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

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

– Jacques Derrida

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*includes CEO donations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Income Group / Minimum Income / Change in Income

Bottom 20% / $0 /  -%1,125

2nd Quintile / $13,840 / -430

3rd Quintile/ $38,065 / $357

4th Quintile / $67,185 / $1.132

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+++

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

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

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

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

Musk’s income: $4 million an hour.

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

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

Board Members / Value of shares sold

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

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

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

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

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

+++

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+ Nicholas Kristof:

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

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

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

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

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

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

+++

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+++

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+++

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

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

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

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

EU

1990: 3.4 million troops
2020: 2 million troops

Germany


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

France

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

UK

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

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

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

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

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

+++

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+++

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

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

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

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

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

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

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

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

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

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

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Here We Go Crazy
Bob Mould
(Granary)

Consentrik Quartet
Nels Cline
(Blue Note)

Oceanside Countryside
Neil Young
(Reprise)

An Age of Insecurity

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

–Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land

The post Roaming Charges: Schlock and Chainsaw appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Photograph Source: SWinxy – CC BY 4.0

Introduction

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

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

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

The Nightmare Returns

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

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

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

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

History Matters

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

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

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

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

Domestic Terrorism as the Organizing Principle of Politics

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

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

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

The Politics of Annihilation and Disappearance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weaponizing Terrorism

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The murder of Jessie Hoffman by Louisiana could now begin.

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

The murder of Jessie Hoffman by Louisiana was now complete.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Brief History of Bret Stephens

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

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

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

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

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

Zionist Ideologue

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

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

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

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

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

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

Increasing Fanaticism after 10/7

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pro-Israel Side Gig

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The “Bret Stephens Policy”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reached by phone, Ali expanded on his experience.

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

And then he got a call from a Times editor.

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

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

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

New York Times Frontman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Addendum

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

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Photo by Levi Meir Clancy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+ Distorting the reality of things;

+ Corrupting individuals and social institutions;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Image by Raghavendra V. Konkathi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Israel’s Attack

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

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

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

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

Pregnant Palestinians

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

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

Reopening Gaza

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

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

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

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

This article was produced by Globetrotter and No Cold War.

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Peter Hegseth, Image via Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

*Banning Black student groups at military academies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black Troops Become the Nucleus of the Freedom Struggle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

White militiaman confronts Black soldier in Chicago

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

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

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

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

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

Pamphlet distributed by the Socialist Workers Party, 1940

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Into Our Era

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

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

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

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

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

This piece first appeared on Empire Files.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

As a Catholic-educated youth from the Midwest, now in my eighties, I am appalled by the President’s current policy of mass deportation. I view the nationwide ICE raids and harsh treatment of detainees as sorely lacking in the social justice of religious teaching.

Operating without moral limits, the indiscriminate deportation of undocumented immigrants proceeds apace, with cruel and humiliating treatment of those apprehended and deported. Young men handcuffed and shackled are forced onto planes heading to the Guantanamo prison or to third countries, where they are incarcerated under undisclosed conditions. Others are held in one or another of the many for-profit “detention centers” scattered about the United States. The ICE roundups target not only criminals and gang  members,  but also undocumented foreign-born residents who have resided peacefully and productively in the U.S. for years or even decades.

ICE raids, detentions and mass deportations now underway utterly disregard religious principles regarding the treatment of migrants and immigrants.  In the Old Testament, Leviticus Chapter 19 enjoins followers to “treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you.”  In the New Testament, Matthew, Chapter 25, God says to the righteous “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.” In the Holy Quran, Verse 17:70 asserts that everyone’s God-given human dignity must be respected.

In his February 10 letter to the Bishops of the United States. Pope Francis stressed the “infinite and transcendent dignity of every human person.” Referring to the mass deportations in America, he said, “The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to …express its disagreement with any measure that… identifies the legal status of some migrants with criminality.”  While acknowledging a nation’s right to “keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes,” the Pope warned that an immigration policy “built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.”

In its January 2025 Statement, which draws from Catholic social teaching on migration, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) proposed the following six elements of immigration reform:

1. Enforcement efforts should be targeted, proportional, and humane.

2. Humanitarian protections and due process should be ensured.

3. Long-time residents should have an earned pathway to citizenship.

4. Family unity should remain a cornerstone of the U.S. system.

5. Legal pathways should be expanded, reliable, and efficient.

6. The root causes of forced migration should be addressed.

Based on such principles and especially on the inherent dignity of every human person, faith-based immigration reforms would limit deportations to convicted criminals, drug traffickers, and gang leaders; and assure humanitarian protections for detainees, expand pathways to legal status or citizenship (especially for long-term residents), promote family unity, and address the root causes of forced migration (such as violence or economic crisis).  As the Bishops Conference document states, “a country’s rights to regulate its borders and enforce its immigration laws must be balanced with its responsibilities to uphold the sanctity of human life, respect the God-given dignity of all persons and enact policies that further the common good.”

Faith-based immigration reform would also relieve the terrible fear and anxiety that now afflict our immigrant population–anxieties that keep children out of school, prevent their parents from reporting crime, and discourage  medical and court appointments.

Fortunately, there is in the legislative pipeline a bill that would address at least three important principles of faith-based reform: legal pathways, asylum reform, and humanitarian concerns. The bipartisan Dignity Act of 2023 would greatly strengthen enforcement efforts at the U.S.-Mexico border. At the same time  it would create new options for obtaining lawful status for many or most of the 12 million documented immigrants now in our country. The bill’s Dignity Program would offer deferral from removal for seven years and employment and travel authorizations for those who comply with the conditions. Some elements of the program would even create a pathway to citizenship.

The Dignity Act of 2023 falls short of some biblical principles in its emphasis on immigration ceilings, its strict application requirements, and its failure to define humanitarian standards for the so-called “Humanitarian Campuses.”  Despite the bill’s shortcomings, the USCCB called the Dignity Act of 2023 “a welcome step in the right direction.”

Let’s hope that a more welcoming Dignity Act will one day replace today’s cruel ICE raids and mass deportations. Faith-based immigration reform would recognize the dignity of each person, whether immigrant or asylum-seeker.

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Protests in Thomas Paine Park against the detention of Palestinian activist and Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil. Photo: SWinxy CC BY 4.0. 

My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.

Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.

Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities.

On March 8, I was taken by DHS agents who refused to provide a warrant, and accosted my wife and me as we returned from dinner. By now, the footage of that night has been made public. Before I knew what was happening, agents handcuffed and forced me into an unmarked car. At that moment, my only concern was for Noor’s safety. I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side. DHS would not tell me anything for hours — I did not know the cause of my arrest or if I was facing immediate deportation. At 26 Federal Plaza, I slept on the cold floor. In the early morning hours, agents transported me to another facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There, I slept on the ground and was refused a blanket despite my request.

My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night. With January’s ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.

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Photograph Source: ajay_suresh – CC BY 2.0

Last week, the  Washington Post audaciously posted a lead editorial that warned about “A threat to First Amendment Rights.”  For the past six months, the Post has been conducting its own assault on the First Amendment, despite a daily masthead that proclaims “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”  Jeff Bezos, the Post’s owner has censored editorials and even an editorial cartoon.  As a result, the cartoonist and several prominent editorial writers have resigned from the paper.  Many staffers have left as well, and several hundred thousand subscriptions have been canceled.  Conversely, during Donald Trump’s first campaign for the presidency, the Post wrote a series of six editorials outlining the “clear and present danger of Donald Trump” with no complaints from Bezos or his senior editors.

There was a similar series of events at the Los Angeles Times, whose editor—Patrick Soon-Shiong—is heavily dependent on support from the Trump administration.  Soon-Shiong proclaimed that the paper’s editorial writers were “very left” and that he wanted the paper to be more “middle of the road.”  Bezos and Soon-Shiong are heavily dependent on support from government agencies for the billions of dollars they earn in the fields of satellite technology and medical technology, respectively.  They are particularly intimidated by the pressure the Trump administration and the Federal Communications Commission are placing on such networks as CBS, ABC, NPR, and PBS.

Bezos’s truckling to Trump began in the run up to the November election, when Bezos made the eleventh-hour decision to kill a lead editorial endorsing Kamala Harris for president.  Bezos’s publisher and chief executive officer, Will Lewis—one of several toadies appointed by Bezos—said that the paper was returning to its roots of having no endorsements in presidential races, but that was one of the many lies and obfuscations the Post hierarchy has used to defend its policy of censorship.  Several hundred thousand subscribers cancelled their subscriptions, and two senior columnists—Robert Kagan and Michele Norris—resigned.

In the wake of Trump’s electoral victory, Bezos immediately began his campaign to kiss the ring of the next resident of the White House, donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration festivities.  Bezos told the New York Times that Trump was a changed man, “calmer…more confident, more settled.”  Obviously, Trump’s troglodytes, like Trump himself, are capable of willful self-delusion despite all evidence to the contrary.

