Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

My birth emerged from European capitalism’s fascistic catastrophe in the 1920s–1940s. That catastrophe also produced Israel’s experiment with settler colonialism in Palestine. This article refers to both these incidents to analyze the current Palestine-Israel catastrophe.

My reasons or qualifications to write such an article start with the fact that my maternal grandmother and grandfather were killed at the Nazis’ Mauthausen concentration camp. My father’s sister was killed in Auschwitz. My mother and her sister spent years in different concentration camps. Because of these events, my parents fled Europe and started a family in the United States. Like some other descendants of victims who witnessed such atrocities, I have tried to understand their victimization and the complex effects this had on my life directly and indirectly.

Descendants differ in their responses to what happened. Some turn inward seeking safety in a survival-focused disengagement from the larger world and its history. Some try for comfort by believing that part or all of the world has moved beyond the conditions that produced fascism’s victimizations. Some suffer long-simmering mixtures of impotence, rage, and fear that it will happen again. Among them are those who fight fascism wherever they see it reemerge and also those who perpetrate further cycles of victimization against others. Still others try to work out an understanding by writing articles and books.

Israel tried to operate settler colonialism on the pattern of earlier European settler colonialisms established around the world. That effort linked to me indirectly in a remarkably personal way. Without grasping why, I chose to participate in a program for Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates that took 20 of us to East Africa in the early 1960s as volunteers for a summer of teaching. I began to learn there what settler colonialism meant. Further studies grew into my doctoral dissertation later at Yale based on research in the records of London’s Colonial Office and the British Museum. My resulting book, The Economics of Colonialism: Britain and Kenya, 1870–1930 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974), tried to analyze Kenya’s settler colonialist economy.

Britain had expelled the native population and reserved the nation’s fertile highlands for a few thousand of its white émigrés. In addition to land and police protection, Britain provided its émigrés with coffee seeds, transport, and a market to operate a Kenya-grown coffee export economy. The millions of Kenyan Blacks forcibly relocated into constricted reservations found them to be inadequate to sustain their lives. Their survival thus required them to do low-wage labor on the coffee plantations of the white settlers. Taxes on those low wages helped finance the British colonial government that enforced a ruthlessly exploitative settler colonial system. This economic and racialized apartness in Kenya paralleled the better-known apartheid in South Africa.

Such economic systems provoke constant resistance ranging from desperate individual and small group acts to mass movements to organized rebellions. These acts of resistance occurred in Kenya, South Africa, and elsewhere too. Britain routinely repressed them. In Kenya, eventually, organizers gathered around Jomo Kenyatta and mobilized the so-called Kenya Land and Freedom Army to rebel. Their fight widely came to be known as the 1950s Mau Mau uprising against the British government. That uprising’s death counts included 63 British military officers, 33 settlers, more than 1,800 native policemen and auxiliary soldiers, and the widely held guesstimate of more than 11,000 Kenyan rebels. The British repressed the rebellion, imprisoned Kenyatta, and loudly declared victory.

Britain’s victory, however, sounded the death knell for its Kenya colony. Mau Mau showed the British the rising levels of resistance and rebellion they would face indefinitely from the settler colonies they had created. British politicians saw these as mushrooming costs of the colonies they could not afford. Since the end of World War II, European colonialisms had been dissolving almost everywhere. British leaders could not escape accommodating the historical reality. Shortly after Mau Mau, Britain acknowledged Kenya’s national independence, freed Kenyatta, and accepted him as Kenya’s new leader. Independence ended Kenya’s settler colonialism.

The Kenya lesson in settler colonialism deeply impacted British leaders but proved one that Israeli leaders refused to learn from. Given the particular histories of Zionism and European Jews, most Israeli leaders were determined to impose settler colonialism on the Palestinian people and to preserve it by force.

Israeli leaders’ declaration of independence in May 1948 provoked immediate Palestinian and Arab resistance that has continued to this moment. Mass movements and broad rebellions have punctuated that resistance and enjoyed increasing external support (from Arab, Islamic, and other sources). The demise of previous European settler colonialisms left a legacy of immense difficulties for Israeli efforts to erect and sustain another.

One crucial aspect of their response to those difficulties was to form an alliance with a world power that could help defend its settler colonialism. The resulting close alliance with the United States positioned Israel as its front-line agent in the Middle East, the United States’s dominant military extension to where major global energy resources were located. Undercutting Israel’s early socialist, collectivist, and kibbutzim components was facilitated by the alliance with the United States. Most Zionist leaders willingly paid the price of this alliance. Another price was Israel’s military, economic, and political dependence on the United States. Finally, Israeli leaders cultivated strong cultural and family connections to financially and politically influential partner communities inside the U.S. and Europe. In these ways, Israeli leaders hoped that settler colonialism might survive and grow despite many examples in history that proved otherwise.

For some decades it seemed, to many inside and outside Israel, that its leaders’ strategy and connections might secure its settler colonialism. But then what happened in Kenya began to repeat itself in Israel (each in different conditions). Palestinians resisted, mass movements followed, and finally, powerful, organized rebellions arose. Israeli victories over each in turn proved to be mere preludes to later, higher forms of opposition with ever more global support. Israeli victories resembled those achieved by their British counterparts in Kenya.

It is equally clear now in Israel and Palestine that the prospect of endless warfare into the future is going to likely cost ever more lives and injuries, physical and psychical damages, and economic and political losses. The victims who survived Israel’s extreme violence in Gaza are already surfacing more motivated, better trained, and with more effective weapons to take up their fight. The children of those victims will likewise include many determined to end Israel’s settler colonialism.

History, and now time itself, is on the Palestinians’ side. Even a staunch Israeli supporter like former Secretary of State Antony Blinken had to admit a stark reality (although he neither admitted its historic meaning nor its political implications). He said, “Indeed, we assess that Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost. That is a recipe for an enduring insurgency and perpetual war.”

Britain’s dying empire forced its acceptance of Kenya’s independence in 1963 and the end of its settler colonialism. The current decline of the United States empire is forcing something similar in Israel. After the latest and the worst Gaza war, Israel’s crucial ally is inching closer to the conclusion Britain reached in Kenya after the Mau Mau uprising.

