Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House, US President Donald Trump said Palestinians have “no alternative” but to leave Gaza. When the two leaders met in the oval office, Trump declared that after Palestinians from the Gaza Strip are moved elsewhere, the US will “take over”. The US president also expressed his desire to transform the Israeli-occupied territory into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.

These surrealistic statements were uttered as Palestinians across the Gaza Strip are facing the unprecedented destruction left behind by the Israeli army. Many of those who were displaced and have managed to go back to their homes in the past two weeks found only ruins. According to the United Nations, Israeli army has bombed 90 percent of all housing units in the Gaza Strip, leaving 160,000 units completely destroyed and 276,000 severely or partially damaged.

As the dust settles and images of the extent of the devastation circulate on mainstream media, it has become clear that the genocidal violence Israel unleashed in Gaza was not only used to kill, displace, and destroy, but also to undercut the Palestinian population’s right to remain. And it is precisely the possibility of securing this right that the Trump-Netanyahu duo is now bent on preventing.

Remaining as a right

The right to remain is not formally recognised within the human rights canon and is usually associated with refugees who have fled their country and are permitted to stay in a host country while seeking asylum. It has also been invoked in the context of so-called “urban renewal” projects where largely marginalised and insecurely housed urban residents demand their right to stay in their homes and among their community when faced with pressure from powerful actors pushing for redevelopment and gentrification. The right to remain is particularly urgent in settler-colonial situations where colonisers actively displace the Indigenous population and try to replace them with settlers. From First Nations in North America to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia, settlers have used genocidal violence to deny Indigenous people this right.

The right to remain, however, is not merely the right to “stay put”. Rather, to enjoy this right, people must be able to remain within their community and have access to both material and social “infrastructures of existence”, including water and food, hospitals, schools, places of worship and the means of livelihood. Without these infrastructures the right to remain becomes impossible.

Beyond mere physical presence, the right to remain also encompasses the right to maintain the historical and contemporary stories and webs of relations that hold people and communities together in place and time. This is a crucial aspect of this right, since the settler-colonial project not only aims for the physical removal and replacement of Indigenous people, but also seeks to erase Indigenous cultures, histories, and identities as well as any attachments to land. Finally, it cannot be enough to be allowed to remain as an occupied inhabitant within a besieged territory. The right to remain includes the ability of a people to determine their own destiny.

A history of permanent displacement

During the 1948 war, Palestinian cities were depopulated and about 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed, while most of their inhabitants became refugees in neighbouring countries. In total, about 750,000 Palestinians out of a population of 900,000 were displaced from their homes and ancestral lands and were never allowed to return. Since then, displacement or the threat of displacement has been part of the everyday Palestinian experience. Indeed, throughout the West Bank and even within Israel, in places like Umm al Hiran, Palestinian communities continue to be forcibly uprooted and removed from their lands and prevented from returning.

The US-backed Israeli denial of the right to remain in the Gaza Strip is far worse – not only because many communities are made up of refugees and this is their second, third or fourth displacement – but also because displacement has now become a tool of genocide. As early as October 13, 2023, Israel issued a collective evacuation order to 1.1 million Palestinians living north of Wadi Gaza, and, in the following months similar orders were issued time and again, ultimately displacing 90 percent of the Strip’s population.

To be sure, international humanitarian law obligates warring parties to protect civilian populations, which includes allowing them to move from war zones to safe areas. Yet, these provisions are informed by the assumption that populations have a right to remain in their homes and therefore stipulate that evacuees must be allowed to return when the fighting ends, rendering any form of permanent displacement illegal. Population transfer must be temporary and can only be used for protection and humanitarian relief, and not, as Israel has used and Trump’s recent comments reinforce, a “humanitarian camouflage” to cover up the wholesale destruction and undoing of Palestinian spaces.

The right to remain and self-determination

Now that a ceasefire has been declared, displaced Palestinians are able to go back to their homes. Yet, this movement back in no way satisfies their right to remain. This is no coincidence: the ability to remain is precisely what Israel has been aiming to eradicate in 15 months of war.

The razing of hospitals, schools, universities and mosques, shops and street markets, cemeteries, and libraries, alongside the destruction of roads, wells, electricity grids, greenhouses, and fishing vessels, was not only carried out in the service of mass killings and the temporary cleansing of areas of their inhabitants, but also to create a new reality on the ground, particularly in northern Gaza. Thus, it is not just that Palestinian homes have been destroyed but that the very existence of the population will now be compromised for years to come.

This is not a new thing. We have seen throughout history how settlers act to permanently displace and eliminate Indigenous populations from the territories. Learning from these stories we know that financial investment in rebuilding houses and infrastructure will not –in itself– ensure the population’s right to remain. Remaining requires self-determination. To enact their right to remain, Palestinians must finally gain their freedom as a self-determining people. 

Israel has denied Palestinians their right to remain for over 75 years; it is high time to set things straight. Any discussion about the future of Gaza must be guided by the claims and aspirations of the Palestinian people. Promises of reconstruction and economic prosperity by foreign countries are irrelevant unless explicitly tied to Palestinian self-determination. The right to remain can only be guaranteed through decolonisation and Palestinians liberation.

This article first appeared in Al Jazeera English 

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“Shock and Awe,” “Fear and Chaos,” “Carnage”—these are just some of the more typical ways mainstream media have described the mood after Donald Trump’s first few weeks in office. From the latest announcements about removing Palestinians from Gaza and the draconian crackdown on immigrants through pulling the US out of the World Health Organization and freezing USAID and tariffs on trading partners, to declaring that the United States recognizes male and female as the only two genders, these executive orders and declaration impact a dizzying array of seemingly disparate issues.

What is clear is that we are witnessing a notable shift in relations of power in the US: from an era in which “progressive” neoliberalism characterized by deregulation, privatization, and financialized capitalism merged with progressive social agendas, such as diversity, equality and inclusion policies to an authoritarian and even fascist iteration of neoliberalism. This new formation deepens neoliberal policies but simultaneously replaces any progressive veneer with policies that single out and oppress marginalized groups. It also reverses any attempt to prevent climate breakdown, concentrating power in the hands of the executive and a few billionaire elites.

How did we get here?

Commentators have rightly pointed to the failures of the Democratic Party, which for decades has become ever more beholden to big money, abandoning not just the poor and working class along the way but increasingly sections of the middle-class.  For many voters, moreover, the Biden Administration’s complicity in and support for the genocide in Gaza crystallized the moral bankruptcy of the Democratic Party, leading to the uncommitted movement, and millions of voters simply staying home on election day.

There is also no doubt that Trump’s return to the Oval Office is about his success in weaponizing the visceral fear, anxiety, anger and resentment of ever-growing groups who feel abandoned by the state and have been increasingly living in precarity. Trump’s victory is due to his ability to frame these people’s grievances as if they overlap with the interests of world’s wealthiest people—the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

The common enemy, voters were told again and again, is the deep state, the swamp in DC and the entire corrupt political system. But while this rhetoric appealed to different groups, it also helped to obscure Trump’s real objectives: to further shrink the state through more deregulation, privatization, and decreasing taxes paid by the wealthy, while providing corporate welfare to all his big donors. Musk might have donated $200 million to the MAGA campaign, but Trump will now ensure that taxpayers’ money will be channelled back to Musk’s coffers multiplying his initial investment several fold. This accounts for Trump’s move to reassert aggressive neoliberal policies, such as rescinding restrictions on oil drilling in Alaska.

Yet, how do we account for millions of voters’ sharp rightward and indeed regressive turn on social issues, a shift that is exemplified by big tech’s current alignment with Trump? After all, Silicon Valley had been at the forefront of “progressive” neoliberalism—particularly on issues relating to gender equality and DEI initiatives.  Just think of the former COO of Facebook Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 feminist manifesto Lean In, which was a harbinger of a neoliberal feminism, encouraging women to lean in to their careers rather than opt-out of paid employment.

To further cement the bond among his disparate supporters, Trump and MAGA Republicans successfully untethered as well as fomented two powerful historical forces, white supremacy and misogyny. These have always been part of the US’ s cultural fabric but have been attenuated and curtailed by progressive movements and legislation over the past fifty years.

White supremacy and misogyny have helped to further solder the somewhat tenuous bond between the precarious, those who feel abandoned, and the obscenely wealthy. The strategy, in other words, has been to displace and redirect anger and anxiety toward age-old easy scapegoats: immigrants, black and brown people, queer and trans folk, and unruly women and their bodies.

These various strategies have worked extremely well. Trump and his supporters have attacked critical race studies and DEI and replaced them with discourses that have always served authoritarian and fascist governments, such as ethnic nationalism and gender traditionalism.  To be sure, this trend is not new and did not begin with Trump, but these processes have now been given unbridled license under his leadership.

The attack on progressive forces can be seen, for instance, in the mainstreaming of a network of women who call themselves traditional housewives, or “tradwives” for short. Posting on social media, these women present themselves as having been liberated from the corporate rat race. They actively promote a lifestyle that takes pleasure in traditional domestic duties, feminine submissiveness, and wifehood.

The tradwife phenomenon was peripheral just a few years ago. Today, it boasts an array of influencers who have garnered significant media attention. Mainstream media outlets now cover their stories, highlighting these women’s embrace of gender traditionalism and their declarations of liberation from the straightjacket of neoliberal feminism’s ideal of a happy work-family balance.