When the Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist, Ann Telnaes, lampooned Bezos’s dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Donald and Melania, the editor of the editorial page, David Shipley, censored it, claiming in bizarre fashion that it was “duplicative.”  Post cartoonists, such as Herblock and Tom Toles over the years were often “duplicative” of editorials and opeds without raising the hackles of management.  Shipley’s act of censorship was the signal that editorial writers, like the editorial cartoonist, were going to have problems with Jeff Bezos.

In the wake of the Telnaes affair, an important editorial writer, Jennifer Rubin, left the paper, and the media critic Erik Wemple, had a piece killed.  Next to leave was Ruth Marcus, who had been at the Post for four decades and, since the retirement of Linda Greenhouse at the Times, was the most influential writer in the mainstream media on the Supreme Court.  (Marcus has been an apologist for Israel over the years, but her legal writings have been outstanding)  The fact that the publisher killed the Marcus piece was unprecedented; the fact that he refused to meet with Marcus was pusillanimous.

Marcus’s “crime” against the Post was to criticize Bezos’s edict that the editorial pages would focus only on “personal liberties and free markets,” which is a fundamentally libertarian position.  Many of Trump’s oligarchs are, of course, libertarians, who want an end to government regulation, if not government itself.  Many of the think-tanks that support Trump, such as the Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, are essentially libertarian institutes that want to restrict government agencies.  Bezos added that any viewpoints that challenge or oppose the twin pillars of personal liberty and free markets can be “published by others.”  Bezos’s demands are a blatant condescension to the Donald, and a threat to the First Amendment above all.  As New York Times’ columnist David Brooks said, the “opinion section in the Washington Post…does not brook dissent, that’s just not journalism.”

It’s also “not journalism” to reject ads that challenge the editorial position of a particular paper.  In February, an ad from Common Cause and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which had a signed contract with the Post at the cost of $115,000, was rejected simply because it asked “Who’s running this country: Donald Trump or Elon Musk?”  Obviously, Bezos’s front-row seat at Trump’s inauguration meant that the pandering to the president would involve every aspect of the publication of the Post.

The conventional wisdom framed the Post over the years as a liberal newspaper, which ignored the conservative luminaries who continue to dominate the editorial pages.  Twenty years ago, it was the conservative work of George Will, the late Michael Gerson, and the late Charles Krauthammer.  Today, it is the conservative writings of George Will, Max Boot, Marc Thiess, and David Ignatius.  Thiess and Ignatius are the mainstream media’s leading apologists for Trump and the Central Intelligence Agency and its covert action, respectively.  Even during the halcyon days of Woodward and Bernstein in the 1970s as well as Ben Bradlee in the 1980s, the Post had a conservative streak that catered to the president, whether Republican or Democratic.

The Post’s support for the lies of the Bush administration to use force against Iraq was particularly appalling with every one of the paper’s editorial and oped writers supporting the war and buying into the disinformation regarding Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.  As recently as March 15th, Marc Thiess was given nearly an entire page to defend the Trump administration’s mugging of Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zalensky in the Oval Office last month and Trump’s hugging of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The conservative views of the Post are no threat to our civil society.  The same cannot be said of the censorship at the Post and the pandering to the most dangerous president in the history of the United States.

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Photo by Abhinav Bhardwaj

There are a multitude of reasons why Donald Trump and his supporters are waging war against colleges and universities.  But among the reasons is a simple one–historically conservative reactionary regimes hate intellectuals.

Trump and his supporters hate higher education for obvious reasons.   Those with college degrees are not his supporters and voted against him in 2024.    Colleges are full of students and professors who vote for Democrats and they have visibly protested  against his policies or  embraced issues such as opposition to Israel’s war against the Palestinians,  support for transgender rights, or DEI in general.  One could argue that Trump’s populism is rooted in what historian Richard Hofstadter labeled “anti-intellectualism” in American life.  Americans generally hate smart people, labeling them as Alabama Governor did as “pointy-headed  intellectuals,” or  in the words of Vice-President Spiro Agnew who lumped them together with the media to call them “An effete core of impudent snobs.”

But there is something here and it is the traditional hatred of intellectuals by  reactionary regimes.  There is a story regarding the trial of Italian Marxist  intellectual  Antonio Gramsci who was part of the opposition party in the parliament to Benito Mussolini and the fascists.  Gramsci was  arrested and at his trial  the prosecution declared: “For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning.”  Gramsci’s crime was providing the intellectual ideas to challenge the ruling power.  Despite his punishment. His Prison Notebooks were secretly written and disseminated.

Gramsci’s thesis was that the battle against fascism was in part an ideological fight for the hearts and minds of the people.  Battles for power may take place in parliament or in the streets but they are also fought in mass pop culture  as well as in universities and colleges to influence and counter  the propaganda of the ruling class and government.  Controlling intellectuals and what they think and say is part of how the fascists, the nazis, and other authoritarian and reactionary regimes maintain power.

Education and learning are about critical thinking.  It is about subjecting power and dogma to truth.  It is about questioning, challenging, and imagining alternative  realities or unmasking facades.  It  is as philosopher Immanuel Kant declared:  “Dare to Know.”  College is where one learns to reject authority for the sake of authority, to ask “Why not?” in response to “Why?”  It is to reject what is accepted as a matter of fact and suggest that what is traditionally accepted as truth may not be so.  If done right, a liberal arts education is inherently subversive and in the spirit of John Dewey, that task is not to produce the next generation  of  docile uneducated workers, but instead to foster the next generation of democratic citizens.  By its very nature, higher education should produce the antithesis of political passivity and blind obedience.

This is why every  authoritarian  regime seeks to control what people think.  It does that in its  school curriculum and via book bans.  But it also does that in terms of who is hired to teach and what they teach.  It is a battle over indoctrination.  Universities and intellectuals, for Gramsci, lead the charge to counter this battle for hearts and minds.  It should come as no surprise why Trump and many Republicans before him have hated higher education.  Arguing that there are more than two sexes, that gender roles are socially constructed, that perhaps capitalism exploits workers or that  the rich do  not deserve their fortunes, is not what  they want to hear.  Education is not to serve the interests of democracy, self-discovery, or personal enrichment, it is to teach  subservience to the status quo.

Trump’s efforts to eliminate the Department of Education and crackdown on higher education may be intensely personal and vindictive.  But it is also part of a predictable agenda to control and eliminate the intellectual seeds of opposition.

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Image by Edrece Stansberry.

Check out Ralph Nader on the most recent episode of CounterPunch Radio.

There are reasons why influential or knowledgeable Americans are staying silent as the worsening fascist dictatorship of the Trumpsters and Musketeers gets more entrenched by the day. Most of these reasons are simple cover for cowardice.

Start with the once-powerful Bush family dynasty. They despise Trump as he does them. Rich and comfortable George W. Bush is very proud of his Administration’s funding of AIDS medicines saving lives in Africa and elsewhere. Trump, driven by vengeance and megalomania, moved immediately to dismantle this program. Immediate harm commenced to millions of victims in Africa and elsewhere who are reliant on this U.S. assistance (including programs to lessen the health toll on people afflicted by tuberculosis and malaria).

Not a peep from George W. Bush, preoccupied with his landscape painting and perhaps occasional pangs of guilt from his butchery in Iraq. His signal program is going down in flames and he keeps his mouth shut, as he has largely done since the upstart loudmouth Trump ended the Bush family’s power over the Republican Party.

Then there are the Clintons and Obama. They are very rich, and have no political aspirations. Yet, though horrified by what they see Trump doing to the government and its domestic social safety net services they once ruled, mum’s the word.

What are these politicians afraid of as they watch the overthrow of our government and the oncoming police state? Trump, after all, was not elected to become a dictator—declaring war on the American people with his firings and smashing of critical “people’s programs” that benefit liberals and conservatives, red state and blue state residents alike.

Do they fear being discomforted by Trump/Musk unleashing hate and threats against them, and getting tarred by Trump’s tirades and violent incitations? No excuses. Regard for our country must take precedence to help galvanize their own constituencies to resist tyranny and fight for Democracy.

What about Kamala Harris — the hapless loser to Trump in November’s presidential election? She must think she has something to say on behalf of the 75 million people who voted for her or against Trump. Silence! She is perfect bait for Trump’s intimidation tactics. She is afraid to tangle with Trump despite his declining polls, rising inflation, the falling stock market and anti-people budget slashing which is harming her supporters and Trump voters’ economic wellbeing, health and safety.

This phenomenon of going dark is widespread. Regulators and prosecutors who were either fired or quit in advance have not risen to defend their own agencies and departments, if only to elevate the morale of those civil servants remaining behind and under siege.

Why aren’t we hearing from Gary Gensler, former head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), now being dismantled, especially since the SEC is dropping his cases against alleged cryptocurrency crooks?

Why aren’t we hearing much more (she wrote one op-ed) from Samantha Power, the former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) under Biden, whose life-saving agency is literally being illegally closed down, but for pending court challenges?

Why aren’t we hearing from Michael Regan, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under Biden about saboteur Lee Zeldin, Trump’s head of EPA, who is now giving green lights to lethal polluters and other environmental destructions?

These and many other former government officials all have their own circles – in some cases, millions of people – who need to hear from them.