For growing numbers of United States leaders, the risks and costs of its alliance with Israel are rising faster than the benefits. Many have been persuaded, including United States citizens, that providing Israel with funds and weapons rendered the United States “complicit in a genocide” and, therefore, isolated globally. The ceasefire imposed by Donald Trump has followed. Whether and how it functions and how Israel resists and evades the ongoing criticism will matter far less than the more basic trajectory underway now. History suggests that Benjamin Netanyahu or his successors will eventually be disconnected from the United States. Their lost alliance will hasten the end of Israel’s settler colonialism.

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Image courtesy of Empire Files.

The current deployment of soldiers and Marines to the US-Mexico border is illegal and immoral. The looming possibility of Trump invoking the Insurrection Act, in an attempt to paper it over, actually raises more danger of unconstitutional orders.

We have just spent 20 years being used as cannon fodder for hapless debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, soldiers and Marines are being used as propaganda fodder for the oldest Commander-in-Chief ever, taking office with the worst approval rating in modern history.

Conventional, active-duty units from the 82nd Airborne Division and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force have been the first to the border under US Northern Command. Units from nine different Army bases have been sent so far (including my old unit, the 10th Mountain). The Air Force and Coast Guard are involved as well. Armored infantry fighting vehicles are expected to arrive soon.

Soldiers and Marines have been prohibited from posting anything on social media about the operation or face punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, while official NorthCom socials glamorize the deployment.

For nearly 150 years, the use of federal troops to enforce domestic law without authorization from Congress has been banned under the Posse Comitatus Act.

Until now, US military involvement in border operations has found legal loopholes: only conducting support operations like surveillance and transportation, not direct enforcement. Or using National Guard troops, who fall under state and not federal chain of command, therefore immune from the Posse Comitatus Act.

Trump’s orders explicitly give troops an enforcement role, and is an all-out military campaign. Legal challenges look inevitable.

His desire to use the military to push the limits of the law with the Insurrection Act, which suspends Posse Comitatus, was a defining feature of his first term.

This is why Donald Trump canned his previous Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. Esper publicly refuted Trump’s demand to use the Insurrection Act to, in Trump’s words, “crack skulls” at constitutionally-protected protest actions in 2020.

Esper did not break with Trump because the Raytheon executive and Heritage Foundation head suddenly sympathised with the protests–but because he knew such a move would implicate him in unconstitutional acts.

The Trump-appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, also fought behind the scenes against Trump’s demands. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Trump called on the Pentagon to “beat the f— out of” civil rights protesters and, more concerning, to “just shoot them.” General Milley refused him because, of course, beating, shooting and the use of federal troops for domestic law enforcement and assaults on protestors would easily be considered unconstitutional.

No coincidence that, as soon as he took office once again, Trump had General Milley’s portrait removed from the Pentagon–a standard honor for former Joint Chiefs. This has just escalated to readying an investigation against him, removing his security detail, and possibly issuing him a post-retirement demotion.

For Trump’s second term, the question became: who would be willing to bend the law in such a way? Who better than a Fox News talking head with a LOT of skeletons in his closet!

The unprecedentedly-close vote to confirm Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense demonstrates he has little sway with the high command. Top Republican Mitch McConnell surprised many with his ‘No’ vote, but McConnell is deeply informed by and connected to the Pentagon brass. He would likely not have voted No without their blessing.

Hegseth also has repeatedly–both in his book and on television–lambasted the current, Biden-appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (only the second Black officer to ever hold the position) for “DEI woke shit” and having “built his generalship dutifully pursuing the radical positions of left-wing politicians, who in turn rewarded him with promotions.” It doesn’t appear he will last long, especially if he pushes back in any way. Trump can quickly replace him with a more agreeable General.

Hegseth’s importance to Trump is apparently not based on credibility among the Pentagon or to carry out foreign policy, but Hegseth’s willingness to break with the command–and potentially with the law–to use the Insurrection Act in ways that will be unconstitutional.

Also suspicious is Trump’s surprise pick to head the Army’s senior leadership: Dan Driscoll, failed Republican congressional candidate and finance bro in his 30’s who never made it past the rank of Lieutenant (and who just happens to be a close personal friend of JD Vance) as Secretary of the Army.

I spoke with Nick Place, a former Captain in the Marine Corps who served in Afghanistan 2011-2012. He is now a civil liberties and constitutional law attorney at the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund and its Center for Protest Law & Litigation. He told me:

“Before, some of Trump’s worst illegal orders wouldn’t be passed down the Chain of Command. Now, he has people who won’t tell him no. That means future illegal orders could get passed further down the chain of command and, at each link, those orders are harder to stop–until eventually they reach the service members who have to carry out those orders; to actually do the thing.

Trump and his yes men know it’s illegal to order the military to turn its guns on the American people and otherwise violate individual people’s Constitutional rights. They’re betting they won’t be held accountable for breaking the law. Troops actually on the ground, really need to ask themselves if they’ll get the same leeway as Trump and his billionaire bosses for executing the orders Trump gives from the golf course.

Everyone needs to ask themselves if directed to act against civilians in the US: is this the right thing to do? Who does it really serve? In that environment of uncertainty, if service members wonder what it is they’re going to be ordered by Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth to do, if they start getting orders to violate people’s constitutional rights, it’s certainly worth talking to lawyers knowledgeable on military law, whether inside or outside their chain of command.”

As it stands, the deployment to the border violates the Posse Comitatus Act. Trump’s interest in the Insurrection Act is using it as a way to suspend Posse Comitatus.

As the Brennan Center for Justice has explained, the Insurrection Act can be used only in a crisis of “insurrection, rebellion or domestic violence” that is “truly beyond the capacity of civilian authorities to manage.”

While the President has the authority to define those terms and parameters, it does not mean that once the orders are given they are automatically lawful.

The Brennan Center referenced a 1932 Supreme Court decision finding that:

“Courts may still review the lawfulness of the military’s actions once deployed … federal troops are not free to violate other laws or trample on constitutional rights just because the president has invoked the Insurrection Act.”

In other words, the current border deployment, and the potential use of the Insurrection Act, are likely to face legal challenges, which could fail to hold up in court. As former Captain Nick Place explained, while the burden of carrying out the orders always falls to the rank-and-file, now even the firewall preventing illegal or immoral orders from making their way down the chain of command may be gone.

Why Is This Happening?

Soldiers and Marines may be asking themselves why they are being mobilized to the border when there are clearly legal implications.