The horrific irony is that gender traditionalism and ethnic nationalism are coming to stand in for freedom. Tradwives insist on “the joy and freedom that comes from submitting to their husbands” and see themselves as symbolising the ability to throw off the shackles of state regulation and societal restrictions.

It is precisely this convergence of forces—the Democratic Party’s moral and political bankruptcy, the entrenchment of neoliberal capitalism and financialisation, the rise of big tech’s influence, and the resurgence and strategic mobilisation of misogynist and ethnic-nationalist rhetoric—that has propelled this shift to an authoritarian-fascist iteration of neoliberalism.

Where do we go from here?

One key lesson from the 2024 elections is that for many US voters—even those who are not die-hard MAGA supporters—upending the unbearable status quo has become paramount, trumping whatever concerns some may have about the unabashed racism and misogyny of the MAGA movement. Many are likely gleeful at the wrecking ball strategy of Trump’s first days in power.

Going forward, the left will have to address people’s desire to destroy the status quo, but also their yearning for a different form of governance, one not created in the image of the corporation.

Another important lesson involves the centrality of tapping into people’s emotions. Addressing the material conditions that have produced precarity and mass grievance may well not be enough. The left will also need to untangle voters’ affective attachments and what they signify so that they can cultivate these powerful forces and reorient them.

Only by learning hard lessons—and before it is too late–will a progressive left bloc be able to regroup and convince US voters to join them in their struggle for a more just and sustainable future.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Across the Arab world, ordinary citizens stand and watch the United States sliding into the abyss and wonder, what can the Americans be thinking there? Their institutions, packaged once as the envy of the world with a free society and values of compassion and tolerance …  all blowing away in the winds of history, over the edge and gone. The true Semites, of the Middle East, and not of Europe, gape at this catastrophe of so-called “liberal” Western-style democracy, as it is casually sucked into the moral black hole of a tedious television entertainer, a Wrestlemania con-man, with his billionaire henchmen and techno- Utopianists, who now plunder the richest, most powerful nation in the world as its own elites sit back in comfort, waiting to carve up the spoils. It is like watching Leviathan washed up on the beach, being dismantled by efficient, busy sand crabs. As everyone knows, fish rots first from the head.

To watch an American president openly say, while dutifully standing in the White House before the flag of an Israeli occupier, “I do see a long-term ownership position” for the United States in the Gaza Strip, as if he were showing a triplex condo on Central Park to a lesser Saudi prince, strips away the last veil in this long, sordid dance, this burlesque of empire pretending to moral superiority, while waiting for the right moment to deploy the Art of the Deal. “The Riviera of the Middle East,” he robotically intones, ever the salesman, as a grinning, indicted and fugitive Prime Minister looks on, scarcely able to believe what he is hearing, “The U.S. will take over,” and “we’ll own it.” Of course, everyone from the Achaemenids to Rome to Napoleon has liked Arab beaches, but Palestinians stand with the people of Greenland when they say, “Our land is not for sale;” nor do we yield to conquest, it should be clear to everyone by now. Any U.S. position in Gaza would have well-deserved consequences Americans are not prepared to own.

The American President—like so many before him—has a strange habit of talking about Palestinians as if they have no agency in what befalls them, no choice in the matter. And he talks too, as if what has happened to Palestinians and their land is just random political weather: “The Gaza Strip, which has been a symbol of death and destruction for so many decades,” he drones on, “it’s been very unlucky, an unlucky place for a long time.” In this, he is not so different from each of his predecessors, pretending in his rhetoric that the U.S. and its citizens have not, in fact, been the subsidizing engineers of Palestinian “bad luck”, the architects of their misfortune, but rather that it just happened to them, and the reasons why are simply lost in the mists of time. In fact, the 118th Congress of the American people, under a Democratic president, delivered 85,000 tons of explosives to Israel, which it dropped on the Gazans—all of this paid for by each and every U.S. taxpayer, red state or blue: over 4000 Hellfire missiles; 14,000 MK-84 2000-lb. bombs, which blast a crater fifty feet wide and three stories deep; many thousands of 1000- and 500-pounders; over 17,000 bomber or drone or missile sorties flown. The total tonnage and complete destruction surpasses that of the Allied bombing of major European cities in the Second World War, or the massive “carpet bombing” dumps over Vietnam. By some estimates, 40% of this destruction came by means of ordinary “dumb bombs,” with unexploded munitions now littering Gaza’s rubble-scape. All this industrial-scale murder, made in the USA, directed at a people without airplanes or ships or tanks or air defenses, or even water and food now—one has to ask, has any military force in modern memory ever acted as cowardly and cruelly as Israel has done?

This moral atrocity had bi-partisan support—Democrats and Republicans, hand-in-hand—in case anyone thinks U.S. politicians are no longer capable of cooperating. It will take an estimated fifteen years to clear the debris alone—that is, unless American troops are so foolish as to land bulldozers, dig in, and attempt to make it their forward operating base, earning the scorn of the free world, and generations of resistance. Imperial over-reach is never far from the American mind, which now prattles from the mouth of its criminal leader, plotting crimes in public, with no one to stop him, as his “efficiency” squads dissolve government agencies in the middle of the night.

All the US tax dollars have only bought it well-deserved contempt and hatred on the Arab street, and around the world. No free-thinking human will ever again entertain the fairy-tale of American liberty and justice, the myth of “Pax Americana.” The meaning of the Holocaust has forever been changed. The shape of Zionist intent was visible all along, and ethnic cleansing now has its sales pitch and its salesman, promising, there will be jobs for everyone!

The mass-murder of over 60,000 innocent, mostly women and children; the maiming and terrorizing of almost two million more; the unrelenting destruction of every standing structure in Gaza; the deliberate starvation of its people and intended spread of disease —all of these activities are the lawless acts of war criminals, led by a delusional, convicted criminal, and paid for by Americans who are now in the eighth decade of a fantasy: that the Palestinians should cease to exist. And now the American president proposes further war crimes openly, to a roomful of applause, musing out loud on what a “world class” development will replace Palestinian towns and cities, as if Gaza were one of his failed casino projects in New Jersey, or his sham on-line university. And the captive “free” press, now quaking in fear before its mighty Potentate, blandly airs without comment his psychotic nihilism, as if concepts of international law no longer exist. For this is what America’s willing dispossession of the Palestinians will mean: that law no longer exists.

It is a dark road to go down, disappearing into a forest of un-broken nightmares. Somewhere in that forest, as the path winds on, are familiar, dark American horrors: black citizens lynched from trees; atomic bombs flashing shadow-people on stone; napalm burning a child running down a road; the Capitol swarmed by a deadly mob of angry men and women desperate to safeguard the privilege of skin-tone that they ache for, but do not have and never will.  A nation born from the genocide of five million Native Americans once again chooses genocide, its original sin, inescapable and mutating through time. There can no longer be any ignorance in the American people about Palestine’s tragedy, or the nature of its fight: Israel’s crimes against Palestinians indict America’s failure to act lawfully as a nation, to stand for what is basic and right. The slow-motion eradication since well before 1948 of Palestinian national rights, sovereign lands and now their people themselves has unfolded in plain view for all to see, and none to deny. The “international community” which once “committed” itself to protect the very rights and lives of all Palestinians, now eagerly awaits real estate brochures for beach-front condos—as if its resistance movements would let that happen. But Palestinians wonder, what will the American people do?

As a dear friend and client of 30 plus years …  a Palestinian resistance leader recently said to me in speaking of the American body politic … “If we might give a word of advice to them: beware of the rot of lawlessness that spreads down from the top, from your elites, your oligarchs. Like a cancer, it will devour your rights sooner than it will defeat ours.”

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As we search for ways to resist efforts by President Trump and his surrogates to undermine our democracy and cripple our government, we focus on pillars of our system— Congress, Courts, and Press.  Congress, controlled by Republicans, is demonstrating it is not up to the task.  The media are as confused and uncertain as the rest of us, and the overwhelming power of social media serves to sow confusion.  As a result, many of us are focusing on a major pillar of our system—the rule of law.  We are counting on our federal and state Courts to roll back and restrain Trump’s more outrageous actions.

There is little reason to believe that Trump and his followers will be constrained by the law, however.  The Supreme Court has given Trump himself a get-out-of-jail free card for all official actions he takes as President.  As all orders coming from him to government officials will be considered official, he can not be held liable for any of them—no matter how illegal.  While his subordinates have not been given these free passes and thus are theoretically culpable for their illegal actions, Trump has the ability to pardon them.  So they need not be constrained by the law either.

The reality of our crisis is demonstrated by what is actually taking place within government agencies.  Trump is taking illegal actions and they are been carried out.  He fired 17 or 18 inspectors general, effective immediately.  This is illegal; Congress requires that it must be notified 30 days in advance for the firing of an inspector general, and a cause for this firing must be given.  Neither of these things was done.  By law, all of these individuals should have remained on the job, pending the proper procedures.  One Inspector General challenged the order.  Phyllis Fong, a 22-year veteran of the US Department of Agriculture, said she intended to stay because proper protocols had not been followed.  She was escorted out of the building by security agents.

Trump’s take over of the Justice Department and the FBI makes it even more clear that he will be able to fire anyone and undertake any investigations or actions no matter their legality.  He is firing apolitical federal prosecutors and agents for doing their jobs and participating in legitimate investigations—a violation of civil service protections.  His followers will stock these institutions with their fellow believers and proceed.  Whether or not charges brought by them are ultimately upheld in court is almost irrelevant.  Years of litigation and prosecution will be sufficient to ruin people.

