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, and John Kerry. More recent secretaries have been less competent or successful (Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo), but no one has been more pathetic than the current secretary, Marco Rubio, who has embarrassed the country, the Department of State, and particularly himself in the first 100 days of the Trump presidency.
Rubio has made the Department of State virtually irrelevant, playing no role in key negotiations involving wars between Russia and Ukraine as well as between Israel and the Palestinians. Rubio is not participating in the sensitive talks between the United States and Iran to restore the Iran nuclear agreement. All of these matters are being handled by a billionaire real-estate developer, Steve Witkoff, who has no experience or knowledge in dealing with any of these issues. But Witkoff is worth $2 billion, and presumably Trump felt that clinching real estate deals is good training for crafting complicated international agreements.
Witkoff has met with Russian President Vladimir Putin four times in the past several months, but the Russian bombardment against Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, has only increased in that period. We know very little about Witkoff’s experiences in these meetings, but we do know that Trump falsely believes that Putin has made key “concessions.” The first concession, according to Trump, is that Putin will be “stopping the war.” The second is even more risible: Putin has agreed “not to take the whole country.” Even before the Putin-Witkoff talks, Trump endorsed Putin’s key demands: “Crimea will stay with Russia,” and Ukraine “will never be able to join NATO.”
Following the most recent talks between Putin and Witkoff last week, Putin’s key foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov praised the meeting for “allowing Russia and the United States to further bring their positions closer together, not only on Ukraine but also on a number of other international issues.” Trump merely said he heard that Witkoff and Putin had “a pretty good meeting,” but hadn’t been able to talk directly to his envoy. As for other global matters, Trump falsely claimed he had concluded “200 economic deals,” and that talks had begun on trade and tariff matters between China and the United States, which Beijing officially denied.
Even before Witkoff left his $6 billion condo in Miami Beach and arrived in the White House, Rubio had already begun the destruction of the Department of State as well as the important humanitarian and infrastructure projects of the Agency of International Development (AID) that were so important the world over. The position of undersecretary for civilian security, democracy, and human rights will be eliminated. The office of global criminal justice that investigates war crimes and conflict operations to prevent wars will be closed. My 42 years of bureaucratic experience tells me that folding a smaller office into a larger one—which is what Rubio is doing—essentially means fewer resources and less bandwidth, and the end of institutional memory.
Elon Musk’s elimination of AID is a good example of the damage that Rubio inherited and even expanded. There were 10,000 AID staffers before the Trump administration arrived; there are now 10 full-time employees seconded to the Department of State. Just as President Bill Clinton’s elimination of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1999 weakened the U.S. capabilities to engage in essential arms control agreements, the elimination of AID means there will no longer be a stand-alone humanitarian assistance bureau. The recent earthquake in Southeast Asia found Russia and China sending humanitarian missions to Myanmar and Thailand. The United States send three humanitarian experts to Myanmar who learned upon their arrival that they no longer had jobs with the Department of State. This is typical of what has become the meltdown of U.S. diplomatic efforts in Trump’s first hundred days.
Rubio has severely weakened the department itself in what the mainstream media euphemistically referred to as a “shake-up.” The so-called “shake up” involved cutting the department’s budget in half, from $56 billion to $28 billion. The State Department’s budget is around 5% of the Pentagon’s budget. Rubio also ended the department’s role in human rights programs, war crimes monitoring, and bolstering democratic institutions abroad. Rubio was a huge supporter of these programs as a senator, but as an acolyte of Donald Trump, he said that he was at the department to reverse “decades of bloat and bureaucracy” and to eradicate an ingrained “radical political ideology.” As part of his deference to Trump, Rubio eliminated the office that focused on combating disinformation from Russia, China, and Iran.
When Rubio was selected to become secretary of state, he immediately reversed his positions on key matters in order to align himself with the views of Donald Trump. Rubio had consistently praised Ukraine’s efforts to defend itself against a more powerful adversary, but in February he said “it’s hyperbole to believe that the Ukrainians are going to completely crush the Russian military.” Rubio previously emphasized that we must help Ukraine “so that we’re not seen as unreliable and undermined in our credibility.” Following confirmation, however, he added that we must “do it in a way that doesn’t drain us.” Rubio added that U.S. involvement in Ukraine’s self-defense was a “costly distraction from efforts to contain China.”
Trump and Rubio are responsible for giving Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu an even freer hand to conduct genocidal attacks against the Palestinians. They state that Israeli attacks are being conducted with “clairvoyance and justice” to ensure that the Hamas terrorist organization may never “threaten the people of Israel again.” Rubio opposes all restrictions on military aid to Israel as well as opposing restrictions on the extremist actions of the Jewish settlers on the West Bank. There is no longer any discussion at the Department of State about a two-state solution in the Middle East, or any other kind of solution.
Rubio’s original plan called for closing down the entire Bureau of African Affairs, but the Central Intelligence Agency lobbied to reverse that decision by intervening at the White House. Did Rubio not know that African capitals are leading sites for recruiting foreign assets. Also, without embassies or consulates in Africa, it would be next to impossible for the CIA to base its agents in African capitals.
There is little direct communication between Trump and Rubio, and certainly no love lost between the two men. They clashed as rivals in the 2016 presidential primaries. Rubio called Trump a “dangerous con man:” Trump called Rubio a “total lightweight.” Both men were right…and both are responsible for diminishing the influence of the United States in global diplomacy.
Just after New Years in 1979 I moved from the East Village to Brooklyn. Carol was pregnant, but her cramped digs on Carroll Street would not accommodate us. We found a loft building, very rare in Park Slope, on the lower margins of the neighborhood near 4th Avenue, a six lane artery running from downtown Brooklyn to Bay Ridge. Across the avenue a ruined commercial zone of dilapidated red brick structures of unknown provenance, mostly abandoned, spread over both sides of the Gowanus Canal, described in the tabloids as “the most polluted body of water in the nation.”
Creating a home in the loft was a stretch, financed on a limited budget, the $12,000 I’d saved from the combat pay of a first lieutenant in Vietnam, augmented by disability payments. We had a raw space 30 x 100 feet to enclose, electrify and plumb, roughly half the second floor off the center stairwell in the warehouse of a former wholesaler. Two existing partitions in lacquered beadboard divided the space in three sections, front, rear and center, and absorbed whatever light the windows on the street side provided, and photos show the interior was always dark even after a large metal door over an opening used for uploading deliveries from an empty lot along the side wall was replaced with a pane of glass half the dimensions of a typical storefront.
Plumbing was a major challenge, and I gaped in awe as our guy melted lead for joints stuffed with oakum in steel drainpipes lowered into the building’s basement to enter the urban sewage. We found sinks for the kitchen and bathroom, and a gas range and fridge in a used fixtures outlet on Delancy Street in Manhattan. And we used my brother’s econovan to transport a cast iron tub we found dumped on a street corner in the Bronx. Finding matching claw feet to support it seemed improbable until I picked through a brim-filled bin with demolition discards in a salvage yard on the fringes of Red Hook. I picked up translucent glass bricks in the same yard. These formed a rear wall in the bathroom to allow some natural light after windows along the building’s rear wall were obscured by the narrow corridor we erected leading to a fire exit. The front beadboard partition formed a T and one side became our bedroom, the other a study, dappled with daylight through four large greasy windows facing the street. To a working chimney we attached a Ben Franklin Stove in front of our bed, acquired how I no longer recall, but fueled by firewood consigned periodically in face cords from a Long Island supplier and hoisted to our loft on a freight elevator accessed from the sidewalk. A large gas blower suspended from the ceiling in the central space provided most of the heat.
Additional bedrooms were roughed out behind the beadboard to the rear paralleling the kitchen wall, for two kids, the child we were expecting and Carol’s daughter, Sarabinh, then six, in joint custody between her father’s nearby apartment in the upper Slope and our loft. A hodge podge of chairs, couches and hanging house plants was arranged near the large sidewall window and a hammock of acrylic fiber stretched between two lally columns that helped support the floor above us. A ballet bar was installed along the rear beadboard wall, which I used for stretching, and in front of that I laid my tumbling mat for acrobatics. In New York at the time, legal occupancy in a loft building required AIR – Artist in Residence – status. As a sometimes student of Modern Dance and other movement disciplines, my certification as a dancer was granted under the signature of Henry Geldzahler, the then reigning New York City Culture Czar. A small sign with AIR in black lettering was affixed near the building’s front door, and applied collectively to all the residents split among six lofts, mostly painters and a sculptor. In December that year, we hosted a party, a belated celebration of Carol’s birthday in October and Simon’s birth in August. It would also honor ‘Lofts Labors Won.’
The following August with our one year old in tow, we departed the city on Carol’s literary mission, destination Castine, Maine. Our first stop was at a commune near Brattleboro, Vermont, where old movement cronies of Carol’s had gone back to the land in the late sixties. They were an ingrown, argumentative lot which, on their periphery, included two columnist for the Nation in private summer residence. For three days we labored and convived with these old comrades, one of whom formerly in the Weather Underground and ensconced there pseudonominously, was still wanted by the FBI. Carol phoned to Castine to confirm our arrival time, and was informed by Mary McCarthy that the visit was off. This was to have been the first face to face with the subject of the biography Carol had just begun, postponed now because Mary’s husband had broken his leg falling off a ladder while cleaning the gutters.
A majority of Carol’s forebearers had settled in Maine from colonial times, and a great aunt whose story she greatly revered was buried there in the family plot, along with a host of other Brightmans and Mortons. The Maple Grove Cemetery played like Thornton Wilder country. So, Maine trip on. While passing from New Hampshire into Maine we stopped to orient ourselves at a Visitor’s Center, where I haphazardly grabbed a few brochures, including a pamphlet of real estate listings. Except where work was concerned – I was also in the midst of a book project – Carol and I weren’t planners; we were impulsive doers. On occasion we daydreamed out loud about finding a place “in the country,” never projecting the fantasy beyond the nearer regions of upstate New York. One real estate offering showed an old federal house on a saltwater farm near where we were now bound. And when our route took us past the office of the agent representing the property, we joked that it was fated. We’d go check it out, “but we’re not serious,” Carol disclaimed.
The house, which had been empty for a quarter century, was structurally sound with a good roof, and came with several outbuildings, including a barn and the middle twenty acres of the old homestead, in field and woodlot. An old bachelor farmer had lived there without indoor plumbing or electricity until the early sixties, then in the local tradition took refuge with a younger family for his final years. Without thinking that this would become the rural equivalent of our recent urban undertaking, another residence to be mounted from scratch, we focused on the $45,000 asking price and bought it on the spot. We had to lean on friends and relatives to assemble the ten grand downpayment, and we had a rough ride to get a mortgage approved, but while we put that home back together, it became our summer escape for the next six years.
There were always wooded areas where I grew up on Long Island, and I was drawn to them. I’m sure looking back they were enlarged in a child’s eyes, and minuscule when compared to our twenty acres of tall pines and spruce that blended seamlessly into miles of contiguous woods where I now wandered on frequent constitutionals. The solitude was compelling and a balm to my mental wellbeing. That I would soon find on the mothballed Brooklyn waterfront a far from bucolic but equally suitable option for these frequent bouts of solitary wool gathering, not for only three months, but for nine, astounds me still.
Exploring the environs of the Gowanus was my first step toward Red Hook. Plans for the rehabilitation of the canal would become a topic for a deep investigative dive by Carol and me into the history of the canal from its idyllic indigenous setting as a healthy estuary where foot long oysters grew, to the contemporary canal in decay which civil minded community leaders in Carroll Gardens, the largely Italian American neighborhood bordering the other side of the patch surrounding the Gowanus, had long in their sights for cleanup and development. We dug into that story for a couple of years, wrote a serious proposal, but nothing ever came of it. Why, I no longer recall? When you live by your pen engineering projects from elevated states of endorphin fueled enthusiasm that never reach completion, certainly for me and Carol also, was a not infrequent occurrence. A colorful sidebar here would include the presence of the Joey Gallo crime family among these mostly silent empty blocks, and while remaining agnostic as to its veracity, news reports on the doings of the New York Mob if the Gowanus warranted a mention might note the neighborhood legend that held the canal was where the wise guys dumped the bodies of their rivals.
We’d soon settled into the neighborhood where a number of familiars from the anti-Vietnam War movement had also settled to start their own families. Carol was teaching remedial classes at Brooklyn College which had initiated open admissions, at the same time peddling articles, to a variety of outlets. I still commuted to my non-profit, Citizen Soldier, in the Flat Iron Building on lower Fifth Avenue in the city until early 1982. It was a movement job at movement wages, advocating for GIs and veterans around a host of issues, most recently the alleged health related illnesses from exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam, and for vets who participated in Atomic Tests during the fifties, from radiation. After twelve years of full time activism primarily related to Vietnam, the move to Brooklyn had severed that umbilical and I was ready for a change, which initially took the form of painting someone else’s living spaces and querying magazines for assignments. Apart from family responsibilities, my time was my own.
When Simon turned three, we enrolled him in the Brooklyn Child Care Collective, one of those alternative institutions organized by lefties of our generation. It was located a fair piece from the loft near Grand Army Plaza. Shaded under the concrete infrastructure of the Williamsburg Bridge in Manhattan I found a shop to custom build a bike adapted to Brooklyn’s rough streets: ten speed, but thick tires, straight handlebar and a large padded seat. With Simon strapped into a red toddler carrier mounted over the real wheel, I peddled him to day care most mornings.
The exploration of the Gowanus along our stretch of 4th Avenue from 9th Steet to Union Street, and taking in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood where many of our informants resided, began during Carol’s and my investigative project. Often, however, I would walk these blocks on my own, camera at the ready. My way of seeing the material wreckage strewn along the banks of the canal was informed by the work of Robert Smithson’s, The Monuments of Passaic. Smithson sited installations “in specific out door locations,” and is best known for his Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake of Utah. In his article for ArtForum illustrated with six bleak black and white photographs Smithson described “the unremarkable industrial landscape” in Passaic, New Jersey as “ruins in reverse…the memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures.” This was the perfect conceptual framework for reflection on what I was looking at. Embedded in Smithson’s musings, his “set of futures” perhaps made predictable the upscale development that would totally transform the blocks around the Gowanus forty years later; but that’s another story.
In an earlier time, the canal had provided the perfect conduit for the materials from which the surrounding neighborhoods had been constructed. A small number of enterprises, the Conklin brass foundry, a depot for fuel storage, were still in operation but the vast acreage that once served some productive purpose was littered with industrial waste and the shells of abandoned buildings, some capacious like a former power plant. Idle cranes and derricks stories high stretched their necks over the canal like metallic dinosaurs. At three compass points along the horizon billboard sized signs on metal grids perched on spacious roof tops – Kentile Floors, Goya Foods, Eagle Clothes – were markers of manufacturing life, but if still active I never learned.
With my new bike, I began to wander farther afield, making stops along Court Street, the main drag in Carroll Gardens where you’d find an espresso stand where Italian was spoken that seemed to have been imported intact – baristas to stainless counter top – from Sicily. If only for the historical record, I insert here the presence of two storefronts that were likely unique throughout the entire city. Pressed tin sheets were still common for ceilings in commercial buildings in New York, and spares in a variety of designs filled upright bins at a specialty shop on Court Street. In the same block locals who kept roof top flocks of pigeons could buy replacement birds and the feed that sustained them.
The pigeon shop in particular conjured scenes from the Elia Kazan film of Budd Schulberg’s On the Waterfront in which Brando tends his own flock on the roof of a tenement, the typical dwelling for the families of stevedores who worked the Brooklyn docks, once the most active waterfront in the nation. After World War Two, container ships were rapidly replacing the old merchant freighters with their cargo holds, and increasingly making landfall, not in Brooklyn, but across the harbor in New Jersey.
Frozen in time, the old Brooklyn waterfront, adjacent to the neighborhood known as Red Hook, now became the cycling grounds for my long solitary ruminations. Access to the area was usually across the swing bridge over the canal on Carroll Street which, after emerging under the Gowanus Expressway, dead ended on Van Brunt Street, a long artery that ran for nearly two miles parallel to the string of wharfs that jutted into the harbor, terminating before an enormous stone warehouse dating from the Civil War. An old wooden wharf, long and wide, ran that building’s length on the water side, its thick rotted planking making an obstacle course I often ventured over despite the warning sign to keep off.
I could ride Van Brunt and up and down its side streets for an hour without ever seeing another person or being passed by a motor vehicle. Many of the roadways were paved with cobble stones, safely navigated by my bike’s thick tires. As with select locations on the Gowanus streets, a sprinkle of diminutive dwellings mysteriously still inhabited and surprisingly well maintained co-existed with the adjoining wasteland, the hold outs from more stable and more populated times. There was a storefront selling live chickens that, when open, filled small wooden crates on the sidewalk. And at the end of one particularly isolated block a small two story clapboard-sheathed home behind a chain link fence and next to a vacant lot, but where several late model gas guzzlers were parked at street side, I actually saw live chickens in the yard pecking at the ground. If I rode down Wolcott Street to the water’s edge, I’d have a close up 400 yards across Buttermilk Channel of Governor’s Island, a military installation for almost two centuries, and since the new millennium the site of a public park accessible only by ferry. Inhabited all those years, generations of soldiers had a front row view of the rise and fall of the Brooklyn waterfront.
The Loft in 2024.
Just before Christmas on an overcast day I was riding along one of these interior streets feeling hemmed in by the ghostly emptiness surrounding me between shuttered buildings to one side and the old dockside secured behind walls of security fencing on the other, when a pack of feral dogs appeared several hundred feet to my front. There was a wooden creche at road side – clearly the devotional installation of a local parish I could never identify – with oversized statues of the cast at the Manger that had become the territorial shelter that four gum baring yelping canines were now furiously defending. As they began to rapidly close on me, I swung my bike one-eighty and hit the peddles with a sprinter’s gusto, soon realizing I could never outrun them. In an instant I stopped my bike, dismounted and faced the charging pack, waving my arms high above my head growling and barking as loudly and aggressively as I could. They stopped in their tracks, turned in formation and low tailed it from whence they’d come. Not to push my luck, I did the same. Barely through the door back home, still in the flush of wonder and exhilaration, I yelled to Carol, “you’ll never believe what just happened to me.”
The scene has become tragically familiar in occupied Palestine: the pounding fists on the door in the dead of night, the splintering wood, the shouts in broken Arabic. Soldiers storm in, rifles raised, children jolt awake, and someone is taken for nothing more than attending a protest or being related to someone who did, or throwing a stone, or posting something on social media in protest to the atrocities committed against their own people.
This past Thursday, April 17, 2025, marked Palestinian Prisoners’ Day amid the height of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the West Bank. Commemorated since 1974, this day honors the central role of Palestinian political captives in the struggle for national liberation. It is also a date etched in sorrow as well as resistance. Nearly one million Palestinians have been imprisoned since 1948—teachers, farmers, health workers, children, artists, and leaders. Today, nearly 10,000 remain behind bars, including 3,500 held in administrative detention without charge or trial, 400 children, and 29 women. Many more abducted from Gaza are held in secret military facilities like Sde Teiman, where they endure severe torture, starvation, and denial of medical care. Nearly 40% of Palestinian men in the occupied territories have been imprisoned at least once. These are not statistics. They are fathers, daughters, poets, farmers- lives interrupted, families torn apart, futures deferred.
Palestinian prisoners are not only victims but leaders of the resistance. From inside the prisons, they organize, write, educate, and inspire movements beyond the prison walls. Their leadership is visible not only in political statements and hunger strikes, but also in the forging of cultural and educational collectives that have spread through refugee camps and solidarity tents. During annual commemorations, family members-especially women-gather in massive numbers, surrounding tents and camp walls covered with portraits of imprisoned, martyred, and disappeared loved ones. These gatherings reflect a deep communal identification with the imprisoned, who are seen as both symbols and agents of resistance. In some cases, imprisoned men have smuggled out sperm to enable their wives to conceive, a powerful act of defiance against a system intent on severing family continuity and reproductive futures.
Administrative Detention in Israel
Israel’s policy of administrative detention allows for the imprisonment of individuals without charge or trial, often based on “undisclosed evidence”. This practice has been widely criticized by human rights organizations. As of early 2025, reports indicate that over 10,000 Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons, with many detained under administrative orders. Detainees endure harsh conditions, including inadequate food, medical care, and reports of physical abuse.(AP, 2025)
The trauma experienced by detainees frequently extends beyond their captivity, a captivity never justified (Guardian, 2025). Former prisoners have reported severe psychological effects, such as insomnia, anxiety, and difficulty reintegrating into family life. For instance, Amer Abu Hlel, after over a year in administrative detention without charges, suffered from physical injuries and profound psychological distress, leading to social withdrawal and fear of re-arrest. Palestinian captives speak of beatings, deprivation, torture, rape: Palestinians speak of the ‘hell’ of Israeli prisons. (Le Monde, 2024)
Gendered Violence in Israeli Colonial Prisons
In the landscape of Israeli colonial repression, the prison emerges not merely as a site of incarceration, but as a gendered apparatus of control. Palestinian feminist scholars and human rights researchers have long argued that sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) is not incidental, but structural to the Israeli occupation regime. From degrading strip searches to sexual torture, these acts serve as tools of humiliation, discipline, and subjugation, part of a calculated strategy to dominate and destabilize both individuals and the broader Palestinian social fabric.
Such acts are not random- they are calculated forms of domination. Sexualized violence against male prisoners is used to demasculinize the colonized subject, to strip away dignity and humiliate in ways that destabilize identity and community. This strategy echoes other colonial regimes where emasculation and rape were used not only to extract confessions but to degrade the captive into an object of scorn-even in their own eyes. On the other side of this gendered war is the violation and control of women’s bodies, used to rupture kinship lines and reproductive futures. As Palestinian feminist scholars have long argued, this is not merely about torture-it is about reconfiguring power through gendered, sexualized trauma.
Palestinian criminologist Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2009) has been at the forefront of theorizing sexual violence as a pillar of settler-colonial governance. In her foundational study, Militarization and Violence against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian Case-Study, she documents how the Israeli state weaponizes threats of rape, sexual humiliation, and coercive tactics such as isqāt siyāsī (political subjugation) to recruit collaborators and terrorize communities. Through a decolonial feminist lens, Shalhoub-Kevorkian contends that sexual violence is not an aberration but a “normal” extension of colonial power, aimed at dismantling kinship structures, eroding resistance, and reinforcing both Israeli domination and internal patriarchal controls (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2009).
Sociologist Nahla Abdo (2014) expands this analysis through her historical account of Palestinian women political prisoners in Captive Revolution: Palestinian Women’s Anti-Colonial Struggle within the Israeli Prison System. Drawing on oral histories and testimonies, Abdo reveals how Palestinian women have endured sexual torture, harassment, and invasive bodily violence as tools of repression. The story of Rasmea Odeh-who was raped, tortured, and later exiled-stands as a harrowing example of how the Israeli prison system targets women’s bodies to punish political dissent and stigmatize resistance. For Abdo, gendered violence is not just about physical harm-it is an assault on Palestinian womanhood itself, aimed at “criminalizing” female fighters and instilling collective fear (Abdo, 2014).
Khalida Jarrar, a Palestinian feminist, former political prisoner, and human rights advocate, contributed further to this field with a 2023 report for the Independent Commission for Human Rights. Based on firsthand accounts from detainees during Israel’s war on Gaza, the report catalogues gendered violations against women, men, and children alike-including threats of rape, verbal sexual degradation, forcible removal of veils, and collective strip searches. Jarrar situates these acts within the framework of colonial gendered violence, emphasizing that such humiliations are not isolated misconduct but “systematic strategies of domination” meant to erode identity and social integrity (Jarrar, 2023).
International findings echo these feminist insights. The 2024 United Nations Commission of Inquiry report on the Occupied Palestinian Territory explicitly recognized the use of sexual and gender-based violence by Israeli forces. It concluded that such acts are “intrinsically linked” to the broader framework of occupation and racial domination. The report confirmed the use of rape, sexual torture, and humiliation against both men and women in detention-including forced nudity in front of family members and rape threats used to extract confessions or silence dissent. These findings offer international validation of long-standing feminist critiques, emphasizing that the body-especially the colonized body-becomes a battleground where control is exercised and trauma inscribed (UN COI, 2025).