There is really one essential reason, and it is not to actually rid the country of 15 million undocumented immigrants; big business relies on them far too much. Our economy, food production, and so much more rest on the super-exploited labor of undocumented workers. These are people who work hard to make America a rich country–well, a country with a small number of very rich people–but without the rights of American citizens.

A real immigrant sweep would hurt profits. This is Shock & Awe. It is a spectacle. This is why the White House immediately produced a video for their social media featuring Marines deploying to the border.

While countless immigrants will be swept up and deported, it will be just enough to say he kept his promise, without stepping on the toes of his capitalist friends.

There is a deeper reason why Trump needs these mass raids and troops at the border: because he knows he cannot deliver on the fundamental promises that got him elected.

Funny enough, Trump won in 2024 for the same essential reason he lost in 2020, and won in 2016.

America is in a crisis. More and more working-class people–the kind of people who join the military for a better life, unlike the children of Trump, Elon Musk, and other billionaires–are finding it harder and harder to get by. Rent, health care and education are becoming more of a burden for hard-working people. Communities degrade, addiction or depression fills the void, and the light at the end of the tunnel grows further and dimmer.

In this kind of economy, anti-incumbent voting becomes more dominant. Less people believe the promises of the party in power, so they stay home or vote to try the other team once again.

But Trump knows he cannot actually solve these problems. An immigrant crackdown was not his only “Day One” campaign promise: so too was immediately lowering the cost of food. That one is not looking likely.

Musk and the other billionaires in his administration live to do one thing: maximize the transfer of wealth from working-class people to the top 1%. They know the lives of working-class families will not improve under their administration, because they know better than anyone: that is not what they have in store.

What they need, instead, are stunts; shows of force to claim “promises made, promises kept.” It is very easy for them to deliver on promises like attacking transgender people (including soldiers and Marines), or brutalizing scapegoats like immigrant workers.

In this case, they need something very important for the stunt: you, the soldiers and Marines called up or on standby for what is coming.

It is you–not the kids of the rich guys in the White House–who will be stuck at the border for an unknown number of months to pose for photos while they carry out actions that lead to the deaths of many innocent people. According to a recent report by Human Rights Watch, the “border deterrence” now carried out by soldiers and Marines causes the death of maybe more than 2,500 migrants per year, as they are intentionally forced onto the most perilous routes.

US troops, many of whom are from immigrant families themselves or have befriended children of immigrants as fellow service members, know that most people crossing the border are good people forced to risk their lives for a better future. Beyond the legal implications of the border operation, there is a serious moral one. And you have the right to question immoral orders just as much as you do illegal ones.

Dark Implications

Service members should be thinking very hard about their role and rights at this moment.

The millions of people who came into the streets in 2020–which include many veterans, active-duty, Reservists, and Guard soldiers–were very fortunate that Trump had some wall of opposition against his demand to have the military open fire on the demonstrations. It seems hard to imagine such an incident, but should now feel very close and very real.

The millions who came out this past year to oppose Israel’s genocide (which, again, included many vets and service members) are attacked as domestic terrorists by the Trump Administration. Any mass protests, for that matter, which oppose the politics of this administration are looked at as a domestic threat. Whether or not you agree with a protests’ demands, they are protected under the US Constitution. Trump has a different view. Even during his campaign, he promised to “crush” protests against Israel’s war crimes that were peaceful and legal.

This time around he has stacked his cabinet with a bizarre cohort who have spent years auditioning for the roles by marketing themselves as diehard loyalists, from Tulsi Gabbard as head of all spy agencies to Kristi Noem as head of Homeland Security. Their top qualification, like Hegseth, is that they will never say no to Trump.

Carrying out his border operation without opposition is the first step down a dangerous path.

There is no telling where this could go. There is no telling how you in the military could be used. But you do have control over your own role.

Your command doesn’t advertise this, but you have a lot of rights. You have the right to speak out, even publicly, against actions you disagree with, as a US Navy Corpsman just did protesting Trump’s inauguration, announcing his plan to file as a Conscientious Objector along with many others who have done so publicly in the past year. You have the right to follow their lead, and file that packet as well.

At minimum, you have the right to question whether or not your use on the border or under the Insurrection Act could be considered illegal or immoral orders, and learn the ways you can protect yourself.

There are various free and confidential legal services at your disposal, to answer any questions, provide legal advice, and defend you if you choose to exercise those rights.

And as things head in a dark direction, how many exercise that right could make the difference.

If you are in the military and have questions about your options, contact us here for confidential advice and support.

You can also call the GI Rights Hotline 24/7 at 1-877-447-4487.

You can also get more information from to A Guide to Getting Out of the US Military Now on the Eyes Left Podcast.

This piece first appeared on Empire Files.

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A web search for former President Biden’s “Justice 40 Initiative” yields this result. U.S. Department of Energy, Jan. 23, 2024. Photo: The author.

Blitzkrieg

President Trump’s recent executive orders are an assault upon the framework of racial justice built since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That law barred discrimination based upon race, color, religion, sex and national origin. Its protections extended to voter registration, public accommodation, schools, parks, and workplaces. Trump’s revocation of former President Biden’s environmental justice initiative (“Justice 40”) and President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 equal employment directive, are veritable licenses to discriminate. The speed and breadth of the onslaught may be described as a blitzkrieg, a “lightening war,” like that of the Nazi invasions in 1939 to ’41, except waged with executive orders, OMB spreadsheets, federal notices, impoundments, and spending freezes.

Impacts

Trump’s overturning of Executive Order 1408 was expected. It eliminated Biden’s “Justice 40 Initiative”, announced in January 2021, which aimed to direct 40 percent of certain Federal investments to disadvantaged communities impacted by pollution. Over 500 federal programs across 16 agencies were involved in dispensing Justice 40 funds – hundreds of billions of dollars – to improve water and air quality, remediate contaminated soils, prevent flooding and fires, develop clean energy systems, create sustainable transportation networks, and offer workforce training for new jobs in the green economy. Though the numbers seem large, they are not considering the scale of the crisis and the size of the disparity in pollution exposure in poor versus wealthy communities.