Other frightening actions are unfolding rapidly.  Elon Musk’s surrogates have gotten access to the Treasury Department’s payments system.  This system is responsible for sending out trillions of dollars in payments to individuals and groups, including Social Security payments.  Anyone with control of the system could presumably target their “enemies” and withhold payments to them.  Illegal?  Yes!  So what?  Similar actions have shut down US AID operations around the world, causing large-scale suffering.

The order issued by Trump’s budget office to halt government funding and grants last week was illegal because the president does not have the right to stop payments that have been authorized by Congress.  This order was pulled back after a day of chaos as well as court injunction.  It is not clear what prompted Trump to pull back the order, but probably it was the chaos—not the court order.  Red states were being hit harder than Blue states.  I think it is likely that, in the future, Trump will pay little attention to court orders.  Federal courts have to rely on government institutions to ensure that their orders are carried out.  How can such orders be carried out when Trump controls these institutions?

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Photograph Source: Spc. Brandon C. Dyer – Public Domain

About three score years ago, on a January Sunday afternoon in 1967, some of us gathered in college dorm basement lounges to watch pro football’s historic first “Super Bowl.” A good bit has changed since then — in football and America.

The changes in pro football could hardly be more striking. Today’s players dwarf the size and strength of players back then. National Football League linemen here in the 2020s, for instance, weigh on average well over 300 pounds and stand almost six-and-a-half feet tall. Pro football players of that size simply “didn’t exist” before 1980.

Contemporary players earn much more as well. The first NFL collective bargaining agreement, signed a year after that initial Super Bowl in 1967, set a $10,000 minimum annual salary for veteran players, the equivalent of some $90,000 today. In 2024, NFL players averaged $3.2 million, with a median base pay of $860,000.

But pro football players these days pay a steep price for their paychecks. The average player career now lasts only a little over three years. But the much longer careers of players in positions that don’t face as much physical contact distort that average. Running backs regularly last no more than two years.

Pro football player lives, more significantly, often run markedly shorter than the lives of their generational peers. Those shorter lifespans reflect both the violence of the collisions between today’s much bigger and stronger players and the much longer length of today’s NFL season. Players participating in that first 1967 Super Bowl only competed in 16 games. Players on the 2025 Super Bowl’s Philadelphia Eagles squad will have competed in 21 games once this season’s competition ends.

The contrast between the dawn of the Super Bowl era and today for NFL team owners rates as even starker.

We need a little history here for context. A century ago, in the NFL’s earliest days, ownership of NFL franchises came at a price that even the modestly affluent could easily afford. Tim Mara, a horse-racing bookkeeper, bought the New York Giants in 1925 for $500, the equivalent of less than $9,000 today. In 1933, Art Rooney bought a Pittsburgh NFL franchise for $2,500, about $60,000 today.

By the 1960s, those early owners were sitting pretty, and much richer Americans, like the oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, wanted in on the pro football action. These rich ended up establishing their own pro circuit, the American Football League, and then, in 1966, cut a deal with NFL owners to merge their two leagues. The first fruit of that merger would be the inaugural “Super Bowl” in 1967.

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A painted wall in the center of Mexico City. Photo by Tamara Pearson.

From preparing to send migrants to Guantanamo Bay, to labeling cartels “terrorist organizations,” Trump has been using both language and policies to frame Latin American countries and Latinx migrants in the US, as criminal. Painting the entire region as a source of danger, as the enemy, rather than as a partner, paves the way for coercion, subjugation, and the normalization of human rights violations. It is a path for the US to advance its business interests and nationalism through control rather than the usual pretense of diplomacy and dialogue.

Terrorists and tariffs

In just two weeks, Trump has put Cuba back on the terrorist list, signed an executive order deeming cartels terrorist organizations, with specific reference to those in Mexico that are apparently “flooding” the US with drugs and violence, as well as a couple of others in Venezuela and Central America, and instructed the departments of Defense and Homeland Security to prepare the US naval base on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to hold migrants.

He said there were 30,000 beds there to “detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people,” adding that some migrants are “so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back. So we’re going to send them out to Guantanamo.” The US has previously used the base to hold untried, so-called suspects of terrorism. The Pentagon said it would send “the worst of the worst” — whatever that means, when referring to people who are in life-threatening danger or so exploited or impoverished they had to flee their homeland — to Guantanamo this weekend, but at the time of writing, that didn’t appear to have happened yet.

At the same time, countries that don’t do what Trump wants, including impossible and inhumane requests like stopping all migrants, get threatened with tariffs. When Colombia refused to accept military planes deporting migrants precisely because it criminalizes them, Trump wrote, “We will not allow the Colombian government to violate its legal obligations with regard to the acceptance and return of the criminals they forced into the US,” then threatened 25% tariffs and a travel ban on Colombian government officials. He also threatened BRICS countries with tariffs if they replace the US dollar as reserve currency, and signed an order Saturday imposing 25% tariffs on Mexico for allegedly not doing enough to stop migrants and drugs from reaching the US.

Reinforcing this control over Latin America, he ordered the Gulf of Mexico be renamed the Gulf of America, and vowedto “take back” the Panama Canal.

Violating refugee and migrants’ rights, in a show of racism

And while coercing Latin America, Trump has also made a big show of deporting Latinxs and denying Latin American migrants entry at the Mexico-US border. In violation of both US and international laws and basic human rights, Trump has suspended the United States Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), and now people can’t request asylum and be interviewed to determine credible fear. However, Trump used an executive order to pass this, even though it requires congressional approval. He also wants to revive Remain in Mexico, though Mexican president Sheinbaum has refused.

He has told quite the story of carrying out “the largest deportation in American history,” but the reality is that deportations are very expensive, and migrants still have to be able to argue their case before a judge first. There is an enormous backlog of cases (3.5 million still open) so Trump’s grand standing — while having real and horrific concrete consequences for mean — isn’t so feasible in practice. In the first few days of his term, his administration deported 600 or so people per day, then reached a thousand. In 2024, Biden deported 270,000 people, an average of 739 per day.

But, these deportations are being talked up by the media and raids are being televised live, in order to put on a show that popularizes the criminalizing of migrants, and demarcates Latinxs and Latin Americans (“illegals” and “criminals”) as the scary enemy. The cameras were ready to photograph people arriving in the Brazilian city of Manaus handcuffed, while agents in New York have been told to be camera-ready for ICE raids there, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem live-tweeted a raid.

She also recently announced that the government revoked a decision to protect some 600,000 Venezuelans from deportation. Trump has been using a very old law, designed for world-war-type scenarios — the 1798 Alien Enemies Act — to detain and deport non-citizens without the typical minimum evidence requirements, due process, or right to appeal. That makes these deportations about identity, race, and nationality, rather than about any kind of law breaking. On top of this, we know he rescinded federal guidance that ICE raids shouldn’t take place in sensitive spaces like schools and hospitals, and he expanded express or expedited deportations beyond the border areas and beyond those who had only arrived less than two weeks ago.

Criminalisation in order to subjugate

All this amounts to a systemic dehumanization of the region, in order to lay the ground for increased control and attacks of it, possibly even intervention. It is both a continuation of, and entrenching of the abhorrent treatment by the US towards Latin America, and towards the Global South more broadly— a justification of subjugation.

It is also, of course, a deliberate offensive against those governments that dare, to different extents, be somewhat disobedient of the US and its unreasonable, unfair trade deals, policies, and its transnationals’ extensive exploitation, contamination, and resource robbery. This is not new, with the White House using crippling and cruel sanctions to try to break uncooperative countries like Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. But sometimes that toxicity is cleverly disguised in either fake diplomacy, or excuses about the nature of the governments of those countries (while the US then materially supports genocide). Criminalizing Latin America is a material and ideological strategy for disempowering it, while asserting the US’s so-called superiority, to then use that for later power plays (economic, or with troops) and furthering injustice.

The mainstream media is right by his side, repeating Trump’s use of terms like “illegal migration” without questioning them, and without using terms that are actually technically correct. They are actively contributing to the normalization of racism towards people that are forced to migrate and denied safe routes to do so.

The real criminals (the proponents of racism and sexism, the active destroyers of the planet, the builders and users of bombs, the manufacturers of inequality and poverty) making the oppressed out to be criminals, is a narrative and program that has been employed ad nauseam. The perpetrators of violence put that characteristic onto their victims. The colonized somehow become the invaders. Rather than US imperialism culturally, economically, and politically dominating Latin America — including its backing of recent right-wing coups, it is Latin American migrants who are depicted as “invading” the US.

The story is upside-down and must be countered. Offensives like this can also often lead to increased organizing and activism. It is possible that attacks all over the place could bring the recipients of such attacks (from Latinxs and Palestinians through to women and trans and non-binary people, workers, and environmental activists) closer together, with a common basis for more united struggles and deeper solidarity.

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Image by Max Böhme.

It didn’t take long for the border and immigration enforcement industry to react to Donald Trump’s reelection. On November 6th, as Bloomberg News reported, stock prices shot up for two private prison companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic. “We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security as well as interior enforcement,” explained the GEO Group’s executive chair, George Zoley, “and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals.” In other words, the “largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history” was going to be a moneymaker.