Together, these scholarly and investigative efforts reveal a disturbing consistency: Israeli prisons and detention centers function as laboratories of colonial violence where gender and sexuality are weaponized with precision. Whether by emasculating men through sexual torture or stripping veiled women to break cultural codes, these acts aim to humiliate and destroy the social and psychological fabric of Palestinian life. Feminist theorists like Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Abdo remind us that this is not merely about individual suffering; it is about domination through intimate, bodily terror. (Abdo, 2014)
Ultimately, the violence meted out in these carceral spaces must be understood as political and gendered. It is not accidental that Palestinian children, women, and men emerge from Israeli detention systems with scars-visible and invisible-that reshape families and futures. Nor is it incidental that these abuses often go unpunished and unacknowledged. As this feminist and decolonial analysis shows, sexual violence is not a side effect of war-it is a core tactic of colonial rule, designed to break resistance from the inside out.
The Machinery of Dehumanization: The Children
A 2013 UNICEF report concluded that the ill-treatment of Palestinian children in Israeli military detention is “widespread, systematic and institutionalized.” The report documented practices such as night arrests, physical violence, blindfolding, and coercive interrogations without legal counsel or parental presence. It also noted that children were often forced to sign confessions in Hebrew, a language they did not understand.
Israel’s prison system is not merely punitive-it is a pillar of its colonial regime. It functions to exhaust and disempower a people fighting for freedom. Military courts convict 99% of Palestinians. (Aljazeera, 2018) Children as young as 12 are tried as adults. “Since 2000, an estimated 12,000 Palestinian children have been arbitrarily detained in Israel’s military detention system. They are mostly charged for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, an act punishable by up to maximum 20 years in prison.” (Justice for All, Canada, 2024) Torture, including beatings and stress positions, is routinely used in interrogations-93% of Palestinian children report experiencing it. (Jabr, 2024)
Incarceration becomes a method not only of silencing dissent but of waging psychological warfare.
Solitary Confinement as Torture: Over 500 Palestinian captives are held in solitary confinement, sometimes for months or even years. According to the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Mandela Rules), solitary confinement exceeding 15 days constitutes torture. (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime). More than 1400 Palestinians are held in solitary confinement (B’tselm, 2014). Prolonged isolation has severe psychological consequences-ranging from depression and hallucinations to long-term cognitive damage. (Reiter, et al, 2020) In many documented cases, Palestinians with developmental or psychiatric disorders have been subjected to repeated humiliation and neglect rather than care. Ahmad Manasra, arrested at 13 and later suffered serious psychological consequences, in part as a result of prolonged solitary confinement. He is one of many who have suffered under such conditions. (Amnesty, 2023, Abu Sharar, 2021)
Medical Neglect: Writer Walid Daqqa spent 38 years in prison and died in 2024 after Israeli authorities denied him treatment for leukemia. “They are killing me slowly,” he wrote in his final letter, “but my ideas will outlive them.” In March 2025, 17-year-old Walid Ahmad from the West Bank died in Megiddo Prison after six months of detention without charge. An autopsy observed by an Israeli doctor indicated that severe malnutrition and untreated colitis likely contributed to his death. Ahmad had shown signs of starvation, scabies, inflammation of the colon, and overall physical frailty, exacerbated by inadequate food, poor sanitary conditions, and possibly contaminated meals during Ramadan.
Deliberate Disease: In 2024, a scabies outbreak spread to 800 captives in Naqab. Guards withheld medicine and hygiene supplies, leaving detainees to scratch their skin raw. An investigation by Haaretz revealed that a quarter of Palestinian captives in Israeli prisons have been infected with scabies in recent months. Prison authorities have been accused of allowing scabies to spread by restricting inmates’ water supply and depriving them of clean clothes and medical care. Without treatment, these wounds become infected. Left untreated in overcrowded, unsanitary cells, even a condition as treatable as scabies becomes a source of ongoing pain and torture, as a result of systemic neglect. These infections are not incidental-they reflect a broader strategy of dehumanization through deliberate medical denial.
Stolen Childhoods: Palestinian children are the only children in the world systematically prosecuted in military courts. Every year, between 500 and 700 are arrested-most during night raids. They are often blindfolded, shackled, and transported to interrogation centers where they are beaten, threatened, denied access to a lawyer, and coerced into signing confessions in Hebrew, a language many do not understand (DCIP-Military Detention).
In 99% of cases, these children are convicted for minor acts such as throwing stones or posting comments on social media. In 2016, the Israeli Knesset passed legislation allowing children as young as 12 to be sentenced to prison, including life imprisonment. This law has been used to target Palestinian children specifically, violating multiple international legal standards (Time, 2025).
In July 2019, a four-year-old boy named Muhammad Rabi’ Elayyan from Issawiya in occupied East Jerusalem was summoned for interrogation by Israeli authorities after allegedly throwing a stone. A dozen armed officers arrived at his home (Middle East Monitor, 2019). The child cried in terror. His father accompanied him to the police station where he was questioned. While he was ultimately not charged, the event reflects the extreme and surreal nature of repression faced even by toddlers.
Ahmad Manasra, arrested at age 13, became a global symbol of this brutality. Severely injured and interrogated while bleeding in custody, his forced confession was broadcast publicly. After nearly a decade of unjust incarceration, solitary confinement, and deteriorating mental and physical health, Ahmad was released on April 10, 2025. Despite evidence that he did not participate in the 2015 stabbing incident in Jerusalem, he was sentenced to 12 years (later reduced to 9.5), following a trial that violated his rights as a child. During his imprisonment, Ahmad was subjected to prolonged solitary confinement, denied adequate medical and psychological care, and endured treatment condemned by international human rights organizations. His release came without proper coordination; he was left alone, disoriented, and deeply distressed in the desert near the prison. He was later reunited with his family and continues to receive psychological support. Ahmad’s case remains a haunting emblem of the systemic “unchilding” of Palestinian youth and a call to end the imprisonment of children under military occupation.(Palestine-Global Mental Health Network, 2025)
Ahed Tamimi, detained at 16 after slapping an Israeli soldier in the wake of her cousin being shot in the face with a rubber bullet, spent eight months in prison. Her case drew international attention, not just for the injustice she endured, but for her defiance. “They think they broke me,” she said upon release. “But this generation was born from the womb of the Intifada” (The Guardian, 2018).
The Psychological Toll of Imprisonment on Palestinian Children
Physical and Emotional Abuse: A 2023 report by Save the Children revealed that 86% of Palestinian children in Israeli military detention experienced physical violence, and 69% were strip-searched. Nearly half (42%) sustained injuries during arrest, including gunshot wounds and broken bones. Such traumatic experiences contribute to long-term psychological distress (Save the Children, 2023).
Psychological Distress and Alienation: The same report highlighted that detained children often suffer from anxiety, depression, and a sense of alienation upon release. Many struggle to reintegrate into their communities, with feelings of fear and mistrust persisting long after their detention (Save the Children, 2023).
Impact on Future Aspirations: A 2023 study titled “Injustice: Palestinian children’s experience of the Israeli military detention system” found that imprisonment disrupts children’s education and future plans. One child expressed, “After you are released from prison you start racing against time trying to catch up… Whatever you had in your mind before your arrest just passed you by” (Save the Children, 2023).
BDS: Breaking the Chains of Complicity
If prison is Israel’s tool of domination, Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) is our collective tool of resistance. BDS calls for economic and cultural pressure on Israel until it complies with international law.
At this moment in history-when the genocide in Gaza continues unabated, when the bodies of the dead and maimed outnumber the living, when fascism parades through global capitals and tyrants rule with impunity-it is easy to lose hope. When every weapon is being waged against our Palestine and her people, when those who speak are censored or arrested, when friends hide their articles and delete their words, and when we all feel we are waiting our turn to be plucked from the path of resistance—it is tempting to believe that our struggle is lost.
But it is not. It is not lost when we remain on the path of steadfastness (sumud), of clarity, of collective care.
History is our witness:
+ Apartheid South Africa was brought to its knees by coordinated global boycott, cultural isolation, and a refusal to normalize oppression.
+ British colonial rule in India fell after decades of economic noncooperation and moral resistance.
+ The U.S. Civil Rights Movement broke segregation’s legal backbone with sustained boycotts and protests.
+ Chile’s Pinochet regime, Argentina’s military dictatorship, and East Germany’s Stasi rule all crumbled in the face of international solidarity and internal resistance.
These movements teach us that boycott, divestment, and sanctions are not abstract theories-they are tools that have toppled empires. Yet we must also recognize that such victories are not permanent. The recent far-right resurgence in Argentina under Milei and the dismantling of civil rights protections in the U.S. under Trump remind us that gains can be reversed when fascism reasserts itself. That is why the fight for Palestinian freedom must be connected to broader global anti-fascist and anti-colonial movements-because the forces we confront do not remain in one place. They metastasize.
And so it is with BDS. Launched in 2005 by over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations, BDS is our weapon and our lifeline. If Israel’s tools are walls, prisons, and erasure, ours are presence, refusal, and solidarity.
BDS has already shown its power:
+ AXA Insurance divested from Israeli arms company Elbit Systems.
+ Ben & Jerry’s halted sales in illegal settlements, stating, “It’s inconsistent with our values.”
+ Veolia lost over $20 billion in contracts and withdrew completely from Israel.
+ G4S, under pressure, sold its Israeli prison operations.
+ Dozens of universities, churches, and pension funds have divested from companies profiting from apartheid.
This is not symbolic. This is material. Every contract canceled, every artist who says no, every pension fund that walks away-weakens the machinery of domination.
Freedom Is the Only Antidote
Palestinian captives are not just victims. They are witnesses. They are leaders. They are the barometers of our shared humanity.
When a blindfold is tightened on a child in the dark, it is our moral vision that is obscured. When a prisoner is denied medicine, our silence sharpens the knife.
BDS is not a slogan. It is a form of care. It is a nonviolent weapon in a world that knows only violence.
As Assata Shakur, a Black activist, author, and former member of the Black Liberation Army, wrote:
The chains will break. The cell door will rust.
And we will still be here,
roots deeper than their prisons.
And so we return to the knock on the door—a summons in the dead of night that, for too many Palestinian families, has become the echo of generational pain. These prisons, with their barred cells and perpetually shadowed halls, are meant to vanish people and break their spirits. But from these very sites of despair come the songs, letters, smuggled stories, and steadfast courage that galvanize a global movement.
This article aims to name the systematic brutality against Palestinian prisoners for what it is—an intentional, gendered, colonial assault designed to cripple an entire people’s struggle for self-determination—and, at the same time, to honor the indomitable spirit that refuses to submit. By shining a light on the prison system and the suffering within it, we also illuminate a path of resistance and solidarity. When we choose Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, we choose a peaceful but potent form of collective action—one that can weaken the pillars of apartheid just as similar movements have toppled oppressive regimes worldwide.
What is at stake here is not just the fate of the imprisoned, but the moral fabric that binds us all. Each time a child is blindfolded or a woman is threatened with sexualized violence, our collective conscience is tested. Each time we stay silent or look away, we risk allowing injustice to calcify into permanence. But every refusal to be silent—every poem written on contraband paper, every protest sign raised in the streets, every institution that cuts ties with profiteers of apartheid—becomes proof that solidarity can transcend walls and barbed wire.
If these prisons exist to bury hope, then hope must outgrow the walls. If this system thrives on complicity, then let our voices, our actions, and our global alliances sever the chains. In the unbreakable words of Palestinian prisoners and in the unwavering commitment of those who stand with them, we find the enduring truth: that freedom is both a right and a responsibility. We owe it to one another—and to all who have been caged—to turn each knock at the door into a rallying cry for liberation.
“Rights are granted to those who align with power,” Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student, eloquently wrote from his cell. This poignant statement came soon after a judge ruled that the government had met the legal threshold to deport the young activist on the nebulous ground of “foreign policy”.
“For the poor, for people of color, for those who resist injustice, rights are but words written on water,” Khalil further lamented. The plight of this young man, whose sole transgression appears to be his participation in the nationwide mobilization to halt the Israeli genocide in Gaza, should terrify all Americans. This concern should extend even to those who are not inclined to join any political movement and possess no particular sympathy for – or detailed knowledge of – the extent of the Israeli atrocities in Gaza, or the United States’ role in bankrolling this devastating conflict.
The perplexing nature of the case against Khalil, like those against other student activists, including Turkish visa holder Rümeysa Öztürk, starkly indicates that the issue is purely political. Its singular aim appears to be the silencing of dissenting political voices.
Judge Jamee E. Comans, who concurred with the Trump Administration’s decision to deport Khalil, cited “foreign policy” in an uncritical acceptance of the language employed by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Rubio had previously written to the court, citing “potentially serious foreign policy consequences” stemming from Khalil’s actions, which he characterized as participation in “disruptive activities” and “anti-Semitic protests”.
The latter accusation has become the reflexive rejoinder to any form of criticism leveled against Israel, a tactic prevalent even long before the current catastrophic genocide in Gaza.
Those who might argue that US citizens remain unaffected by the widespread US government crackdowns on freedom of expression must reconsider. On April 14, the government decided to freeze $2.2 billion in federal funding to the University of Harvard.
Beyond the potential weakening of educational institutions and their impact on numerous Americans, these financial measures also coincide with a rapidly accelerating and alarming trend of targeting dissenting voices within the US, reaching unprecedented extents. On April 14, Massachusetts immigration lawyer Nicole Micheroni, a US citizen, publicly disclosed receiving a message from the Department of Homeland Security requesting her self-deportation.
Furthermore, new oppressive bills are under consideration in Congress, granting the Department of Treasury expansive measures to shut down community organizations, charities, and similar entities under various pretenses and without adhering to standard constitutional legal procedures.
Many readily conclude that these measures reflect Israel’s profound influence on US domestic politics and the significant ability of the Israel lobby in Washington DC to interfere with the very democratic fabric of the US, whose Constitution’s First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and assembly.
While there is much truth in that conclusion, the narrative extends beyond the complexities of the Israel-Palestine issue.
For many years, individuals, predominantly academics, who championed Palestinian rights were subjected to trials or even deported, based on “secret evidence”. This essentially involved a legal practice that amalgamated various acts, such as the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) and the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), among others, to silence those critical of US foreign policy.
Although some civil rights groups in the US challenged the selective application of law to stifle dissent, the matter hardly ignited a nationwide conversation regarding the authorities’ violations of fundamental democratic norms, such as due process (Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments).
Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, however, much of that legal apparatus was applied to all Americans in the form of the PATRIOT Act. This legislation broadened the government’s authority to employ surveillance, including electronic communications, and other intrusive measures.
Subsequently, it became widely known that even social media platforms were integrated into government surveillance efforts. Recent reports have even suggested that the government mandated social media screening for all U.S. visa applicants who have traveled to the Gaza Strip since January 1, 2007.
In pursuing these actions, the US government is effectively replicating some of the draconian measures imposed by Israel on the Palestinians. The crucial distinction, based on historical experience, is that these measures tend to undergo continuous evolution, establishing legal precedents that swiftly apply to all Americans and further compromise their already deteriorating democracy.
Americans are already grappling with their perception of their democratic institutions, with a disturbingly high number of 72 percent, according to a Pew Research Center survey in April 2024, believing that US democracy is no longer a good example for other countries to follow.
The situation has only worsened in the past year. While US activists advocating for justice in Palestine deserve unwavering support and defense for their profound courage and humanity, Americans must also recognize that they, and the remnants of their democracy, are equally at risk.
“Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere,” is the timeless quote associated with Abraham Lincoln. Yet, every day that Mahmoud Khalil and others spend in their cells, awaiting deportation, stands as the starkest violation of that very sentiment. Americans must not permit this injustice to persist.
German officers of the Ordnungspolizei examining a man’s papers in Nazi-occupied Poland, 1941. Public domain.
American citizens are being routinely caught in Trump’s deportation dragnet, detained, jailed, and threatened with deportation, even a four-year-old with cancer and a pregnant mother who would have given birth to an American citizen. When ICE’s “mistakes” are revealed, usually through the presentation of a birth certificate days after the false arrest, the typical response has been to blame the victims. That’s if they haven’t already been deported.
Take the case of 19-year-old Jose Hermosillo, who was detained by Border Patrol outside Tucson on April 8 and held for 10 days in the privately run Florence Correctional Center before being released. Hermosilla, who has a learning disability, told his jailers he was an American citizen. They told him to tell his lawyer. At that point, Jose Hermosillo didn’t have a lawyer. Two days later, Jose told an immigration judge the same thing. Federal prosecutors requested a week-long delay in the case. And Jose, who is the father of a six-month-old American citizen, was held for another seven days until his family could finally present the court with his birth certificate.
After his release, DHS smeared Hermosillo, blaming him for his own arrest and detention. In a post on Twitter (of all places), DHS said: “Hermosillo’s arrest and detention were a direct result of his own actions and statements.” In trying to cover their own cruel blunders, DHS officials alleged “that Jose Hermosillo approached Border Patrol in Tucson, Arizona, stating he had ILLEGALLY entered the U.S. and identified himself as a Mexican citizen.”
This was a convenient concoction, a fiction. Hermosilllo hadn’t been in Mexico and he’s not a Mexican citizen. To support their self-serving claim, DHS said Hermossilo signed a transcript of an alleged interview attesting to this version of events. But Hermosilla can’t read or write. He can only scratch out his name, according to his girlfriend.
What really happened is quite different, tragic even. Hermosillo lives in Albuquerque and had traveled to Tucson with his girlfriend to visit her family. While in Tucson, he suffered a seizure and was taken by ambulance to the hospital. He was treated and released, unsure exactly where he was or how to return to his girlfriend.
Hermosilla flagged down what he thought was a police car to ask for directions. It turned out to be Border Patrol. He told the officer he was staying in Tucson but was lost.
The BP officer responded harshly, “You’re not from here. Where are you from?
“New Mexico,” Hermosilla said.
“I don’t believe you,” the BP cop said. “Show me your papers?”
Hermosilla told him he’d left his New Mexico ID at his girlfriend’s family’s place.
“I’m not stupid,” the cop told him. “I know you’re from Mexico.”
Then the cop arrested Hermosilla, told him to sign some papers, and then deposited him in a cell with 15 other men, where he was served cold food and denied his medications for the next 10 days.
“I told them I was a US citizen,” Hermosillo told Arizona PM. “But they don’t listen to me.”
+++
+ On Friday, Federal Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, issued an order saying that DHS had apparently deported a 2-year-old American citizen to Honduras with “no meaningful” process, even though the girl’s father, also a US citizen, fought to keep her in the country.
+ The ACLU reported that on Friday, the New Orleans field office of ICE deported two families with minor children. Three of the children (age 2, 4 and 7) are US citizens. One of the children suffers from a rare form of metastatic cancer. The citizen child was deported without medications or being able to consult with their doctors, even though ICE was fully briefed about the child’s dire medical condition. One of the mothers is pregnant. Both families have lived in the US for many years.
According to the ACLU, “ICE held the families incommunicado, refusing or failing to respond to multiple attempts by attorneys and family members to contact them. In one instance, a mother was granted less than one minute on the phone before the call was abruptly terminated when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number.”
+ Aldo Martinez-Gomez, a US citizen living in California, received a DHS notice on April 11, threatening “criminal prosecution” and fines if he does not depart within seven days, even after he showed them his birth certificate. “Do not attempt to remain in the United States,” the letter warned. “The government will find you.’ Martinez-Gomez: “I’m just trying not to be one of the government’s mistakes.”
+ But wait, the Democrats have a solution for American citizens being “mistakenly” rounded up for deportation.
+ “Show Us Your Papers”…
+ Yglesias is, of course, the Biden whisperer and they followed his right-center advice right off the electoral cliff. That hasn’t stopped Matty from veering even farther right.
+ Since Friedman believes the world is flat, maybe that Waymo will drive him right off the edge…
+ What, pray tell, does a Waymo Democrat do? “Waymo Democrats would do everything Trump is doing maliciously today — but do it productively.” Sorry, I asked.
+++
+ At 8:30 in the morning on Friday, U.S. Marshals entered a county courthouse in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and arrested trial judge Hannah Dugan on charges that she had obstructed the arrest of a noncitizen. Trump officials, including FBI director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi, publicly gloated over her arrest, as did Trump, who posted a photo of the judge wearing a medical mask on his Truth Social feed.
Shockingly (right?), the facts are a little different from what the Trumpites have presented. Flores was in Dugan’s courtroom on another matter, when ICE agents entered and attempted to arrest him without a warrant. Dugan ordered the agents out of her court and told them to contact the supervising judge. Then she escorted Flores and his attorney out the back of the courtroom to a public hallway.
Flores Ruiz was not, as Patel crudely asserts, a “perp.” He hadn’t been accused of “perpetrating” any crime, except that of being in the US without papers. There was no “increased danger” to the public because there was never any “danger” to begin with, except to Flores Ruiz. He was later detained by ICE and jailed without incident. Surely, judges have sovereignty over their own courtrooms and have the authority to demand to see a warrant before an arrest is made inside their chambers.
Of course, this is yet another provocation, pushing the limits of executive power to see how far it reaches. It seems as if Trump is heeding Bukele’s advice at the White House that you need to “get rid of the judges.” In 2021, the Salvadoran despot removed all five judges from the nation’s supreme court and fired its attorney general.
+ In a federal court filing last Thursday, the Trump administration admitted ICE agents did not have a warrant when they detained Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil in March, conceded that it was a warrantless arrest: “We were permitted to arrest him without a warrant, because he gave us reason to think he would escape, namely that he said he was going to walk away if we didn’t have a warrant.”
+ This admission by the Feds contradicts what officers told Khalil and his lawyers at the time of his arrest and in a later arrest report.
+ How Columbia grad student Mohsen Mahdawi was entrapped and kidnapped at his own citizenship hearing: “At his citizenship interview, he signed a pledge to “defend the Constitution.” The official left to go “check” something. Then masked & armed agents came in, shackled Mahdawi, and tried to fly him to Louisiana.”
+ How is it possible to feel any allegiance to the government of a country that does things like this to children who are citizens of the US as a matter of policy? “For months, NPR has been receiving tips about the Detroit-Canada border, immigrants and U.S. citizen children being held without access to legal counsel, because they took a wrong turn on the highway.”
+ After terminating legal support for noncitizen children, the Trump administration is making 4-year-olds represent themselves in immigration court.
+ ICE moved a Venezuelan man who had worked in construction in Philadelphia to Texas for possible deportation after a federal judge had issued an order blocking his removal from Pennsylvania or the United States.
+ Three ICE agents raided a courthouse in Charlottesville in plain clothes without badges, ID or warrants and carted off two men without explanation and dragged them into an unmarked van.
+ Sulayman Nyang, a soccer coach in Aurora, Colorado, was detained by ICE at the airport—24 hours later, his family still doesn’t know where he is. Nyang has a green card, is married to a U.S. citizen, and is the father of a 3-month-old son. He has no criminal record — a marijuana possession allegation was dismissed in 2009. “Seeing that he’s been in the country for 25 years, we didn’t think there was a problem,” his wife said. “What do you mean, 2009? He hasn’t done anything. Everything has been dismissed… They won’t explain why. They give two different answers.”
+ So ICE isn’t rounding up rapists, murderers and maniacs, but mostly day laborers, who would be paying taxes and contributing to Social Security: “Laborers who arrived at a Home Depot in Pomona on Tuesday morning in hopes of earning a day’s wage were met with uniformed ICE agents who reportedly began rounding up workers in the parking lot. ”
+ Radley Balko, one of the best criminal justice journalists around, is charting the pattern of ICE officers attempting to intimidate immigration lawyers, including one outrageous case where ICE agents showed up at a lawyer’s home to harass him about representing immigrants and cut his wifi to disable his Ring cam from recording the interaction…
+ The Trump administration gratuitously released Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s wife’s address, resulting in the predictable flood of abuse, threats, and harassment from MAGA goons that’s gotten so extreme she’s had to move to a safer place with her three kids, two of whom are autistic…
+ In its 8-2 ruling last week, the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. They ordered the Trump administration to give people a fair day in court and the chance to file a lawsuit. How did Trump respond? By giving detainees facing deportation only 12 hours to file suit.