Unfortunately, the slow speed of the rollout – partly the consequence of delays in passage of Biden’s “Build Back Better” legislation (later, the scaled-down Inflation Reduction Act) — meant that the program only really got up to speed by the time of the 2024 election. Since then, federal agencies have been in a race against time to get money out the door and into the hands of communities, municipalities, states and non-profits before it’s withdrawn. Trump’s inauguration and executive order blitzkrieg stopped that advance in its tracks. To make matters worse, the recent funding freeze (now rescinded) and OMB directives (essentially, a blacklist) meant that even grants already awarded under Justice 40 may never be dispersed. An OMB memo to federal agencies requires them to report any grantees in their portfolios whose work involves immigrants, foreign aid, climate change, abortion, “gender ideology”, “equity” or “environmental justice.” The presumption is that funding for any of these purposes will be cut. (In some cases, this may constitute an unconstitutional impoundment of congressionally allocated funds.)

Some blame for the fiasco must go to the previous administration. Even if they’d tried, Biden’s team couldn’t have created a program more likely to be halted by a Republican administration. The 40 per cent number looks like – indeed is – a quota, long a bugbear of conservative politicians who decry “reverse discrimination” or “discrimination against white people.” Moreover, by deploying the term “environmental justice” in its program descriptions, Biden’s team subjected future beneficiaries to the depredations of the racists who control the party of MAGA. (They should have named the program MEGA – “Make the Environment Great Again”!) Biden painted a big bullseye on the back of the environmental justice movement, and then gave Trump the arrows.

The term “environmental justice” first gained prominence in a 1987 report from the United Church of Christ, Racial Justice Commission, and then in Robert Bullard’s book, Dumping in Dixie (1990). The idea that Black and other historically marginalized communities suffered disproportionately from pollution was at the time, uncontroversial, so little so, that President George H.W. Bush, (of Willie Horton fame), established in 1992, an Office of Environmental Justice at EPA. Two years later, President Clinton signed an executive order to broaden the initiative and develop a strategy for implementation.

The first sign that environmental justice would be segregated from the broader environmental movement was the establishment of EJ centers at several universities. The first was the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, inaugurated in 1992 at Xavier University, led by Beverly Wight. After that came more university centers and the inevitable bureaucratization and academicization: specialized jargon, advisory councils, grant programs, working groups, career guidance, conferences, guidebooks, interagency task forces, risk assessments, toolkits, blogs, training courses, strategic plans, action plans, and foundation funding. Environmental organizations big and small began to trumpet the value of environmental justice, while fencing it off from broader environmental concerns. Under the George W. Bush administration, new appointees at EPA reacted to the development by redefining environmental injustice as something that impacted all Americans, not just those in minority and low-income communities. The movement was simultaneously being expanded and gutted.

A series of inspector general’s reports in the early 2000s indicated that staff, managers and successive directors at EPA failed to take environmental justice into consideration in policy and decision making. In 2008, newly elected President Obama convened a working group to address the problem, and issued a series of memoranda and executive orders, but passed no significant laws addressing environmental justice. On the eve of President Trump’s accession to power in 2017, a former official at the Department of Justice’s Natural Resources Division, was sanguine about the future of the movement: “The [Trump] administration may plan to cut budgets and …reduce authorities, but [environmental justice] is well ensconced in the career people in the federal government…It’s not a law thing as much as it is a social thing.” Trump’s scattershot approach to governance during his first administration, plus his shambolic responses to the pandemic, limited his opportunity to undermine environmental justice.

On January 27, 2020, newly inaugurated President Biden issued an executive order “laying the foundation for the most ambitious environmental justice agenda ever undertaken by an administration.” Unlike Obama, Biden enshrined his initiatives in laws, though their implementation, as noted above, was slow and halting. But even Congressional legislation is not safe from the depredations of an autocrat – particularly one that controls the Senate and the House (albeit with small majorities) and the Supreme Court. It’s unclear at this point, how much of the remaining Justice 40 funds allocated by Congress, will be distributed to communities impacted by pollution and climate change. If you are poor and politically disfavored, the wheels of justice turn slowly, if at all.

Trumps second major executive action in civil rights, reversing President Johnson’s equal employment directive, is potentially more destructive than the first. It’s also, on the face of it, more perplexing. Johnson’s order banned federal contractors from “discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin,” precisely what Trump claims to do in his contravening action. So why cancel a long dead president’s nearly identical initiative? Two reasons: First, Johnson’s order contained the now proscribed words “affirmative action.” Employers were mandated to take “affirmative action to ensure that job applicants and employees are treated…without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” The phrase “affirmative action” here, meant nothing more than ensuring that hiring and promotion was conducted without bias. It didn’t require “reverse discrimination,” or the provision of advantages to non-white job applicants or employees. It didn’t prescribe D.E.I. (diversity, equity and inclusion) training, or the hiring of administrators to police workplace speech for possible insensitivity or microaggressions – what the right likes to call “wokeism”. Nevertheless, by revoking Johnson’s order, Trump put another nail in the coffin of affirmative action as the term is now commonly understood. (It’s already banned in higher education.) No disadvantaged communities or individuals are to be given a leg up during Trump’s regime. No effort will be made to make up for past inequities, however much they occlude future prospects.

The second reason for countermanding Johnson’s order is vengeance, which for Trump – in true Mafia style — is a meal best served cold. In 1973, he and his real estate developer father Fred Trump, were sued by the U.S. Department of Justice for violating the Fair Housing Act. They discriminated against Black renters at an apartment complex they owned in Queens, New York. After a long and acrimonious legal fight – Trump was represented by the notorious Roy Cohn, anti-communist Senator Joe McCarthy’s attack dog – the case was settled by a consent decree, which the defendants quickly violated. Trump was sued again but managed to delay the case long enough that the government lost interest in enforcing it. In fact, Donald and Fred’s history of housing discrimination is far wider and deeper that that single case, as a New York Times investigation from 2016 revealed.

Since President Trump couldn’t cancel the Fair Housing Act, passed by Congress in the wake of the assassination of Marin Luther King in 1968, he would revoke one of its predicates, and gain the last word in a more than 50-year-old dispute. More ominously, by banning efforts to reduce racial, gender and other bias, he legitimates and even institutionalizes discrimination. The upshot of his executive order is to prevent government agencies from enforcing U.S. civil rights law, whether in the workplace, housing, education, commerce, health, or environmental protection. Trump would have the U.S. revert to a pre-civil rights era legal and political framework. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Fair Housing Act of 1968 are still the law of the land. So is the Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock (et al) ruling, extending Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to cover sexual orientation and gender identity. But without enforcement by the executive branch, laws are empty vessels. How did it come to this?