They can take some courage of the seven former I.R.S. Commissioners — from Republican and Democratic Administrations — who condemned slicing the I.R.S staff in half and aiding and abetting big time tax evasion by the undertaxed super-rich and giant corporations. I am told that they would be eager to testify, should the Democrats in Congress have the energy to hold unofficial hearings as ranking members of the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means Committees.

Banding together is one way of reducing the fear factor. After Trump purged the career military at the Pentagon to put his own “yes men” at the top, five former Secretaries of Defense, who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents, sent a letter to Congress denouncing Trump’s firing of senior military officers and requesting “immediate” House and Senate hearings to “assess the national security implications of Mr. Trump’s dismissals.” Not a chance by the GOP majority there. But they could ask the Democrats to hold UNOFFICIAL HEARINGS as ranking members of the Armed Services Committees!

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker can be one of the prime witnesses at these hearings – he has no fear of speaking his mind against the Trumpsters.

On March 6, 2025, the Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Times, Elisabeth Bumiller, put her rare byline on an urgent report titled, “‘People Are Going Silent’: Fearing Retribution, Trump Critics Muzzle Themselves.”

She writes: “The silence grows louder every day. Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes ask not to be quoted by name. University presidents [one exception is Wesleyan University President Michael Roth] fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute.”

To be sure, government employees and other unions are speaking out and suing in federal court. So are national citizen groups like Public Citizen and the Center for Constitutional Rights, though hampered in alerting large audiences by newspapers like the Times rarely reporting their initiatives.

Yes, Ms. Bumiller, pay attention to that aspect of your responsibility. Moreover, the Times’ editorial page (op-ed and editorials) are not adequately reflecting the urgency of her reporting. Nor are her reporters covering the informed outspokenness and actions of civic organizations.

Don’t self-censoring people know that they are helping the Trumpian dread, threat and fear machine get worse? Study Germany and Italy in the nineteen thirties.

The Trump/Musk lawless, cruel, arrogant, dictatorial regime is in our White House. Their police state infrastructure is in place. Silence is complicity!

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Encampment protest at the University of California, San Diego (May 5, 2024).  Photo by Gary Fields.

Over the course of the last sixteen months, the public sphere has witnessed an assault on rights to free expression and freedom of assembly unlike anything since the Communist witch hunts and Lavender Scare of Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.  Not only are government officials at all levels participating in this suppression of basic rights associated with the First Amendment.  University Administrators are imposing censorship directives against students and faculty who have been speaking out against a genocidal onslaught perpetrated by the State of Israel against the Palestinians of Gaza that has been enabled and supported by the U.S. Government.  The source of this military carnage, and the politics of censorship being woven around this assault by Government and university officials, derives from the pervasive influence of Israel and its ideology of Zionism on American politics and cultural life.

What is less understood in this appalling campaign is how Israeli influence, which was formerly restricted to support for the Jewish State in the sphere of American foreign policy, is now recasting domestic politics in the U.S., primarily around First Amendment Rights and the right to assembly.  Paradoxically, where Zionist influence is remaking U.S. domestic politics most profoundly is on American University campuses.  The complicity of University Administrators in this project of censorship is more than disturbing.  These Officials have turned what are supposed to be spaces for the free and open exchange of ideas into surveilled and policed camps of fear and paranoia.  How did this occur?

Since 1967, the U.S. has aligned its foreign policy with that of Israel and its primary goal of suppressing Palestinian rights by means of a brutal apartheid regime and an occupation army.  At that time, what the U.S. saw in Israel was a partner in a common cause linked to the Cold War.  For the U.S., Israel represented a powerful regional proxy capable not only of thwarting Palestinian self-determination, but disciplining those Arab regimes in the region that were aligned with the Soviet Union and supportive of the Palestinian struggle.^[1]  From 1967 to present day, the U.S. has supported its ally with a vast arsenal of military hardware making it the single largest recipient of American military assistance and one the most powerful militaries in the world.  At the same time, the State of Israel helped create a vast apparatus of political support in the U.S. for the Jewish State, anchored by the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

For decades, this lobbying network, which casts its influence over all levels of American life, has successfully bribed and bought almost every single politician in the U.S. Congress and the Executive Branch to do Israel’s bidding.  The result is that there has been virtually no debate in the chambers of the American Government about Israel and its policies, despite the distasteful brutality of its decades-long rule over the Palestinians that the International Court of Justice has declared to be an illegal military occupation.

During the last 16 months, the U.S. single handedly ensured that Israel’s incessant bombardment of Gaza would continue without interruption by sending it weekly shipments of armaments that Israel could in no way produce on its own.  All this ordinance was exported illegally to Israel in violation of America’s own laws about the use of such weaponry with the help of lies about the matter by Antony Blinken.  While all of this is truly sordid, a new element has come into the picture that has played an integral role in what is now playing out on college campuses.

On April 24^th of last year, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu broadcast a speech that was recorded in English specifically for an American audience.^[2]  In it, he assailed the protests on U.S. college campuses against the genocidal assault of his military, stating that “antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities.”  In his tirade, Netanyahu also emphasized the one card that Israel plays whenever it is criticized for its human rights abuses and violations of international law.  Netanyahu likened the protests on campuses to Nazi pogroms in German Universities in the 1930s while labelling protestors as antisemitic bigots and demanded that University officials punish these protestors.  “It has to be stopped,” he intoned.

In this way, the state of Israel, with its perch as a dominant influence in U.S. foreign policy, was now demanding an equally influential voice in American domestic politics involving rights to free expression and rights of assembly.  Although aimed at University officials, Netanyahu’s comments, were also a signal to the various branches of the Israel Lobby to target those university institutions that seemingly failed to stem what he charged were the antisemitic mobs on college campuses.

Some universities such as Columbia in New York, had already heeded the call to defend Israel at all costs.  In November 2023, five months before students even set up a protest encampment at the University, the Administration at Columbia preemptively banned its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace.  On April 17, 2024, seven months into Israel’s murderous genocide, protestors at Columbia established the Encampment that would inspire a national and even global protest movement.  Less than one week later, dozens of encampments emerged around the country.^[3]  It was at this moment that Netanyahu made his demands to University Administrators with his overt reference to antisemitism and his unmistakable directive to shut down the encampments and discipline those students and faculty involved in these antisemitic Nazi pogroms.  The message certainly reached Israel’s chief genocide enabler, Joseph Biden.  On May 2024, Biden weighed in on the Encampment protests saying “order must prevail” and went on to echo the same kind of rhetoric about antisemitism as his Israeli counterpart.  “There should be no place in any campus, no place in America, for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students” he instructed his American audience. ^[4] One by one, University campuses were violently cleared of these protests in May, 2024 soon after the speeches of Netanyahu and Biden – including my own campus of UCSD where the Chancellor called in 3 police forces on May 6^th to shut down the Encampment and arrest protestors.

What enabled University Administrators to justify these crackdowns while defending their actions was the effort of a consortium of 31 countries known as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) to recast the historical definition of antisemitism.   In 2016, the IHRA crafted a definition of antisemitism with seven separate clarifications of its meaning that dealt specifically with Israel.  Numerous organizations spearheaded by Human Rights Watch criticized this definition because it essentially equates criticism of a State (Israel) with the way antisemitism has traditionally been understood which is animus toward Jews and the Jewish people.^[5]

In the U.S., federal agencies now use the IHRA definition of antisemitism to assess compliance with Title VI of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act against discrimination.  What this means for universities is that they can be held accountable for failing to correct violations of Title VI that prohibits discrimination, in this case discrimination against Jews.  The problem is that with the IHRA definition, the meaning of antisemitism has been extended to include criticism of the State of Israel and its policies thereby making an exception of Israel as being above critique.

Administrators thus justified their abrogation of free speech and rights to assembly by decrying Encampment protests as violations of Title VI that protects minority groups from discrimination but in this case, the protection was reserved not for Jews but for Israel.  In this way, University Administrators turned a venerable Civil Rights Era law on its head.  They claimed that the protests against a State committing genocide in Gaza with American support, were bigoted, antisemitic acts, and that campuses had become unsafe for Jewish students and Jewish faculty.  This fictional discourse of antisemitic bigotry against Jews has spread throughout the community of University Administrators and has assumed the form of newly designed restrictions on speech and protest accompanied by firings, suspensions, and the establishment on campuses of a climate of surveillance and fear.

         This massive campaign on college campuses against freedom of expression and rights to assembly has now come into contact with an equally ominous force – the anti-immigrant assault now underway by the current Administration.  This convergence of anti-immigrant and anti-Palestinian vitriol has evolved swiftly with recent events.

Last week, in a bizarre paradox, the U.S. Government announced that it was withholding $400 million from Columbia University for its supposedly hostile antisemitic climate toward Jewish students and faculty.  Despite the University’s brutal crackdown on protestors against the Israeli genocide against the people of Gaza, and despite Columbia’s ongoing crackdown on anti-Israel protest of any kind, such censorship of protest against Israel was apparently not good enough for the Administration and the Zionist networks of lobbyists and donors who dictate policy to both government and universities. ^[6]

One week ago, ICE agents apprehended one of these Columbia protestors, Mahmoud Khalil in what is reminiscent of the illegal renditions under George W. Bush’s war on terror and spirited him to some unnamed prison location in Louisiana.   Columbia officials offered no comment on its own involvement in this appalling violation of the constitutional rights of one of its own students.  Trump himself has weighed in on this shameful apprehension with a boastful missive on his Truth Social page in which he gloats: “Following my previously signed Executive Orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”  Indeed, this is no idle threat.