+ David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute: “We have a situation where the executive branch intentionally violates the law, evades judicial review for as long as it can, then gets ordered to stop but pretends not to understand that, and keeps violating the law the whole time. It doesn’t matter if they eventually stop…”
+ The Trump administration has been texting college professors to ask if they are Jewish. Barnard College admitted to its staff that it had provided Trump’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission with personal contact information for faculty members.The federal government reaching out to our personal cellphones to identify who is Jewish is incredibly sinister,” said Barnard associate professor Debbie Becher, who is Jewish and received the text. Some might recall that IBM helped the Nazis ID Jews in Europe and facilitate their transport out of Warsaw to Auschwitz.
+ The same college (Barnard) that gave Trump the contact info for its faculty tried to use a bomb threat to smear the students the threat targeted!
+ What kind of so-called university disciplines students for writing an op-ed in the school’s newspaper? That would be Columbia, which sanctioned two students, Maryam Alwan and Layla Saliba, for their “alleged participation” in writing a pro-Palestinian editorial (“Recentering Palestine, Reclaiming the Movement“) for the Columbia Spectator in October 2024.
+ Trump’s immigration/deportation policies cut overseas travel by 11.6% in March, putting up to 7900 American jobs at risk. Every 40 international visitors generate one U.S. job.
+ On Wednesday, a federal judge barred the Trump administration from pulling federal funds from places it deems “sanctuary cities,” saying the policy is unconstitutional.
+ Cost of Trump’s original border wall: $11 billion
Number of times it was breached by smugglers in 3 years: 3,200.
+++
+ The lower he sinks, the more whacked out he’s going to get.
+ Trump’s numbers in the latest Reuters poll are even worse: 37% approval, 57% disapproval.
+ Gen Z women emphatically don’t want to be baby mills in the Tradwife Sweatshops envisioned by Trump and Musk…
+ Trump’s net approval rating on immigration (his strongest issue for months) is now -5 and he’s squandered whatever marginal allure he once had with Hispanics: Trump approval/disapproval with Hispanics in new Pew poll: 27% / 72%–a collapse of the 42% support he enjoyed (courtesy of Biden and Harris’ incompetence) in the 2024 election.
Of course, the Democrats are polling even worse than Trump (38% approval rating, five points worse than the Republicans). There’s a reason. Consider Chuck Schumer’s answer to CNN’s Dana Bash on the Democrats’ response to Trump’s threats against Harvard: “We sent him a very strong letter just the other day.”
Bash: “You’ll let us know if you get a response to that letter?”
Trump: Get me a ticket on an aeroplane
Ain’t got time to take the fast train
I can’t stay here, I’m running away in fear
Cause Chuckie, he sent me a letter…
+ Or consider this feckless cavilling from another top Democrat…The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner allows Deborah Lipstadt, Biden’s former “antisemitism” envoy, to expose her shameful moral hypocrisy. Chotiner’s interviews with imperious powerbrokers are master classes in how to lead elites into condemning themselves…
+ DOGE staffers allegedly marked four million people as dead in the Social Security database, without having any evidence that these people had died.
+ In yet another blow to Trump and Bessent’s “great encirclement” plan to isolate China, Japan categorically refuses to do any trade deal with the US, detrimental to their relationship with China.
+ Trump on April 23, claiming negotiations with China were ongoing: “Everything is active. Everybody wants to be a part of what we’re doing.”
He Yadong, spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Commerce: “There are currently no economic and trade negotiations between China and the United States. Any claims about progress… are baseless rumors without factual evidence. If the us truly wants to solve the problem, it should…completely cancel all unilateral tariff measures against China.”
+ Wall Street Journal editorial board: “[the] harsh reality is that China called Mr. Trump’s bluff and seems to have won this round.”
+ One big reason for Trump’s humiliating surrender: In the 3 weeks since the tariffs took effect, ocean container bookings from China to the United States are down over 60% industry-wide.
+ Within two weeks, the Port of Los Angeles, the largest in the US, will experience a 40% drop in cargo ship traffic.
+ Percent of Americans worried about the economy falling into a recession: 53%.
+ S&P Global reports that more US companies declared bankruptcy in the first quarter of 2025 than at any time in the last 15 years.
+ At $4.1 trillion a year, California now boasts the fourth-largest economy in the world, trailing only the USA as a whole, China, and Germany.
+ Millennials, who were born between 1981 and 1996, earn 20% less than baby boomers did at their age, per FORTUNE
+ March existing home sales in the US were the weakest since the Great Financial Crisis. At the same time, 42% of mortgage refinance applications are being denied — the highest rejection rate in more than 12 years.
+ The 19 richest households in the US amassed more than $1 trillion in new wealth last year alone. Inequality isn’t the word for the kind of grotesque disparities our economic system generates…
+ According to Gallup,53% of Americans (a record high) now say their financial situation is getting worse. It’s the first time since 2001 that a majority has expressed an economic outlook this gloomy.
+ The National Institute of Health is now prohibiting the awarding of new grants to any institutions that boycott Israeli companies. Boycotts of companies from other countries are perfectly okay.
+ Journal of the American Medical Association on declining vaccination rates in the US for measles: “If current vaccination rates stay the same, the model estimated that the US could see more than 850,000 cases, 170,000 hospitalizations, and 2,500 deaths over the next 25 years. The results appear in the
+ It’s not just rare earth materials. Big pharmaceutical companies now buy one-third of their experimental molecules from Chinese laboratories. Three years ago, this number was 10 percent. Nearly 25% of all early drug development is done in China.
+ “History shows again and again,
How Nature proves the folly of men…”
+ The first quarter of 2025 was the second warmest on record, just a fraction behind last year’s mark. An ominous portent, given that 2024 was super-charged by a strong El Nino event, while 2025 started off with weak La Nina conditions.
+ According to a new study by researchers at Dartmouth College published last week in “Nature”, emissions from 111 fossil fuel companies have caused $28 trillion in climate damage, the study finds. These five generated the most harm.
+ Only three years ago, China imported three times as many cars as it exported. This year, it’s exporting more than it’s importing.
+ UNICEF has warned that the water crisis in Gaza has reached “critical levels,” with only one in 10 people able to access clean drinking water.
+++
+ Lemkin Institute on Genocide Prevention’s warning about RKF, Jr’s Autism Registry:
The Lemkin Institute urges the American people, especially the scientific community, to take an unwavering stand against any sort of registry of autistic people (or any other group). We also urge Americans to push back hard against violations of privacy and limits on disabled people’s rights to life, inclusion, and respect. Americans must reject the idea that the state should be able to trample these fundamental rights whenever it feels a certain group is a threat to “national strength” or is becoming too costly, as RFK Jr. has made clear he views autistic people to be.
+ Meanwhile, RFK, Jr. has fired the HHS staffers who ran “a program that helps millions of poor families keep the electricity on so babies don’t die from extreme heat or cold, have all been fired. The office overseeing the enforcement of child support payments nationally has been hollowed out.”
+ Public Citizen: “Donations to Trump’s inauguration from corporations facing federal investigations/lawsuits: $50 million (one third of corporate inauguration donations).
+ “President Trump will have an ‘intimate private dinner’ with top 220 buyers of his crypto memecoin at his DC-area golf club, the issuers of the token said on their website. The coin skyrocketed on the news, at one point up 49%…” This is like the Clinton/Gore Koffee Klatches, except those were to sell off face time with the president and vice president for political donations. This money is going right into Trump’s own pockets. Like the genocide in Gaza, the political corruption here is taking place right out in the open. They even advertise the opportunity to take part…
+ If the purchaser/influence-seeker were domestic, they would have used Binance.USA.
+ The value of Trumpcoin increased by over 80% after Trump’s announcement.
+ The Fox Business Network reported that Trump’s team privately alerted Wall Street executives to the state of its trade deal negotiations, giving them inside knowledge to help them profit off the swings in the market. Martha Stewart went to prison for less, MUCH less.
+ The Trump regime is now using U.S. attorneys to intimidate academic journals by sending them letters demanding they explain how they ensure “viewpoint diversity.”
+ According to the FBI, Americans aged 60 and older reported losing almost $3 billion to crypto scams last year. In total, Americans reported being bilked out of around $9.3 billion via crypto, out of a total of $16.6 billion in reported losses to financial scams that year.
+ Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at the Kennedy School on Trump’s threats against Harvard, including terminating federal grants and banning visas for foreign students:
“What’s at stake is the presence of independent centers of thought in a free society. Ultimately, this is an attempt by the administration to bring Harvard, as the world’s most prominent private university, under its control. If you read the [Trump] letter carefully, they were basically wanting to have control over who got hired, control over what got taught, control over the content of the curriculum, control over admissions, in a variety of different ways. At which point the university is no longer independent. It has to get up every morning, say to itself: ‘Gee, what does the president think of what we’re doing here?’ And that means you don’t have independent thought.”
+ NYPD officers attended a training session informing them that Palestinian symbols like the watermelon and the keffiyeh, as well as phrases such as “settler colonialism” and “all eyes on Rafah,” were antisemitic. Apparently, being born Palestinian is an antisemitic act. “All eyes on Rafah,” of course, stemmed from Biden’s warning to Israel that a full-scale invasion of the city was a “red line” that would trigger a ban on offensive weapons sales to Israel. Israel destroyed the 2,000-year-old city, anyway. Now, to even mention it is evidence of anti-semitism.
+ Why does the Defense Department need a $1 trillion budget next year? Pete Hegseth has ordered the construction of a make-up studio inside the Pentagon.
+ All these tough MAGA guys need their own beauticians: Trump gets his face with orange paint, Vance has his eyes done up in kohl and Hegseth needs to get prettified in his own make-up room. The Trump cabinet is being to look like an over-the-hill glam rock band.
+ Speaking of Trump cabinet members demanding their own make-up rooms, it sure looks like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told his stylist to give him “the Full Rumsfeld.”
+ Bessent: “I intend to make an all-out push to make Americans financially literate.”
= Be careful what you ask for, Secretary Bessent. When the French became “financially literate” (236 years and counting before the Americans), it didn’t turn out so well for the Ancien Régime…
+ France’s Jean-Luc Melenchon: “The only reason Trump won is that there is no left in the United States.”
+ Trump’s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: “The government can and will collect defaulted federal student loan debt by withholding tax refunds, federal pensions, and even their wages.” Imagine Trump’s bankers doing the same to him!
+ Michigan State Rep. Matt Maddock claims that anyone who opposes his bill to rename the Gulf of Mexico hates America. “I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the people opposed to this are the same people that hate America.”
Netanyahu to the Pope: “We have a natural bond. We know Jesus. He was here in our land. He spoke Hebrew.”
The Hippie Pope: “He spoke Aramaic.”
+ After attending a Mar-a-Lago soiree with top Republicans, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the fanatical Kahanist and ethnic cleanser who, as a young man, cheered the assassination of Rabin, said: “They expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed.”
+++
+ There are “rules” to Columbus Day? Rule 1: Make the Genoan mercenary for Spain an Italian! Rule 2: Pretend the Genoan mercenary “discovered” “America”, which had been discovered 30,000 years earlier by the ancestors of the people living there, over a much more treacherous route! Rule 3: Ignore the fact that the Genoan mercenary had no idea where in the world he was. Rule 4: Elide from the “celebration” any troublesome mention of the Genoan mercenary’s rape, slaughter, infection and plunder of the people living on the Islands the wind and ocean currents thrust his ships upon…
+ A vicious new bill in the Texas legislature would criminalize transporting youth younger than 18, or funding their transportation, out of state to access abortion without written parental consent, with up to 20 years in prison.
+ America needs babies, consent be damned!
Indiana State Sen. Gary Byrne (R) amended a sex education bill to remove requirements to teach consent.
STATE REP. ANDREA HUNLEY (D): “What groups were consulted in the removal of the section about consent?”
BYRNE: “Nobody came to me. This is a decision that I made not to have it in there.”
Speaking of the legislature of my home state, Benjamin Balthatzar tells me that it has exerted DeSantis-like power over the state’s leading university: “Indiana state legislature just staged a hostile takeover of IU, functionally eliminating tenure, promising to close smaller (hum) majors, taking over the IU board, and cutting the IU budget. This is so bleak.”
+ Sen. Patty Murray: “I was denied permission to host a roundtable at the Puget Sound VA to hear from women veterans about their health care. I have NEVER been outright denied from having open & honest conversations with VA—until this administration.”
+ As Freud (or, was it, Groucho Marx?) said, sometimes a flagpole is only a flagpole. But probably not this time…
+ Travis Akers: “Since hiring Kristina Wong from Breitbart News as the Secretary of the Navy Communications Director this week, the Secretary of the Navy’s Twitter account has twice posted the incorrect date of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, ‘a date which will live in infamy.’”
+++
I’m a H.O.O.D, low-life scum, that’s what they say about me…
“Who are the oppressors but the nobility and gentry, and who are oppressed, if not the yeoman, the farmer, the tradesman and the like? .. Have you not chosen oppressors to redeem you from oppression? . . . It is naturally inbred in the major part of the nobility and gentry . . . to judge the poor but fools, and themselves wise, and therefore when you the commonalty calleth a Parliament they are confident such must be chosen that are the noblest and richest . . . Your slavery is their liberty, your poverty is their prosperity . . . Peace is their ruin . . . by war they are enriched . . . Peace is their war, peace is their poverty.”
– Lawrence Clarkson, A General Charge of Impeachment of High Treason, 1647
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Voltaire, Enlightenment author and philosopher (1694-1778)
Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the United States and Israel have been zealous in their efforts to disempower it. Israel has used its powerful hasbara (propaganda) machine to peddle absurdities about Tehran as a nuclear threat to the region and the world.
For refusing to bend to U.S.-Israeli demands to abandon the Palestinian cause and for standing against their hegemonic plans for the region, Iran has been the target of the most restrictive economic sanctions in history and under perpetual threat of military intervention.
Like any sovereign nation, Iran has a right to defend itself. Nuclear weapons are a security guarantee that Iran has not sought. Unlike Israel and the United States, it has not threatened nor bombed, invaded or occupied its neighbors. However, after Israeli air strikes in April and October 2024 and continued U.S. threats, Iran has had no choice but to debate and reevaluate its long-held nuclear doctrine which regards weapons of mass destruction against Islam.
In a civilized conflict-free world, there would be no need for weapons, nuclear or otherwise. Unfortunately for some countries, like Iran, possessing nuclear weapons may become a necessary tool for survival. For others, like the United States and Israel, the ghastly weapons are used as cudgels to bully countries into submission.
It is important to establish that the U.S. intelligence community—the collective work of America’s 18 spy organizations—has determined that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons. It stated as much in its “Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community” 2024 report: “Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device.” Previous reports have also stated that Iran’s military doctrine is defensive and its nuclear program is meant to build negotiating leverage and to respond to perceived international pressure.
The question then becomes why is it that the nuclear issue is front and center when the United States does engage with Iran and why has its program, in existence for more than four decades and intended for civilian energy/scientific purposes, been so falsely represented.
Demonizing Iran has served the imperial interests of the United States and its military outpost Israel in the Middle East. Through the well financed aggressive propaganda efforts of Israeli lobby groups like the tactically benign sounding American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Tel Aviv has been successful in selling Washington, the corporate media and the American public on the provocative idea that Iran is a threat to it, the region and the United States.
The narrative about Iran and its nuclear objectives is replete with myths and distortions. U.S. foreign policy decisions have been largely framed to protect and secure Israeli interests, often to the detriment of America’s own.
A fettered Iran allows Israel unchallenged regional supremacy. Like former U.S. administrations, the Trump White House, in collaboration with Israel and their Arab allies, are determined to strip Iran of its revolutionary identity and undermine its regional clout.
Iran has legitimate security interests and concerns, fully aware that it is the primary target of Israel’s military and nuclear arsenal. A 2025 Arms Control Association report reveals that Israel—the only nuclear weapons power in the Middle East—has an estimated 90 nuclear warheads with sophisticated delivery systems in its inventory, as well as the fissile material stockpiles for at least 200 nuclear weapons.
Iran, on the other hand, is a threshold state. To achieve the weaponization stage, it would need to enrich uranium to 90 percent purity, weaponize the fissile material and develop the delivery systems. None have been done.
Unlike Israel, Iran is a signatory to the 1968 U.N. Non-Proliferation Treaty. As such, it is prohibited from developing, acquiring or using nuclear weapons, although it does have the right to manufacture and enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. In addition, Iran’s leaders have vigorously pursued the establishment of a nuclear weapons-free zone for the region.
There are a number of rational reasons for the Islamic Republic to go down the road toward acquiring nuclear weapons; principally, self-defense.
Former Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak (2007-2013), in his memoirs, for example, reveals that the regime of then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came close to attacking Iran at least three times between 2010 and 2012. Barak stated that he and Netanyahu had pushed for military operations against Iranian facilities, but they backed down after opposition from their top security officials.
Barak also discloses that he disagreed with Netanyahu that Iran’s nuclear program posed an existential threat to Israel. He was instead more concerned about the regional balance of power.
Some in Iran’s political class, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
suspect that the United States, Israel and their Arab allies are intent on
overthrowing the Islamic Republic. Recent history confirms their suspicions.
They point to crippling economic sanctions, covert operations, cyber attacks, assassination of nuclear scientists and military personnel, missile attacks and sabotage of gas pipelines and military sites.
In July 2022, for example, during a visit to Israel, President Joe Biden signed a pledge to never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon and to “…use all elements of its national power to ensure that outcome.”
It is with that pledge and President Trump’s ultimatums that the United States has entered a new round of nuclear talks with Iran, currently underway. Strangely enough, it was Trump, encouraged by Netanyahu, who pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement in 2018 and imposed heavier “maximum pressure” sanctions; believing that economic hardships would drive Iranians to topple the government.
Before the recent nuclear meetings began in early April, Trump threatened: “If they [Iran] don’t make a deal, there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.” In a show of force, in addition to two aircraft carriers in the Red Sea, the White House has deployed a squadron of fighter jets, stealth bombers, air defenses and large quantities of weapons to the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.
Also, Netanyahu, incapable of remaining silent, sounded off saying that the only nuclear deal Israel would accept would have Iran agreeing to eliminate its entire program. He further elaborated: “We go in, blow up the facilities and dismantle all the equipment, under American supervision and execution.”
The Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, reported (17 April 2025) that Netanyahu recently sought the U.S. administration’s support to conduct joint commando and air strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. Trump, however, vetoed the plan while discussions with Tehran are ongoing. Netanyahu is clearly intent on derailing the negotiations to insure that there will never be rapprochement between the U.S. and Iran.
Except for a short interval during the Obama administration, when Iran and the P5+1 countries (China, France, Russia, U.K., U.S.) plus Germany finalized the JCPOA in 2015, the United States has leaned on a muscular military policy and has never been serious about engaging cooperatively with Iran. It has, however, been serious about insuring Israel’s hegemony in the region.
President Obama’s “new dawn for the Middle East” included moving away from years of failed policies, particularly “Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” a 1996 initiative pushed by pro-Israel stalwarts and advanced during the George W. Bush administration.
Following the attacks of 11 September 2001, Bush and Netanyahu set in motion the aggressive goals documented in “Clean Break” to contain, destabilize and overthrow governments that challenged U.S.-Israeli hegemony. Plans were drafted for military action against seven countries, starting with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. All but Iran have been destabilized and/or balkanized.
Even though the relationship between Obama and Netanyahu was often strained, Obama’s actual record in office makes him one of the most pro-Israel presidents since Harry S. Truman.
The scale of Israel’s barbarity in Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and its insatiable addiction to expansion and power forewarns Iran and other actors in the Middle East that they must be vigilant in their defense to survive.
Netanyahu’s jingoistic vision of Zionist Israeli supremacy has never changed. Ten years ago, he bluntly told an Israeli parliamentary committee that there could never be peace with the Palestinians: “I’m asked if we will forever live by the sword,” and I say “yes.”
Israel may not be visibly present at the nuclear negotiating table, its influence over the outcome is, however, palpable and discernible.
What Washington and Tel Aviv fail to understand is that they are dealing with a politically astute country, that deserves the respect it demands as a nation that has
resisted colonizers and colonization throughout its 5,000-year history in West Asia.
No amount of absurdities—American or Israeli—can change that reality.
Since my previous post referenced the renowned Lakota author Joseph Marshall III, it is with great sadness that I inform you of his passing into the spirit world on April 18. It is somewhat coincidental that he departed the day following my discussion of Crazy Horse. His literary works and historical insights have profoundly influenced my perspective. I frequently revisit his writings, particularly those concerning Crazy Horse, as I seek to make sense of the world, especially in times of great suffering. While our political ideologies may differ, his depictions of the last generation of free Lakotas is authentic. And I am very critical of the term “authentic” when applied to American Indian history.
As a historian, one encounters the necessity of engaging with library shelves containing volumes of U.S. apologia of various orientations concerning the theft of a continent and the associated genocide of its Indigenous peoples. A sense of frustration and predictability can often mark this experience. For example, the predominant narrative trajectory concerning Lakota historiography, as articulated by non-Lakotas, generally follows this pattern: initially, the portrayal depicts us as violent savages; subsequently, we are reframed as noble savages. Eventually, the representation culminates in depicting an archetypal image of American Indians: dwelling in tipis, donning headdresses, engaging in war cries, and riding bare-chested across expansive plains. The arrival of Kevin Costner’s Private Dunbar further popularized this image, leading to a widespread belief that others, if they tried hard enough, could become us.
Additionally, some assert that we were latecomers to our own site of creation—territory which we purportedly appropriated—aggressively displacing others until we finally got what was coming to us. (Imagine them telling Christians that Adam and Eve were invaders within the Garden of Eden.) Recently, a Finnish historian has endeavored to restore our rightful position in the historical narrative, concluding that we were imperialists in our own right, akin to the Comanches, competing against our expansionist counterpart, the United States of America. It is noteworthy that most of these authors have neither resided in Lakota Makoce, nor have they mastered the Lakota language, spoken to Lakota experts, or investigated the extensive archives of Lakota knowledge and textual materials. My academic qualifications in history required fluency in at least one foreign language, ideally corresponding with a regional specialization. Mastery of a foreign language is a prerequisite for conducting thorough archival research in a foreign nation. What credibility would we attribute to a Russian historian who lacked proficiency in the Russian language and did not undertake travel or study within Russia? (The answer may suggest otherwise, given the prevailing anti-Russian sentiments in the United States; however, the central argument remains intact.) So why give so much credibility to historians and writers who lack these credentials?
On the other hand, Joseph Marshall, or Joe as I called him, possessed these qualifications. He was a first-language Lakota speaker, and much of his referenced knowledge comes directly from the Lakota oral tradition. Having lived among and been closely related to many of the finest practitioners of Lakota oral history, he provides unique insights. For instance, The Journey of Crazy Horse includes no footnotes or non-Lakota references. Instead, Marshall lists numerous Oglala and Sicangu elders in the book’s sources section, his primary references. Several elders were just a generation away from when Crazy Horse walked the earth. I am unaware of any contemporary histories of the nineteenth century that rely so heavily on oral traditions as primary sources. Marshall exemplified the strength of Lakota knowledge. He was more than a historian; like the elders who served as his archives, he became a living memory for the Lakota people.
I first met him at an American Indian education conference in Oacoma, South Dakota, in 2010. Since that time, his books have occupied a prominent place on my shelves and have been included in many of my high school syllabi. A former student of mine, now an adult, once showed me that they still possess their well-worn copy of “ The Lakota Way, “ which I assigned in my Oceti Sakowin studies course years ago. I have gifted his writings to friends, family, and acquaintances more than any other author, owing to their unwavering commitment to portraying an unapologetic Lakota perspective.