Identity politics, DEI, and stigmatization

It’s tempting to believe that Trump’s so-far successful dismissal of the legal armature of anti-discrimination is solely the expression of his own epigenetic racism, or the re-irruption of longstanding American animus. Racist demagogues, from Andrew Jackson to Pat Buchanan, have always had a place in American politics. But that’s to evade the question posed earlier: How did it come to this? And why now? How did a racist grifter like Trump manage to be elected president of the U.S. – not once but twice? Why is the public – which twice voted for a Black president — willing to see more than half a century of civil rights initiatives suspended with the flourish of a presidential pen? The answer is that Trump had unwitting accomplices, or at least, divided opponents.

Since the 19^th century, there have been displaced communities, groups and individuals who organized themselves according to one or more features of their identity – such as language, ethnicity, or religion – and used them to foster solidarity and accrue power. Some forged powerful separatist movements, for example the Basques and Catalonians in Spain, Zionists in Palestine, and Sikhs in India. In the U.S. – because of its legacy of genocide, slavery, and segregation — the most salient feature has been race, or ethnicity. More recently, sex and gender identity have been important bases for group identity, solidarity and struggle.

At the same time however, there has existed the more universalist impetus to organize people according to the category of class. Proponents of socialism argue that national and ethnic affiliation and gender identification are less insignificant in the struggle for power than the position of people in the class structure. Capitalists and politicians discriminate against one identity or another, the argument goes, but their ultimate purpose is sowing division among working people, the better to consolidate ruling class power. (In the U.S., some 70% of people may be classed as workers. They own little more than the value of their own labor power.) That doesn’t mean that racism or sexism aren’t real — they grip the masses and have been the cause of untold displacement, suffering and death. Rather, that the struggle for rights must be fought on a wider plane, so that people with common class interests don’t dissipate the power of their numbers by sectarian disputes. The last line of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848) is still relevant: “Worker of the world, unite!”

In the U.S., socialism and class politics, which made strong advances in the Depression years of the 1930s, were set back by the cold war and red scare of the 1950s, while identity politics advanced. In the 1960s, leaders of the civil rights, farm workers, feminist, and gay liberation movements, articulated powerful demands and achieved some key goals. A few of these groups and their leaders were ecumenical, seeking (and finding) support from people who did not share their identity. Martin Luther King was exemplary in that regard; the language he deployed came from texts – especially the Hebrew and Christian Bibles and U.S. Constitution – that were honored by nearly all Americans. Far from identity based, his appeals for justice and equality were universalist, even though he sought legal emancipation for one group especially, Black Americans. King’s assassination was one of the rare examples of a single catastrophe that changed history.

The mid 1970s marked a setback in U.S. and global struggles for equality under law, economic opportunity, and environmental justice. That’s when nations from the United States to Chile, and the United Kingdom to Indonesia, shifted dramatically to the right. Concerned that the economic and political power of workers and anti-imperialist insurgents had advanced too far, large corporations and their government partners engineered a capitalist counter-revolution, what’s now called neo-liberalism. Citing recession, inflation, an oil crisis and supposed Soviet expansionism, capitalist democracies and autocracies undertook concerted attacks upon unions, justice leaders, anti-war groups, and civil rights organizations. Major industries were increasingly monopolized and financialized. (“Financialization” is increased trade in stocks, bonds, commodity futures, currency and other forms of fictive capital.)

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the U.S. was once again on a war footing, and dissent was suppressed or marginalized by a compliant media. “Morning in America,” was Reagan’s best-known slogan, though he also vowed to “make America great again.” The emphasis for him, like the current occupant of the White House, was promotion of a national identity that supervened all others. Though race and gender-based identity groups can accrue a modicum of power, they can never be as large and powerful a constituency as those who identify with the nation, what Benedict Anderson called “an imagined community.”

That was the context in which identity politics, which sometimes operated in conjunction with class politics, bloomed but also grew parochial, alienating large sectors of the working class, while energizing the latter’s nationalism-as-identity. The full history of that development has yet to be written, but it’s fair to say that the recent onslaught by the Trump administration may prove its death-knell. Indeed, the pledge to destroy identity-based politics and its tools, including DEI initiatives and training, was one of the bases of Trump’s re-election. Yet that evisceration may in the end prove a liberation, opening new avenues for inter-group, and class-based solidarity. That’s assuming the current assault on civil and human rights don’t completely disable democratic politics and usher in authoritarianism or fascism.

Don’t agonize, organize

The American working class is currently divided into educated and less educated sectors, each with its own histories, habits, allegiances and vulnerabilities. The former is generally more resilient to economic shocks than the latter, though a recession – like the one from 2008-11 — can badly undermine the position of both. The latter, however, worse paid as well as less educated, are particularly susceptible to myths of race and nation, believing that their precarious social and economic positions can be improved by the subjugation of others. It isn’t so much that they are racist – though that may be a reasonable characterization in some cases — as that they have decided that the DEI and racial justice initiatives embraced by their more advantaged class fellows are opposed to their practical interests. There are clearly other factors that account for divisions within the broad, American working class, but it’s fair to say little effort is made by the major political parties to understand and bridge them. For now, Trump and the Republicans are more successful, using appeals to race, gender cliches, xenophobia, and nationalism as glue.

Yet there are many reasons to hope that the American working class may be on the cusp of regeneration. Trump’s three bromides – tariffs, oil drilling, and the expulsion of immigrants – have no chance of succeeding at what they are supposed to do: revive the fortunes (“lower the price of eggs”) for a working class whose position continues to deteriorate while the wealthy – including the billionaire class – are ever more enriched. A smaller immigrant population and higher tariffs will only worsen inflation – the third rail of American politics – and increase working class precarity.

In addition, the increasing pace of environmental and climate disasters may soon reach a tipping point prompting mass organizing and protest. (Though possibly not before rising global temperatures reach their own tipping points, leading inexorably toward ever greater disasters.)

In the course of my work with the Anthropocene Alliance, I’ve observed the emergence of a diverse, environmental proletariat poised to act. Working class whites in the Gulf South are just as concerned about rising sea levels, flooding, and displacement, as working-class Blacks in coastal Texas. Chemical contamination is equally dangerous to more and less educated people in Mississippi, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Alaska. Though the science-loving, semi-professionals among the American working-class embrace climate science while the uneducated sector still questions it, both recognize that the weather is getting warmer, fires are coming closer, floods are more frequent, and insurance less affordable. They will soon demand that something is done, and when they do, appeals to tariff, immigrants, and “gender ideology” won’t cut it.