As it happens, that Bloomberg piece was a rarity, offering a glimpse of immigration enforcement that doesn’t normally get the attention it deserves by focusing on the border-industrial complex. The article’s tone, however, suggested that there will be a sharp break between the border policies of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Its essential assumption: that Biden adored open borders, while Trump, the demagogue, is on his way to executing a profitable clampdown on them.

In a recent article, “The Progressive Case against Immigration,” journalist Lee Fang caricatured just such a spectrum, ranging from people with “Refugees Welcome” yard signs to staunch supporters of mass deportation. He argued that Democrats should embrace border enforcement and “make a case for border security and less tolerance for migrant rule-breaking.” This, he suggested, would allow the party to “reconnect with its blue-collar roots.” Fang’s was one of many post-election articles making similar points — namely, that the Democrats’ stance on free movement across the border cost them the election.

But what if the Biden administration, instead of opposing mass deportation, had proactively helped construct its very infrastructure? What if, in reality, there weren’t two distinctly opposed and bickering visions of border security, but two allied versions of it? What if we started paying attention to the budgets where the money is spent on the border-industrial complex, which tell quite a different story than the one we’ve come to expect?

In fact, during President Biden’s four years in office, he gave 40 contracts worth more than $2 billion to the same GEO Group (and its associated companies) whose stocks spiked with Trump’s election. Under those contracts, the company was to maintain and expand the U.S. immigrant detention system, while providing ankle bracelets for monitoring people on house arrest.

And that, in fact, offers but a glimpse of Biden’s tenure as — yes! — the biggest contractor (so far) for border and immigration enforcement in U.S. history. During his four years in office, Biden’s administration issued and administered 21,713 border enforcement contracts, worth $32.3 billion, far more than any previous president, including his predecessor Donald Trump, who had spent a mere — and that, of course, is a joke — $20.9 billion from 2017 to 2020 on the same issue.

In other words, Biden left office as the king of border contracts, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, since he received three times more campaign contributions than Trump from top border-industry companies during the 2020 election campaign. And in addition to such contributions, the companies of that complex wield power by lobbying for ever bigger border budgets, while maintaining perennial public/private revolving doors.

In other words, Joe Biden helped build up Trump’s border-and-deportation arsenal. His administration’s top contract, worth $1.2 billion, went to Deployed Resources, a company based in Rome, New York. It’s constructing processing and detention centers in the borderlands from California to Texas. Those included “soft-sided facilities,” or tent detention camps, where unauthorized foreigners might be incarcerated when Trump conducts his promised roundups.

The second company on the list, with a more than $800 million contract (issued under Trump in 2018, but maintained in the Biden years), was Classic Air Charter, an outfit that facilitates deportation flights for the human-rights-violating ICE Air. Now that Trump has declared a national emergency on the border and has called for military deployment to establish, as he puts it, “operational control of the border,” his people will discover that there are already many tools in his proverbial enforcement box. Far from a stark cutoff and change, the present power transition will undoubtedly prove to be more of a handoff — and to put that in context, just note that such a bipartisan relay race at the border has been going on for decades.

The Bipartisan Border Consensus

In early 2024, I was waiting in a car at the DeConcini Port of Entry in Nogales, Arizona, when a white, nondescript bus pulled up in the lane next to me. We were at the beginning of the fourth year of Biden’s presidency. Even though he had come into office promising more humane border policies, the enforcement apparatus hadn’t changed much, if at all. On either side of that port of entry were rust-colored, 20-foot-high border walls made of bollards and draped with coiling razor wire, which stretched to the horizon in both directions, about 700 miles in total along the U.S.-Mexico border.

In Nogales, the wall itself was a distinctly bipartisan effort, built during the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Here, Trump’s legacy was adding concertina wire that, in 2021, the city’s mayor pleaded with Biden to take down (to no avail).

There were also sturdy surveillance posts along the border, courtesy of a contract with military monolith General Dynamics. In them, cameras stared over the border wall into Mexico like dozens of voyeurs. Border Patrol agents in green-striped trucks were also stationed at various points along the wall, constantly eyeing Mexico. And mind you, this represented just the first layer of a surveillance infrastructure that extended up to 100 miles into the U.S. interior and included yet more towers with sophisticated camera systems (like the 50 integrated fixed towers in southern Arizona constructed by the Israeli company Elbit Systems), underground motion sensors, immigration checkpoints with license-plate readers, and sometimes even facial recognition cameras. And don’t forget the regular inspection overflights by drones, helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft.

The command-and-control centers, which follow the feeds of that digital, virtual, expansive border wall in a room full of monitors, gave the appropriate Hollywood war-movie feel to the scene, one that makes the Trump “invasion” rhetoric seem almost real.

From my idling car, I watched several disheveled families get off that bus. Clearly disoriented, they lined up in front of a large steel gate with thick bars, where two blue-uniformed Mexican officials waited. The children looked especially scared. A young one — maybe three years old — jumped into her mother’s arms and hugged her tightly. The scene was emotional. Just because I happened to be there at that moment, I witnessed one of many deportations that would happen that day. Those families were among the more than four million deported and expelled during the Biden years, a mass expulsion that has largely gone undiscussed.

About a year later, on January 20th, Donald Trump stood in the U.S. Capitol building giving his inaugural speech and assuring that crowded room full of officials, politicians, and billionaires that he had a “mandate” and that “America’s decline” was over. He received a standing ovation for saying that he would “declare a national emergency at our southern border,” adding, “All illegal entry will be halted. And we’ll begin the process of sending millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.” He would, he insisted, “repel the disastrous invasion of our country.”

Implied, as in 2016 when he declared that he was going to build a border wall that already existed, was that Trump would take charge of a supposedly “open border” and finally deal with it. Of course, he gave no credence to the massive border infrastructure he was inheriting.

Back in Nogales, a year earlier, I watched Mexican officials open up that heavy gate and formally finish the deportation process on those families. I was already surrounded by decades of infrastructure, part of more than $400 billion of investment since 1994, when border deterrence began under the Border Patrol’s Operation Gatekeeper. Those 30 years had seen the most massive expansion of the border and immigration apparatus the United States had ever experienced.

The border budget, $1.5 billion in 1994 under the Immigration and Naturalization Service, has risen incrementally every year since then. It was turbocharged after 9/11 by the creation of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (or CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE), whose combined budget in 2024 exceeded $30 billion for the first time. Not only were the Biden administration’s contracts larger than those of its predecessors, but its budget power grew, too. The 2024 budget was more than $5 billion higher than the 2020 budget, the last year of Trump’s first term in office. Since 2008, ICE and CBP have issued 118,457 contracts, or about 14 a day.

As I watched that family somberly walk back into Mexico, the child still in her mother’s embrace, it was yet another reminder of just how farcical the open-borders narrative has been. In reality, Donald Trump is inheriting the most fortified border in American history, increasingly run by private corporations, and he’s about to use all the power at his disposal to make it more so.

“Is He Going to Be Like Obama?”

Fisherman Gerardo Delgado’s blue boat is rocking as we talk on a drying-up, possibly dying lake in central Chihuahua, Mexico. He shows me his meager catch that day in a single orange, plastic container. He shelled out far more money for gas than those fish would ever earn him at the market.

“You’re losing money?” I ask.

“Every day,” he replies.

It wasn’t always like this. He points to his community, El Toro, that’s now on a hill overlooking the lake — except that hill wasn’t supposed to be there. Once upon a time, El Toro had been right on the lakeshore. Now, the lake has receded so much that the shore is remarkably far away.

Two years earlier, Delgado told me, his town ran out of water and his sisters, experiencing the beginning of what was about to be a full-on catastrophe, left for the United States. Now, more than half of the families in El Toro have departed as well.

Another fisherman, Alonso Montañes tells me they are witnessing an “ecocide.” As we travel along the lake, you can see how far the water has receded. It hasn’t rained for months, not even during the summer rainy season. And no rain is forecast again until July or August, if at all.

On shore, the farmers are in crisis and I realize I’m in the middle of a climate disaster, a moment in which — for me — climate change went from the abstract and futuristic to something raw, real, and now. There hasn’t been a mega-drought of this intensity for decades. While I’m there, the sun continues to burn, scorchingly, and it’s far hotter than it should be in December.

The lake is also a reservoir from which farmers would normally receive irrigation water. I asked every farmer I met what he or she was going to do. Their responses, though different, were tinged with fear. Many were clearly considering migrating north.

“But what about Trump?” asked a farmer named Miguel under the drying up pecan trees in the orchard where he worked. At the inauguration, Trump said, “As commander and chief I have no other choice but to protect our country from threats and invasions, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. We are going to do it at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”

What came to mind when I saw that inauguration was a 2003 Pentagon climate assessment in which the authors claimed that the United States would have to build “defensive fortresses” to stop “unwanted, starving migrants” from all over Latin America and the Caribbean. The Pentagon begins planning for future battlefields 25 years in advance and its assessments now invariably include the worst scenarios for climate change (even if Donald Trump doesn’t admit that the phenomenon exists). One non-Pentagon assessment states that the lack of water in places like Chihuahua in northern Mexico is a potential “threat multiplier.” The threat to the United States, however, is not the drought but what people will do because of it.