Since the U.S.-backed Zionist genocide in Palestine, it has been hard to ignore the parallels between American Indians and Palestinians. But it’s one thing to pity the victims of genocidal war and quite another to try to understand why they continue to resist, despite facing enemies equipped with more technologically advanced weapons and a propensity for extreme violence. Marshall inspired me to write about Palestinian and Lakota resistance. In the analysis section of The Journey of Crazy Horse, trying to understand Crazy Horse’s spirit of total resistance, Marshall asks the reader to:
[T]hink of the emotional impact if suspicious and pushy people suddenly drove an armored troop carrier into your quiet suburban or rural neighborhood, deployed men with guns, made unreasonable demands that couldn’t be satisfied, and opened fire, killing and wounding your friends, neighbors, and relatives. Any[one] who witnessed such a horrific incident would be suspicious and distrustful of such intruders forever.
Palestinians don’t have to imagine this scenario. They are living it. Lakotas lived it, too. And that’s what Marshall’s books did to me. They humanized the Lakota warriors of the last free generation who did not live on reservations. They were deeply scarred and defined by the horrors they witnessed. Their terror and pain were their motivations for resistance; they were acts of self-defense and survival. And it became more than that. Their courage and skill to defeat their enemies turned them into legends, inspiring future generations. They broke the spell of inviolability that surrounds the colonizer. They tore him from his horse, just as Palestinians in sandals pulled him from his tank, forcing him to confront his mortality, reminding him that we may not be equals in this world, but we are all equals in death. They did this in the face of terrible danger, remaining steadfast and humble protectors while confronting their own shortcomings as human beings, as sometimes imperfect relatives and lovers.
I have observed this same spirit reflected in the eyes of Water Protectors and veterans of the Red Power Movement, aware that they may not live long enough to witness the results of their sacrifices. They embodied the spirit of Crazy Horse. Marshall conveyed it as a living memory for all future generations of the Lakota people and our allies, rather than as an idealistic fantasy of violence and adventurism. This unique essence of recognizing a higher power, or living for a greater purpose, has the potential to inspire ordinary individuals to achieve extraordinary feats. That’s what makes it powerful. It moves people, and, using their only possession—their life, people make history with it.
For that, we know Joe Marshall joins the ancestors. His gift to us was not stories about the best days of the Lakota Nation in the nineteenth century. His gift was that, if we embody the spirit of Crazy Horse, our best days are in front of us.
Sue Coe, Touchless Fascism, 2024. Courtesy the artist.
Preface: Emigre politics
When writers go into exile, I read somewhere, they discuss the politics of their former countries more than before they left. I have an image of that in my head – scruffy emigres huddled over coffee and schnapps in a smoke-filled café. Voices are raised, tables are pounded, and drinks are spilled, before a quiet settles on the group — the silence of displacement.
My writer friends here in Norwich are all British, and they don’t go in for fist pounding. Their take on American politics is mostly expressed in eyerolls and feigned shock. They always knew, they seem to be saying, there was something terribly the matter with the U.S; now it’s wrongs are laid bare. “You’re the American,” they say, “what do you think?” In the quiet that follows those conversations, I don’t feel displaced, just a little nauseous.
1. Fascism is embarrassing
The press and liberal politicians have responded with suitable alarm to the Trump administration’s attacks upon education, the environment, law, non-profits, immigrants, the economy (tariffs) and the courts. They have described violations of due process, and the threat of authoritarianism. They have predicted recession, inflation, or stagflation, and warned about the costs to the nation–material, intellectual, cultural-of the deportation or exclusion of immigrants.
Trump’s onslaught has been relentless, and no one is safe. If legal residents – immigrants and students – protected by the first amendment, are subject to deportation because of their speech, so are birthright or naturalized citizens. If law firms are punished for their selection of clients, no one can be confident of obtaining legal representation when they need it. If research scientists can have their funding cut for ignoring Trump administration priorities, then nobody can be sure public health and safety are protected; if non-profits are targeted for their charitable work, how many people will step up to fill the gaps left by a tattered social safety net?
Just before the 2024 election, the words fascist or Nazi were beginning to be used by Democratic politicians – including Joe Biden and Kamela Harris – to describe Trump. Those terms have now largely disappeared from public discourse. The savants say they were politically ineffective, turning off the very voters who most needed to be engaged. There’s no evidence to back up those claims. I think the real reason is different: the wolf at the door has taken up residence in our living rooms, and that fact is simply too shameful to acknowledge. A majority of American voters freely elected a fascist, an approbation even Hitler never received. What’s more, they elected a congress willing to disable itself to enable him. Who would want to admit such things?
2. Universal tariffs — a Hitlerian policy
Since inauguration, Trump has done everything he can to cement his power. That’s what dictators do. In Hitler’s time, the process was called Gleichschaltung, meaning stabilization or bringing into alignment. The Reichstag (parliament), the courts, businesses, education, law, unions, the police and military, and the organs of civil society, including charities and arts organizations, were all made to toe the Nazi line. Many did so willingly. Those that didn’t were steamrolled or destroyed.
Hitler accomplished Gleichschaltung in a matter of months. Trump has been in office just four months and has already managed to dismantle entire government agencies and subvert well-established consumer, investor, civil and environmental protections. He has disbanded U.S.A.I.D., the government’s largest provider of foreign aid, and brought to heel some of the nation’s biggest law firms and a few of its wealthiest universities. It’s a veritable Anschluss, and as with Austria, those who accede to the dictator will remain in his thrall for as long as he’s in power. Trump has been less successful so-far, however, in accomplishing what got him elected: improving the economy by reducing prices.
Trump’s economic policies appear at first glance conventional. By embracing the budget framework put forward by the U.S. House – which slashes about $1.5 trillion in spending — Trump plants himself firmly in the camp of austerity. That’s the policy of every Republican since Herbert Hoover. The theory behind it is roughly as follows: Cut spending to reduce the supply of money and lower inflation and interest rates. That makes it easier for businesses to borrow to invest in new enterprises and produce more goods and services. That in turn, increases hiring and raises salaries (because of competition for workers) and improves the general welfare of the nation.
In fact, austerity never works like that. Cuts in spending reduce both employment levels and the social safety net, disempowering workers, and emboldening businesses to lower salaries. Eventually, a lack of consumer demand idles factories and services, propelling the economy into recession. The crisis can be long or short, depending upon outside forces available of to stem the crisis – war or militarization, a major government stimulus, a large increase of credit, or a paradigm changing technology. Under monopoly capitalism, as Paul Sweezy wrote, “stagnation is the norm, good times the exception.” In recent years, the economy has been propped up by enormous profits in the financial sector, but little of that has trickled down to the mass of the population; thus, the continued anger and disillusionment of the American working-class, comprising 70% or more of the population. (The working class consists of those who live on salary alone, paycheck-to-paycheck, not investments).
By firing thousands of federal workers and shuttering whole agencies, Trump is a typical austerity-loving Republican. (That despite stuffing the White House with gold-plated bling.) His vow to cut taxes for the wealthy – even though that would vastly increase the deficit – is also standard Republican fare. It’s always the poor, not the rich, who are forced to accept austerity. But where Trump parts ways with Republican orthodoxy is his plan to achieve economic autarchy (self-sufficiency) through tariffs. His model here isn’t so much President McKinley, Trump’s favorite president, as Adolf Hitler, with whom he also has a relationship.
A tariff is a duty or tax on an imported good. They have been used for millennia, mostly for corrupt purposes, such as increasing the wealth of a ruler or raising funds for wars of conquest. As early as the 15th century, however, tariffs were used for more benign, or at least more rational reasons: import substitution. Successive English monarchs taxed imported woolens so that domestic producers could gain a bigger share of the market. Indeed, because of tariffs – plus a large navy — England ultimately gained global dominance in cloth manufacture and sale. The English Corn Laws (1815-46) too were a set of tariffs intended to protect British manufacture and trade. They prevented the importation of grain, raising the prices of domestic products and enriching landowners. However, they also increased food costs, exacerbating starvation in Ireland (under English control), and antagonizing manufacturers forced to pay their workers higher wages.
Some of Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs, April 2, 2025. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
The goal of Trump’s tariff program is something like Britain’s – empire building, or in this case, empire repair. American global dominance has been in decline for a generation, and China is now the world’s leading manufacturer (by far) and the leading trading nation. A closer parallel than imperial Britain, therefore, is Nazi Germany. When Hitler came to power in 1933, he faced an economic crisis. His country was deeply dependent upon imports – especially oil, rubber, animal feed and fertilizer – but lacked the export income to pay for them. In addition, Germany still owed significant war reparations to the United States — those to France and England had already been cancelled. Hitler’s policy therefore, devised by his economic minister Hjalmar Schacht, was to abrogate remaining reparations agreements, embrace tariffs to prioritize exports over imports, and pursue relative autarchy — “a selective policy of disengagement,” as Adam Tooze called it — with its chief trading partners, including the U.S. The roll out of this program was fraught with challenges, but it ultimately allowed the Nazi regime to rapidly re-arm while at the same time boosting the domestic economy. Germany achieved full employment by 1938 with the significant exception of Jews forced from their jobs by the repressive Nuremberg Laws. By 1940, labor shortages began to arise, quickly compensated by slave labor performed by Jews and war prisoners. In the end, of course, Hitler’s economy could not sustain such a massive war effort against the combined forces of the U.S. and US.S.R. and by the spring of 1945, it was decisively defeated.
Like Hitler, Trump is focused on disengaging from historical trading partners – Canada, Mexico, the EU, U.K., Japan, Soth Korea and China — and achieving relative autarchy. He wants to strengthen American imperialism, and expand the American Lebensraum to include Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal. His chief economic target is China, which he’s hit with tariffs as high as 145%, but every nation in the world (including non-nations, like the Heard and McDonald Islands, inhabited only by penguins) are subject to tariffs in an effort to reduce foreign dependency, increase domestic production, and raise money.
Tariffs of the kind currently implemented or proposed, make no economic sense and have no chance of either heading off stagnation or restoring lost dominance. If Trump wants to raise enough money from tariffs to cut or eliminate income taxes, he’s bound to fail since rates high enough to pay for U.S. government services and spending will quickly reduce imports, cutting off the very revenue tariffs are supposed to raise. If his goal is instead to use tariffs to foster domestic manufacturing (import substitution), he must fail since imports – raw materials, silicon chips, machine parts and exotic food items (such as avocados) – are essential to U.S. business expansion and consumer spending. China’s retaliatory threat to cut-off U.S. access to essential rare earth elements is one example of the necessity of imports.
Finally, the underlying premise that high tariffs always buttress American prosperity is fundamentally flawed. Consider the following thought experiment:
The Chinese government, in “an expression of love for the great American people”, decides to give to every American adult an electric car worth about $50,000. The U.S. government at first thinks this is a Trojan Horse, but after examining a thousand cars sent as a downpayment, discovers there are no booby-traps or listening devices. The American public rejoices. Car manufacturers and the U.A.W. are furious.
Question: What should the U.S. do?
Answer: Take the cars.
If the Chinese people want to dispense raw materials, capital and labor with a value of $50,000 – we’d be idiots to turn it down. The cars would increase the net worth (as well as mobility) of American adults, allowing them to buy other goods and services. They would stimulate the economy and greatly reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses. There would be a rush to build charging stations and electric generation to power them, and lots of scrap metal to make new steel. If some auto workers lose their jobs, they can be employed in industries juiced by the $1.25 trillion Chinese gift. The U.S. government can support workers with the transition.
Now suppose the Chinese only offered the value of one-half, one-third, or even just one-tenth of a car? The answer must be is the same – take the money. Turning down cheap Chinese and other imports is the equivalent of turning down the car, so long as the goods are sold at prices below the global, average necessary labor time required for their production. (For model calculations, please see Zhming Long, et al. Also Larry Summers.)
This hypothetical transfer of resources is not in fact, exceptional; it is the basis of Imperialism. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the expropriation of colonial resources and exploitation of people enriched the metropolitan powers, including the U.S. The difference today is that many, so-called “developing” countries self-exploit to establish domestic industries sufficient to move their populations out of extreme poverty. Moreover, they accept as payment for their goods dollars used to buy American products or U.S. Treasury bonds. China is the greatest example of this self-exploiting practice, but its willingness to continue is being tested right now. It may decide to simply accelerate existing plans to increase domestic consumption in pursuit of a long-term policy of “de-globalization” and “co-development.”
In the face Chinese push back, Trump’s protectionist and Hitlerian trade policy is ludicrous. His plans to impose further tariffs on computer chips and pharmaceuticals, or even charge nations to trade with the U.S will, if implemented, speed the coming recession, or deepen it when it arrives. The only plausible way to ameliorate the declining fortunes of the American working class are the ones that Trump and other Republicans (and most Democrats) have ruled out from the start: subsidize or nationalize industries key to a sustainable, green economy; restore high marginal tax rates, like those in effect from 1944-63; tax wealth to reduce inequality; support the growth of labor unions to ensure fair wages; clip the wings of the non-productive finance sector by imposing fees on stock trades; limit patent protection; and establish good, non-coercive trading relationships with other nations.
2. Trump aims to punish immigrants to validate his racism
Trump’s tariff policy discomfits allies and adversaries alike. His capriciousness – tariffs raised one day and lowered the next — is not a flaw in his system, it’s the purpose. By controlling with a word or a tweet the rise and fall of global markets, or a nation’s trade and monetary policies, Trump manifests his dreamed omnipotence, the product of a narcissism that’s Hitlerian in scale if not so far in impact. The pathology is not limited to the economic domain. It’s also apparent in immigration policy, the other issue that got him elected.
During the presidential campaign, Trump called immigrants from non-European countries murderers, rapists, diseased, vermin and blood poisoners, language borrowed from Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and other Nazis. He proposed arresting and expelling twenty million of them (even though there are only about 11 million undocumented workers in the U.S.) and building an archipelago of camps to facilitate the process.
Trump is not alone in his extremism. He’s supported by a vast organizational and personnel infrastructure that includes anti-immigrant think tanks, “English only” advocates (a policy recently advanced by executive order), and opponents of diversity and educational multiculturalism such as Christopher Rufo. Among Trump’s most committed individual allies, naturally, is his vice-president, former Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, who infamously claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating resident’s pets, and last week stated, prior to his visit to the Vatican, that the U.S. Conference of Bishops was settling “illegal immigrants” just to collect federal aid. (A rumor is growing that Vance killed the pope. I have no evidence to prove or disprove the claim.)
Many other prominent Republicans, including Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton and Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller have expressed similarly hateful views.
Miller in the past endorsed openly racist, online publications such as VDARE and American Renaissance and recently demanded “reparations” for all the damage done to U.S. families by “uncontrolled, illegal, mass immigration.”
Lately, Trump has moved away from Nazi-inspired, biological racist language to a rhetoric that focusses instead on public safety. He’s accused large numbers of Latin American immigrants of being members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, and the El Salvadorian gang MS-13. That was the pretext used to deport about 200 immigrants to a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador. Few if any of the deportees were afforded due process, and most are neither gang members nor in fact guilty of any crime. (Under federal law, being undocumented is a civil, not criminal offense.) The case of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Venezuelan legal immigrant, deported due to an “administrative error” according to the government, remains the focus of intense interest. Despite a Supreme Court judgement that the U.S. must “facilitate” his release, he remains in prison. Further deportations to El Salvador are currently blocked by a Supreme Court order.
In late March, work was begun on an immigrant detention center at Fort Bliss, in El Paso, Texas. It will hold about 8,000. (Biden previously housed an unknown number of unaccompanied migrant children at Fort Bliss.) The camp would be a model for about ten others at bases across the country from Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station near Buffalo, N.Y., to Hill Air Force Base in Utah. Assuming all are built – an unlikely prospect given the coordination and focus required — that would mean that 80,000 immigrants could be housed in camps, awaiting processing, a small fraction of the promised 20 million deportations.
In fact, Trump has so far detained and expelled fewer immigrants than Biden at the same point in his term. The reasons are both banal and programmatic. Trump fired most of the people at the Department of Homeland Security who knew what they were doing. But more important, Trump recognizes that any program of mass expulsions would be devastating to the American economy. At least 40% of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented; 31% of workers in the hospitality sector; and smaller but still large percentages in health care and construction.
Site Monitor, Fort Bliss, April 10, 2025. (Photo: Rose Thayer for Stars and Stripes (U.S. Department of Defense).
Another focus of racial and xenophobic bias is college students. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has expanded its scope to arrest legally resident, but foreign-born students. Many of them – around 1700 so far, but possibly many more — have been involved in pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel protests. Others have had their visas revoked for minor legal infractions, including speeding tickets, or for having been charged, but not convicted of misdemeanors. These students are not however immigrants at all; they are recipients of U.S. educational exports. Foreign-born students collectively add almost $45 billion to the U.S. economy and support almost 380,000 jobs, about ½ the impact of the U.S. auto industry. The improve the U.S. balance of trade.
The point of Trump’s detentions and expulsions is not to end immigration, or even significantly reduce its numbers. It’s to stigmatize immigrants and non-whites, thereby validating the national and racial superiority of the president, his allies and supporters. Still more broadly, it’s to affirm the naturalness and inevitability of a political, economic and social system – challenged by developing nations, allies and rivals — in which the United States occupies the center of the global order. By his actions on tariffs and immigration, Trump is inadvertently hastening the end of that dominance. For that we can thank him. But what will be the cost?
Puyé Ruins, northern New Mexico. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
“If we approach nature and the environment without [an] openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs. By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously.”
On the day Pope Francis released his encyclical on the fate of the Earth, I was struggling to climb a near-vertical cliff on the Parajito Plateau of northern New Mexico. My fingers gripped tightly to handholds notched into the rocks hundreds of years ago by Ancestral Puebloans, the anodyne phrase now used by modern anthropologists to describe the people once known as the Anasazi. The day was a scorcher and the volcanic rocks were so hot they blistered my hands and knees. Even my guide, Elijah, a young member of the Santa Clara Pueblo, confessed that the heat radiating off the basalt had made him feel faint, although perhaps he was simply trying to make me feel less like a weather wimp.
When we finally hurled ourselves over the rimrock to the top of the little mesa, the ruins of the old city of Puyé spread before us. Amid purple blooms of cholla cactus, piñon pines and sagebrush, two watchtowers rose above the narrow spine of the mesa top, guarding the crumbling walls of houses that once sheltered more than 1,500 people. I was immediately struck by the defensive nature of the site: an acropolis set high above the corn, squash and bean fields in the valley below; a city fortified against the inevitable outbreaks of turbulence and violence unleashed by periods of prolonged scarcity.
The ground sparkled with potsherds, the shattered remnants of exquisitely crafted bowls and jars, all featuring dazzling polychromatic glazes. Some had been used to haul water up the cliffs of the mesa, an arduous and risky daily ordeal that surely would only have been undertaken during a time of extreme environmental and cultural stress. How did the people end up here? Where did they come from? What were they fleeing?
“They came here after the lights went out at Chaco,” Elijah tells me. He’s referring to the great houses of Chaco Canyon, now besieged by big oil. Chaco, the imperial city of the Anasazi, was ruled for four hundred years by a stern hierarchy of astronomer-priests until it was swiftly abandoned around 1250 AD.
“Why did they leave?” I asked.
“Something bad happened after the waters ran out.” He won’t go any further and I don’t press him.
Cliff dwelling, Puyé, northern New Mexico. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
The ruins of Puyé, now part of the Santa Clara Pueblo, sit in the blue shadow of the Jemez Mountains. A few miles to the north, in the stark labs of Los Alamos, scientists are still at work calculating the dark equations of global destruction down to the last decimal point.
This magnificent complex of towers, multi-story dwellings, plazas, granaries, kivas and cave dwellings was itself abandoned suddenly around 1500. Its Tewa-speaking residents moved off the cliffs and mesas to the flatlands along the Rio Grande ten miles to the east, near the site of the current Santa Clara (St. Clair) Pueblo. A few decades later, they would encounter an invading force beyond their worst nightmare: Coronado and his metal-plated conquistadors.
Again, it was a prolonged drought that forced the deeply egalitarian people of Puyé — the place where the rabbits gather — from their mesa-top fortress. “The elders say that the people knew it was time to move when they saw the black bears leaving the canyon,” Elijah told me.
Elijah is a descendant of one of the great heroes of Santa Clara Pueblo: Domingo Naranjo, a leader of the one true American Revolution, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, which drove the Spanish out of New Mexico. Naranjo was half-Tewa and half-black, the son of an escaped slave of the Spanish. That glorious rebellion largely targeted the brutal policies of the Franciscan missionaries, who had tortured, enslaved and butchered the native people of the Rio Grande Valley for nearly 100 years. As the Spanish friars fled, Naranjo supervised the razing of the Church the Franciscans had erected — using slave labor – in the plaza of Santa Clara Pueblo.
Now the hope of the world may reside in the persuasive powers of a Franciscan, the Hippie Pope, whose Druidic encyclical, Laudato Si’, reads like a tract from the Deep Ecology movement of the 1980s, only more lucidly and urgently written. Pope Francis depicts the ecological commons of the planet being sacrificed for a “throwaway culture” that is driven by a deranged economic system whose only goal is “quick and easy profit.” As the supreme baptizer, Francis places a special emphasis on the planet’s imperiled waters, both the dwindling reserves of freshwater and the inexorable rise of acidic oceans, heading like a slow-motion tsunami toward a coast near you.
Climate change has gone metastatic and we are all weather wimps under the new dispensation. Consider that Hell on Earth: Phoenix, Arizona, a city whose water greed has breached any rational limit. Its 1.5 million residents, neatly arranged in spiraling cul-de-sacs, meekly await a reckoning with the Great Thirst, as if Dante himself had supervised the zoning plans. The Phoenix of the future seems destined to resemble the ruins of Chaco, with crappier architecture.
Puyé Cliffs, looking across the Rio Grande. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
I am writing this column in the basement of our house in Oregon City, which offers only slight relief from the oppressive heat outside. The temperature has topped 100 degrees again. It hasn’t rained in 40 days and 40 nights. We are reaching the end of something. Perhaps it has already occurred. Even non-believers are left to heed the warnings of the Pope and follow the example of the bears of the Jemez.
Yet now there is no hidden refuge to move toward. There is only a final movement left to build, a global rebellion against the forces of greed and extinction. One way or another, it will either be a long time coming or a long time gone.
As President Donald Trump’s second term is about to hit the wall of 100 days, one critique has grown louder: his inconsistency. Critics point to his sudden reversals, contradictory pronouncements, and policies that shift as quickly as his moods. In an age of social media and 24-hour news cycles, these whiplash decisions are magnified—and often amplified. The result is a presidency that feels deeply unmoored, erratic, and impulsive. But is Trump truly the most inconsistent president in modern history? Or is the chaos simply louder now?
History offers a few instructive parallels. And while no two presidents are the same, Trump’s volatility does echo the struggles of past leaders whose inconsistent or indecisive styles defined—and in some cases derailed—their presidencies.
Throughout his first term, Trump’s approach to policy could best be described as transactional. He pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, only to later suggest rejoining it. He simultaneously praised and criticized NATO. One day he was threatening to “totally destroy North Korea,” the next he was praising Kim Jong-un’s leadership. This pattern wasn’t limited to foreign policy. On COVID-19, he vacillated between downplaying its danger and declaring a national emergency—sometimes in the same week.
In his second term, the trend hasn’t changed. Trump has imposed massive and broad tariffs, only to lift them days later, reimpose them, lift, and so on. He has promised mass deportations while signaling support for undocumented workers in politically useful industries. His stance on tech regulation oscillates between government intervention and libertarian restraint. For critics, the result is confusion. For supporters, it’s “strategy”.
But while we find ourselves so deeply immersed, every single day, in all things Trump, it’s worth stepping back for a second and noting that this governing style is not without precedent.