What a new, working-class movement needs therefore, is skilled leaders, relentless organizing, and effective communication. While the major political institutions – Congress, the courts and regulatory agencies — are currently being hollowed out by Trump and his sycophants, civil society groups still exist, and social media stars can quickly reach masses of potential activists. Both need to act together and quickly. If they do, we may one soon discover that Trump’s onslaught against racial and social justice has already, in the early days of his administration, reached its apogee. From there, the fall may be precipitous.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

–Henry A. Kissinger, August 29, 1967

Believe it or not, the caption under Justice Neil Gorsuch’s Columbia University yearbook picture in 1988 is “The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”  It would seem to be an odd choice for someone whose primary credential is his supposed textual fidelity to the Constitution.

Donald Trump could be the poster child for that yearbook caption in view of the fact that in less than two weeks in the White House he has challenged the Constitution and several  congressional laws. Trump’s attack on the Constitution was his challenging of birthright citizenship, which is protected by the 14th Amendment.  It took just three days for a federal judge to temporarily block Trump’s move, which he called a “blatantly unconstitutional order.”  On January 28th, another federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s order that paused trillions of dollars for federal programs and sparked mass confusion throughout the country.  The order was unconstitutional and broke congressional laws.

Trump broke the law last Friday night when he summarily fired 18 inspectors general and ignored the 1978 law that requires giving 30 days notice to the Congress and providing cause for such actions.  The law was strengthened in 2023 to require the notice to include a “substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reason” for their removal.   Security agents escorted the Department of Agriculture IG out of the building on January 28, when she refused to obey Trump’s firing orders.

There are 76 inspectors general throughout the executive branch, but only 36 of them are Senate-confirmed and presidentially appointed.  Trump’s firings came from the latter group, and involved mostly Cabinet-level IGs, including the departments of agriculture, commerce, defense, education, interior, and labor.  In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller declared that Donald Trump did not accept the legality of the 1978 law, which was part of the post-Watergate reform movement.  Just as Trump had no justification for his Muslim ban in 2017, he provided no justification for the firing of the IGs in 2025.

Trump’s actions in his first and second terms point to a comprehensive effort to weaponize and politicize the key departments and agencies of government, particularly the judicial and national security departments.  His appointees to the Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, and the Office of National Intelligence demonstrate the comprehensive effort that Trump will make to get complete subordination from these departments.  The key institutions that could monitor and even block malfeasance in these departments would be their Offices of  Inspector General and of course the inspectors general themselves, who are responsible for preventing fraud, abuse, waste, and lawlessness at their agencies.

Trump’s attack on the inspectors general is part of a larger campaign against the civil service that was documented in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint to transform the federal government into a satrapy that serves the wishes of Donald Trump.  Vice President J.D. Vance is already on record as stating that the Trump administration will need to “fire every mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people.”  Trump took a major step in this direction on January 27th, when he offered buyout arrangements to all 2.3 million federal employees if they would resign before February 6th.  House Speaker Mike Johnson said that Trump can’t simply walk into an agency and fire everyone, although it would be “appropriate for him to do so in some places.”

Trump has had a grievance against the IGs since the last year of his first term, when the intelligence community’s IG forwarded a CIA whistleblower complaint to Congress that led to his first impeachment.  The law required the IG to forward the complaint.  Trump also removed the Department of State IG for investigating Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s misuse of government employees to run personal errands for himself and his wife.  Trump stated that these IGs were treating him “very unfairly.”

There are few federal offices that are more essential to the maintenance of our democracy than the Offices of the Inspector General.  Without their work, there would be far fewer congressional investigations of the misuse of federal powers.  The reports of the IG as well as congressional investigations are essential to prevent lawlessness in the government and maintain our democracy itself.  One government agency that I’m particularly familiar with is the OIG of the Central Intelligence Agency, which over the years exposed the intelligence failures linked to the 9/11 attacks; the sadistic torture and abuse program; the use of secret prisons in East Europe and Southeast Asia; and the coverup of a shoot down of a missionary plane that was an illegal part of a drug monitoring program in Peru.

Trump’s actions demonstrate that he has little concern regarding good and efficient government; he simply wants to shrink the ranks of the federal workforce and make sure there is no internal investigation or monitoring of the departments and agencies of government.  The investigations of the government’s IGs save the federal government billions of dollars annually.

Unfortunately, there have been other presidents and even CIA directors who have worked to weaken the OIG without any congressional response.  President Barack Obama weakened the CIA’s OIG by taking two years to appoint an IG, and then appointing a very weak one.  CIA director Leon Panetta moved the office outside of the headquarters building in 2015, which made it more difficult to conduct rigorous oversight.

In all these cases, the Senate and House intelligence committees made no effort to intervene and correct these matters.   Trump’s actions are the latest efforts to weaken an open and accountable democracy, and move toward the kind of authoritarian society that George Orwell warned about.

The post Trump Hates Accountability So He Fires Independent Inspectors General appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

–Henry A. Kissinger, August 29, 1967

Believe it or not, the caption under Justice Neil Gorsuch’s Columbia University yearbook picture in 1988 is “The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”  It would seem to be an odd choice for someone whose primary credential is his supposed textual fidelity to the Constitution.

Donald Trump could be the poster child for that yearbook caption in view of the fact that in less than two weeks in the White House he has challenged the Constitution and several  congressional laws. Trump’s attack on the Constitution was his challenging of birthright citizenship, which is protected by the 14th Amendment.  It took just three days for a federal judge to temporarily block Trump’s move, which he called a “blatantly unconstitutional order.”  On January 28th, another federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s order that paused trillions of dollars for federal programs and sparked mass confusion throughout the country.  The order was unconstitutional and broke congressional laws.

Trump broke the law last Friday night when he summarily fired 18 inspectors general and ignored the 1978 law that requires giving 30 days notice to the Congress and providing cause for such actions.  The law was strengthened in 2023 to require the notice to include a “substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reason” for their removal.   Security agents escorted the Department of Agriculture IG out of the building on January 28, when she refused to obey Trump’s firing orders.