“Is he going to be like Obama?” Miguel asked about Trump. Indeed, Barack Obama was president when Miguel was in the United States, working in agriculture in northern New Mexico. Though he wasn’t deported, he remembers living in fear of a ramping-up deportation machine under the 44th president. As I listened to Miguel talk about the drought and the border, that 2003 Pentagon assessment seemed far less hyperbolic and far more like a prophecy.

Now, according to forecasts for the homeland and border-control markets, climate change is a factor spurring the industry’s rapid growth. After all, future projections for people on the move, thanks to an increasingly overheating planet, are quite astronomical and the homeland security market, whoever may be president, is now poised to reach nearly $1 trillion by the 2030s.

It’s now an open secret that Trump’s invasion and deportation spiels, as well as his plans to move thousands of U.S. military personnel to the border, have not only proved popular with his large constituency but also with private prison companies like GEO Group and others building the present and future nightmarish infrastructure for a world of deportation. They have proven no less popular with the Democrats themselves.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

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Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

FASCISM: Fascism is  a populist political philosophy that exalts the nation and often race above the individual.  It is associated with a centralized autocratic government and a far-right authoritarian and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a authoritarian leader.  Fascist movements emphasize extreme nationalism, militarism, and the supremacy of the “dear leader” and the nation over the individual.

The 21st century is witnessing a resurgence of fascism or neofascism in the global community.  Currently, the leaders of Russia, China, India, Argentina, Hungary and Bulgaria conform to a fascist model.  The leaders of these countries are contemptuous of electoral as well as political and cultural liberalism.  For the first time in its 250-year history, the United States has an ultra-nationalist and authoritarian leader in Donald J. Trump, who exhibits many of the dangerous attributes of fascism.

The most authoritative figures in the Trump administration conform to the ideas and ideals of fascism.  Trump’s choices to serve as his vice president (J.D. Vance); director of the Office of Management and Budget (Russell Vought); secretary of defense (Pete Hegseth); director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (Kash Patel); deputy chief of staff (Stephen Miller), and Attorney General (Pam Bondi) fit that description.  They have declared their fealty to their “dear leader” in the White House.  As Chris Lehmann noted in “The Nation” last month, they are the “fixers and fascists in the 47th president’s orbit.”

In less than two weeks, Trump himself has taken actions that can only be described as authoritarian—steps that will advance his personal and political power at the expense of the rule of law and America’s democracy.  On the two most recent Friday nights, Trump has emulated Richard Nixon’s Saturday night massacre in 1973 by firing 18 Inspectors General and then 30 federal prosecutors who worked on the January 6th Capitol riot cases over the past four years.  Trump also revoked security clearance for 51 signers of a letter suggesting that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop could be Russian misinformation.

The Department of Justice ordered the firing of eight FBI executives and began an investigation of thousands of FBI officials who worked on the January 6th uprising.  All of these steps were taken without regard for the laws that protect these officials from such summary actions.  When asked about the firing of the IGs, which ignored the legal requirement to provide 30-day notice to the Congress as well as the appropriate cause for such action, deputy chief of staff Miller explained that the Trump administration doesn’t recognize the legality of the laws.

There have been additional steps that have raised alarms throughout the nation, and have transformed American society.  Trump’s call for ending birthright citizenship, which is recognized in the Constitution, would mark a major change in U.S. immigration policy.  His pardon of the 1,600 rioters from January 6th never specified the criteria that were used in evaluating the various cases.  Trump’s threat to investigate the “entire Biden crime family” was unprecedented and tore a page out  of the fascist playbooks of such countries as Russia and China.  These threats led Biden to issue pardons to his immediate family as well as to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, who Trump once insinuated would be subject to the death penalty for committing “treason.”

Although Trump’s inaugural address supported a “colorblind” and “merit-based” society, his order to federal agencies to purge the concepts of diversity, equity and inclusion was an act of white supremacy that targeted civil rights protections for civil servants and government contractors.  In a classic display of meanness, Trump blamed the tragic air collision over the Potomac River last week that took 67 lives on “diversity hiring” at the Federal Aviation Administration.

In less than two weeks, Trump has taken comprehensive steps to weaponize and politicize the key departments and agencies of government, particularly the judicial and national security components.  Executive orders have ignored federal law and judicial rulings in order to challenge the so-called “deep state,” and to reverse existing policy on immigration, the environment, and diversity.  Trump froze federal hiring, exempting only the military and “positions related to immigration.”  He restored a category of federal workers known as Schedule F in order to eliminate job protections for civil servants, and offered buyouts to nearly the entire federal work force of 2.3 million men and women.

Meanwhile, the so-called guardrails of our democracy are folding their tents and succumbing to Trump’s pressure.  In recent weeks, Paul Krugman of the New York Times; Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post; and Jim Acosta and Chuck Todd of CNN have resigned their positions because of institutional pressure to tone down or avoid criticism of Donald Trump.  Powerful industries are dropping their DEI programs because of Trump’s intimidation.  Two networks (ABC and CBS) are settling law suits in Trump’s favor because their institutional backers (Disneyland and Paramount, respectively) want to avoid antagonizing Trump.  Too many Democrats in the Senate are voting to confirm Trump’s cabinet choices, no matter how unqualified or unsavory they are.  The major players in the technology arena were particularly pathetic, rushing to Mar-a-Lago to bend the knee and kiss the ring.  Mark Zuckerberg, the chairman of Meta, is particularly pathetic in this regard.

This is sadly reminiscent of Germany in 1933, when the titans of industry and the media believed that they could handle Adolf Hitler simply by catering to his whims.  By the middle of the year, the democracy of the Weimar Republic had been transformed into the police state of the Third Reich.  In just two weeks, the Trump administration has been dynamic and fast-moving and, as a result, the so-called guardrails of our democracy have been weakened and submissive.

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Ronald Reagan meeting with Jack Abramoff and Norquist in connection with the College Republican National Committee in 1981 – Public Domain

No, the emails aren’t from a Nigerian prince, but whoever is writing them seems to use the same style, cajoling and repetition. The sad thing is, these aren’t from some poor guy in an internet cafe circa the 2000s, no–these emails have been pummeling the inboxes of federal workers from their own government. These workers have had their email inboxes flooded with bizarre imperatives to basically go away. They’ve been insulted in the emails, being encouraged to leave and find “higher productivity” jobs in the private sector. They’ve had carrots dangled in front of them, saying they can take a second job or go on awesome vacations. They’ve been demoralized, and most are likely very confused, of course, by design. What we have here is the Grover Norquist quote coming to life, the: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it in the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” For those too young to have heard this, the quote is from one of the OG architects of this current bile-filled situation. It’s always been their fervent desire to implement this bathtub murder–they’ve been patient and have all the plans in place. Now they are in the stage where they’ve drawn up the water, telling you they have some nice lavender bath bombs and beckon you through the steam.

Of course, Grover Norquist types still have good versus bad government notions. They will never try to drown the missing dollars of the defense budget. You are only “federal bad” if you are someone like a physical therapist at the VA working with the mangled bodies of veterans–or someone working to keep food safe for consumption. You are incredibly “federal bad” if you were serving in some manner to keep illness counted and mitigated. You are “federal good” if you are a part of the massive military, ICE, or a teenager with a cross married to an old man, spouting nonsense for a federal paycheck. I think you understand. And, of course, it is crazy-making. That’s baked in and a very real part of how this is all designed to work. The few of us still trying to follow the blitzkrieg that is the real-time attempt to remake the entire government are probably in the minority. Mainly, it’s chaos and confusion to the vast populace, and this is often what causes a brain to simply shut down. It’s too much and we aren’t wired for it. It’s the plan, to bring in so much rapid damaging change that it will be near impossible to stop. It seems the goal of the broligarchy is to reshape all of it in some fashion that they seem to believe will become their new utopia (but of course, almost everyone else’s BAD PLACE).

There is talk from individuals like Zuckerberg that workplaces need to become more masculine. It’s bizarre and telling that they embrace a philosophy like this. Though I disagree with what these formulaic masculine/feminine dumbed-down versions of reality try to say, I’ll look at this from what I imagine their perspective is as far as “masculine energy”. They seem to embrace a notion that all is about power and forcing change on others, rather than any type of collaborative energies. Rape versus love societal normalization. They seem to believe that there is an inherent inefficiency in taking in all opinions, in adjustments for others that may be outside what they consider the mainstream (of course that means them). Where would humans be if we all adapted this kind of thinking? Right where we are, I guess, barreling towards catastrophe.

The very real consequence of this shift to the Zuckerberg masculine is destruction, death, and misery. He implied that encouraging this energy would save businesses, but I’d say the embrace of this “energy” over the last couple thousand years is very much what is wrong with us. Enormous time spans with humans in small collaborative groups was sustainable, but this regimented and unequal world is the thing that has careened us towards oblivion. Yes, yes, let’s lean into that during this time of crisis.

What are the moments you’ve celebrated in your life—the ones that touched your heart and made life worth living? I’m guessing for the vast number of individuals, it was a moment that would touch on what these damaged men (and accomplice women) call “feminine energy.” Obviously, it could have been a moment of decency and empathy from a man or woman—it’s the concept of this collaborative and kind energy and what they seem to want to demonize. These types are using the terms masculine energy and feminine to define something very warped, something that speaks to their inability to live in a shared world.  All they know is conquest and theft; they have convinced themselves that it is the pinnacle when in fact it has always been the lowest of behavior. They consider empathy to be a weakness, but how much more difficult is it to use the frontal lobe rather than the amygdala–the fear-based region of the brain? It is much easier to steal than to share, to lord over with authoritarianism than to win support through collaboration. They rebrand what really is mental weakness as superiority, and they slap the label “masculine” on it. It’s as pathetic as Zuckerberg’s new look, an artificial edifice that reeks of insecurity and Axe body spray.