Commensurate with the kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil, the Department of Education issued a list of 60 University campuses suspected of harboring antisemitic activity.  “Too many universities have tolerated widespread antisemitic harassment and the illegal encampments that paralyzed campus life last year, driving Jewish life and religious expression underground,” said Craig Trainor, Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights for the Department of Education.  Trainor used the occasion to accuse the Biden Administration of “doing little to hold those institutions accountable.”  The truth of the matter, however, is vastly different.  It is the Biden Administration, following the lead of Netanyahu and the State of Israel, that essentially rolled out the red carpet for precisely this kind of lawless suppression of free speech and freedom of assembly to take place. ^[7]

As one of the Universities targeted by the Administration with being a repository of anti-Jewish hate, and as a campus located in San Diego on the border at one of the most critical immigration flashpoints, my own campus of UCSD now finds itself in a perilous predicament.  Students at UCSD established a large and spirited Encampment near the Main Library of the University.  This Encampment was brutally attacked by three different police units on May 6, 2024 and was one of the most noteworthy where both students and faculty were arrested.^[8]

Police confront Encampment protestors at the University of California, San Diego.  Photo by Gary Fields.

At the same time, with the ongoing threats of deporting immigrants, alongside the boastful swagger of Donald Trump on the ICE abduction of Mahmoud Khalil from Columbia, UCSD is poised at the epicenter of a disturbing convergence of anti-Palestinian and anti-immigrant vitriol.  With its credentials as an Encampment against Israeli genocide and with a strategic location on the Mexican border, my campus may very well witness visits from ICE agents targeting not just DACA students and the like, but those who have protested Israel’s genocide in Gaza.  Indeed, University Administrators throughout the country, including at UCSD, have played a duplicitous role in the calamity now unfolding on campuses with the ICE arrest of this student at Columbia by shamefully discarding the idea of the university as a space of open discussion and debate about issues of the day.  What is to be Done?

It may seem counterintuitive, but the ongoing crackdown on pro-Palestinian protest and the chilling campaign against freedom of speech and assembly, alongside what is now an intensified assault against immigrant rights, is creating a new set of imperatives for protest.  It may very well be time once again to test the water with protests directed both at the protection of immigrant rights, against Israeli genocide, and against the curtailment of our basic rights of free expression and assembly.  The situation at Columbia with the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, and the likelihood of more of these assaults on our rights makes such protest more critical than ever.

Notes.

^[1]  https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/11/15/343218/

^[2]  https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-likens-us-campus-encampments-by-antisemitic-mobs-to-1930s-nazi-germany/

^[3]  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68906215

^[4]  Steve Holland, “Biden Breaks Silence on College Protest over Gaza Conflict, Reuters,” (May 2, 2024); https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-breaks-silence-college-protests-over-gaza-conflict-2024-05-02/

^[5]  https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/04/04/human-rights-and-other-civil-society-groups-urge-united-nations-respect-human

^[6]  https://theintercept.com/2025/03/08/columbia-trump-funding-gaza-israel/

^[7] Noura Erakat, “The Boomerang Comes Back:  How the U.S.-backed War on Palestine is Expanding Authoritarianism at Home,” Boston Review (February 5, 2025);  https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-boomerang-comes-back/

^[8]  https://www.axios.com/2024/04/27/palestinian-college-protest-arrest-encampment

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Photo by Maurice Pehle

He who laughs
Just hasn’t yet received
The terrible news.

– Bertolt Brecht

Terror and anticipation begin the moment iftar ends. That is when the mujahideen knock on doors and search homes. Calls to the General Security prove useless; the response is shocking: “We cannot do anything about them.”

Bullets pierce windows, shattering glass, as threatening voices echo at building entrances. A Kalashnikov barrel searches for a victim.

Wael, an Alawite, moved his child to a Sunni family’s home on another floor to keep him safe. That same night, five armed, bearded men stormed the home of Hussein and Malika, asking if there were any young men inside before ordering the two to leave. Terrified and unable to process the fact that their lives had been spared, Hussein and Malika hurried to their neighbor’s apartment on the second floor. The militants seized their sea-view home and took up residence there.

Ahmed trembled as he stared at his children, his words choked with fear. He ended the call with me, saying they had reached the entrance of his building and that he could no longer continue speaking. Later, he reassured me in a text message that they had not entered.

In the Al-Amara neighborhood, Reem clutched her two daughters, watching the door leading to the black tunnel of death. She said, “I sing to them as I wait. I repeat the same songs over and over.” She choked on her tears and fell silent. She had nothing more to say. Her tear-filled silence spoke louder than the media screens shamelessly spreading lies.

Many individuals have disappeared, their fates unknown. The bleeding corpses in the streets tell stories that may never reach readers or listeners, drowned in a sea of fabricated media narratives designed to mislead public opinion.

Khalil, an intellectual, aimed to send a message about famous Arab TV channels. He explained, “The killers control the narrative, and shaping public discourse. By dominating the screens, they influence the audience, using media coverage to portray their crimes as battles against the regime’s remnants.”

 Video clips surfaced showing Jableh city as a deserted wasteland, just as a foreign jihadist had boasted on social media about his role in turning it into a desert. In another video, he is seen chasing an elderly man with a Kalashnikov, gunning him down while riding a motorcycle like a hunter toying with his prey.

Ali, a high school student, believed he was safe in his village. Walking near his home with a friend, he was caught in a hail of bullets fired from a passing vehicle in a mujahideen convoy. Merhej, on the other hand, was persuaded by his wife to flee Jableh to her family’s home in Hmeimim village. But the killers were waiting there too. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, have perished, though documentation is still incomplete, and the final death toll remains uncertain.

Samia wept over the phone: ‘No food, no water, and we can’t leave or even think about opening the door.” She sat in complete darkness with her two sons, one a university student, the other with special needs but fully aware of the fear on his mother’s and brother’s faces. The regime had executed her husband, though the details remained unclear. “Every day is worse than the one before. We go to sleep not knowing if we’ll wake up, and wake up not knowing if we’ll make it through the day, as the Arab classical poet Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri once said. Do you remember when they destroyed his statue in his birthplace, under the pretext that it was an idol? The same people are here to kill us.”

Nearby, Wael heard his female neighbor’s screams as her husband and two sons were executed before her eyes. Everyone heard, but no one could help. No one could do anything.

In a desperate attempt to survive, Ayman, a lawyer, called his Sunni friend: “Come take me to your home.” Ayman sought refuge in a Sunni household, just as Hussein, the agricultural engineer, and Malika, the schoolteacher, took shelter in their Sunni neighbor’s apartment upstairs. Outside, Syrian and foreign jihadists roamed the streets, hunting Alawites, while Alawite and Sunni Syrians came together in a rare display of human solidarity.

Ahmed, his voice weak and uncertain, said, “I now understand the looming presence of death in war. I understand how it comes through shelling, through the sound of mortars, through explosive barrels, or exploding landmines. I see how everything that happened in the north and northeast fueled this killing machine here. We should have been braver in showing solidarity with the Syrians who were being killed since the beginning of the last decade, but we were afraid. We failed to grasp the power of human solidarity with those who were pushed toward extremism. Yet, slaughtering civilians like this is not a solution, it cannot be justified as a retaliation, because the victims are not fighters, or remnants of the old regime as they claim. It is ethnic cleansing.”

Muhsin came to my mind. Fourteen years ago, I attended his funeral in to express my condolences to his parents. He had been doing his military service in Raqqa. As a university graduate, he was supposed to stay in the army for two years, but with the emergency laws in place, there was no promise of being released. In Raqqa, he disappeared without leaving any trace behind. It turned out that ISIS had kidnapped him. His parents waited in vain for any news, until one day someone called to tell them he was dead. His mother, furious, said the regime had never cared to search for her son. “Nobody cared,” she said. “He wasn’t connected, and he didn’t have money.”

Two years later, he miraculously reappeared. When the terrorists had a gun barrel pressed to his head, he found the courage to ask, “How can you kill someone who has memorized the Quran by heart?” The emir ordered them to spare him and had someone bring the Quran to test him, verse by verse. He succeeded, and they let him live.

“Now, people with the same mentality are besieging our homes,” he said, with the same courage he had once shown. “Let’s see what God has written for us. I hope their God will not be my judge; He promised me hell.”

Marwan, overcome with anger, suffered sleepless nights in Angola, constantly checking his phone for updates on his wife, two daughters, and old parents. He directed his fury at Bashar al-Assad, holding him primarily responsible for the carnage. “They are making us pay for crimes we did not commit. We were never the core supporters for the regime, as the opposition factions claim. The true backers of the regime were Iran, Russia, the West, and oil-rich Arab states. They funded and supported al-Assad’s military dictatorship. Even former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright endorsed Bashar al-Assad’s inheritance of his father’s position. We were just ordinary people looking for work. We failed to realize that we were part of the oppressive machine that served the Assads. I understand that now. Existential shocks deepen awareness.” He paused, then, with bitterness, added, “But look at what they are doing! They are killing innocent, powerless people, while the real criminals were spared by the deal that changed the country’s course. Those who committed crimes either settled their status or fled the country to Russia, while the poor and innocent are the ones paying the price.”