There are 76 inspectors general throughout the executive branch, but only 36 of them are Senate-confirmed and presidentially appointed.  Trump’s firings came from the latter group, and involved mostly Cabinet-level IGs, including the departments of agriculture, commerce, defense, education, interior, and labor.  In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller declared that Donald Trump did not accept the legality of the 1978 law, which was part of the post-Watergate reform movement.  Just as Trump had no justification for his Muslim ban in 2017, he provided no justification for the firing of the IGs in 2025.

Trump’s actions in his first and second terms point to a comprehensive effort to weaponize and politicize the key departments and agencies of government, particularly the judicial and national security departments.  His appointees to the Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, and the Office of National Intelligence demonstrate the comprehensive effort that Trump will make to get complete subordination from these departments.  The key institutions that could monitor and even block malfeasance in these departments would be their Offices of  Inspector General and of course the inspectors general themselves, who are responsible for preventing fraud, abuse, waste, and lawlessness at their agencies.

Trump’s attack on the inspectors general is part of a larger campaign against the civil service that was documented in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint to transform the federal government into a satrapy that serves the wishes of Donald Trump.  Vice President J.D. Vance is already on record as stating that the Trump administration will need to “fire every mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people.”  Trump took a major step in this direction on January 27th, when he offered buyout arrangements to all 2.3 million federal employees if they would resign before February 6th.  House Speaker Mike Johnson said that Trump can’t simply walk into an agency and fire everyone, although it would be “appropriate for him to do so in some places.”

Trump has had a grievance against the IGs since the last year of his first term, when the intelligence community’s IG forwarded a CIA whistleblower complaint to Congress that led to his first impeachment.  The law required the IG to forward the complaint.  Trump also removed the Department of State IG for investigating Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s misuse of government employees to run personal errands for himself and his wife.  Trump stated that these IGs were treating him “very unfairly.”

There are few federal offices that are more essential to the maintenance of our democracy than the Offices of the Inspector General.  Without their work, there would be far fewer congressional investigations of the misuse of federal powers.  The reports of the IG as well as congressional investigations are essential to prevent lawlessness in the government and maintain our democracy itself.  One government agency that I’m particularly familiar with is the OIG of the Central Intelligence Agency, which over the years exposed the intelligence failures linked to the 9/11 attacks; the sadistic torture and abuse program; the use of secret prisons in East Europe and Southeast Asia; and the coverup of a shoot down of a missionary plane that was an illegal part of a drug monitoring program in Peru.

Trump’s actions demonstrate that he has little concern regarding good and efficient government; he simply wants to shrink the ranks of the federal workforce and make sure there is no internal investigation or monitoring of the departments and agencies of government.  The investigations of the government’s IGs save the federal government billions of dollars annually.

Unfortunately, there have been other presidents and even CIA directors who have worked to weaken the OIG without any congressional response.  President Barack Obama weakened the CIA’s OIG by taking two years to appoint an IG, and then appointing a very weak one.  CIA director Leon Panetta moved the office outside of the headquarters building in 2015, which made it more difficult to conduct rigorous oversight.

In all these cases, the Senate and House intelligence committees made no effort to intervene and correct these matters.   Trump’s actions are the latest efforts to weaken an open and accountable democracy, and move toward the kind of authoritarian society that George Orwell warned about.

The post Trump Hates Accountability So He Fires Independent Inspectors General appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Philip Cohen – CC BY-SA 2.0

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

– Thomas Jefferson, 1816

I think we can assume that unless the non-MAGA sector of American voters find some way to remove Donald J. Trump from office, or he vacates it the way Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy did, or the way Harrison, Taylor, Harding and FDR did, or the way Nixon did, you can settle down to four years of Trump presidency.

So far, after about two weeks, we can expect President Trump will push hard to replace all possible obstructions, Congressional, Constitutional, and Military, to his will to power. This is a power claim not directed at shaping a “higher humanity,” Nietzsche’s dream, but profiting on real estate, regal offerings, and merchandizing his presidency (Shop at Trumptstore.com). If you know U.S. presidential history, you’ll know this guy is a “never before.”

Actually, in Thomas Jefferson’s view, being ignorant of history and the workings of government and much more is a danger to any electoral Constitutional democracy hoping to hold on to freedoms won. Always, however, in danger of being lost. Like now.

Trump can be a one-off if we bring History, for one, back into public education, alongside Civics and its focus on how democratic governments work, the role of political parties, and Constitutional rights and the paths to their enactment. Here, we should teach historical struggles, highlighting strong positions at the time which collapsed into nonsense, and weak positions which over time found their way to acceptance. At a more primer level, we need to stand firm in regard to what a sentence is, in other words, how to read beyond messaging and emojis, how to build an argument grounded in supportable facts and evidence, and how to employ the methods of both dialectic and rhetoric to expose what is false, inconsistent and baseless.

You can discern at once that we are in desperate need of such skills.

Reading critically not confined to what STEM curricula require is essential if the scope of knowledge Jefferson found necessary to battle the forces of anti-liberal autocracy can be attained. There is much nonsense that has gained an equal footing with rational and empirically based discourse. Much has been turned upside down. For instance, the United States House Select Committee on the January 6^th insurrection presented clear evidence to make its case. Results: the insurrection was turned by Presidential order into a “day of love.” The members of the Select Committee should be indicted Trump declared. Trump demands an apology from a bishop who asked from the pulpit that mercy be shown to immigrants and LGBTQ+ people.

Examples of how the world of reliable reasoning is being turned on its head proliferate every day. What the response has been is expressed here in an 2023 Atlantic piece: “Trump Floats the Idea of Executing Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley: The former president is inciting violence against the nation’s top general. America’s response is distracted and numb.” Is not such distraction and numbness a clear indication that this is not a civilized state and that we are perversely believing we are free?

In the present, Trump’s own Heinrich Himmler, DOD secretary Hegseth, is doing what he can to execute President Trump’s orders but Biden’s preemptive pardon of Milley nixes execution. In our cockeyed world, it’s Biden’s preemptive pardons and not a President’s vindictiveness that are deplorable here.

We’re under a sort of Humpty Dumpty regime of authority. However, authorities do exist; what Fauci says about a virus is not equivalent to what Trump says; what the IPCC says about global warming is not equivalent to your experience of the weather; there are alternative theories, but no alternative facts; false equivalence is a rhetorical device, truth is not in repetition or volume; rhetoric is persuasive not crushing. There is much that has set critical thought back to troglodyte level.