That said, they are obviously the ones in power; that sickening worldview is very efficient at creating open-air prisons and taking over equitable societies through the ages. The energy of the natural world– they would say the “feminine” has not been successful at countering this disease. This has been exhibited over and over whether it was expecting a mutual agreement to be honored (say in the form of treaties with Native Americans) or other failings of the reciprocal world. They are liars above all else—others operating in good faith with them fail. It is said that those who are not malignant narcissists have difficulty understanding their behavior because the wiring in those individuals is so vastly different. I don’t know that it’s wiring differences, as much as it is giving the reins to your inner child and that child is Joffrey Baratheon. It is difficult to fathom those who truly enjoy causing misery. For most of us, being in control of the world and its vast resources would mean little if we did it at the cost of humanity. And it is impossible to negotiate with these types as they don’t respect anyone else as having the same rights they do. It’s an extremely toxic worldview and can have no other endpoint than destruction of all that makes life worthwhile.

As far as this masculine/feminine thing–it is difficult to define; I find our language so lacking when the energy of inclusion, nurturing and belonging becomes “feminine energy”. We do need a new term. Most likely the broligarchy would just call it “weak”. But the moments that count, when someone truly understands you, when you perhaps felt alone and someone stepped in made you feel seen, heard and protected—this is the kind of energy these types are against. Feeling safe, whether as a child in the care of someone who loves you and would do anything for you—that’s truly the powerful energy they want to be rid of. We aren’t to look down the road as stewards for our descendants; we are to scramble and clutch for belongings like deranged psychopaths in their image. We are not to feel secure (it’s better to have your workforce scared and compliant in their view, not a willing member of a just society). It is a philosophy created in retrograde, that is, an individual who has a deep loathing of others who show empathy looks for a worldview with no reciprocities, one of top-down authoritarianism. It’s as if Jeffrey Dahmer stumbled upon an entire community supportive of cannibalism and its celebration. Yes, he’d probably really have liked that group and would have gladly paid the monthly dues to join. It feels great to have your pathologies turned into virtues.

The keys are in the hands of individuals looking for an excuse in regard to their own internal hollowness. In the same way that it is more difficult to use your frontal lobe than the amygdala, it is more difficult to look at internal shortcomings and to address them than to proclaim and embrace a worldview that it’s all dog-eat-dog. I think there might even be a simmering jealousy of those not infected with the “hungry ghost” that can never be satisfied, so a perverse need to punish may stem from that. And the rest of us are to pay for that rot that seems to very much infect those “masculine” types–those who do not place worth with true human connection, but instead value standing on top of the rubble pile they created.

There is so much less safety in a world like this, so much more hatred. If it truly was a philosophy that believed less government is good, then there would be some sort of consistency. They would have the same aversion to the bloated military that they do free school lunch programs. The fact that they hate one and celebrate the other tells you all you need to know about these types. It’s a death cult.

So of course they are wholeheartedly demonizing the federal workers at this time. Much like Reagan did with the air traffic controllers, how teachers began to be treated after privatization became the goal, how healthcare workers were treated during the pandemic……….in short, they try to drive a wedge among those of us who all should be allies. Billionaires are marketed as exemplary citizens; a nurse’s aide at the VA is the scourge of society.

One interesting thing I’ve come across in trying to parse out the philosophy of this Business-Plot-Come -to-Fruition is that they seem to consider city-states to be an excellent form of government. These smaller entities can work more in line with their idea of states working as corporations. Everything stems from that idea that top-down, it all needs to be private and what they consider nimble. They love private schools, gated communities, tiny principalities with their own rules……..often with the right to be racist, sexist or any other ist they enjoy. But overall, they want it all to be like a myriad of corporations, slipping into a locality as they see fit to extract resources in the most “efficient” manner. No common good, simply commerce and extraction. Of course, they will need to keep the military to enforce their notions of masculine energy and conquest, but they seem to have a soft spot for fluid locales they can swing in and out of, taking advantage of the best tax breaks etc. I am hoping this leaves an opening for some areas to simply slip out of the noose during this chaos. Places like California who contribute more to the federal economy than they get back might consider simply walking backwards like Homer in the bushes. But seriously, this craziness will not be efficient in the long run, and I don’t think it’s illogical to consider a fracturing of the US might take place, whatever that might end up meaning.

It’s a cliché, but I’m sure that perhaps Sun Tzu might have a book or something about maneuvering in times of chaos. If that guy ever got published, that is. Even smaller areas like left leaning cities might be able to find a modicum of independence if they are annoying enough to try to manage. We have to look for hope– what’s the alternative? I think of places like New Orleans that have so little in common with the rest of their state. The ample money they take in from visitors gets funneled to places that decide the Ten Commandments should be on their school walls……on the walls that is, not actually obeyed by those in power. This is just one notion I think of when I try to consider what might happen in the setting of this truly abhorrent time. Managing a bag of cats might be disruptive to the end goal for them, however.  Can a city or state do an Irish Goodbye to the US government when things get more unhinged? They are creating true chaos; I certainly hope individuals of good intent are looking for ways to benefit others in this situation and looking for exit strategies. The current state of affairs is a dead-end.

But back to the government emails. They seem to be trying to coerce individuals into taking what the establishment media without context call buy-outs. It looks to be more like a Twitter level trick—that of demoralization, and carrot dangling, making people think they can leave and still be paid something. It all sounds like making a deal with a leprechaun or the jinn. Basically, do not do it. They are bad faith actors. Also they are forcing individuals who worked from home to come back to offices. This is another threat to get staff to just go away, and if they don’t leave, well it can artificially pump up that commercial real estate. So, layers of motivations on their part, all bad.

Sadly, some of this shit behavior will probably start to work. Erosion and death by a hundred cuts. Those who take any “deal” will likely be screwed, just like the Twitter workers were when Musk took over. The staff remaining will have more difficult jobs and will leave by attrition until yes, Grover and company can start strangling. As an aside, isn’t that a wild red flag for your branded worldview when you invoke that you need to strangle anyone? I mean, I think that’s a fair sign that you’ve lost your way as a human, right? You are wildly wealthy with power and security, but you wax poetic about bathtub strangling? Nothing more throbbing with masculine energy than strangling someone, I guess.

I have massive respect for those who will continue to fight this onslaught they are facing. If you want to hear from some brave, good people check out the federal government workers subreddit. It’s incredible to observe what they are going through and to hear from those the current administration would consider ineffective bloat. They sound like some stoic, principled individuals who have been doing a lot of heavy lifting for us all in various positions. An energy of decency and dignity. I don’t think you put a label on it like masculine or feminine. I’d say that type of energy is life-affirming and reciprocal, in short, what will be needed if we are going to make it as a species.

At this point, though, we do have to realize we are stuck on the path with grade-A psychopaths. We need to be furtively darting our eyes in every direction like a character in a bad movie, looking for workarounds, escape paths and allies. In short, we need to fight the Bathtub Stranglers and all the chaos and hate they bring with them.

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

For the past quarter century, ever since 2001, presidents of the United States inaugurate their terms not with bottles of champagne but with drone and missile strikes. Donald Trump followed the rhythm. Not long after he ascended to the chair in the Oval Office, he sent off missiles against ISIS fighters “hiding in caves” – as he put it on social media – in the Golis mountains in northeast Somalia. No civilians were killed, said Trump. They always say that.

Trump’s first missile strike of this presidency reminded me of Barack Obama’s first missile strike, only three days after the Nobel Peace Prize winner was sworn in as the president of the United States in 2009. In the morning of January 23, CIA director Michael Hayden told Obama that they were ready to strike high-level al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders in northern Pakistan. Obama did not object. At 830pm, local time, a drone flew over Karez Kot in Ziraki village, Waziristan. The people on the ground heard it. They called the drones bhungana, that which sounds like a buzzing bee. Three Hellfire missiles were fired remotely, and they smashed into some homes. Fifteen people died in that attack.

One of the missiles went through the wall of a home and exploded in the drawing room of the house. Inside that room sat a group of family members who were celebrating before one of the young men – Aizazur Rehman Qureshi (age 21) – was to leave for the United Arab Emirates. The drone strike killed him. It also killed two men, Mohammed Khalil and Mansoor Rehman, leaving their fourteen children without a father. Their nephew, Faheem Qureshi (age 7), felt his face on fire, and ran out of the room (he lost an eye). Not one of the men and boys in the room had a connection to either al-Qaeda or to the Taliban. They were hard working people, one of the men had been a worker in the UAE and on his return, his nephew was preparing to go and help the family by working in the Gulf. Now, a hasty decision by the CIA left the family distraught. The US government never apologised for the attack and did not compensate the family.