Aziz, whose poet friend and his two children were killed before their mother’s eyes, said the murderers are ideologically programmed to commit their crimes. “They see the other as an infidel, a heretic, stripped of any human worth. True, we deserve blame for our lack of solidarity with other Syrians and our failure to speak out. But we were just as afraid of the security apparatus as anyone else, and we never condoned the killing of Syrians. Maybe we erred by not making our voices louder, but many of us stood by our principles with courage and honor. Syrians chanted at the start of the revolution: ‘He who kills his people is a traitor.’ And that is exactly what is happening now. The killers believe they are eliminating infidels and criminals, but in reality, they are slaughtering their own people. I condemn the killing of the General Security’s personnel in the ambush. However, the killers are armed gangs who do not represent us, and we are not responsible for their crimes.”

Ghasan refused to surrender to fear. He had seen this coming. “The regime’s practices for decades inevitably led to this bloodshed. But the real problem lies in culture. Islam in Syria must be reformed and charged with an entirely different cultural vision, where faith remains a personal matter between individuals and their God. The flaw is not only in the Quran but also in what the Algerian scholar and thinker Mohammed Arkoun calls the second text (the interpretations of the Quran that have fueled extremist thought). We need new critical thought to dismantle this deep-rooted culture that turns minds into weapons of extremism. If this does not happen, this massacre will repeat itself.”

Ghasan was not afraid. He believed in the resilience of the Syrian people. “There is a power outage, the water is cut off, and we cannot buy necessities. The only thing that flows uninterrupted is the fear of indiscriminate slaughter, the fear of being killed like an insect, stripped of humanity. The executioner who may enter soon does not know me, does not care about my thoughts, will not even try to know me. To him, I am an infidel, undeserving of life. His mind is fed with narratives that make me worth nothing more than a bullet.”

I could not reach many I wanted to check on. Darkness prevailed, cold gripped the air, and the specter of fear filled the streets, where death squads prowled, committing genocide, looting, and burning homes across the Syrian coast and its countryside.

However, I managed to get in touch with Samar who cried over the phone, saying, “I am not afraid of death, but of this look directed at me, as if I lack a human identity, the look that strips me of my humanity. I have been dehumanized. I have been given an identity that is not mine. I have been burdened with the sins of others. Soon, the fast will end. Our home might be next.”

She continued, “The death squads belong to forces that became official after the dissolution and unification of factions under the Ministry of Defense. At first, we heard that these forces had come to support the General Security’s forces, which had been attacked by remnants of the regime. However, the government-affiliated forces carried out a ‘jihadist raid’ aligned with the traditions of Al-Qaeda and ISIS. They stormed the homes of unarmed civilians, executing children, women, the elderly, and young men in cold blood without even trying to hide it. They filmed the killings with their mobile phones and posted videos on social media boasting of killing the infidels, leaving the bodies scattered in the streets or inside homes, while shouting phrases that stripped the victims of their humanity and further dehumanized them. They vowed to turn cities and towns into deserts. The death squads continue their killing operations under the pretext of fighting the remnants of the regime, while the government’s vague statements aimed to portray the massacres in the coastal areas as retaliation for crimes committed by the remnants of the former regime. This justifies the crimes and encourages more of them. There has been no attempt to stop the killing or force the criminals to withdraw from the cities and the countryside, where genocide is taking place as if under a legal cover.”

I was unable to reach Tareq directly, but he wrote to me, saying that criminals’ patrols are roaming the streets of Jableh, Latakia, Baniyas, Tartous, and the countryside of Masyaf. The zealots storm houses after breaking their fast. Fear engulfs the residents after iftar, which has turned into an appointment with Azrael (the Angel of Death in Islam). After executions, money, jewelry, and cars are looted because the jihadists consider them as booties; any vehicle that cannot be driven or transported is set on fire. Some homes have been occupied and turned into headquarters, such as what happened in the Teachers’ Housing Units in the Mediterranean coastal city of Jableh.

Tareq said that the killings are still ongoing, with people falling dead in the Rumeila neighborhood and other villages, and no serious effort has been made to stop the crimes.

After many desperate attempts, I finally reached Ayham, my old friend. “I escaped death by a hair’s breadth. The emir spared me. They broke into the house, demanded money, electronics, and everything of value. Just as they were about to shoot me, the emir signaled them to stop, saying he wanted to interrogate me. I told him I was ready to embrace their version of religion, to be guided to the right path, and to become a Sunni. I used my extensive knowledge of Islam as a lifeline, a lottery ticket that saved my life and it worked. I escaped, but all my close friends were killed. I am now a Sunni; my change of faith was the only thing that spared my life.”

I managed to reach my old friend Maisa. She was in disbelief over what had happened to their house after the death squads left. Everything of value was stolen, including frozen food, olives, olive oil, nuts, and chinaware. What shocked her the most was that her wedding album had been emptied of all the photographs, their torn pieces scattered on the floor alongside the broken remnants of some paintings.

“You know that Alawi women don’t wear hijab in the coastal region. At my wedding, all of my female friends wore short dresses, some with collars that revealed a bit of skin. But for the fundamentalist intruders, women must wear the veil and live like slaves. Now my memories are erased. They even tore up the photos of me as a baby and a child. They executed me in photographs, leaving no trace of my past life. They didn’t respect the sanctity of personal belongings that give value to our lives. I feel like a stranger in this country now. I no longer belong here. I cannot live with this kind of religious mentality.”

The former communist and poet Anwar, who left Damascus for the coastal area after work opportunities dried up in the capital, told me about hunger, thirst, halted salaries, layoffs, and the growing anger among people. He said the “death squads were sent to silence everyone”. He added that “Syrian officials’ statements in the first and second days of the mass killings showed a clear refusal to condemn the systematic genocide, treating it not as an isolated crime but as a justifiable reaction, an atrocity contextualized in a way that gives it legitimacy. Had the perpetrators been civilians seeking revenge, it might have been understandable. But the fact that these mass killings are being committed by official government forces under the current Ministry of Defense means that the government’s refusal to stop the massacres is effectively a green light for them to continue. The proof is that even as I speak with you, the killing continues in some areas. When the Assad regime fell, we looked to the people who came from the north – who had been portrayed as barbarians by the regime’s propaganda- as kind of solution. But now, after the genocide, it would have been better if they had never come, because, contrary to what Cavafy said in his famous poem “Waiting for the Barbarians”, they will never be a kind of solution.

This article is based on WhatsApp calls and interviews with individuals living in Syria’s coastal region, where the genocide took place, and their lives were threatened. One of them miraculously escaped death.

Osama Esber is a Syrian poet, photographer, and translator currently based in California. He serves as an editor for Salon Syria and the Arabic section of Jadaliyya, as well as an editor for Status audio magazine. His poetry collections include Screens of History (1994), The Accord of Waves (1995), Repeated Sunrise over Exile (2004), and Where He Doesn’t Live (2006). He has also published short story collections such as The Autobiography of Diamonds (1996), Coffee of the Dead (2000), and Rhythms of a Different Time (forthcoming). As a translator, he has rendered into Arabic the works of renowned authors including Salman Rushdie, Raymond Carver, Michael Ondaatje, Bertrand Russell, Toni Morrison, and Noam Chomsky, among others.

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“The Grapes of Wrath” by Michèle White, 2025.

Having declared a national emergency on the first day of his administration, the newly sworn-in American president Donald Trump announced plans to implement tariffs on Canadian goods, countering his own reworked NAFTA/USMCA reciprocal free trade agreement from five years earlier. After weeks of insulting remarks, annexation jokes, and social-media frothing, a 25% tariff came into effect on March 5, which lasted a day before being threatened again for April 2 in another disruptive flip flop, roiling stock markets and setting off a tit-for-tat economic war between two previously friendly nations. The “world’s longest undefended border” just got a whole lot chillier. As the saying goes, “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”

Citing an imbalance in trade, the United States added fentanyl and illegal immigrants to the mix to justify the national emergency … from Canada. Good fences make good neighbo(u)rs, but the strategy doesn’t wash as with most Trumpian logic. In 2024, the US had a global trade deficit of over $1 trillion, $60 billion with Canada. Excluding subsidized petroleum products, which helps keep American gas prices low, the exchange in goods is almost equal, while the US runs a surplus in services. The amount of drugs and illegals entering the United States from Canada is also minimal. Are these the acts of a rational player or a smokescreen for more uncertainty and a new kind of trampling on the rights and dreams of others?