Andrew Johnson, who ascended to the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, was similarly unpredictable. Though he was a Democrat on a Republican ticket, many hoped Johnson could help reunite the country after the Civil War. Instead, his presidency devolved into a combative and contradictory mess. He opposed Reconstruction, vetoed civil rights legislation, and clashed violently with Congress—often simply because he could.
From my recollection of college history decades ago, Johnson’s inconsistencies were personal as much as they were political—just like Trump, especially Trump volume 2. To me, both men are deeply led by their own egos—even to the point where not putting your ego into some heart-shaped box will spell almost certain destruction.
Johnson’s refusal to build coalitions or stick to a coherent policy path led to paralysis—and impeachment. Though he survived removal by a single Senate vote, his presidency is widely considered a cautionary tale in leadership undone by personal volatility.
Another instructive comparison is Jimmy Carter. Where Johnson and Trump governed from their gut, Carter was a technocrat, often paralyzed by his own desire to do the right thing. But that didn’t translate into clarity. His foreign policy swung between a moral commitment to human rights and a pragmatic embrace of problematic allies. On energy, he made strong public pronouncements but failed to unify his party around a plan. And during the Iran hostage crisis, his inability to commit to a clear strategy left Americans with a sense that he had lost control.
I remember studying Carter in real time and being struck by his overarching decency. He seemed, at least to me, as someone beautifully fit for the American presidency in theory and hideously so in practice. He was indecisive, like Trump, but this was exacerbated by something completely absent from the Trump persona—deep weakness.
When we look at all of this holistically, the key difference with Trump at least appears to be that his inconsistency isn’t just incidental—it’s wildly performative. He doesn’t hide his unpredictability; he champions it. “I like to be unpredictable,” he has boasted more than once, framing his policy reversals as strategic misdirection, a way of keeping allies, enemies, and the media guessing.
That may serve him in the political arena, but in government, inconsistency has a cost. Foreign allies don’t know whether American promises will last. Government agencies can’t implement policies that change week to week. Business leaders, hungry for regulatory clarity, are left in limbo. And citizens lose faith that their leaders are working with a steady hand. All we need to do is look at today’s news—China refuting Trump’s claim that talks are well underway to again and hopefully finally remove absurdly punitive tariffs between the nations.
There is, of course, a difference between flexibility and flippancy. Great presidents adapt. They change course when new facts demand it. But they do so with purpose, signaling to the nation and the world that leadership means more than instinct. It means coherence.
That’s where Trump’s approach falters. His inconsistency isn’t just about policy—it’s about process. There is often no clear deliberation, no evident consultation with experts, no structured roll-out. A policy may be announced on Monday, walked back on Tuesday, and forgotten by Friday. This instability erodes credibility—not just for Trump, but for the entire government.
Supporters argue that this chaos is intentional—that Trump is a disruptor breaking old norms. They see his reversals not as failures but as recalibrations in real time. But disruption, when not grounded in vision, becomes noise. And governing by impulse is not the same as leading with intent.
Leadership requires clarity. Allies need to trust in American constancy. Citizens need to believe their president governs with something more enduring than impulse. Trump’s challenge is that he blends the stubborn populism of Andrew Johnson with the managerial disarray of Jimmy Carter, in an era where every misstep is immediately broadcast—and archived forever.
Whether this second Trump term results in transformative policy or a deepening of dysfunction will depend not just on what Trump chooses to do, but whether he can ever truly decide what he stands for. History has not been kind to presidents who flail. It remembers those who led.
And leadership, in the end, is not about keeping people guessing. It’s about giving them something to believe in.
It is believed that Crazy Horse placed this signature on a bluff near Ash Creek just before the Battle of Greasy Grass in 1876. The image depicts a snake, representing the enemy or the United States, pursuing a horse with a lightning bolt on its flank, the signature of Crazy Horse.
This is the first of several posts about Tasunka Witko, reflecting on Joseph Marshall III’s book, The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History. It is the most exemplary biography of Tasunka Witko. The narrative is presented from the perspective of the Lakota people and is derived from the oral histories of Lakota elders.
In recent months, I have focused on reexamining Lakota texts and influential figures who have significantly impacted my perspective. A recent podcast interview with Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa prompted me to revisit one of the most mythologized and often misunderstood leaders of Lakota resistance, Tasunka Witko—commonly referred to as “His Horse Is Crazy” or simply “Crazy Horse.”
The killing of Palestinian resistance leader Yahya Sinwar, as noted by Susan, bore similarities to historical figures like the Lakota war leader Tasunka Witko, known as Crazy Horse to his enemies. She reflected on how Sinwar endured days without food, continuously engaging in combat until his demise, which occurred after he launched grenades at enemy soldiers. In an act of ultimate defiance, he also threw a stick at a surveillance drone that recorded his final moments before a tank shell blew up the building, taking him with it.
Sinwar’s last days were marked by hardship; he did not seek refuge in a tunnel or remain surrounded by captives, as suggested by his adversaries. Instead, he faced his enemies directly, sometimes yards away. This sharply contrasts with the leaders of the opposing forces, who sought to eliminate him, as they have entrenched themselves in underground bunkers, shielded by the protective reach of the United States.
Susan mentioned that Crazy Horse also fasted, receiving spiritual guidance and a vision that contributed to the success of his battlefield exploits. He led his men not from the safety of the rear but by engaging the enemy, favoring his war club in close combat. However, their deaths differ: Sinwar was killed by an unknown enemy, while Crazy Horse fell to a fellow Lakota after he had previously surrendered.
What Sinwar and Crazy Horse hold most in common is their spirit of resistance as anti-colonial fighters, equally villainized and mystified by the forces that sought their annihilation. Their stature as myths reveals more about their colonizer than about their humanity. The culture of genocide makes a double move. While it demonizes the people it seeks to destroy as primitive savages, it also attributes superhuman powers to them.
The portrayals of brutality and depictions of merciless violence obscure the motives for resistance, thereby attempting to frame genocide as self-defense and a rational response to an irrational opponent. Anti-colonial resistance gets framed as led by “fundamentalists,” “hostiles,” “extremists,” or “terrorists” — that is, in other words, people who react and respond to their conditions in irrational or extreme ways beyond the bounds of what is considered “civilized.” This purposefully obscures the material and objective conditions of resistance. At the same time, the colonizer projects invulnerability and superiority. Starving Lakotas and Palestinians, without the weaponry and material wealth of their opponents, still represent an existential threat. Why? Because they continue to draw breath. Their heartbeats are constant reminders of the precarity of the settler project.
This analogy may resonate more with some in the context of Palestine. However, if Lakota people are not still viewed as a threat, why do we see such high levels of repression within our communities? There is evident political repression against Water Protectors. A slew of anti-protest and critical infrastructure laws have progressed through state legislatures, criminalizing Indigenous dissent in the aftermath of the 2016 Standing Rock movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Natali Sergovia, the executive director of the Water Protector Legal Collective, referred to the recent lawsuit against Greenpeace as a “proxy war” against Indigenous sovereignty. The less evident is the continued criminalization and punishment of ostensibly “non-political” acts.
It’s not just the high rates of incarceration among and police violence against Lakotas — and American Indian people, in general — but also the extremely low life expectancy. For example, 58 is the median life expectancy of American Indians from my home state, South Dakota, more than two decades shorter than that of white people. Such a severe disparity in other parts of the world might justify calls for “regime change” or “humanitarian intervention.” In our system, the overseers of such immiseration, like former South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, are promoted to the highest levels of government, as head of the Department of Homeland Security. We can link these deaths to the conditions colonialism still imposes despite having moved away from industrial extermination and slaughter yet profoundly connected to the current regime of repression against pro-Palestinian students and university faculty and the intensified war against migrants.
This structural elimination of Lakota people today is directly linked to the same war waged against Crazy Horse during his day. This war has expanded with the U.S. empire and its homicidal alliance with zionism.
Crazy Horse may not have pursued the warrior’s path had the United States not invaded his homelands. He might have followed his father’s path as a spiritual leader and healer. Yet, there is something material and profound about the supposed supernatural powers received from his vision that guided his path as a resistance leader. In that dream, enemy bullets and arrows rained down Crazy Horse but were unable to harm him while he charged mounted on a horse. But the hands of his own people rose from behind him, grabbing and pulling him down.
The dream apparently granted him immunity from the weapons of his enemies but not from those of his own people. In today’s parlance, we might see Crazy Horse’s dream as envisioning the counterinsurgency campaign against the Lakotas. U.S. military leaders and Indian agents fomented and exploited divisions within Lakota society after imposing conditions of starvation, scarcity, and deprivation. Colonization wasn’t just an external enterprise that had to be forced upon recalcitrant Lakotas; it was internalized, turning relatives against each other.
Yahya Sinwar sitting in a chair atop the ruins of his home.
Yahya Sinwar sitting in a chair in the final moments before being killed.
Yahya Sinwar’s enemies used the images of his final moments to diminish his stature. It had the opposite effect. Equally iconic were the images of him smiling defiantly while sitting in an upholstered chair atop the rubble of his home, which had been bombed by Zionists, as well as his final moments spent in the chair, hurling a stick in a last act of resistance. A similar case could be made about the killing of Crazy Horse. He was one of the few Lakota leaders who never signed a treaty. (Tatatanka Iyotake, Sitting Bull, had also never signed a treaty and was also killed at the hands of his own people.)
Assassinations are meant to serve as lessons for those choosing the path of resistance. They are meant to make mortal ideas that are immortal and cannot be killed. The killing of Crazy Horse may not have inspired armed resistance right away. His life, nonetheless, has served as a model of total resistance and embodying the virtues of Lakol Wicoun, the Lakota way of life, that inspired generations of Lakotas and allies since. It is no coincidence that “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse” became the rallying cry of the American Indian Movement when it took up arms in defense of Lakota homelands and declared independence from the United States in 1973.
Crazy Horse’s body was destroyed, but his spirit lives on.
This piece first appeared on Nick Estes’s Substack, Red Scare, you can subscribe here.
On 27 March 2025, President Donald Trump did one of his favorite things: he issued an Executive Order (EO). He is drawn to issue these proclamations because doing so reinforces his sense of “self-importance, control and perceived superiority, which, in turn, are features of [his] narcissistic personality.”
Past Trump EOs have resulted in real time destruction such as depriving millions of people of their livelihood, damage to the environment, destruction of parts of the national health grid, etc. All of those proclamations ate away at the American quality of life, while allegedly preparing the nation for revival of past greatness. How such national masochism is supposed to make the USA “great again” is a mystery only Donald Trump seems capable of unraveling. Nonetheless, while these past EOs constituted an official blitzkrieg on the present, they lacked that special Orwellian commitment to bending future generations to the will of our present empowered narcissist.
However, now we have the 27 March EO. Why is it different?
Entitled, “Restoring Truth and sanity to American History” this EO seeks to assure control of future American perceptions by putting a stop to any reexamination of the nation’s aging batch of “justification myths”.* Hence, quoting this most recent EO: “Section 1. Purpose and Policy. Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort torewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” My italics.
It is fascinating to witness Donald Trump’s ability to project onto his opponents pretty much what he himself is doing or intends to do. For instance, he is asserting that revision (based on historical evidence) of an idealized, self-glorifying U.S. history is creating a “distortednarrative.” When, in his opinion, someone else is allegedly “replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative” it is a monstrous fault, maybe even a crime. When Trump himself does this same thing, it is heroically redemptive.
What is going on here?
First of all, we should realize that it is quite possible to propagandize a population into believing that a foundation myth or justifications myths are historically factual. It is done by taking as nearly total control of a national narrative as is possible. The Chinese have done this, the Russians did it for nearly a hundred years, believing Christian, Muslims, Hindus have done this relative to their religions. Jews of the Zionist persuasion have done it when it comes to Israel. Finally, a large subset of Americans has bought into their nation’s idealized myths as fact. Yet, now we find that, in the case of the USA, there has been substantial slippage. Where did that come from?
It has been much more than a decade that a large number of historians of U.S. history have been examining America’s various justification myths. This effort has been largely motivated by taking seriously the experience of America’s non-white minorities and colonized people. As a result, such claims as the USA represents to the world an “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness” has been called into question. We are thus presented with the choice: (1) To take seriously the work of hundreds of historians over decades exploring such subjects of American history as slavery; a persistent post-Civil War practice of deep-seeded racial bigotry resulting in segregation and persecution; the destruction of the American Indians; the imperial adventures of the 19th and 20th centuries, and so on. (2) Or, accept Trump’s claim, made in his March EO, of America’s “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty …” as a statement of “objective fact.” Both positions cannot be simultaneously true.
It is option (1) representing an effort to introduce the stories of those long excluded from American history that Trump finds “sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.” Putting the cart before the horse, he charges that the result of “the widespread effort to rewrite history also deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame. It seems to me that this is the equivalent of accusing the little fellow who proclaimed “the emperor has no clothes” of pornography.
There is no doubt about it, Donald Trump and those pushing this message have taken a stand that belief in a simplistic, ethically skewed idealization of national history is the only acceptable foundation of patriotism. No doubt millions of patriots in hundreds of other countries take the same stand. But Trump seems to want to go further suggesting that to challenge the myth is itself undermining truth. That might sound like a contradiction based on denial and confusion—but it is obviously a confusion President Trump has taken to heart.
Looking beyond the Tapestry
Why would Trump and his supporters, including some very well educated people: (1) insist that myth is really “objective truth.” (2) That a second look at the historical record will only distort the truth. Specifically, (3) why characterize that second look as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or an otherwise irredeemably flawed”? This is what is being said in recent attacks on the Smithsonian Institution, The National Museum of African American History and Culture, and American Women’s History Museum. Again, quoting from the 27 MarchEO:
“Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology. This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive. For example, an exhibit representing that “societies including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement” …. The National Museum of African American History and Culture has proclaimed that “hard work,” “individualism,” and “the nuclear family” are aspects of “White culture.” The forthcoming Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum plans on celebrating the exploits of male athletes participating in women’s sports.”
The Trump administration attack on the Smithsonian and other federal institutions is a good example of Confirmation Bias—the habit of selecting what evidence supports your point of view and ignoring or dismissing all the rest. In our case this use of confirmation bias facilitates turning the Smithsonian and other institutions into shrines—like so many Revolutionary and Civil War battlefields.
Such an effort implies real fear of a balanced view. More specifically, what these attacks suggest is that Trump and his backers are seriously afraid of the “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive” facts that happen to be truthful parts of American history. They refuse to countenance any program of revision based on evidence. Why? Perhaps because these facts represent aspects of history that are incompatible with the claim that we can “MAGA” our way to recovering alleged past glory. As such, historical revision is seen not just as an attack on the national image, but what Trump imagines to be the collective ego of the white America. Denial is the only alternative.
The Fact of Prevailing Ignorance
It is hard to believe that any broadly educated American would believe Trump’s doublespeak—and, indeed, maybe most such people would not. But one must realize just how few folks are broadly educated, and how the majority of even college graduates are narrowly educated because their schooling has been compartmentalized into occupational specialties. That means that unless they have taken it upon themselves to supplement their education with broad reading, your typical engineer, accountant, businessperson, as well as carpenter, plumber, electrician, etc. will know no more about the historical background of current events than he or she reads in the newspaper. And, newspapers are not well known for presenting objective truth or, for that matter, even paying for fact-checkers.
You can carry this theme of compartmentalization further. A society like the U.S. has always been and remains racially segregated. That means the subset of the white population that voted for and continues to support Trump has no sociological context for understanding why charges of “institutional racism” or the notions of “woke culture” would make sense to socially aware African Americans. Nor can they historically understand the essential role of immigrants in the history and economy of the U.S. Existing in what essentially has long been a self-imposed ethnic ghetto, these white Americans have been easily manipulated. This, in turn, has allowed the present government to summarily shut down every federally funded Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) program in the country.
The Tale’s Present Consequences
First, the broad attack on DEI, followed up by the near erasure of public recognition of historical events such as the Underground Railroad during the Civil War, the deletion of photographic records of the contributions of American Indians during World War II, and others constitutes no less than a denial that non-white Americans have any role in the nation’s history except as well-treated supplicants.
Second, once you publicly assert such a mythologized version of your own history as the unassailable, you will be forced to continuously lie to support it. In other words, once you set foot down that path you will be forced to increasingly rely on official censorship and propaganda to maintain the unreal image. Simultaneously, you must claim that any attempt at revision using evidence based research is itself an attempt at distortion. This is a complicated maneuver, even for someone as devious as Trump, and can only be maintained through denial and sustained ignorance.
Third, there is no nation on the planet whose actual history is beyond sin and guilt. The only way you can create that image is by turning history into a fairy tale. Strangely, as far as one can tell, President Trump constantly seeks to present his own history/biography in just this fashion. Now he seeks to do the same with the United States—perhaps as part of a narcissistic process to make the country conform to the notion that,history is just what President Trump says it is. And, if you contest that claim, you must be some sort of traitor.
* Justification myths are like foundation myths which, usually growing up around a few actual events, set in place a self-glorifying narrative to explain the nation’s founding, and then, periodically, enhance the narrative with compatible myths justifying subsequent national actions.
Photograph Source: Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies – Public Domain
While the mainstream media was copiously tracing the physical and mental decline of President Joe Biden during the presidential campaign of 2024, Donald Trump’s decline was largely ignored or downplayed. The media seemed obliged to track Biden’s every move and stumble. Conversely, the media seemed obliged to ignore the worst of Trump’s faltering executive decision-making, but—even worse—believed it was their duty to make Trump’s irrational utterances appear to be rational.
There are already obvious political differences between the first term Trump and the second term Trump, but the cognitive decline of the Donald cannot be explained solely by the fact that there were a few rational advisers in the White House the first time around, and simply no competent advisors or leaders on hand for the second term. Economic advisers, such as Gary Cohn and Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin, played a very important moderating role in the first term. The three and four-star generals in the first term were a particular surprise, doing their best to calm the roiled waters of the White House and the roiled behavior of the president himself.
In the second term, such economic players as Secretary of Commerce Howard Luttnick and Peter Navarro, are making things worse and making decision making more capricious and random. It’s safe to say that there isn’t one competent player in Trump’s inner circle, and falsely-labeled moderates such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio will find their reputations soiled by their experiences in toadying to the president. The moderate generals of the first term (Generals Kelley, Milley, and McMasters) have been replaced by an incompetent and unqualified secretary of defense who has conducted a quiet purge of the senior ranks and the Judge Advocate Generals that the media has played down.
An ironic example of the huge differences between Trump I and Trump II is the different handling of deportation cases that dominated Trump’s first term and the early weeks of his second term. Seven years ago, for example, an Iraqi immigrant who had been living in the United States for nearly 25 years, was mistakenly swept up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and deported to Iraq in violation of a court order. The Trump administration soon realized that a serious error had been made, and that led to a month-long odyssey to track down and retrieve a man who never should have been deported in the first place.
The case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia has followed a far different pattern. Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi falsely refer to Abrego Garcia as being a member of the violent MS-13 gang, although he has never been charged with being in a gang and a government lawyer even acknowledged his deportation was an error. The lawyer was fired because of his honesty.
But the total unwillingness to work to bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States differs from efforts of the leaders of Trump’s first term, when ICE immediately and affirmatively went to the court to acknowledge that it had violated the Court’s orders. There was coordination between the U.S. Embassy in Iraq and the Iraqi government. The government itself conceded that the Iraqi immigrant had been removed to Iraq despite the court order. Several months later, the Iraqi immigrant was tracked down and returned to the United States.
In the current confrontation, Trump and his closest aides (Miller, Bondi, Homan) are ignoring the decisions of the federal and district courts, even the Supreme Court, to ensure that Abrego Garcia remains in notorious prisons in El Salvador, where he faces indefinite lockup. They are playing a game with the Supreme Court, focusing on the Court’s use of the word “facilitate” to say that they can’t do that because he’s out of U.S. control.
In any event, the intransigence of the Trump administration ignored the courts demands for “facilitating” the return of Abrego Garcia; providing “regular updates” on the steps that have been taken; and halting the deportation proceedings. The administration is challenging the constitution’s demands for due process, and the checks and balances that accompany the separation of powers.
Trump has called Senator Chris Van Hollen a “fool” and a “grandstander” for meeting with Abrego Garcia last week in El Salvador. El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, who has received $6 million from the Trump administration to keep the deportees in the notorious Cecot prison, also ridiculed Van Hollen’s meeting with ugly postings on X to match the mendacious postings of Donald Trump. Bukele has used a two-year state of emergency to reduce crime and violence in El Salvador at the expense of democracy and civil liberties that no longer exist.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has temporarily blocked the government’s removal of an additional 30 Venezuelan men held in Texas under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The vote was 7-2, with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito predictably dissenting. The decision on Saturday follows an astounding array of Trump’s unconstitutional actions, including the elimination of federal agencies created by statute; the refusal to spend federal funds allocated by federal law; the firing of those working in the executive branch; and the elimination of birthright citizenship.
No two events demonstrate the meanness and mendacity of the Trump presidency more than the 2025 meetings in the Oval Office between Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky and between Trump and Bukele. Trump’s deceitful condemnation of Zelensky in February for starting the war with Russia (“You should have never started it.”), and the grotesque spectacle between Trump and Bukele exuding smug impunity over the illegal deportation of Abrego Garcia to the notorious Cecot mega-prison. U.S. citizens had never before witnessed such abject cruelty and heartlessness from their commander-in-chief.
Street art in Venezuela, depicting Uncle Sam and accusing the U.S. government of imperialism. Photograph Source: Erik Cleves Kristensen – CC BY 2.0
Nobody is complaining anymore about Latin America and the Caribbean being neglected by the hegemon to the north. The Trump administration is contending with it on multiple fronts: prioritizing “massive deportations,” halting the “flood of drugs,” combatting “threats to US security,” and stopping other countries from “ripping us off” in trade. The over 200-year-old Monroe Doctrine is alive and on steroids.
But has Washington taken a sharp right turn, qualitatively departing from past practices, or simply intensified an already manifest imperial trajectory? And, from a south-of-the-border perspective, to what extent are the perceived problems “made in the USA”?
Externalization of problems
The view from Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is that the Yankees have a problem; they project their issues onto their southern neighbors. An extreme example is Barack Obama’s baseless declaration in 2015 of a “national emergency” – subsequently reaffirmed by each successive president – because of the “unusual and extraordinary threat” posed by Venezuela.
From Washington’s imperial perspective, problems are seen as coming from the south with the US as the victim when, as in the case of Venezuela’s national security, reality is inverted.
Another case in point: migration is seen as a supply-side conundrum; “they” are “invading us.” In practice, deliberate past US policy (Trump has largely ended these practices) encouraged migration from Venezuela, Nicaragua, and especially Cuba to weaken their governments.
More to the point, as has been admitted by some of the perpetrators, the main driver for migrants to leave their homes and face great risks in transit are not pull factors, such as a purported love of “our democracy,” but push factors. These range from capitalist exploitation of Central America’s Northern Triangle to the impoverishment caused by US unilateral coercive measures in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
As for drugs, trenchantly pointed out by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to her US counterpart, the US itself harbors cartels, is the largest narcotic consumer market, exports the majority of armaments used by drug barons and hosts money laundering banks.
Rather than “ripping off” Uncle Sam in trade, the LAC region runs lopsided deficits in service industries, a trade benefit conveniently ignored when Trump’s tariffs were calculated. US firms also benefit from LAC as a low-cost source of inputs and assembly for their supply chains. The imperialist narrative conveniently omits crediting its access to strategic resources at favorable terms and the dominance of US firms and dollar-based finance. Various trade agreements, which Trump treats as giveaways, in practice favor US corporations. Unequal exchange is established as a key factor in underdevelopment of the LAC region, despite Trump’s assertion of the opposite.
Finally, gang violence is another US export: literally so in the case of the notorious Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 gangs which originated in Los Angeles and whose members were deported by US authorities to El Salvador.
Migration becomes “invasion”
Biden’s ambivalence on migration, tightening aspects of border controls but encouraging more than half a million Latinos to enter the US via “humanitarian parole,” gave Trump an opening. He sold his working class base the notion that migrants were not just taking US jobs but were “criminals.” His populist argument appears to side with US workers, but doesn’t impact the corporate elites who support him.