In 2012, Newsweek’s Daniel Klaidman published Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency. If I were Obama, I would like this book. It is sympathetic to him. After that drone strike, Klaidman points out, “Obama was understandably disturbed.” The next day, a person who was there in the Situation Room told Klaidman, Obama walked in but “you could tell from his body language that he was not a happy man.” Apparently, this was the spur for Obama to learn about the CIA’s “signature strikes” (when the US government felt it could kill anyone who looked like a terrorist) and “crowd killing” (when it was acceptable to kill civilians in a crowd if a “high value target” was also there). Obama said that he did not like this that he was unhappy that there might be women and children in the crowd. But, as Klaidman writes, “Obama relented – for the time being.” In fact, the “time being” seems to have extended through the two terms of his presidency. What differentiated Obama from Bush before him and Trump afterwards was merely his hesitancy. His actions were the same.

In 2010, Obama’s team developed the Disposition Matrix or the “kill list” and the procedures to activate the use of strikes to kill or capture “high value targets.” The chain of decision making for this kill list did not include any sense that the men on the list could have been accidentally placed there or that they would get a chance to defend themselves from the CIA’s accusations in a court of law. In other words, there was no judicial review. In 2011, this should have raised eyebrows when these procedures led to the assassination of several US citizens in Yemen (first Anwar al-Awlaki, born in New Mexico, and then – in a separate drone strike – his sixteen-year-old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki); in 2017, the US government killed al-Awlaki’s eight-year-old daughter, Nawar al-Awlaki. All three were US citizens, who should have been afforded some US constitutional protections even if the US disregards international law. None was available to them.

In 2012, the film Ghaddar (Traitor) has a popular song sung by Rahim Shah called Shaba Tabhi Oka (Come on Destroy Everything). The film is in Pashto, the language of northern Pakistan and large parts of Afghanistan. It is also the language of those who died in Obama’s 2009 drone strike. In the song sequence, two lovers, played by the popular actors Arbaaz Khan and Sobia Khan, dance and sing with the culture of drones and bombs now associated with love. “Look at me, bomb my heart,” says Sobia Khan, while the refrain runs, “come on, destroy everything.”

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Photograph Source: Vice President – Public Domain

Donald Trump’s re-election marks not just a political turning point but the ascendance of a corpse-like order, a nation stiffening under the weight of its own decay. His second coming is less a victory than a death march, a spectral procession of hollow men in red ties and stiff gaits—zombies with ice in their veins. Videos of Trump dancing evoke images of  him moving in a style that is jerky, lifeless, as if his body resents rhythm itself. A wooden plank with a painted sneer, twitching to the anthem of reaction, soulless and mean. No body on fire here. no slow bend toward desire, no trace of the supple grace that lives in a world still capable of love. Instead, the image signals the aesthetic of a new order of crudely celebrated as the manosphere—puffed-up bodies, drunk on steroids and grievance, exuding the acrid scent of sweat and power.

This is the culture that Trumpism has wrought: stripped of tenderness, of improvisation, of joy. Gone is the world I knew as a working-class kid, where music spilled into the streets, where voices—aching, defiant, untamed—set bodies in motion. Etta James wailing, Billie Holiday lingering on the edge of heartbreak, Nina Simone playing the piano like she was conjuring a storm. Little Anthony and the Imperials harmonizing into the night. This was a world of movement, of bodies ignited by something more than rage—by love, longing, the exquisite pain of feeling too much.

But in the America of Trump 2025, the only bodies that matter are those that march in unison, rigid and obedient. His regime, unbound by law or morality, has reconfigured the machinery of the state into an instrument of vengeance. The January 6th insurrectionists walk free, hailed as patriots. Federal agencies are gutted, purged of dissent. Civil rights protections are erased with the stroke of a pen. Universities, once imperfect sanctuaries of critical thought, are being remade into white Christian indoctrination centers. And in an act of breathtaking cruelty, thousands of immigrants await detention in Guantánamo Bay, that purgatorial space of empire where justice goes to die.

This is not simply the return of authoritarianism; it is its evolution—leaner, more technologically adept, more deeply enmeshed in the fabric of corporate and digital power. Trump does not rule alone. He is merely the frontman for a brutalizing oligarchy that has abandoned even the pretense of democracy. The billionaire class—those slick architects of social media monopolies, the digital overlords of surveillance capitalism—have found their perfect vehicle in his shamelessness. Spoiled boys in men’s bodies giving Nazi salutes, orgasmic over their new found power. This is the oligarchy of fools now kissing the ring of the grifter immune for his past and future crimes. Unfettered capitalism has reached its final stage, where wealth no longer hides its contempt for the masses but wears it like a badge.

The spectacle of political theater has become the defining element of Trump’s aesthetic. It has morphed into what Susan Sontag called “fascinating fascism,” a form of power that “thrives on gestures of provocation.” It glamorizes unbridled authority, indulges in the pleasure of humiliation, and expresses outright contempt for “all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic.” This is not mere political performance—it is the spectacle of domination, staged as both entertainment and ideology. In this fascist aesthetic, power is not simply wielded but flaunted, paraded in grotesque excess—an orchestrated display of cruelty, intoxicated by its own illusions of national rebirth. This revival is not new; it is modeled on the white supremacist legacy of the Confederacy, draped in the symbols of its past and resurrected as a blueprint for the future. Meanwhile, the legacy press registers the horror but too often stops short of critically interrogating or denouncing it. But this is more than the pornography of power; it is an excremental spectacle—a celebration of misery, violence, and death itself.

Former President Biden, in his farewell speech, warned of the creeping shadow of oligarchy, yet he dared not name the truth: that his own party, with its bloodless embrace of neoliberalism, helped forge the conditions for Trump’s resurrection. This is not simply the triumph of reactionary forces but the consequence of a culture that has surrendered to its own worst instincts—one that has forsaken solidarity for spectacle, justice for cruelty, hope for managed decline.

And so we are left with this: staggering inequality, a militarized state, the slow and methodical unmaking of democracy. The new oligarchs scorn the very notion of the public good. They mock reason, erase history, and demand that the government sever itself from any lingering obligation to care. They speak the language of the market, where everything—including life itself—is merely another commodity to be traded, exploited, discarded. Trump and his sycophants are the walking dead. They have blood in their mouths and anti-freeze in their bodies. The rhythm they embrace is one of stiff soldiers playing in military parades.

But I remember another rhythm, another cadence, one that refuses to die—symptomatic of another time when politics seemed possible as a force for justice, equality, and hope. As a shoeshine boy working Black clubs in Providence, RI.in the fifties, I remember Etta James, her voice raw and thunderous, shattering the quiet. I remember the bodies in motion, defiant and free. In her music, in her story, in the way she broke down racial and musical barriers, there was a fire that no amount of repression could smother. Etta James never bought into the whitewashing of history. She was a border-crosser, refusing to be contained, her music too powerful to be tamed by an industry that sought to erase the rough edges of Black artistry. She carried with her the weight of struggle and the possibility of something beyond survival—of love, of dignity, of a world where music could still touch the soul rather than serve as corporate wallpaper.

Even in her later years, when she sang Fool That I Am at the Newport Jazz Festival or in Toronto when I saw her a few years before she died, her voice carried the same intensity, the same unapologetic passion. But the world she sang into had changed. When Barack Obama was elected, it was not Etta but Beyoncé who sang At Last at his inauguration. It was a gesture that wounded Etta deeply—a reminder that the world she had shaped had turned away from her, preferring a polished version of history over the raw, defiant reality she represented. The same forces that had once feared her power now erased her legacy in favor of something more palatable, more marketable.

This is the fate of all radical voices in a society bent on forgetting. Whether in politics, education, or culture, the forces of erasure work tirelessly to neutralize history, to sand down the edges of struggle, to replace resistance with spectacle. Trumpism is only the most grotesque expression of this impulse, but it is not the only one. The neoliberal university, the corporate music industry, the political establishment—they all participate in the politics of forgetting.

And yet, something lingers. A voice that will not be silenced, a rhythm that refuses to be stilled. In this age of zombie politics, where bodies are reduced to instruments of control and obedience, there is still a memory of movement, of improvisation, of freedom. And as long as we remember—through music, through writing, through acts of defiance—the fire cannot be extinguished. Memory rescues and that is why is has become so dangerous in the age of Trump.

I first heard Etta James in a cramped basement apartment at a party with my Black high school teammates. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced. At the Catholic Youth Organization dances I had attended, white-washed music reigned—Pat Boone instead of Little Richard, the Beach Boys instead of Little Anthony. Nuns patrolled the floor, ensuring that no one got too close, warning us to leave room for the Blessed Virgin Mary. Desire was something to be policed. Bodies were to be contained.

But in that smoke-filled apartment, everything was different. Bodies pressed together, laughing, flirting, moving with a kind of freedom I had never known. And in the background was Etta James, her husky voice breaking through the noise, filling the room with something raw and undeniable. She transformed the body from an object of discipline into a site of joy, creativity, and resistance. I danced without moving my feet, unlearning the rigid postures imposed on me and stepping into a different kind of world—one where solidarity and social justice were stitched into the fabric of music, movement, and feeling. A moment not of nostalgia, but one that reminds me of the power of passion, the body in flight, anger transformed into a collective song of struggle. A moment that fueled a culture of resistance. A moment to come, hopefully sooner than later.

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Photograph Source: The Trump White House – Public Domain

In the wake of Donald Trump’s first week as President, the Democrats opposing him are reported to be stunned, paralyzed, and intimidated. According to Peter Baker of the New York Times (Jan. 26, 2025), they have been shocked and rendered passive by “norm-shattering, democracy-defying assertions of personal power that defy the courts, the Congress, and the ethical lines that constrained past presidents.”