Whatever the motivation, the economic ramifications of impeded trade between two highly integrated economies are potentially devastating, costing millions of jobs in both countries, especially in the carmaking industry where hundreds of different parts can transit the border many times before a finished vehicle rolls off the factory floor. The cultural, social, and political ramifications are incalculable with many Canadians venting their anger by cancelling trips to the States, booing the American national anthem at sporting events, and enacting “Buy Canadian” or “Anything but American” campaigns. The maker of Jack Daniel’s noted that removing American liquor from Canadian stores is “worse than a tariff.” Echoing the feelings of many anxious compatriots, a former Canadian ambassador to the US stated that relations “may never be the same.”

As a Canadian, I admit to harbouring some anti-American sentiment that comes from growing up next to a giant. Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau famously declared that living next to the United States is “like sleeping with an elephant.” A popular saying is “When the US sneezes, Canada catches a cold.” But this is different. Our best friend older brother wants to own us, or at least says he does. Some call it a negotiating tactic. Oh yeah, “your mother wears army boots.” WTF? Is this the level of American diplomacy?

I also admit having grown up admiring the US, both learned and experienced in Canada and abroad. I regularly watched American TV shows – there were 3 Buffalo stations in the Toronto area – puzzling over the subtle differences in our worlds. Hockey teams I played on billeted each other as we played home-and-away games versus teams from Detroit. Many of my heroes are American (the list is very long). But when an American president stakes claim to Canada as his own and openly taunts the prime minister as the governor of the 51st state, it’s no longer geopolitical gamesmanship. American elephantism/exceptionalism has run wild. The US is now as dangerous to Canadians as in the days of cross-border raids during the War of Independence, the 1814 burning of the White House, or “54-40 or fight.”

Canadians get it, probably more than many Americans think. You feel you’ve been pushed around after you helped save the world for democracy in World War II. The country that spent trillions of dollars to beat the Soviet Union to the moon quite literally created the modern world with the transistor, integrated circuit, personal computer, and the Internet. We have you to thank for the car, IBM, and Elvis Presley (but not the telephone, universal health care, or Joni Mitchell). And now we are all ungrateful.

Sorry to suggest how you might feel, but do you really believe Canada threatens your existence with fentanyl and underpaid workers or that international agreements can’t be renegotiated? Go ahead, pull the other one Johnny Appleseed. More likely, the chaos is by design to undermine governance and put even more power in fewer hands. Of course, the facts don’t matter in Trump’s supercritical black hole of imploding nonsense.

Perhaps gangster tactics are needed to forge a successful real estate business in New York City. Self-promotion, barstool bullying, and buying one’s own ghostwritten books en masse to ensure entry on the New York Times book list may be the cost of success in such rarefied skyscraper air, but bullying people is not the mark of anything great. Leader? Statesman? No responsible governmental steward plays games with the lives and livelihoods of hard-working citizens and families. I think Trump has watched too many Times Square reruns of The Godfather. Government is not a business and everything is personal.

Is it fealty you want? Oh Donald. You are so fine. Must everyone kiss the hand? Please tell us your world is more than game-playing, whatever the consequences to others, in the name of a fairytale Golden Age. The conflict-seekers taking advantage of the conflict-averse. The rich stamping on the poor. Prehistoric, medieval, the American Way? Don’t you know Lucy will never hold the ball for good old Charlie Brown?

Is it our minerals – the gold, copper, nickel, and uranium? You could have asked politely and we would have sold more to you at a reasonable price (now surcharged by 25%). Is it 2% GDP spending on NATO, an organization you actively undermine? Do you want to arm the world in what economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis calls “military Keynesianism” so that others will buy more American weapons, adding to an already bloated death industry and undercutting social spending and diversity?

Do you want Canadians to apologize for “American Woman,” even though New Yorker Lenny Kravitz also covered that classic ‘70s Guess Who hit. In this case, “woman” is a metaphor for the coloured lights that hypnotize. Sorry for the Toronto Blue Jays winning the World Series for the first time on foreign soil in 1992, but Babe Ruth hit his first professional home run in Toronto and Jackie Robinson played his first professional game for the Montreal Royals. Besides, you’ve won the last 30 Stanley Cups. Three decades of Detroit, Tampa Bay, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and other amazing American cities lifting the greatest sporting prize ever – even Anaheim’s Disney-owned Ducks – albeit with mostly Canadian players.

Sorry that Superman was co-created by a Canadian. Sorry Margaret Atwood wrote about a Christian patriarchal takeover in the Republic of Gilead, a.k.a. a future USA gone mad. I know Canadians are famously courteous and nice and apologize too much (sorry), but we’re not sorry for any of that. It’s called life. We all know the madness isn’t going to stop, but why didn’t you tell us you wanted to break up? You are like a crazed boyfriend from an Alanis Morissette song. Oh yeah, Americans don’t do irony.

We are sorry for the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965 that knocked out power to most of the eastern seaboard after a transmission line near Niagara Falls tripped. That got fixed and the shared international CANUSE grid is stronger for it. We didn’t cause the largest ever US blackout, however, that crashed the grid for two days in northern Ohio in 2003. Canada was initially blamed, but it was a fallen American tree and software bug. Essentially, reduced public works such as insufficient tree pruning because of too much deregulation. If you don’t pay for services, everything goes to pot (shades of DOGE to come). We’re not sorry for the Texas freeze of 2021. That was Ted Cruz. No it wasn’t, sorry, I lie – see what happens when facts don’t matter?

But don’t worry friends, I doubt Ontario premier Doug Ford will turn off the juice to New York, Michigan, or Minnesota. That’s illegal in winter and dumb. Premier Ford is a conservative, but politics and economic takeovers make strange bedfellows. I am proud that Canadians also encourage friendly civic mindedness by asking everyone to shovel their snow within 24 hours of a snowfall as seen in cutesy government-funded ads: “Be nice, clear your ice.” If you are over 65, the city workers do it for free. Big city homes do come with locks, although some doors are probably still left open as our Michigan neighbour Michael Moore famously noted in Bowling for Columbine. Many Canadians have never seen a gun in their life other than in a police holster.

What is it you really want, Donald? Our lifestyle? We are sorry the US doesn’t live up to world standards when it comes to health, education, and diversity. Or civility. Calling women names is neither presidential nor patriotic to a nation of supposed god-fearing citizens. Your misogyny is beneath even a schoolboy taunt. Nor are community-minded citizens “commies,” “libtards,” and “losers.”

Why are Americans so angry? Breitbart is littered with vile. Ditto the Murdoch-owned New York Post? Clearly one has to watch out for the armed bands of evil squirrels, beavers, and moose amassing on the Canadian border. Dudley Do-Right and Nell Fenwick are readying the furry forces. It may be a constitutionally protected war of words (or paid Russian bots), but who actually thinks this? Is it our stoicism (a.k.a. “socialism” to Americans) nurtured in the depths of yet another endless winter?

Like many Americans, Canadians grew up during the biggest jump in technology since the Industrial Revolution in an age of transistors, space travel, and satellites. Like others, we were left to navigate a vastly different world than that of our parents, both scary and revealing, from relaxed social mores and crazy Cold War posturing to an explosion of artistic expression in a growing technological tyranny. How did we drift so far apart, brother? We are not a coloured square on a Risk board to conquer. It’s not our place to tell other countries what to do, but can you please curb your arrogance?

Sadly, we have to get used to the vindictive game playing, exaggerated outrage, and unpredictable behaviour as Bizarro Trump exports the chaos in his own country abroad. The motive behind his rambling, unsympathetic, and know-it-all posturing may be to undermine governance and increase billionaire wealth even more. Sowing dissent at home is not enough; the US is now encouraging division elsewhere to turn life into permanent crisis, anxiety, and poverty for the wealthy to exploit the fearful. So long fellowship, respect, and diversity; hello more 1% wealth and fewer taxes for the rich. First he took Manhattan, then he tried to take the World. But as Leonard Cohen warned us “there is no beauty to their weapons.”

We can debate the hierarchy of social responsibility: garbage pickup, sanitation, infrastructure, emergencies, policing, tax collecting (sales tax/income tax) and the efficiencies within any public system. But why doesn’t Donald Trump fix his own US health system, education scores, and potholes first? Canada can be an example of how to provide a publicly funded universal health care that both aids and protects workers (thank you Tommy Douglas, number one in a 2004 “Greatest Canadian” newspaper poll). Did you know a tenant can’t be evicted from a Canadian home in winter? Equal pay and a 40-hour work week are the law. The minimum federal wage is $17.30/hour indexed to inflation. As Dylan sang “the money you make can’t buy back your soul.” Or “The first one now will later be last.” That’s from the Bible.

For all his divisiveness at home Trump is uniting the world … against the United States. The governing Liberals were expected to lose the next election, but are now rising in the polls as former banker Mark Carney takes over from the outgoing three-term prime minister Justin Trudeau. In his acceptance speech on March 9, Carney stated, “We didn’t ask for this fight, but Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves.”

Others are signalling with their “elbows up” in a nod to Mister Hockey, Gordie Howe, who played 25 seasons for the Detroit Red Wings and whose poorly remunerated prowess was instrumental in establishing a hockey labour union. Across Europe, far-right parties are being asked to reconcile their fealty to Trump and his anti-European rhetoric. America First is becoming America Alone as the world unites in opposition against such gauche tribalism.