In fact, deportations have not increased, but are now much higher profile and overtly political. So Venezuelans are arbitrarily characterized as gang members and sent to prison in El Salvador. Deportations to other countries have involved waving the big stick: supposed “allies,” Costa Rica and Panama, have even been obliged to accept asylum seekers from elsewhere, rejected and abandoned by Washington.
The “war on drugs” risks becoming a literal war
Trump’s anti-drug policy has maintained a decades-long focus on supply-side enforcement with a renewed emphasis on deploying military assets to attack cartels and interdict drug shipments.
What has distinguished his approach is not so much the policy itself, but the blunt and often unilateral manner in which it is being implemented. Support is overtly conditioned on political alignment with Washington’s objectives.
So troops are deployed on the southern border and Mexico’s cartels are threatened with drone attacks, with no promise to consult Mexican authorities. Alleged members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang are treated as terrorists, and wartime legislation is deployed against them as supposed agents of a narco-terrorist state.
Hemispheric security
The focus of current US policy in the region is countering Chinese influence, particularly Beijing’s investments in infrastructure, telecommunications, and energy. “The expanding role of the Chinese Communist Party in the Western Hemisphere,” Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio complains, “threatens US interests.”
Yet while the US approaches geopolitics as a “zero-sum game” in which its military dominance is a priority, China professes to follow the principles of “equality and mutual benefit,” offering carrots rather than waving a stick.
China’s economic penetration has been spectacular, making it the region’s second largest trading partner and the first in South America itself. However, Trump has succeeded in forcing Panama to leave China’s Belt and Road Initiative, while Brazil and Mexico, the region’s two largest economies have yet to join, presumably due to US pressure. In Peru, users of a major port developed by China may be threatened by special tariffs.
The US International Development Finance Corporation’s budget is slated to double. According to Foreign Policy, it should be strengthened still further to combat China’s influence. However, China has an enormous head start, and the US will struggle to catch up, especially as its other development agency, USAID, has had its budget decimated.
Militarily, Trump has increased the visibility and scope of US security operations in the region. Joint exercises, port calls, and programs like the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative continue to be ramped up. While Latin American leaders at April’s CELAC summit called for the region to be a “zone of peace,” Trump threatens war:
+ Panama has been strong-armed into accepting a greater US military presence, in what has been dubbed a camouflaged invasion.
+ Ecuador’s President Noboa is accepting US military help as well as the private mercenaries of Blackwater’s Erik Prince, in his own “war” against gang violence.
+ Marco Rubio has warned Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro that “we have a big navy, and it can get almost anywhere,” threatening to deploy forces in neighboring Guyana.
NATO’s presence in the region has been growing with Colombia already a “partner” and Argentina working to become one. The latter’s collaboration is vital to the West’s military role in the South Atlantic. Its president Milei has become tellingly ambivalent about his country’s claim to the British-occupied Malvinas islands, which are key to strategic dominance.
War by other means – tariffs and sanctions
Washington’s enormous machinery of unilateral coercive measures (aka “sanctions”), now total 15,373 (of which over 5,000 were imposed in Trump’s first term). The US blockade of Cuba has been tightened, and it is even attempting to throttle Cuba’s extraordinarily effective and popular medical missions abroad. Rubio issued an ominous warning: “The moment of truth is arriving, Cuba is literally collapsing.”
Sanctions against Venezuela have also been strengthened, despite Trump initially hinting at a more collaborative approach. Nicaragua has so far evaded new sanctions, but is threatened both with exclusion from the regional trade agreement (CAFTA) which benefits its exports, and with the loss of its remaining multilateral source of development finance.
The region escaped relatively lightly from Trump’s “Liberation Day” declarations, with a new, minimum 10 percent tariff. Mexico still faces heavy tariff barriers and higher “reciprocal” tariffs on some other LAC countries – Guyana, Venezuela and Nicaragua – have been postponed until July.
Prospects for LAC unity or sowing seeds in the sea
Fragmentation of regional unity has been a long-standing US policy objective. Trump, in particular, openly disdains multilateralism, which is really another term for opposition to US imperialism.
Left-leaning electoral victories in Mexico (2018), Chile and Honduras (2021), and Colombia and Brazil (2022) have bolstered regional unity. This so-called Pink Tide added to the successes and leadership of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela and their respective socialist revolutions.
But upcoming elections in Chile and Honduras (November), and Colombia and Brazil (both 2026) could significantly reverse those gains. Continuation of leftist rule in Bolivia after this coming August’s election looks dim, given bitter splits in its ranks. In a reportedly fraudulent election in Ecuador, the leftist challenge to the incumbent Noboa appears to have failed. However, current rightist hegemony in Peru’s 2026 election could be challenged.
Foreign Affairspredicts: “Widespread frustration over organized crime throughout the hemisphere, as well as social changes such as the spread of evangelical Christianity, mean that right-wing leaders may be favored to win upcoming elections.”
The future for progressive unity is therefore uncertain and has constrained LAC’s response to the Trumpocalypse. The Organization of American States will not question US imperialism. The alternative regional mechanism, CELAC, was set up without Washington’s participation, in part to rectify the OAS’s deficiencies. A broad, anti-imperialist statement drafted by Honduran President Xiomara Castro for its recent summit was heavily watered down by Argentina and Paraguay, who then rejected even the weakened version (Nicaragua also rejected it, for the opposite reasons). CELAC ended up decrying sanctions and calling for LAC to be a zone of peace, but failed to explicitly support Cuba or Venezuela against US aggression.
The multilateral body with a potentially strong but as yet unclear regional influence is the BRICS, of which Brazil is a founding member and now has associates Cuba and Bolivia. Other LAC countries are keen to join. But (in another show of regional disunity, this time on the left) Venezuela’s and Nicaragua’s recent applications were blocked by Brazil.
From Biden to Trump – a bridge or a break?
Independent of the theatre surrounding Trump’s performance style – inflammatory language, threats, and public ultimatums – his underlying policies are mostly aligned with the bipartisan consensus that has long guided US policy for the region. These include support for market-oriented reforms, militarized security assistance, antagonism to leftist governments, and containment of Chinese influence.
When the actual consequences are examined, what might be called the “Biden bridge” underlies, at least in part, Trump’s distinctively confrontational practices. For instance, in March 2020, Trump placed a $15M bounty on the head of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Biden reciprocated, upping the ante to $25M in January 2025. Or, compare the number of deportees in Trump’s term to-date in 2025 to a comparable period in 2024, when Biden booted out even more migrants.
Under Trump’s first administration, Biden’s interim tenure, and now Trump’s return, deportation machinery remained largely intact, enforcement funding stayed robust, and private detention centers prospered. In effect, Biden normalized the enforcement-heavy model, just without Trump’s nativist overtones.
In short, Washington’s regional policy has become increasingly shaped by institutional inertia and bipartisan enforcement consensus, rather than sharply divergent ideological commitments.
That is not to say the policy has been static. In fact, the trajectory has been precipitously to the right. Warning that the “anti-leftist component of Trumpism can’t be overstated.” Latin America analyst Steve Ellner predicts, “when threats and populism lose their momentum, the anti-communist hawks may get their way.”
So, there is a “Biden-bridge” in the sense of the continuation of a trajectory of increasingly aggressive imperialism from one president to the next. But there is also a “bridge too far” aspect, of which dumping migrants in El Salvador’s pay-by-the-head prison is (so far) the most extreme example.
If there is an upside to Trump’s return to the Oval Office, it is that he unapologetically exposes the core imperialist drive for naked domination, making explicit the coercive foundations of US hegemony in the region. While Trump pays scant regard to international commitments, disregarding trade treaties, his predecessors – Biden, Obama, Clinton, and Bush – all promoted the “rules-based order” to reflect US priorities, conveniently replacing international law.
Trump’s policies have been a stark amplification of enduring US priorities. They have revealed the structural limits of regional autonomy under Yankee hegemony, especially as Trump’s new territorial ambitions stretch from Greenland to Panama. The strongarm underpinnings of policies, previously cloaked in the hypocritical language of partnership, now take the form of mafia-style threats.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent visit to Washington was no ordinary trip. The consensus among Israeli analysts, barring a few remaining loyalists, is that Netanyahu was not invited but, rather, summoned by US President Donald Trump.
All evidence supports this assertion. Netanyahu rarely travels to the US without extensive Israeli media fanfare, leveraging his touted relationships with various US administrations as a “hasbara” opportunity to reinforce his image as Israel’s strongman.
This time, there was no room for such campaigns. Netanyahu was informed of Trump’s summons while on an official trip to Hungary. There, he was received by Hungarian President Viktor Orbán with exaggerated diplomatic accolades, signaling defiance against international condemnation of Netanyahu, an accused war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), and portraying him as anything but an isolated leader of an increasingly pariah state.
The capstone of Netanyahu’s short-lived Hungarian victory lap was Orbán’s announcement of Hungary’s withdrawal from the ICC, a move with profoundly unsettling implications.
It would have been convenient for Netanyahu to use his Washington visit to deflect from his failed war in Gaza and internal strife in Israel. However, as the Arabic saying goes, “the wind often blows contrary to the ship’s desires.”
The notion that Netanyahu was summoned, not invited, is corroborated by Israeli media reports that he attempted to postpone the visit under various pretexts. He failed, ultimately flying to Washington on the date determined by the White House. Initially, reports circulated that no press conference would be held, denying Netanyahu the platform to tout Washington’s unwavering support for his military actions and to expound on the “special relationship” between the two countries.
A press conference was held, though it was largely dominated by Trump’s contradictory messages and typical rhetoric. Netanyahu spoke briefly, attempting to project the same confident body language observed during his previous Washington visit, where he sat with an erect posture and spread out his legs, as if in command. But this time, his body language betrayed him; his eyes shifted nervously, and he appeared stiff and surprised, particularly when Trump announced that the US and Iran would begin direct talks in Oman soon.
Trump also mentioned the need to end the war in Gaza, but the Iran announcement clearly shocked Netanyahu. He desperately tried to align his discourse with Trump’s, referencing Libya’s disarmament under Muammar Gaddafi. But that was never part of Israel’s official regional plan. Israel had consistently advocated for US military intervention against Iran, despite the certainty that such a war would destabilize the entire region, potentially drawing the US into a conflict far more protracted and devastating than the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Further evidence of the US’ diverging views from Israel’s regional ambitions—centered on perpetual war, territorial expansion, and geopolitical dominance—lies in the fact that key political and intellectual figures within the Trump administration recognize the futility of such conflicts. In leaked exchanges on the encrypted messaging platform Signal, JD Vance protested that escalating the war in Yemen benefits Europe, not the US, a continent with which the US is increasingly decoupling, if not engaging in a trade war.
The Yemen war, like a potential conflict with Iran, is widely perceived as being waged on Israel’s behalf. Figures like Tucker Carlson, a prominent commentator, articulated the growing frustration among right-wing intellectuals in the US, tweeting that “anyone advocating for conflict with Iran is not an ally of the United States, but an enemy.”
Trump’s willingness to openly challenge Netanyahu’s policies remains unclear. His conflicting statements, such as calling for an end to the Gaza war while simultaneously advocating for the expulsion of Palestinians, add to the ambiguity. However, recent reports suggest a determined US intention to end the war in Gaza as part of a broader strategy, linking Gaza to Yemen, Lebanon, and Iran. This aligns with Washington’s need to stabilize the region as it prepares for a new phase of competition with China, requiring comprehensive economic, political, and military readiness.
Should Trump prove capable of doing what others could not, will Netanyahu finally submit to American pressure?
In 2015, Netanyahu demonstrated Israel’s unparalleled influence on US foreign and domestic policy when he addressed both chambers of Congress. Despite a few insignificant protests, Republican and Democratic policymakers applauded enthusiastically as Netanyahu criticized then-President Barack Obama, who did not attend and appeared isolated by his own political class.
However, if Netanyahu believes he can replicate that moment, he is mistaken. Those years are long gone. Trump, a populist leader, is not beholden to finding political balances in Congress. Now in his second and final term, he could, in theory, abandon the US’s ingrained reliance on Israel’s approval and its aggressive lobby in Washington.
Moreover, Netanyahu’s political standing is diminished. He is perceived as a failed political leader and military strategist, unable to secure decisive victories or extract political concessions from his adversaries. He is a leader without a clear plan, grappling with a legitimacy crisis unlike any faced by his predecessors.
Ultimately, the outcome hinges on Trump’s willingness to confront Netanyahu. If he does, and sustains the pressure, Netanyahu could find himself in an unenviable position, marking a rare instance in modern history where the US dictates its terms, and Israel listens. Time will tell.
[Apologies for more typographical chaos than usual in this edition of Roaming Charges, which was largely written and assembled by iPhone after the 8-week-old Australian shepherd chewed her way through the powerchord of the editor’s Macbook Pro.)
“During the Cold War, US allies used to deny the disappearances — the uncertainty was part of the terror. Now they just straight-up say they have a right to kidnap innocent people. The terror now is the fuck-you impunity these thugs claim.”
– Greg Grandin
+ In Kafka’s “The Penal Colony,” a man called only the Traveler visits an island penal colony of a country not his own. Or a country that he doesn’t recognize as his own. Why is he here? We don’t know. He seems to be on some kind of inspection, though who he might be reporting back to and what effect his report might have on what is going on here is unclear. The story opens with the Traveler being shown a new torture and execution device by someone called the Officer, a machine that inscribes the fatal sentence of the state on the flesh of the condemned, over and over again, slowly, on strip after strip of skin, for 12 hours, until the victim bleeds to death. The machine was designed by the Commandant, now deceased. Its use once attracted large crowds, mainly of women, who would toss handkerchiefs at the condemned, as the killing machine did its lethal work. The Condemned do not know they have been condemned. They don’t know they’ve committed a crime. Silent accusations are enough in this penal colony. Once accused, the accused is presumed guilty. He is never told he has been accused. He is never given the chance to defend himself.He only learns of his offense when it is written on his skin by the stabbing of needles: “Honor thy Superiors.”
Trump dreams of his own penal colony, a place where he can ship the accused without the trouble of a trial, a place where the imprisoned have no chance to defend themselves and, in fact, may not know why they are condemned or how they can find their way out, if there is a way out.
Trump’s Devil’s Island is the death-haunted country of El Salvador. If Trump is the crude Commandant, Nayib Buekele is his dutiful Officer, eager to perform any act of depravity to please his superior…for a price ($20,000 a person). The Travelers have been sent away from this prison state, denied any inspection of its torture chambers.
Trump’s ICEtapo has sent 238 people to El Salvador. A Bloomberg analysis shows that more than 90% of them had no criminal record. And of those with criminal records, only five had been convicted of felonies. This hardly matters. To be sent to El Salvador means you are guilty. You are a terrorist in the eyes of the state that deported you, even if the state’s highest courts have intervened on your behalf. There will be no return. Even two self-proclaimed Autocrats say they don’t have the power to make it happen. Only the machine writes the fate of the condemned.
This is merely the precedent. Trump wants to use the egregious treatment of noncitizens to break the legal system that protects citizens from abuses of state power. Trump is eager to deport American citizens to El Salvadoran prisons. He told Buekele to build more of his concentration camps for a coming flood of American “criminals” (aka, dissidents), who will be condemned as “terrorists” and stripped of their rights: “The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns. You’ve got to build about five more places.”
+ Supreme Court justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson on the 9-0 decision ordering the Trump administration to return wrongfully deported man from El Salvador: the government’s argument implies “it could deport and incarcerate any person, including us citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”
+ Welcome to the “left-wing industrial complex,” Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas!
+ First, you get away with deporting non-criminal non-citizens. Then you try to deport non-criminal citizens whose ethnicity you dislike.Last week, Juan Carlos Gomez-Lopez, a 20-year-old Georgia man of Mayan heritage, was pulled over and arrested by Florida Highway Patrol for “being an undocumented immigrant over the age of 18 who had illegally entered the state of Florida.” There were just two problems. First, the enforcement of DeSantis’s punitive immigration law Gomez-Lopez supposedly violated, has been blocked by a federal court. Second, Gomez-Lopez is a US citizen. When Gomez-Lopez appeared for his arraignment before the local court, his advocates presented the judge with his birth certificate and Social Security card as proof that he is a natural-born US citizen. Leon County Judge LaShawn Riggins said, “In looking at it and feeling it and holding it up to the light, the court can clearly see the watermark proving this is an authentic document.” Riggins said there was no probable cause for his detention, but that her hands were tied because ICE had asserted jurisdiction and wants him sent to a detention center for deportation.
“It’s like this dystopian nightmare of poorly written laws,” said Thomas Kennedy of the Florida Immigrant Coalition. “We’re living in a time when this man could be sent to El Salvador because, what? Is he going to be treated as a stateless person?”
+ Meanwhile, in Boston: “Immigration attorney Nicole Micheroni says she was born at Newton Wellesley Hospital, grew up in Sharon, Massachusetts, and was educated at Wellesley College. So, anyone can imagine her surprise when she says she received an emailed letter from the Department of Homeland Security, telling her to self-deport within 7 days…”
+ Alec MacGillis, Pro Publica: “Kseniia Petrova left Russia in protest of Putin and found work at a Harvard lab, w/ a valid visa. She arrived with only a backpack.CBP stopped her recently at Logan for failing to declare frog embryos she had brought from Paris for her lab. This would normally come with a fine. Instead, she is in prison in Louisiana.“I feel like something is happening generally in America. Something bad is happening. I don’t think everybody understands.”
+ Trump’s “counter-terrorism Czar,” Sebastian Gorka, told Newsmax this week that political opponents of Trump’s mass deportations could be charged with “abetting terrorism.”
It’s really quite that simple. We have people who love America, like the president, like his cabinet, like the directors of his agencies, who want to protect Americans. And then there is the other side, that is on the side of the cartel members, on the side of the illegal aliens, on the side of the terrorists… And you have to ask yourself, are they technically aiding and abetting them? Because aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime in federal statute.
+ Sen. Chris Van Hollen, after being refused any contact with his constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador on Wednesday:
“The courts of the United States have said there’s no evidence to support the charge that he’s part of MS-13, so I asked the Vice President of El Salvador whether or not El Salvador has any evidence that he’s part of MS-13 or has committed a crime. So I asked the Vice President, ‘So, if Abrego Garcia has not committed a crime, and the US courts have found that he was illegally taken into the United States, and the government of El Salvador has no evidence that he was part of MS-13, why is El Salvador continuing to hold him in CEPOS. And his answer was that the Trump administration is paying El Salvador to keep him at CEPOS. I pointed out that neither the government of El Salvador nor the Trump Administration has presented evidence to support the claim that he has committed any kind of criminal act. So why not release Abrego Garcia today? And he said, what President Bukele said the other day at the White House, which is that “El Salvador can’t smuggle Mr. Abrego Garcia into the United States.’ And I said, ‘I’m not asking him to smuggle Mr. Abrego Garcia into the United States, I’m simply asking him to open to the door to CEPOS and let this innocent man walk out.’ And I pointed out that the Attorney General of the United States, Pam Bondi, has said that the United States would send a plane to El Salvador to pick him up. And why did she do that? Because the Supreme Court of the United States, in a ruling of 9-0, has said that the Trump administration has to facilitate his return to the United States. Now there is no evidence that the Trump administration is complying with that order. In Fact, the US embassy here has told me they’ve received no direction from the Trump administration to help facilitate his release. So the Trump administration is clearly in violation of American court orders. That still leaves the question of why the government of El Salvador continuing to imprison a man where they have no evidence he’s committed a crime and they have been provided with any evidence from the United States that he’s committed a crime.”
+ CNN’s Kaitlyn Collins: “You said if the Supreme Court ruled that someone needed to be returned, you would abide by that.”
Trump Almighty: “Why don’t you just say, isn’t it wonderful that we’re keeping criminals out of our country? That’s why nobody watches you.”
+ El Salvador has the highest incarceration rate in the world. One in every 57 Salvadorans is incarcerated, triple the rate of the U.S. And Bukele’s set to double the size of its concentration camp prison to 80,000, mostly to house deportees from the US.
+ Civil liberties and 1st Amendment lawyer Jenin Younes on the Trump non-responsive response to judicial orders in the Mahmoud Khalil case:
After the immigration judge in Mahmoud Khalil’s case ordered the government to provide evidence to justify deporting him, this is what they filed. I’ve been a lawyer for 14 years, & a criminal defense lawyer for 9 of those years, and I’ve never seen anything like this. Totally nebulous, vague allegations about involvement in “antisemitic protests” and “disruptive activities” without any specific attributions of unlawful activity or even “antisemitic” speech to Khalil himself (which in any event is protected; the US rightly does not have hate speech laws). In the US and all civilized societies, if gov’t is going to punish someone under the law, it had better provide evidence of specific forms of unlawful activity BY THE INDIVIDUAL it’s targeting. Not only has the gov’t entirely failed to do that here, but it’s obvious it’s case is predicated on punishing 1A protected speech and protest.
+ Contempt of Court is now the official policy of the Trump Justice Department.
+ The Trump administration not only sent flights to El Salvador while the court was adjourned for a short period of time, but when court resumed the Trump admin concealed the fact that the flights had already left from the court: “Those later-discovered flight movements, however, were obscured from the Court when the hearing resumed shortly after 6:00 p.m. because the Government surprisingly represented that it still had no flight details to share.”
+ Federal Judge James Boasberg, finding probable cause that the Trump Administration is “in criminal contempt of court” in the Venezuelan deportation case:
The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders — especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it. To permit such officials to freely ‘annul the judgments of the courts of the United States’ would not just ‘destroy the rights acquired under those judgments’; it would make a solemn mockery’ of ‘the constitution itself.’
+ Matthew Segal: “My guess is that any Trump officials implicated by this order will, quite understandably, want due process.”
+ James Ball, the New European: “The fight over García’s custody is not a battle about one man’s fate. It is also not a row about immigration, illegal or otherwise, or border security. It is a battle for the US Constitution, the rights it guarantees, and the basic freedoms of Americans.”
+ We’re watching the Milgram Experiment breakout in real-time, as hundreds of ICE agents commit sadistic acts against innocent people, they’d never imagined themselves ever doing back in Sunday School…(At least I hope they’d never imagined themselves doing it): A Guatemalan immigrant with no Massachusetts criminal record was arrested Monday on Tallman Street in New Bedford after federal agents shattered the glass on his vehicle with axes, as he and his wife waited inside the car for their lawyer to arrive. Like so many others, he was detained without a warrant.
+ The former cop who sent gay makeup artist, Andry Jose Hernandez, Romero to a hellhole of a prison in El Salvador is a known liar, who was put on a Brady List of cops whose testimony should not be trusted at trial. He also drove drunk into a family’s house and falsified his overtime hours.
+++
+ Here’s an example of the Trump “Red Pill” Effect in action. Most Republicans want an unnamed president to follow court orders. Except when that President’s name is Trump…
Reuters/IPSOS poll on Trump’s conflicts with federal courts
The president should obey federal court rulings, even if he disagrees with them…
All
Yes: 82%
No: 14%
GOP
Yes: 68%
No: 28%
Dem
Yes: 97%
No: 3%
Other
Yes: 82%
No: 11%
But use “Trump” instead of “the President” and the answers shift dramatically…
Trump should keep deporting people despite a court order to stop…
All
Yes: 40%
No: 56%
GOP
Yes: 76%
No: 22%
Dems
Yes: 8%
No: 92%
Other
Yes: 35%
No: 57%
+2028 National Republican Primary Poll…
Donald J. Trump 56%
JD Vance 19%
Ron DeSantis 4%
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 4%
Nikki Haley 3%
Vivek Ramaswamy 3%
Marco Rubio 2%
Tulsi Gabbard 2%
Brian Kemp 1%
Glenn Youngkin 1%
Ted Cruz 1%
Josh Hawley 1%
Tim Scott 1%
Steve Bannon 1%
– Yale
+ As for the Democrats, I’ve seen garden slugs with more spine…
+ The Democrats’ evolving position on ICE’s mass deportations (keep the good ones, deport the bad) mirrors their bold stance on the death penalty of opposing executions for innocent people.