Well . . . yes and no. Yes, many of Trump’s executive orders stretch or overturn existing political norms. Yes, they are meant to augment his power. They are certainly impulsive, vindictive, and cruel. But no, these activities do not “defy democracy.”  They are what often happens when a strongly led political movement attempts to alter the way an existing system operates.

Establishment liberals like Baker portray the President as a megalomaniac narcissist who wants to be King. Even though there is truth in this depiction, it oversimplifies a far more complex reality. Focusing exclusively on Trump’s personal failings distracts attention from the systemic sources of his power and the need to change that system.

Consider Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal changed or overthrew a host of established norms, including limited federal power over the economy, state supremacy in matters of labor relations, health, and welfare, weak executive agencies with little discretion, presidential deference to Congress and the courts, the sanctity of individual labor contracts, and more. His opponents called him a norm-breaker and an authoritarian, and comparing his actions with those of earlier presidents, they had a point. But they missed a more important point: significant changes in an existing system almost always involve altering old norms and augmenting the power of new leaders. Although called an authoritarian and a socialist, F.D.R. redefined democracy rather than ending it and (for better and for worse) saved American capitalism.

What about Trump?  Obviously, the greedy, impulsive, narrow-minded president is no Roosevelt.  Peter Baker accuses him of wanting to increase his personal power, and he certainly does. But this characterization ignores the fact that every “imperial” president from F.D.R. to Joe Biden has increased the Chief Executive’s discretionary power, augmenting an authority that is simultaneously personal and official  If you don’t understand that the CEO of an empire is an emperor, you will attribute his actions purely to power-lust. But for the most part, the man who currently occupies the White House is simply doing nakedly what previous presidents have done with more protective coverage.  Moralizing about his personal failings does nothing to close any of America’s 700 foreign military bases or to reduce the super-profits of the military-industrial fat cats.  It is system-analysis and system-change that we need, not liberal posturing.

System-change and mass movements

Anti-Trumpers need to learn to think less in terms of the President’s cartoon villainy and more in terms of broken systems and the mass movements that challenge them. The American system, I’m sorry to say, IS broken and has been for some time. Its failure to satisfy working people’s expectations for a better and happier life is what kept millions of them from voting Democratic in 2024. The Trump administration’s principal vice is not that it seeks systemic change, but that its analysis is intellectually bankrupt, the changes it proposes are misconceived, and the policies it has already begun to implement will almost certainly make things worse.

At present, the U.S. politicians who think in terms of systems and mass movements for change are almost all right-wing ideologues like Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and the denizens of think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. Their philosophy, now being turned into executive orders and legislation, sees government itself (the “administrative state”) as the chief obstacle to economic, social, and personal development. According to them, the solution to problems of vanishing economic opportunity, social decay, and endemic violence is to liberate the power of the oligarchs. Unfettered capitalism led by billionaire industrialists like Elon Musk will produce a new American “golden age.”

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump pretended to be ignorant of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, but, clearly, its program of right-wing system change is now driving the MAGA bus. The key to Trump’s electoral victory was his success in organizing what Marxists call a “rotten bloc” – a cross-class coalition of giant capitalists, small businesspeople, and workers. Since deregulating the economy, crippling welfare programs, and slashing taxes on the rich are all obvious forms of class warfare, the Trumpers’ key need was to find some way to win discontented lower-class people to their banner. The answer was “America First” – an ideology designed to convince workers and retirees that their class interests and identities are irrelevant in a bonded ethno-national community that privileges and protects them. “However tough things may seem right now,” MAGA leaders tell their followers, “you are members of a Chosen Nation and masters on the global stage. Trust us — enriching the nation’s business elite will enrich you as well.”

A crucial feature of this appeal is that it splits the working class into two groups: workers in newer industries associated with technology and public services, many of whom are college-educated and urbanized, and workers in older manufacturing and retailing industries who are mostly high school graduates living in smaller towns and cities and in rural areas. Members of the first group tend to be slightly better paid than the second and like to think of themselves as a white-collar or “professional” middle class, but the vast majority are financially insecure, non-unionized workers with liberal cultural commitments. Even so, members of the older industrial group feel deprived relative to high-tech and service workers and are vulnerable to MAGA allegations that the latter are members of a government-dependent “elite.”

Trump and his movement have been quick to take advantage of this disunity among working people and the Democrats’ failure to heal the split.  So long as the division is defined in terms of competing cultural values and identity group interests, it remains unhealed and serves as a reliable source of MAGA power. No wonder that the Right’s answer to “identity politics” has been . . . identity politics!  Changing this dynamic requires a Leftist perspective that considers all working people, whatever their industrial and cultural base, members of a single social class. The name of the game is to redesign the system to provide all of them, collectively, with greater wealth, opportunity, purpose, and respect.

Where is the Leftist Project 2025?

The question that Democrats and other anti-Trumpers need to answer is this: what is your equivalent of Project 2025?  This suggests a series of other questions that sorely need answering.  For example: What are effective solutions to structural problems such as the wild increase in socioeconomic inequality, the vicious effects of global climate change, the skyrocketing costs of housing and other necessities, and the diversion of resources needed for civilian development to a trillion-dollar military budget?

Clearly, mild reforms like raising the minimum wage will not solve systemic problems of this scale. But to the extent that Trump’s opponents accept the self-censorship caused by political taboos like the taboos against economic planning, workers’ control, and any other reforms smacking of socialism, they disable themselves from providing credible solutions.

In the recent election, for example, MAGA demagogues succeeded in making illegal immigration topic # 1. Taboo-ridden Democrats were unwilling and unable to argue that socioeconomic planning can help us construct a humane and enforceable immigration system – one that could protect the jobs and incomes of native workers, relieve strained welfare systems, and help overcome our chronic labor shortage. All they could do was moralize about America as a nation of immigrants – an attractive vision, but not to low-wage workers living in underfunded communities and forced to compete for jobs and living space with desperate new arrivals.

In a similar way, the failure to offer solutions to systemic problems prevents many progressives from dealing successfully with crucial cultural, psychological, and spiritual issues exploited by the Right. What do anti-Trumpers have to say about the plague of loneliness that afflicts so many of us, the instability of American families, the explosion of drug addiction, or the difficulty of satisfying imperative needs for security, identity, self-esteem, and moral purpose? Again, although the issues may be defined as personal, the solutions – if they are to be effective – will involve transforming current systems.

The current wave of MAGA attacks on “woke” consciousness and institutions of affirmative action makes this clear. They clearly pose the question of how best to secure social and economic justice for people formerly marginalized because of their race, gender, or sexual preference. The answer, it seems to me, will not be simply to restore pre-existing DEI programs that implicitly force identity groups to compete for scarce resources.  Our aim should be to eliminate these system-generated scarcities – to supply a rich array of good jobs, rewarding educational opportunities, and comfortable living places for everyone. The goal is realizable, but it remains a utopian dream so long as we accept the current norms and taboos of an oligarchical profit system.

A concluding Biblical note

Under Trump and his pet ideologues Republicans have moved toward a more systemic approach to cultural and political policies. Why don’t anti-Trumpers make a similar shift but do it far better by identifying the system’s real problem – not the “Deep State” so much as “Deep Capital” – and proposing real solutions?

One reason is the conservatism of many Democrats – their unwillingness to recognize the failures and limitations of oligarchical capitalism, an imperialist foreign policy, and a winner-take-all political system that restricts people’s participation largely to electioneering and interest-group lobbying.  But there is another reason, too: an assumption often accepted that thinking in terms of systems and system-change exonerates bad people and relieves them of responsibility for their sins.

Some readers of this essay, for example, will very likely accuse me of “apologizing” for Trump by emphasizing the American system’s failures. I have no intention of justifying the Orange One’s intellectual or moral failings, which are many. But focusing on them to the extent of obscuring the social system’s role in generating injustice and violence mis-states the situation and makes it impossible to prevent later abuses.

Consider an original tale of abuses: the Cain and Abel story told in the book of Genesis. Cain clearly commits a sin by murdering his brother. God warns him in advance not to get carried away by jealous rage against Abel, but he doesn’t listen; he has a will of his own and he bloodily misuses it. Yet what provoked Cain’s jealousy was a systemic factor – the unequal treatment of the brothers. For reasons that remain unclear (although generations of rabbis tried vainly to identify them) God had accepted Abel’s sacrifice and rejected his. Along with Cain’s angry and disobedient nature, a system of parental favoritism was responsible for the subsequent violence.

Understanding this systemic context has implications for violence prevention; altering the “favored child” dynamic is one way to make a sibling rivalry less lethal. The context doesn’t absolve Cain of his sin, of course – nor does this existence of an oligarchical, profit- and power-obsessed American empire absolve Mr. Trump for his.  But without appreciating the system’s role in generating problems, one can’t offer credible solutions.

It is possible – and necessary – to move beyond liberal moralism and into the realm of systemic solutions. Rather than focus exclusively on Trump’s villainy or accept the kleptocratic nationalism of MAGA, we can describe the institutions that betray American working people and offer practical methods of transforming them. Doing this will take hard work, imagination, and the courage to reject political taboos, but without a Leftist alternative to Project 2025, people in pain will turn even more desperately to the Right.  Rosa Luxemburg’s famous description of the alternatives seems as apt now as ever: either we will have some form of socialism or we will have barbarism.

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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.

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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.

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“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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“. . . 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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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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