Degrading or even dismantling an integrated economy won’t happen overnight. The resistance is beginning as citizens rise against the common enemy seeking to rip up long-standing agreements. Deep down, we all know more unites than divides us. Trump’s cruelty has been laid bare from Ukraine to Gaza and from Panama to Greenland. If the politics were any good, there would be no need to bully. Business uncertainty may be the most important last check as investors shun the United States amid a looming Trumpcession. The painted ponies go up and down. No one wants to keep on rockin’ in an un-free American world.

Cruelty will never be a virtue. Trump has tapped into the vengeful apocalyptic Christian war machine, imaging himself at the head of the troops, their blood-wine feet hovering over whoever dares call out the lies, venality, and misogyny. The answered chorus is not to declare “Glory glory Hallelujah” but to call out the wrath as a failed ideal, a misinformed and misguided act of a dying republic. When the abuser claims abuse and the bully cries victim, we know the vintage has spoiled. Conflict is a con, sold by those afraid to understand the meaning of communion and the depth of community.

Trump isn’t responsible for all the nastiness blowing from the south, but he is the mouthpiece, permanently campaigning on a trail of pain while spending other people’s money. For now, the boycotts will grow against Colgate, Coke, Gillette, …, and the United States. We will protest, stand up, and be heard. Because we don’t live in Donald Trump’s angry world. The Toronto singer Jim Cuddy lamented about how “We used to be the best of friends,” but as Montreal Canadiens star goalie Ken Dryden and former member of parliament notes, “Canadians will need to be defiantly Canadian.” I am Canadian. Sorry friends, life is not a game and Donald Trump is nobody’s king.

Michèle White is a Toronto artist and professor emeritus at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD U). “The Grapes of Wrath” is part of an ongoing series entitled “Written on the Body.” Her newest work can be viewed on squarespace and Instagram.

The post The United States Versus Canada: Mine Eyes Don’t See Any Glory appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Embajada de EEUU en Argentina – CC BY 2.0

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) played a pivotal role in shaping a legal system in post-socialist Yugoslavia (later Serbia) which exacerbated homelessness and enabled large corporations, banks, state agencies and public institutions to seize people’s only homes and burden the residents of the war-torn Balkan country with overwhelming debt, public sources reveal. While evidence that the US intended to impoverish and displace the people of Serbia is limited, a rare testimony from a former telecommunications minister offers invaluable insight into Washington’s thinking.

NASCENT NEOLIBERALISM

Beginning in 1992, the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) had privatized its housing fund, enabling most citizens to purchase apartments at low cost that were previously ‘socially’ owned — a distinct form of ownership pioneered by the Yugoslav socialist experiment. This led to high homeownership rates across all the former Yugoslav republics, similar to other post-socialist states like Russia and current socialist countries such as China and Vietnam.

In 1999, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), an American regime change instrument operating under the auspices of the national-security state, financed and critically advised a coalition of 19 Serbian opposition organizations (the Democratic Opposition of Serbia – DOS) on the only viable way they could overthrow the bloc around Slobodan Milošević. The US, along with the European Union, has ever since ’’aided’’ pliable governments in implementing gutting neoliberal reforms, with the purported aim of ’’economic stabilization“ , ’’democratic development’’ and other such fanciful catchwords.

A decade of war, sanctions and an illegal NATO bombing campaign preceded the ’’revolution’’ in 2000, in which pro-Western, decidedly neoliberal parties won the elections by a very narrow margin. In the first decade of ’’democratic“ rule private monopolies were formed, social safety nets were shredded and democratic institutions inherited from socialism pulverized, with estimates of people who lost their jobs in Serbia alone reaching hundreds of thousands.

The end goal of this first phase of neoliberalizing the economy (and more broadly, the whole of society) was the wanton destruction of domestic industry through the privatization of socially owned enterprises (SSOEs), which were worker-operated businesses, another staple of Yugoslav socialism. Financially solvent SSOEs were declared bankrupt and sold off for less than the value of their bankruptcy estates, with the bankruptcy process marred by irregularities and corruption. The domestic bourgeoisie would later make billions by consolidating privatized firms into oligopolies and selling them off to foreign capital.

After this came the next phase of “development”– introducing austerity, expanding the debt-based economy and allowing (foreign) capital to pilfer what wealth was left–natural resources and peoples’ homes. This pivot from privatization and deindustrialization to introducing debt slavery and soaring prices of commodities in Serbia coincided with a passing of the torch from the old political elite (DOS), at this point widely hated for it’s overwhelming corruption and haughtiness, to the ruling manager of neoliberalism in Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić and his “Progressive” party. Unlike his predecessors who failed to meet IMF requirements and thus forfeited the help from their “friends” in Washington, Vučić took in every third-rate huckster from the previous regime and disciplined them, centralized political power and provided a “stable investment climate”.

HOMES AS FINANCIAL “INFRASTRUCTURE”

A former Minister of Telecommunications in the short-lived government of 2007-2008, Aleksandra Smiljanić, explainedin an interview with the Party of the Radical Left (PRL) how a representative from a US financial consulting firm foresaw that real estate would act as a means of payment and that frequent evictions would become common judicial practice years before this catastrophe fully materialized.

The American consultant was to advise the ministry on how to sell off the public telecommunications company and the meeting had been arranged by Mlađan Dinkić, the minister of economy at the time. The “advice” was that, after privatizing it, “Telecom” should increase the cost of its services tenfold, so that it could “attract more foreign investors”. Smiljanić was dumbfounded by the suggestion and asked the consultant if he was aware that a lot of her fellow citizens wouldn’t be able to pay such exorbitant prices, especially the elderly.

The reply was that the people of Serbia have “infrastructure” that would act as a means of payment, but Smiljanić, still surprised, insisted on a straight answer. The explanation she got was as sincere as it was brazen – “Well, your country has a lot of homeowners”. Years later, legislative changes would make this a grim reality – families frequently losing their only home because of piled-up bills.

Was this calculation a result of pure professional acumen garnered through years of corporate expertise, or did the consultant know something that the minister didn’t, about the bleak future Serbia was barreling towards?

JUSTICE IS SERVED…DIGITALLY

On March 6th 2001, just a couple of months after the “revolution” in 2000, the governments of Yugoslavia and the US signed an Agreement “concerning economic, technical and related assistance”. This paved the way for USAID to get intimately involved with Serbian statecraft  – “helping” with legislative changes, the reconstruction of public institutions, the economy, etc. One of the agency’s first endeavors was “digitalization” – USAID donated a mountain of old computers to Serbian institutions, especially courts and public prosecutors’ offices. Money was also allocated for the renewal of some court buildings and even the website of parliament bears a USAID stamp at the bottom.

This fits the MO, as has been exhaustively documented in other cases and in different countries, in which the US provides some technical support or funds humanitarian groups, in order to obscure the other nefarious developments they put into play. The good will that this charity temporarily ensured with the general public paved the way for another Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Serbian Ministry of Justice and the US government in 2006 regarding the reformation of the Bankruptcy and Enforcement systems. These processes, which resulted in the new Law on bankruptcy (2009) and Law on Enforcement and Security Interest (2011), were vital. Both legislative changes outsourced public authority and judicial power to private entrepreneurs. The former ensured that what was left of SSOEs was privatized with virtually no transparency, while the latter destroyed basic human rights for poor debtors within the enforcement system.

The work group that drafted the new law on enforcement was composed of lawyers, economists, but also (and very tellingly) – bankers. But before the establishment of the work group, the ministry formed an “expert group” that set the parameters of the new law, which the work group would adopt. Naturally, this group of experts worked closely with USAID, the forerunner of judicial reform in Serbia.

The seemingly carefully crafted framing in the years leading up to the law on enforcement being changed in 2011 was that it would protect “the little creditor”, the masses of people who’ve lost their jobs during privatization, and were owed severance pay and/or dozens of monthly wages. People were led to believe that private entrepreneurship will help speed up the still sluggish court system. This was the prevailing narrative, in no small part thanks to liberal media outlets, which led the charge in bolstering the voices of “professionals” and ignoring dissenting voices, which were too few.

In sharp contrast to what was publicly promised, the new enforcement process heavily favored those who could pay for it, the big, giant and gargantuan creditors. In 2024 alone, thousands of workers from Niš and Prokuplje protested, because they are still owed millions of euros in backpay, despite having positive verdicts from the Constitutional court, the highest judicial body in the country, confirming the validity of their claims (and these are only the people we know about through media reports).

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A BAILIFF, AN ENFORCER AND A RACKETEER? 

With parliament officially adopting it in 2011, the new law uprooted the “traditional method” of enforcing court decisions. Whereas enforcers, or bailiffs, were previously directly accountable to the courts which employed them, after 2011 they became self-employed private entrepreneurs working for profit. This policy effectively privatized a part of the judicial system, with bailiffs now being under the vague control of the Ministry of Justice and their own chamber. Bailiffs now get paid for enforcing each legal writ separately, with an untransparent “reward” system for expedient enforcement.