+ So many Democrats show nothing but contempt for constituents who demand they take an ethical stance, which may not be to their immediate political or financial advantage.
+ Harvard finally stood up to Trump, now Trump wants to crush Harvard by removing its tax-exempt status (not likely) and banning it from admitting any foreign students.
+ Trump Almighty on Harvard…
+ Harvard President Alan Garber: “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what privateuniversities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
+ Sen Lisa Murkowski, the Republican from Alaska, speaking to leaders of non-profit groups in Anchorage, on Trump’s relentless fits of retribution: “We are all afraid. It’s quite a statement. But I am in a time and a place where I certainly have not been before. And I’ll tell ya, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.”
+++
+ Nouriel Roubini on Trump caving to the tech industry by exempting high electronics from his tariffs:
Expensive IPhonesand other high end consumer electronics purchased mostly by the well-off/affluent are exempted; but the 80% of good Chinese cheap consumer goods purchased by his left-behind blue collar base at Dollar Stores, Walmart, Costco, and other low price retailers are slapped with a 145% tariff. Most of them are low-end low value-added labor intensive good quality cheap Chinese products that we never ever manufactured in the US in the first place or that we stopped producing decades ago as it is not our comparative advantage to produce low end cheap goods! So he says that he wants to reshore tech rather than cheap toys . But his exemptions will not reshore iPhones or tech goods and they will not reshore either cheap goods we can’t and won’t produce at home! So all contradictory dissonant inconsistent and incoherent policies taken by the seat of the pants and are decided and reversed on a whim via UnTruth Anti-Social in the middle of sleepless zombie nights!
So not even Make America CheapToys Again!This 145% tariff is the most regressive tax in US history that shafts the working class that he pretends to want to help while leading to almost no reshoring ever of jobs on goods we stopped producing in the US in the 1960s nor of the tech goods we want to reshore and that we are now exempting from tariffs to avoid pissing off many US consumers and to avoid screwing Apple’s and all other US tech firms’ profits!
+ Promoted as a way to revitalize manufacturing in the US, the immediate effect of Trump’s chaotic trade policy seems to be tanking it instead.
Philly Fed Survey: “New orders fell sharply, from 8.7 in March to -34.2, its lowest reading since April 2020”
NY Fed Survey: “Expected orders and shipments plunging.”
+ According to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Colleges and universities are among America’s most competitive international exporters. In dollar terms, last year, the United States sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it sold in natural gas and coal combined.”
+ As Trump slashes research funding for America’s top universities, China is filling the “mind shaft gap.” Since 1985, China has produced more than 400,000 postdocs. In 2024 alone, 42,000 new students entered postdoc programs in China, a threefold increase from 2012.
+ China has installed more industrial robots (276,000 units than the rest of the world combined (265,000 units).
+ Daniel Melendez Martinez: ‘Trump may [or may not] have written “The Art of the Deal,” but he is messing with those who wrote “The Art of War.”
+ Goldman Sachs analysts on the effect of Trump’s tariffs on employment in the US:“A net negative impact from trade protection on employment, even before accounting for the employment drags from the growth slowdown we expect”.
+ Michael Hartnett, Bank of America’s chief investment strategist, said the U.S. is no longer the global economy’s “primary growth engine.”
+ According to Fortune, half of American parents are subsidizing their Gen Z and millennial adult children at the rate of $1,474 a month.
+ Coachella on the Enstallment Plan: Billboard reports that more than 60% of attendees at Coachella used a “buy-now-pay-later” plan to finance their tickets at the three-day music festival. General admission tickets this year start at $499. The payment plan charges an upfront $41 fee.
+ $30 billion: the amount it would cost Apple to move 10% of its production out of China and to the US over the next three years.
+ Trump’s tariffs will raise new-home costs by $9,200, according to the New York Post.
+ Amount Trump claims his tariffs are generating a day: $2 billion (or even $3.5 billion!)
+ Total amount actually collected per day since April 5: $250 million
+ Ray Dailo, the billionaire hedge funder: “I’m worried about something worse than a recession.”
+ Bruce Kasman, JPMorgan’s chief economist: “Disruptive U.S. policies have been recognized as the biggest risk to the global outlook all year.”
+ Fed Chair Jerome Powell: “While uncertainty remains elevated, it is now becoming clear that tariff increases will be significantly larger than expected and the same is likely to be true of the economic effects, which will include higher inflation and slower growth…My confidence in inflation moving back down is lower than it was.”
+ A Trump-appointed judge just quashed a rule that capped credit card late fees at $8—siding with big banks over consumers. That means $32 fees are back, and Biden’s crackdown on junk fees is out the door.
+ Despite DOGE’s slash-and-burn attack on the federal workforce, government spending is up $154 billion under Trump…
+++
+ Apparently, Pete Hegseth’s a great Secretary of Defense because he can throw a wobbly forward pass. But I remember when he threw an axe on live TV, missed the target, and almost killed a pedestrian, the errantly tossed axe hitting a military musician (a drummer) in the arm and preparing us for the collateral murders he’s now inflicting on peasants around the world.
+ Trump’s a pretty good salesman…for the opposition to any policy he’s proposing: In January 2025, 77 percent of Canadians opposed being annexed by the US. By April, the number had risen by seven points to 84 percent.
+ Nearly 900,000 fewer people went to the U.S. in March as cross-border travel has plummeted. In 2024, international travelers to the US spent $254 billion, an average of $4,000 per visit.
+ Why would anyone come here knowing they could be “accidentally” arrested without cause and sent to a death camp in El Salvador with no recourse whatsoever…
+ The EU’s Ursula von der Leyen tells Zeit newspaper: “The West as we knew it no longer exists. Europe is still a peace project. We don’t have bros or oligarchs making the rules. We don’t invade our neighbors, and we don’t punish them.” No irony detected.
+ As predictable as melting ice sheets….Greenland’s foreign minister has said it is seeking deeper cooperation with China and potentially a free trade agreement.
+ Why would anyone come here knowing they could be “accidentally” arrested without cause and sent to a death camp in El Salvador with no recourse whatsoever…
+ Elon Musk: ‘Tim Walz, who is a huge jerk, was running around on stage with the Tesla stock cut in half. He was overjoyed. What an evil thing to do. What a creep. What a jerk. Who derives joy from that?” Perhaps Elon’s baby mammas…?
+ Incredible piece in the Wall Street Journal on how Musk impregnates, then gags his harem of baby mammas…
Musk offered [Ashley] St. Clair $15 million and $100,000 a month in support in exchange for her silence about the child, whom they named Romulus. Similar agreements had been negotiated with other mothers of Musk’s children…In 2023, he had a meeting in Austin where people he described as Japanese officials asked him to be a sperm donor for a high-profile woman, according to a text message reviewed by the Journal. “They want me to be a sperm donor. No romance or anything, just sperm,” he texted St. Clair. Musk later told her he gave his sperm to the person who asked for it, without naming the woman…While Musk posts sometimes dozens of times a day on X about right-wing politics or his companies… [he] sometimes interacts through direct messages, some of whom he eventually solicits to have his babies, according to people who have viewed the messages.
+ It’s as if a bunch of 13-year-old boarding school brats are running the country…
+ Jesus in the Land of Gadarenes asked the Gerasene Demoniac: “What is your name?” And he said, “Legion,” because many devils had entered him. (Mark 5:9)
+ A lawsuit filed in February accuses Tesla of remotely altering odometer readings on failure-prone cars, in a bid to push these defective machines beyond the 50,000-mile warranty limit…
+ Since 2014, one-third of Tesla’s profits (or roughly $10.7 billion) have come from government-sponsored climate credits. So much for Elon Musk’s claim that his companies are being “strangled to death” by regulations. But the billionaire’s car company, Tesla, might not have survived without them. According to a review in E&E, “in the first nine months of 2024, some 43 percent of its net income came from those credits, which Tesla sold to rival carmakers after exceeding climate mandates in California and elsewhere.”
+++
+ The real takeaway here is that UnitedHealth has been making billions off the denial of care…
+ A study in Nature estimates that the elimination of US global health funding over the next fifteen years would cause 25 million deaths worldwide, which would place Trump, Musk, Rubio and RFK, Jr in the ranks of some of the world’s most infamous mass killers…
– 15.2m deaths from AIDS
– 2.2m deaths from TB
– 7.9 additional child deaths
+ RFK, Jr’s Children’s Health Defense to Peter Hildebrand, who unvaccinated daughter Daisy died from complications associated with the measles: “Do you or your wife have any regrets about not giving the MMR to Daisy or any of your children?
+ Peter Hildebrand: “Absolutely not. And from here on out if I have any other kids in the future they’re not going to be vaccinated at all.
+ This is a perfect example of When Prophecy Fails Syndrome, where followers of apocalyptic preachers don’t abandon their prophet when his prophecies but only become more devoted to him, even as he leads them to ruin.
+ As for the Prophet (RFK, Jr), why shouldn’t he be held accountable for his complicity in this infanticide by medical negligence?
RFK JR: And these are [autistic] kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
+ For an alleged champion of autistic children, RFK, Jr. seems to know nothing about autistic children or their abilities, which are often as diverse and remarkable as any other children. People with autism can write poems, dance, run businesses, make films and do complex math. Instead, this self-aggrandizing jerk seems to view them as human throwaways, nothing but a drain on society–sounds familiar. You know who doesn’t pay taxes, Bobby? Elon Musk (2018) & Jeff Bezos (2007 & 2018), along with Michael Bloomberg, Carl Icahn and George Soros…
+ Elizabeth Warren: “I won’t share RFK Jr.’s lies about autism. It’s disgusting and dangerous. If he had a shred of decency, he would apologize and resign. Autistic people contribute every day to our nation’s greatness. To every kid with autism, I’m in this fight all the way for you.”
+ The Lancet estimates that nearly 500,000 children could die from AIDS-related causes by 2030 as a consequence of Trump’s decimation of PEPFAR programs.
+ The global growth rate in CO2 emissions was 3.5 PPM, causing NOAA to extend its y-axis by 1 ppm for the first time. The significance of the graph is still understated, since it’s charting the rate of increase not the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, which would continue to grow even if the rate of increase fell flat or even decreased.
+ According to Berkeley Earth’s dataset, March 2025tied with March 2016 and March 2024 as the warmest on record. It was 1.55°C above preindustrial (1850-1900) levels.
+ Imagine living in a place that cared even a little bit about your health and well-being…
+ A new study in Science estimates that as many as 1.4 billion people live in areas with soil dangerously polluted by heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, chromium, copper, nickel, and lead.
+ This week Trump’s EPA began gutting the bans on toxic forever chemicals. How does this “Make America Healthy Again,” Bobby old chap?
+++
+ Jay Gatsby would have regretted inviting every single one of this rotten crowd to his parties…
+ Speaking of creeps. Here’s Kyle Langford, a 20-year-old new right candidate to replace Gavin Newsom as governor of California: “I am pro-deportation. You know, I want, like, I was thinging too, first off, like, deport all the men and then for the women maybe you’ll have, like, a one-year timeline to marry: we know who you, we know where you are, if you marry one of our Californian incels then you can stay. But if you don’t, then you’re getting sent back across the border.”
+ Alec Karakatsanis on his important new book, Copaganda:“I wanted to write a book about how institutions that think of themselves as being liberal contribute to the mythologies that underlie the authoritarian turn in our society.”
+ This is a greivous insult to bats, who are communal, intelligent, environmentally beneficent and don’t recognize borders of any kind…
+ Although the number of Americans who express a belief in God and attend church services has been in steady decline, the number of Americans who believe there is “life after death” has increased from 76% in 1973 to 83% in 2022. (General Social Survey, 1973-2022). This says something profound about the current state of American politics, though I don’t know what the hell it is…
When They had My Trial, Baby, You Could Not be Found…
“Out there, all around them to the last fringes of occupancy, were Toobfreex at play in the video universe, the tropic isle, the Long Branch Saloon, the Starship Enterprise, Hawaiian crime fantasies, cute kids in make-believe living rooms with invisible audiences to laugh at everything they did, baseball highlights, Vietnam footage, helicopter gunships and firefights, and midnight jokes, and talking celebrities, and a slave girl in a bottle, and Arnold the pig, and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn’t find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness . . . how a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good.”
All across the United States, people are rising up–refusing to be complicit in the slow-motion annihilation of democracy. They march against a regime that strips away public goods, criminalizes dissent, vanishes students, and hollows out the very institutions meant to protect civic life. But these assaults are not new; they are the culmination of what I once called the scorched-earth politics of America’s four fundamentalisms: market worship, ideological conformity, religious zealotry, and educational repression. These fundamentalisms have steadily laid the groundwork for a society governed by violence, cruelty, and unaccountable power–where the market is sacrosanct, history is erased, justice is inverted, and knowledge is policed.
Today, these forces converge in a violent crescendo, a politics of cleansing intent on purging democracy of its ethical substance and moral vocabulary. The government is hollowed out, memory is criminalized, and the law is weaponized to serve the interests of those in power. Racialized others are marked for disappearance, as society sinks into a state of profound erasure. What remains is not merely authoritarian rule, but a theater of terror, where disposability becomes the guiding principle and silence is dangerously mistaken for peace.
Politics has become the extension of crime itself, with governance morphing into organized barbarism. At every level of society, militarization and repression have taken root, directed not only at critics but at entire communities. This is a state-sponsored culture of fear aimed at immigrants, dissenters, and marginalized populations. It manifests in overt abductions of U.S. citizens, targeted because of their race, their dissent, or their opposition to Trump’s domestic and foreign policies. As the fabric of democratic life unravels, the groundwork is laid for the rise of authoritarian rule, where resistance is met with violence, and the very principles of freedom and justice are hollowed out.
This is not governance in the democratic sense; it is the blueprint for authoritarian control disguised as order. The dismantling of public institutions, the suppression of historical memory, the dismantling of legal protections, the assault on higher education, the abduction of students, and the demonization of dissent all signal the emergence of a new mode of state terrorism. This machinery of domination no longer hides its contempt for democracy. It mimics, manipulates, and ultimately discards it. It channels the darkest moments of the past, echoing the brutality of slavery, the violence of the police state, and the horror of the camps. In this rising authoritarian landscape, the state no longer serves the people; it abandons them to a ruthless order in which solidarity is shattered, justice is privatized, and hope is exiled to the margins. This is fascism on steroids.
Resistance is rising, fierce, luminous, and charged with hope. Across the nation, people are pushing back against a regime that robs them of the very essence of life: security, care, sustenance, and dignity. University faculty, students, and more and more administrators are calling for Academic Mutual Defense Compacts to defend themselves against Trump’s attacks From city streets to university campuses, this defiance grows stronger every day. Workers, educators, artists, federal employees, and students, among others, are rising up against the erosion of their rights, the violence inflicted upon their bodies, and the assault on their sense of justice and agency. As fears mount over the collapse of retirement funds, immigration status, police violence, and job security, the crushing weight of scarcity, poverty, and powerlessness takes a toll, both emotionally and physically. With food prices soaring and consumer goods becoming more elusive, the misery deepens. Yet, in the face of this darkness, resistance continues to grow, an act of bold defiance against what Rob Nixon calls the “slow violence” of policies that crush daily life, erase memory, and hollow out the very meaning of agency.
This tide of defiance confronts a politics of cleansing and erasure, spreading like wildfire through the body of democracy: a state stripped to serve the market, memory razed and rewritten, dissent smothered beneath ideological obedience, law twisted into a weapon of vengeance, and racial others cast beyond the bounds of belonging. This is not mere policy, it is a war on the very idea of justice, equality, and freedom, and it must be named for what it is: a multi-front cleansing campaign that demands unrelenting mass resistance. These protests are not symbolic gestures; they are insurgent affirmations that the promise of a radical democracy is not dead, only endangered, and still worth fighting for. Yet, they unfold under an ominous horizon: a politics of cleansing, governmental, ideological, legal, racial, and historical that is intensifying in the U.S. and metastasizing globally, threatening to become the blueprint for a brutal new world order.
Governmental Cleansing and the Death of Social Responsibility
Governmental cleansing begins with a calculated assault on governance as an instrument of the public good. In Trump’s America, the state is no longer envisioned as a guardian of collective well-being. It no longer is seen as offering vital protections like Medicare, Social Security, affordable housing, and public education; instead it is viewed as an obstacle to unfettered capitalism. Neoliberalism provides the ideological scaffolding for this transformation. It redefines freedom as the absence of regulation, empties democracy of its social content, and reduces all human obligations to the cold calculus of profit and efficiency. In this worldview, there are no social problems only personal failures; no public goods, only private investments. This is a politics with closing horizons, one that undermines translating private troubles into larger systemic structural issues.
Milton Friedman’s infamous assertion that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits” epitomizes a worldview where social justice is seen as heretical and public welfare is synonymous with socialism. Friedman’s contempt for collective responsibility and his sanctification of profit as moral imperative reveal the ideological foundation of this new horizon of barbarism and cruelty. He writes:
But the doctrine of ‘social responsibility’ taken seriously would extend the scope of the political mechanism to every human activity… That is why, in my book Capitalism and Freedom, I called it a ‘fundamentally subversive doctrine’ in a free society, and have said that in such a society, ‘there is one and only one social responsibility of business to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud’… Talk about social responsibility by businessmen is nothing more than pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.
Friedman was not alone. Friedrich Hayek warned that even modest forms of state intervention would lead inevitably to tyranny. Margaret Thatcher took it further, famously declaring that “there is no such thing as society,” only individuals and their families. And Ronald Reagan, the affable face of neoliberal rollback, sealed the message when he proclaimed in his 1981 inaugural address, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” With that, the ideological war on the social state was no longer whispered, it became national doctrine.
In Trump’s authoritarian worldview, social responsibility is not a democratic obligation but a fatal weakness–a threat to market supremacy and a check on unchecked power. Any commitment to equality, inclusion, justice, or the common good is cast as a liability to be eliminated. Trump’s policies do not merely echo this neoliberal logic; they manipulate and weaponize it. Federal employees are purged, regulatory agencies dismantled, and essential public services auctioned off to private interests. What emerges is not a government of, by, and for the people, but a privatized state of exception where cruelty is policy, social needs are criminalized, and governance becomes the handmaiden of wealth and power.
This is not merely the rollback of the state; it is a resurgence of market-driven authoritarianism. In this regime, democracy is gutted of its moral core, replaced by an apparatus of disposability built on raw power, profit, and the “airbrushing of the unpalatable and the unfortunate.” In Trump’s America, we are witnessing the rise of a criminalized regime of terror. How else can we explain Issie Lapowsky’s report in Vanity Fair, which reveals that Trump is “openly flirting with the prospect of deporting immigrants and green card holders deemed criminals to the cruel and dehumanizing mega-prison in El Salvador.” Noah Bullock, executive director of Cristosal, aptly calls the CECOT Prison a “judicial black hole.” David Levi Strauss adds some detail to Bullock’s comment noting that “CECOT can hold up to 40,000 prisoners, when they’re stacked up like cordwood. Those held there have no visitation rights, no recreation time, no exposure to the outside, no reading material, no bedding, and they will never leave the facility.”
Memory Cleansing and the Plague of historical amnesia
Across the country memory laws are emerging designed to ban critical renditions of history, narratives that challenge dominant renderings that whitewash, censor, and exclude the history of the oppressed, slavery, cruelty, war, and regressive notions of exceptionalism that give a voice to those written out of history. Historical amnesia has become a central pedagogical tool of Trump’s fascist politics and state terrorism. Drawing from the past has become dangerous in Trump’s America because history allows students and the larger public to draw parallels, recognize patterns, and learn how not to repeat the worse acts of oppression in history. Memory matters because it gives people the language not to overlook or dissolve as Timothy Snyder notes “the historical consequences of slavery, lynchings … voter suppression,” and other acts of injustice. Trump and his MAGA black shirts are doing more that producing what Hazel Carby calls “a national crusade to control historical knowledge,” they are turning history into a racist weapon. History cleansing is part of a broader backlash against inclusive histories; it is a central element of authoritarian regimes that make people disappear by eliminating their histories, memories, institutions of learning, and in the end their dignity, agency, and collective identities.
Historical cleansing, as Maximillian Alvarez aptly describes it, is a “twenty-first-century political warfare on long-term historical consciousness.” This war is unfolding in the United States, where books are banned, libraries are purged, and far-right politicians demand that public and higher education institutions sanitize the curriculum, erasing “the difficult parts of our past.” In this form of ideological cleansing, the brutality of racism is obscured. Facts like the brutal truth that “between 1877 and 1950, more than 4,000 Black men, women, and children were lynched in cities and towns across the country,” and that the lynching of Black men and boys continues, though no longer as public spectacles, are systematically erased. This racial terror has deep roots in history, yet it is now being deliberately erased from the historical record. In its place, a new spectacle has emerged—one defined by mass deportations and the rise of the prison as a central instrument of fear, lawlessness, and punishment. David Levi Strauss aptly characterizes this intensified focus on the punishing state as “carceral porn,” a powerful reflection of our times. His words are worth quoting at length:
Carceral porn reached a new level of depravity on March 26, when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem (aka ICE Barbie) channeled Kafka in the penal colony and Lynndie England at Abu Ghraib and shook her ass in front of rows of caged, bare-breasted tattooed prisoners in El Salvador’s CECOT prison. She was wearing a blue cap with a badge and an 18-karat gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona watch worth about $50,000. Noem has made a cottage industry out of parading around in swat or combat gear in the midst of disasters, with a make-up person and hairstylist in tow. Of the above image, she said, ‘People need to see that image.’
The spectacularizing of politics cannot be removed from the whitewashing history, another potent form of depoliticization–n erasure in which the censorship of truth not only obliterates the struggles of the marginalized and oppressed but also dismantles critical thinking, the rule of law, and the very notion of justice. Under Trump, this deliberate politics of organized forgetting extends into the mechanisms of state violence, where those erased from the historical narrative are abandoned to detention centers, prisons, and the brutalities of a police state.
Memory cleansing is not merely a distortion of history; it transforms politics into a lie, legitimizing the exclusionary acts that silence people’s voices and erase their histories, desires, and identities. Like all authoritarian regimes, the Trump administration seeks to turn the public into historical amnesiacs, obscuring the violence, corruption, and exploitation woven into the fabric of gangster capitalism and authoritarian power. It denies the lessons of the past that show us that what happened before need not happen again. Being attentive to history is not just an intellectual exercise; it is a moral imperative, directed at making people understand that learning from history teaches us to recognize how future crimes can be prevented by remembering the past in all its painful truth.
Ideological Cleansing and the Rise of Indoctrination Factories
Fascism endures not merely through brute force, but through the systematic erasure of memory, critical knowledge, and informed judgment. It intertwines historical amnesia with ideological cleansing, preventing the public from accessing past catastrophes so that, as Maria Pia Lara powerfully observes, they are unable to “exercise judgments whose results can give rise to disconcerting truths.” This process of historical cleansing inevitably leads to moral cleansing, which enacts the stage upon which other violent dramas can be produced. Fascism flourishes in a world where lies replace truth, spectacles drown out critical thought, and fear serves to justify and legitimize the apparatuses of indoctrination.
Across the United States, universities and public institutions are increasingly transformed into ideological battlegrounds. Books that address racism, gender violence, and settler colonialism are being banned. Professors who challenge the Trump regime, tackle urgent social issues, or advocate for Palestinian freedom face harassment and, in many cases, dismissal. As Zane McNeill reports in Truthout, international students, too, are now increasingly vulnerable, subjected to government harassment simply for engaging in political discourse or dissent– targeted because they fail to meet the White House’s ideological litmus test for what constitutes a “patriotic” resident. Over 600 international students across more than a hundred institutions have had their visas revoked, with social media monitored by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for supposed “antisemitic content.” This pattern of ideological repression extends beyond the classroom, where entire academic departments, especially those focused on Middle Eastern Studies, are systematically dismantled, branded as havens of “ideological capture,” and accused of fueling “antisemitic harassment” through targeted legislation. Faculty members are being stripped of their jobs, their tenure, and their dignity, subjected to a surveillance state that calls to mind the darkest chapters of history echoing the purges of Hitler’s Germany and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile.