This president is intent on making miserable the lives of those who oppose him. Some his fraudulent Justice Department may indict and imprison, others now without security detail may disappear. We won’t become less ignorant in time to save these or spin the world right side up but hopefully we can grow wiser before the 2026 Congressional elections. In a couple of generations of critical thinking education, the chances of both plutocracy and autocracy may diminish. But then AI may do the critical thinking for us, or the Owners of such will.

Long term goal: if we want to keep our republic, which Franklin obviously saw was not guaranteed (as if he foresaw Trump as did Tocqueville and Madison), we need to find a path to reaching common understanding. We need to ease up on our personal perspective and see beyond the illusions of our own likes and opinions, which are authorized only by the assertion that they are ours. A vicious circle. We cannot claim the deity of our own views, though Trump does, because in doing so we ignore the ruthless conditions of economic inequality that have led us to the antiliberal Trump. Likewise, the force of an increasing global warming does not dissolve because we choose to ignore its existence. Our ignorance on this matter is beyond tragic.

I am not advocating a path to Universal and Absolute Truth that is clearly marked and mysteriously devolved into a Trump politics of “alternate facts.” I am also not denying that methodologies to that path, rational since the Enlightenment and finely tuned empirically in the Scientific Method since Francis Bacon, have not saved us from degenerating into a Trump politics. The reasoning of reasonable people in government was stormed, like the Bastille, in the recent presidential election and that lot was vilified and scorned as The Elite. In accordance with our world upside down state, the Elite are no longer the wealthy and powerful but the journalists, the university faculty and those who write long form essays.

Education has gone down with reason itself, both at low ebb among Trump supporters. It is imagined that the bureaucratic dark web of the Deep State is woven in the web of reason itself.

I would, however, assert that there is nothing in our present level of discourse that can dislodge and replace either the Scientific Method or the Western Rationalist Tradition.

It is only because we are descending from a state of civilization to a world Hobbes feared (solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short), that we can presume to be both free and ignorant, ignorance here fully accepted as a “crushing” of the purveyors of “fake news” and all criticism of Trump. Interrogation and debate, a point-counterpoint, the formation of a dialectic and so on, requires a mutual respect for the process and an acceptance of the legitimacy of those engaged. Neither of those requirements now exist. They don’t because you can turn reasoning on its head and not be stopped, you will not concede any justness or fairness in opposing views, and you accept as a given that inquiry and investigation are weapons employed by Trump’s enemies, which are also yours. Faith in him has replaced a critical reasoning that would expose the uncivilized state of his own mind.

In point of fact, a U.S. state of civilization in which a substantial middle class and a reliable mobility ladder blocked a face-off between the poor and the wealthy vaporized. The reasons are many. Investment wealth crushed wage earner wealth; wealth invested in politics to preserve and protect its ownership; wealth invested against government obstructions to unbridled Market Rule; wealth is investing in a man who can win the popular vote even though the vast majority of that populace is best served by democratic and not oligarchic, autocratic rule.

The U.S. state of civilization has fallen into the hands not only of the will of the wealthy but also, as a double whammy, the hands of an autocrat wannabe who serves himself. Whether his transactional ways collide with the ways of global investment and finance is a speculation as to whether Trump can bend Market Rule to his own will as he has with 50% of those making under $50,000 total income.

In one telling, this demographic of voters were ignorant of who and what is endangering to them and their democracy, or, Trump has Rasputin/Svengali powers. In another telling, or recitation, this demographic had no political party representation, was thirsty for relief and saw that in Donald J. Trump, who gave them recognition.

Regardless of what explanation you choose, failures to push for working class and middle class representation in a party detoured from its New Deal roots, as well as failure of both parties to organize against the autocratic ambitions of Trump point to a collapse in our state of civilization.

We are not critically aware and accurately informed enough to keep ourselves free. What is a decline into a plutocracy or autocratic rule but a failure to keep ourselves free?

The whole tragic drama is different with Market Rule.

There’s some nervousness regarding what Trump may do but private gain and private property are not threatened either by Trump or were they over the 16 years of Democratic presidencies. Losers are part of the game and expected. There was no way that the party of Reaganomics was going to bring relief to those who became MAGAS. What the Losers in growing numbers would have done and how the Winners would have responded is academic at this point. Trump stepped in and buffered the conflict.

Conflict may arise, however, between the forces of market globalization and an autocrat’s need to bend such forces to his will. Or, more likely, Trump will withdraw within the domain he has won. He remains a Baltic and Mediterranean Avenues real estate guy from Queens. The fox doesn’t stray from home turf. What we do have more assuredly is a clear case of globalized capitalist strategic expertise in an unscheduled relationship with a clever fox who has gotten into the unprotected White House coop. Twice.

Perhaps Hobbes, who wrote that an authoritarian government would constrain the degeneracy of a state of Nature, would be MAGA today, looking upon Trump as an imposer of peace and a protector of the people from the responsibilities of keeping a republic. After this election, Trump tells us, we won’t need elections. We’ll have him. If we don’t acquiesce to his view of his own immortality, we face the possibility of a continuing regime of MAGA sponsored Trump clones.

In the collapsed and sorry state of civilization we are in, very little is grounded in thought but mostly passion as well as a cultish strain of allegiance to Trump. With him gone, passionate hatred wanders off, as it tends to do, and in the absence of a gospel left to us, there’s a good chance that Mother Nature will really go viral on alternative media sources and the fear of a planet heating up and destroying God, Country and Personal Freedom will be trendsetting. Passionate hatred that has no thought will react to the next Big Fear.

There’s a good chance Trump’s wild crew of miscreants will sink under the weight of their assignments by reason of ignorance and incompetence, or, as Big Plans crumble as poor execution becomes the norm, that chaos will lead to Congressional wins for Democrats in 2026. There’s also a good chance that the wizard’s curtain is thrown open and we proceed to see and think clearly. And fortify our defenses in the classrooms, in the eager minds of the young. . . if we can keep AI from replacing our own intelligence.

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Photo by Damir Samatkulov

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

—Joanna Moncrieff, Chemically Imbalanced, 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Photograph Source: salty_soul – CC BY 2.0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This first appeared on Border Chronicles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Gaza’s return, Youtube screenshot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Photograph Source: Office of Speaker Mike Johnson – Public Domain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Bertrand Russell – Public Domain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note.

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

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Editorial cartoon in the NYT, 1903.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Image by Khashayar Kouchpeydeh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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