Ron DeSantis, the self-proclaimed anti-woke governor of Florida, embodies this crackdown with frightening precision. In a brazen act of ideological surveillance, pedagogical repression, and an intricately planned assault against all levels of critical education, DeSantis issued an executive order demanding that Florida’s colleges and universities submit detailed records of faculty research grants over the last six years, including lists of papers published by faculty. This sends a clear, chilling message to those faculty and others researching topics related to critical race theory, which Donald Trump has vilified as “a hateful Marxist doctrine that paints America as a wicked nation…rewrites American history…and teaches people to be ashamed of themselves and their country.”
Columbia University’s shameful acquiescence to the Trump administration’s demands for ideological purification starkly underscores the failure of American higher education to defend justice, truth, and the rights of students. In her searing critique, Fatima Bhutto captures the spirit of Columbia University capitulation to authoritarianism. She writes:
Trying to prove that they are a university the government can rely on, Columbia has …agreed to ban certain masks, empowering new campus security personnel to arrest students, and appointed someone to oversee the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies department and the Palestine studies center of study. “Vichy on the Hudson,” Professor Rashid Khalidi called them recently, referring to France’s Vichy regime that collaborated with Nazi Germany.
Ideological cleansing is not limited to public and higher education. Trump’s recent executive order targeting the Smithsonian for promoting “anti-American ideology” echoes the darkest chapters of history. In July 1937, Hitler organized the notorious Degenerate Art Exhibition to condemn any cultural expression that defied state doctrine. The intent then, as now, was to impose a singular, monolithic national narrative and criminalize complexity and artistic dissent. Fascism thrives on political theater that celebrates cruelty, militarism, manufactured ignorance, and a multitude of fundamentalisms, whether rooted in neoliberalism, religious tyranny, white supremacy, ultra-nationalism, or settler-colonialism. As Donalyn White and Anthony Ballas rightly argue, ideological cleansing and historical amnesia are central to today’s capitulation to fascism. The politics of historical oblivion embrace not only ideas but also bodies, leading directly to concentration camps, prisons, and modern-day gulags.
The White House’s deliberate erasure of history reaches its nadir with the removal of anti-slavery icon Harriet Tubman‘s image and biography from the U.S. Park Service website, an ideological lynching that seeks to wipe away the legacy of slavery while diminishing the profound contributions of African-Americans to the nation’s story. This isn’t an oversight; it’s a calculated assault on memory, a form of aesthetic assassination where icons like Tubman are disposed in to dustbin of history, alongside figures like Jackie Robinson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and the Tuskegee Airmen. In this act, the far-right not only rewrites history but attempts to re-imagine the very identity of America itself, one that can no longer acknowledge the brutal truths of its past or the resistance, courage, and brilliance of its Black citizens.
This is the dangerous terrain upon which we now tread. To allow this cleansing to continue is to abandon the very essence of democratic life and the moral imperatives that should guide us. We must recognize that the erasure of history, both in the mind and in the body, is not a neutral act, it is an invitation to totalitarianism.
Legal Cleansing and the End of the Rule of Law
Legal cleansing refers to the systematic dismantling of the law as a democratic safeguard and its conversion into a tool of authoritarian rule. This pattern of legal cleansing replaces the rule of law with the law of rule. It is not about justice, but about domination, turning the law into an instrument of exclusion, vengeance, and authoritarian control. Under Trump, the law is no longer about protecting rights, it’s about enforcing loyalty. Federal employees are fired en masse to make room for partisan loyalists. Trump has threatened elite law firms, many of whom are capitulating to his demands–smeared judges who rule against him, and promised to pardon those convicted of political violence. He’s vowed to revoke Social Security numbers from immigrants and carry out mass deportations without due process, all done beyond the boundaries of the law. The Trump-aligned Congress is passing laws to restrict the independence of the courts and the power of judges. The Trump administration is relentless in its efforts to purge experienced, nonpartisan civil servants and replace them with political loyalists who will enforce his agenda without question. In the process, legal protections are dismantled, regulatory agencies are stripped of their power, and dissent is treated as a crime. Immigrants and students have been abducted off the street, thrown into unmarked vehicles, and disappeared into remote ICE detention centers, for little more than advocating pro-Palestinian views. No charges. No trial. No justice.
The sheer horror of this form of organized barbarism was starkly revealed when El Salvador’s ruthless dictator, Nayib Bukele, met with Trump and callously refused to return Abrego Garcia to the United States, dismissing him as a “terrorist” he would not “smuggle” into the country. Garcia is not a terrorist, and the government itself admitted that he was mistakenly deported. Yet it gets worse. As Hafiz Rashid reports in The New Republic, despite the Supreme Court’s order for Garcia’s return to the U.S., “the Trump administration has stalled and refused, hiding behind semantics and technicalities. And with the backing of a dictator like Bukele, the White House seems content to let an innocent immigrant languish in a gulag,” showing a complete disregard for justice and due process.
State terrorism extends beyond physical violence; it flourishes through the embrace of irrationality, with the state justifying acts of terror under the guise of national security. A striking example is the state-sponsored abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student involved in anti-Israel protests. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a memo, stated that while Khalil’s beliefs may be lawful, he invoked a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 granting the Secretary of State the authority to “personally determine” whether he should remain in the country based on his “expected beliefs.” This alarming statement, with its Nuremberg-like laws and Kafkaesque nightmares, exposes the essence of authoritarian regimes, where punishment extends beyond actions to preemptively target individuals for their very thoughts. It echoes the darkest chapters of totalitarian history, where freedom is not just stifled but eradicated at its roots. This is no mere legal overreach; it is a blatant assault on due process and liberty, a grotesque perversion of justice designed to strip away the most fundamental human rights.
No one is immune from the looming terror unleashed by the Trump administration. When White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt casually claims that Trump was not joking about deporting U.S. citizens to the notorious El Salvador prison, this frightening threat demands our full attention. It is not just rhetoric; it is a stark warning of the grave dangers this administration poses to our basic freedoms, and a harrowing glimpse into the shape fascism is taking in America. These threats are matched by what
This is an American style fascism without apology, unhinged in its violation of rights, justice, and essential democratic freedoms. Such rhetoric transforms dissent into a criminal act before it even occurs, exemplifying the essence of legal and ideological cleansing that underpins fascist politics. It reveals the deeply irrational nature of authoritarian rule, where the state not only controls actions but seeks to control the very minds of its citizens, justifying state violence and terrorism against those deemed undesirable, whether for their beliefs, speech, or associations. This escalation into ideological terror is the hallmark of fascism, which thrives on the erasure of reason, the criminalization of free thought, and the normalization of state-sanctioned violence.
It is worth emphasizing, this logic is already at work on the ground. Students demanding justice for Palestine face arrest, suspension, deportation. Protest is branded as terrorism. Solidarity is met with surveillance. And all of it unfolds under the shadow of a government preparing to use the full weight of the state, military included, to crush dissent. For the Trump administration to openly declare the power to abduct and imprison individuals not for what they have said or done, but for what they might think, secretly believe, or may come to believe, is a mind-numbing manifestation of Orwellian terror. This, without question, stands as a glaring example of state-sanctioned brutality, nothing less than state terrorism.
Trump’s purge of the military, targeting high-ranking commanders and inspector generals is not mere reshuffling, but a calculated attempt to replace constitutional loyalty with personal devotion. It echoes the most dangerous precedents in modern history: Hitler’s co-optation of the Wehrmacht, Pinochet’s military coup in Chile, and the deployment of armed forces under Videla in Argentina. This is the scaffolding of militarized authoritarianism, where the armed forces no longer protect the republic but enforce the will of a would-be strongman. If Trump turns the military against dissidents, demonstrators, or student protesters, as he has repeatedly threatened, the expectation is chillingly clear: they will obey.
In this vision, the law is no longer tethered to justice; it becomes a tool for vengeance, exclusion, and raw domination. The silence and craven accommodation to fascism that follows is not peace, it is complicity. And what looms on the horizon is not order, but the slow, calculated unfolding of a coup already in motion.
Racial Cleansing and the Scourge of White Supremacy
State violence always has a target, and it is painfully evident that these targets are racialized. From the southern border to the voting booth, from campus protests to inner-city neighborhoods, racial cleansing is no longer a hidden strategy, it is a governing principle. Hundreds of immigrants are detained and deported without due process, sometimes sent to a mega-prisons in El Salvador or held indefinitely in ICE facilities where human rights are an afterthought. Under Nayib Bukele reign of terror, the concept of governing through crime is visible in the fact that “ 84,000 people have been arrested and jailed, usually without a trial, hearing, or any other due process of law.” Black and brown communities are overpoliced, under protected, and routinely brutalized, caught in the crosshairs of a carceral state that sees them not as citizens but as threats. Police violence has become a normalized form of racial discipline and terrorism, while white supremacist militias are emboldened and often protected.
Stephen Miller stands as one of the most influential architects behind Trump’s racist policies. Infamous for championing the cruel separation of thousands of children from their parents during Trump’s first administration, Miller has long aligned himself with far-right media and figures. His outspoken opposition to DACA and calls to end Temporary Protected Status for predominantly non-white populations further underscore his deeply entrenched racism. This bigotry is so well-known that even his own family members have publicly denounced him.
Racial cleansing manifests through a cascade of reactionary policies. The right to vote is under siege, restricted through gerrymandering, voter roll purges, intimidation at polling stations, and laws designed to disenfranchise communities of color. DEI programs are being dismantled under the pretense of purging racist policies, when in truth they are targeted precisely because they seek to redress systemic racism. In schools and universities, anti-racist pedagogy is vilified, books are censored; books by authors of color are banned, and any effort to center marginalized voices is cast as indoctrination.
Muslim communities are relentlessly surveilled, their lives scrutinized under policies that disproportionately target them. Latinx neighborhoods are raided. Indigenous sovereignty is ignored. And students who protest these injustices, especially those who defend Palestinian rights are labeled as extremists and enemies of the state.
Conclusion
In an age when fascism no longer hides in the shadows, we must learn to see clearly the architecture of cleansing now hollowing out and already weakened democracy–socially, ideologically, legally, and racially. This is not merely about isolated policies, but the totality of a system, a mode of neoliberal fascism, that feeds on amnesia, fear, and disposability. To resist, the American public needs to become historically conscious, attuned to how power operates both in the bloodstream of everyday life and in plain sight.
As the late sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, gangster capitalism or its updated version of neoliberal fascism thrives not only through repression but through the death of imagination, the dismantling of critical thought, informed judgment, and the very institutions that nurture them. It is essential to challenge the formation of oppressive identities, agency, and subjectivity, while equally vital is the cultivation of cultural and educational forces that can undo them. Just as we must confront the economic, financial, and institutional structures of neoliberal fascism, both nationally and globally, it is equally crucial to recognize that domination operates on an intellectual and pedagogical level, shaping minds and ideas as much as markets and policies. What’s needed now is not just understanding and outrage, but organized defiance. Education must be reclaimed as a vehicle of liberation, capable of producing critical, informed, and courageous citizens. This is not the time for silence or spectatorship. It is a time to act in defense of freedom, justice, equality, and the fragile dream of a democracy not yet fully realized.
Recall those feverish days leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq when Colin Powell presented his dubious evidence to the United Nations Security Council, claiming Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs. The result of those bogus lies was The Iraq Resolution, which authorized the use of force against the sovereign state, and passed the Senate by a decisive 77-23 margin, with only 23 dissenting votes. Support crossed party lines as Hillary Clinton and many other prominent Democrats consistently reached into George W. Bush’s basket of lies, repeating the neocons’ WMD propaganda. The New York Times, fulfilling its usual perfunctory role, ran Judith Miller’s series of bogus articles parroting the same falsehoods. Outrage grew, and we took to the streets as the U.S. invasion loomed.
Today, I have the same sense of helplessness each time Israel is engulfed in yet another murderous deception, which warmakers spread through a compliant mainstream press. Much like their selling of the Iraq war, The New York Times relentlessly publishes pieces reiterating Israel’s rationale for bombing hospitals and promoting the (now thoroughly debunked) allegations of mass sexual assault, which have been used to depict all Palestinians as savages deserving of execution. The New York Times often qualifies its errors with caveats but rarely admits fault. Democrats still vote against halting arms shipments to war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, knowing it will likely harm innocent children in Gaza. History repeats, and mothers weep.
In March 2003, during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we were still adapting to the emerging digital media landscape. There were no smartphones, TikTok, Twitter, or Instagram. While information was accessible, distribution was limited to email lists and message boards. Independent outlets like CounterPunch, TomDispatch, and Antiwar.com were trailblazing radical journalism, countering the tide of pro-war disinformation from mainstream sources.
Consider YellowTimes.org, a prominent alternative to The New York Times before the Iraq War. Shortly after the U.S. military arrived in Iraq, their server was suspended for posting screenshots from Al Jazeera of dead U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians. The outrage stemmed not from dead Iraqis but from the sight of lifeless troops, victims of the Bush administration’s deceit.
“No TV station in the US is allowing dead US soldiers of POWs to be displayed and we will not either. We understand free press and all that but we don’t want someone’s family member to see them on some site. It is disrespectful, tacky and disgusting,” read an email to Yellow Times editor Erich Marquardt from the site’s Florida-based server provider, VortechHosting.
YellowTimes was finished, never to return. While their decision to publish graphic war photos might have smacked of poor taste, there was nothing illegal about publishing gruesome war photos. The blatant suppression of the YellowTimes, along with the mainstream media’s unwillingness to question the government’s WMD narrative, would have disastrous consequences. Over the next eight years, nearly 500,000 excess deaths would be attributed to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, including 4,419 U.S. service members, and mainstream media outlets would be disseminating the majority of the reporting.
First They Came for the Students
In March, nearly 22 years to the day since YellowTimes was taken down, a video captured six plainclothes ICE agents apprehending Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk on the streets near her home in Somerville, Massachusetts. As widely reported, Öztürk, a Fulbright scholar, was in the country on a student visa, concluding a PhD program in Child Study and Human Development. The disturbing video footage provides a bird’s eye view of the authoritarian overreach we are experiencing, highlighting the intensification of Trump’s efforts to suppress pro-Palestine activism and a broader assault on press freedom.
Like Mahmoud Khalil of Columbia University, and others who’ve been arrested in recent weeks, Öztürk had not been accused of breaking any laws; she had merely co-written an op-ed for the student newspaper urging Tufts’ President Sunil Kumar to recognize resolutions passed by the student senate, which included a call for the university to disclose and divest from companies with ties to Israel.
“These resolutions were the product of meaningful debate by the Senate and represent a sincere effort to hold Israel accountable for clear violations of international law,” Öztürk and her co-authors wrote. “Credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide.”
Öztürk’s arrest by ICE and the threat of deportation represent an escalation. The ICE abduction of Öztürk was a draconian strategy intended to dissuade others, especially those on student visas, from expressing similar empathy for Palestinian suffering. As of April 10, a total of 600 student visas have been revoked in the United States, with most citing pro-Palestine activism.
Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestine protests at universities like Columbia—and the threat to withhold $400 million in federal funding–is an escalation of a bipartisan effort to silence pro-Palestinian voices. While President Biden spoke against alleged anti-Semitism, he only weakly addressed the violence directed at pro-Palestine encampments last year, which drew criticism.
“Rather than addressing the sources of violence and heeding calls for immediate federal action to protect student activists and uphold their rights to free expression and assembly, President Biden has misplaced the blame on the peaceful student activists,” wrote American Muslims for Palestine in a May 2024 statement. “Doing so sets a dangerous precedent for students across the United States, making them open targets for attacks by police, administrators, and extremist Zionist groups.”
It was Biden’s dangerous precedent that set the stage for Trump’s escalating attacks on those speaking out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Students on visas in the country have been an easy target, but these ICE arrests may only signal the beginning of what’s to come. The press, especially media outlets that expose Israel’s genocide, are likely to be next.
The Case of the Alleged Hamas Freelancer
Ramzy Baroud, one of CounterPunch’s popular contributors, was born in a Gaza refugee camp and now resides in the U.S. His early life in the refugee camps gave him a profound understanding of his people’s struggle for liberation. A prolific journalist and author, Ramzy also serves as the editor of the Palestine Chronicle, one of the first English-language Palestinian media sources on the internet, which has been active since 1999.. Last October, his sister, Dr. Soma Baroud, was assassinated by the Israeli Defense Forces when a missile struck her vehicle. Her crime? Being a doctor in Gaza. At that time, she was one of over 1,000 healthcare workers killed by Israel.
Ramzy clearly explains why his sister, like many others, was targeted. We recently had him discuss it on our CounterPunch Radio podcast.
“ [Israel knows] the importance of our women in our society. They know the significance of doctors in our society, especially doctors who play more than the role of just someone who heals wounds and helps people at hospitals,” Ramzy explained. “Doctors who also serve the role of community leaders. And she really was a [leader] … So it’s kind of layers of devastation. I think the family is still unable to understand fully or to come to terms with the emotional loss just because the loss is never really stopped and there is just no time to even reflect in any profound or deep way about all of this.”
While Ramzy’s sister was targeted in Gaza, the non-profit Palestine Chronicle has also faced attacks. Last July, The New York Times published an article about a former Israeli hostage in Gaza named Andrey Kozlov, who had been held captive by Hamas fighters for six excruciating months after being kidnapped. Kozlov claimed that one of his captors, Abdallah Aljamal, was moonlighting as a journalist for the Palestine Chronicle. This accusation was repeated by Almog Meir Jan, who had been abducted along with Kozlov and another Israeli named Shlomi Ziv at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023.
Aljamal was killed in a massacre at the Nuseirat refugee camp in June 2024. He was 37 years old. Israel has provided no evidence that Aljamal, a well-known Palestinian journalist, was ever a member of Hamas, participated in the October 7 attacks, or held Israeli hostages. However, as we know, Israel doesn’t require evidence to commit war crimes, including the murder of journalists. Aljamal wasn’t the only contributor to the Palestine Chronicle who Israel killed; notable journalists Wafa Al-Udani and Yousef Dawas were also targeted, among the over 175 media workers killed by Israel during its onslaught on Gaza.
In July 2024, Almond Meir Jan, one of the Israeli hostages, filed a lawsuit against the Palestine Chronicle, claiming that, by publishing Aljama, they had provided “material support” for a “designated foreign terrorist organization.” The suit was later dismissed for lack of evidence that Baroud’s media project was in any way connected to Hamas.
U.S. District Court Judge Tiffany Cartwright stated in her ruling, “Many of the positions taken by the Chronicle, such as highlighting the deaths of Palestinian civilians and criticizing Israeli airstrikes, have been echoed by countless news organizations, protesters, and political leaders around the world … These articles do not cross the line from protected speech to inciting or preparing for unlawful activity. Nothing in the complaint alleges that Defendants advocated for, incited, or planned specific human rights violations.”
For its part, the Palestine Chronicle denied having knowledge of any ties between Aljama and Hamas, noting that he was an unpaid freelancer and not a staff writer. Additionally, they stated in their response to Jan’s lawsuit that “Defendants do not contest that the underlying torts committed against Jan by Aljamal and Hamas—the kidnapping and imprisonment of a civilian hostage—are international human rights violations.”
Following the death of Ramzy’s sister last October, Almond Meir Jan and Shlomi Ziv filed another lawsuit against the Palestine Chronicle, submitting a similar complaint that by publishing Abdallah Aljamal, they were providing “material support” for terrorism. This suit is supported by the National Jewish Advocacy Center, led by Mark Goldfeder, who argues that he perceives anti-Zionist activism as inherently antisemitic. The organization has filed similar lawsuits against other media outlets, including the Associated Press, for their reporting on the October 7 attacks.
“ [Trump] wants to silence dissent in the United States, and there’s been a major war on Palestinian voices and pro-Palestinian voices, [anyone] who dares stand up for the Palestinian people,” Ramzy Baroud told CounterPunch Radio. “For many Americans, what is happening [to] Mahmoud Khalil … [is] not igniting the kind of attention that it really should be igniting … [Next we] are going to see attacks on American citizens under various guises. The Espionage Act of this and that. The Israelis have done it … I feel like the Americans are following that trajectory.”
The lawsuits targeting the Palestine Chronicle are not standalone incidents; they form part of a larger strategy involving widespread visa cancellations and, illustrated by Rümeysa Öztürk’s case, a repression of student journalism aimed at silencing those seen as threatening U.S. interests. Consider the fate of YellowTimes during the Iraq War, now intensified many times over. A fresh wave of McCarthyism is resurfacing, energized by Donald Trump.
The Media as Terrorist Enablers
Palestine supporters have faced various forms of censorship since October 7, including significant collaboration between Israel and Meta to eliminate anti-genocide content from their Facebook and Instagram platforms. Additionally, Meta has radically adjusted its algorithms to shadow ban posts criticizing Israel. In a 2023 report, Human Rights Watch described Meta’s assault on free speech as “systemic and global.”
In June 2024, former Meta engineer Ferras Hamad filed a lawsuit against Meta, claiming he was wrongfully terminated for attempting to undo a program used to suppress content related to Palestine.
These well-documented actions have affected not only personal accounts but also media outlets. And it’s not just Meta. The New York Times, seemingly acting on behalf of the State Department, has done its best to discredit journalists like Vijay Prashad, peace organizations like CODEPINK, and others, suggesting they are pawns of the Chinese Communist Party (a claim they openly deny). The Times’ questionable reporting has led conservative lawmakers to urge Attorney General Pamela Bondi to investigate the situation in hopes of shutting them down. Our own podcast, CounterPunch Radio, had an episode discussing the October 7 attacks with investigative journalist Arun Gupta removed twice, without notice, by our hosting service Blubrry. While these various attempts at censorship might seem disparate, collectively they signify a deliberate assault on media free speech.
The U.S. government has stepped up its legislative efforts against non-profit media, viewing it as detrimental to its foreign policy goals. In November 2024, HR 9495, referred to as the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, was approved with a vote of 219-184. This legislation allows the Treasury Department to strip the tax-exempt status of any non-profit organization it classifies as a “terrorist-supporting organization.” Full authority would be granted to Treasury officials, bypassing due process. While the bill has stalled in the Senate, it could be brought back at any moment and, with considerable Democratic support, might find an easier route to the President’s desk. The act would first target organizations that oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
This legislation is not an isolated act but a continuation of the government’s crackdown on voices it finds uncomfortable–a ruthless campaign that dates back to the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which laid the foundation for the PATRIOT Act, enacted after the 9/11 attacks. What we are experiencing now is an extension of these policies. The plan is to expand the government’s authority to curtail free speech. Under the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, journalists and whistleblowers could face prosecution. Additionally, Project Esther—developed by the same goons behind Project 2025—outlines a strategy to categorize all pro-Palestine protests as anti-Semitic and supportive of Hamas. This sinister initiative, as exposed by Mondoweiss last year, also advocates for the removal of pro-Palestine students and professors from universities.
“As the more notorious U.S. policies of the post-9/11 era … fade from public memory, these older antiterrorism laws have been normalized as a comparatively liberal baseline, their structurally anti-Palestinian character having been obscured in the meantime,” writes Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights in a 2024 report. “The most important of these has been the statute criminalizing ‘material support’ for terrorist organizations, the most commonly charged federal antiterrorism offense … As in prior moments of crisis, the same Zionist organizations that pushed for expanded antiterrorism laws – most no- tably the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) – now brazenly tar all advocacy of Palestinian liberation as support for terrorism.”
Frederick Douglass once stated, “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants.”
Douglass recognized that it’s our responsibility to resist censorship in all its forms. This begins by speaking out and supporting radical, independent media. Because, no matter how hard the tyrants try, they’ll never silence us all.