The changes also brought a cruel penalty for poor people – if you can’t pay your debt, a bailiff will sell your property or seize your earnings, and you have to pay them for doing so. These are known as “enforcement costs” and can vary wildly, with some going up to 10,000 euros for trying to enforce a single eviction attempt. These new astronomical fees bloated every transaction, so that the enforcement industry made at least two for every euro transferred from debtor to creditor. Bailiffs are now known to make a million euros in sheer profit annually, in a country where the median monthly wage is around 500 euros.

In actuality, what was created was a “mafia”, cartel, a “state within a state” as attested by a significant portion of the Serbian populace. High-profile debacles involving bailiffs abound, with both sides of the polarized major media machine (government sponsored and western-backed opposition oriented) running stories on bailiffs every month or so. Introducing the profit motive in enforcing court documents opened up the broadest avenues for legalized corruption, with money being the ultimate accelerant of the final part of the judicial process. The more money you had, the more “justice” you could afford.

Forced evictions became commonplace, with homes being sold for meager debts and often auctioned off for 20-30% market value. The opaque “reward” system meant that bailiffs were paid in proportion to the disputed value between debtor and creditor. This meant that enforcing documents pertaining to immovables became a lucrative business model, which in turn meant a surge of forced evictions, often while the evictees were still in a legal battle against the decision which led to their dislodgement.

IF IT AIN’T BROKE…

In 2017, USAID produced an analysis of the price list of the enforcement industry. Their own conclusion was that the system they created might be “unsustainable”, if not for an influx of new cases. The American agency also organized workshops for bailiffs, in which they were taught the art of rhetoric and PR competence, a much needed skill in the industry. USAID even did a public opinion poll asking banks how satisfied they are with the new enforcement process. This should more than suffice as evidence of what the US cares about developing in Serbia – an enforcement system that favor, most of all, banks.

Even with the extensive power and ample autonomy the enforcement industry was entrusted with thanks to the USAID sponsored law, there are plenty of instances in which bailiffs were accused of forgery, embezzlement, bribery and so on. Working hand in glove with banks, huge construction firms, investors and public utility companies, meant that it pays to break the law sometimes. Conveniently, for violations other than criminal offenses, the only place to file a complaint is the chamber of bailiffs and ministry. However, the endless stream of scandals and strong public outrage forced the government to change the law in 2019, again with the help of USAID.

This legislative change was presented as a crackdown on bailiff corruption by government controlled media, but in reality it only made the state of affairs worse for everyone except them. Despite their sheer unpopularity, impunity and rampant rapacity, the government gave them more authority over the police in eviction processes, for example. Bailiffs couldn’t sell property they seize to their friends and relatives anymore, but they still can trade in devalued dwellings, just through thuggish third parties, as has been reported from the ground by activist and citizen journalists. The new regulations also allowed for homes to be auctioned off online, without the “occupants” having a real choice in the matter. This too was portrayed as “greater transparency”.

From a broader perspective, it’s worth pointing out that this kind of brutal enforcement system with privatized entrepreneurial “agents” was established and had major consequences in other European countries, particularly Spain, where hundreds of thousands were forcibly evicted and displaced, with banks repossessing a huge swath of real estate after the crash of 2008 drowned a lot of ordinary people in debt. This in turn gave rise to social movements resisting and blocking eviction attempts all across Europe, including in Serbia, where privatizing a part of the judiciary was one of the preconditions to EU accession.

The post How USAID Makes People Homeless In Serbia appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Florida Department of Transportation – Public Domain

Florida, the “Sunshine State,” once known as a beacon of government transparency, is growing ever darker, and the clouds are spreading throughout the United States.

From March 16-22, 2025, the nation celebrates the 20th anniversary of national Sunshine Week, which originated in Florida, historically home to the most transparent and accountable governments in the country.

Times have changed.

At the University of Florida Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project, my colleagues and I have researched and taught about the freedom of information since 1977. We monitor the state of open, accountable government, and our research findings do not bode well for democracy – in Florida and throughout the U.S.

But first, let’s look back to sunnier days.

Sun rises

Florida enacted its first version of a public records law in 1909, the sixth state to do so. The movement was led by Nebraska in 1866 and Montana in 1895. Florida’s law was repealed in the 1950s and then returned in 1967 as the Sunshine Law.

“Sunshine” was equated with the state’s nickname but also the concept of government transparency – lighting the dark recesses of secrecy. The Sunshine Law also played on a famous quote by former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis that “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”

Something unique happened in Florida then. Transparency took hold.

Journalists such as Pete Weitzel at the Miami Herald pushed hard for governments to operate more transparently, building momentum through the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. They and other media groups helped launch, with US$11,000, the Florida Freedom of Information Clearinghouse in 1977 at the University of Florida. The journalism college assigned a professor and grad student to monitor public record denials, open meeting closures and court cases, and to alert newspaper editors to secrecy legislation. This effort created a culture of transparency, including among elected leaders.

Journalists successfully pushed for a constitutional amendmentin the early 1990s, which required transparency across the state and required a two-thirds vote from the state Legislature to adopt exemptions to the law.

Several provisions of Florida public records law stood out:

• Attorney fee-shifting is mandatory. If a citizen is denied government information, sues and prevails, the agency is required to pay the person’s attorney fees. Our research indicates that this is one of the most important elements in public record laws to encourage compliance.

• The definition of a public record is broad, even applying to documents created by a private person or contractor acting on behalf of the government. Applying the law to private actors is unique in the U.S., and even in the world.

• Governing bodies face strict requirements to deliberate in public. Just two officials communicating with each other constitutes an official meeting and must be announced ahead of time, allowing for public attendance. Most states require a quorum, or majority, of the governing body to be considered an official meeting.

The nonprofit Florida First Amendment Foundation was launched in 1985 to promote government transparency and hired its first paid employee, Barbara Petersen, in 1995, to monitor secrecy legislation, train public employees and aid people trying to get information. The organization banded with the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors to create Sunshine Sunday each March to promote the right to know. This event went national in 2005 as Sunshine Week.

All these factors led Florida to become known as the most transparent state in the nation.

Increasing clouds

Fast forward to 2025, and we see an entirely different climate in Florida.

The decline of newspapers has meant fewer reporters pushing for records, fewer editors advocating for transparency, and fewer owners suing government agencies.

Copy charges related to getting public records create barriers for average citizens. Research shows that providing fee waiverswould increase accessibility without significant costs.

Through the years, legislators became emboldened to pass more exemptions to the Florida Sunshine Law – more than 1,100 and growing. Some of those exemptions were focused on protecting personal privacy – for example, in reaction to journalists requesting the autopsy file of NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt after his 2001 death.

Fear of terrorists following 9/11 led to a flurry of exemptions, such as hiding records about crop dusters to prevent al-Qaida from hijacking planes to spread anthrax.

Companies profiting from public records sparked another backlash. For example, some companies acquired public mugshots, posted them online and allowed people to have them removed for a price. Some attorneys gamed the fee-shifting provision, submitting public record requests that would be difficult to fulfill, sued immediately and then settled with agencies for thousands of dollars.

Elected leaders turned against transparency, Petersen, who now directs the Florida Center for Government Accountability, told me recently. One of the prominent examples she points to is Gov. Ron DeSantis’ refusal to disclose his travel expense records.

I hear it every week – calls from journalists and others stymied by state and local government agencies. They often cite high copy fees for public records, claims of exemptions and outright ghosting by agencies. One reporter encountered Miami city commissioners sworn in at a private ceremony. Another challenged Tallahassee police refusing to provide information about an officer-involved shooting. A college journalism student was told she had to pay $1,665 for records about Florida dams that could fail and ended up pleading with the government to “free the dam records.”

One of my studies from 2019 indicated that, on average, if you requested a public record in Florida, you would receive it about 39% of the time. That placed the state 31st in the nation, the bottom half.

More recent data from the nonprofit MuckRock reports Florida’s percentage declining – as of February 2025, to 35%.

Bobby Block, current director of the Florida First Amendment Foundation, wrote in February that “There was a time when Florida set the gold standard for open government. … Those days are over.”

Not just Florida

Florida is reflective of a national trend – a secrecy creepspreading throughout the country, culminating in transparency deserts in cities big and small.

The United States is losing its reputation as a leader in open, accountable government. Its federal Freedom of Information Act, often known as FOIA, ranks 78th in strength out of 140 nations, and continuously drops as new countries adopt better laws. An information commissioner from Africa told me a few months ago that he and his colleagues laugh at the United States’ weak FOIA law, referring to it as a “toothless poodle.”

On average, according to our research, if you asked for a public record in America 10 years ago, you would get it about half the time. Now, it’s down to about a third of the time, and just 12% at the federal level.

Even the U.S. Department of Justice’s own statistics show a similar decline in full release of records, and the average response time has nearly doubled over the same period, from 21 to 40 days.

What happens when compliance reaches 0%?

Aside from the ramifications on democracy itself, every American will feel the pain in their pocketbooks and everyday lives.

Studies show that public record laws lead to cleaner drinking water, safer restaurants, better-informed school choice, less corruption, saved tax dollars and a lower chance of sex offenders reoffending.

According to Stanford economist James Hamilton, for every dollar spent on public-records journalism, society benefits $287in saved lives and more efficient government.

Some transparency advocates have raised the alarm on actions taken by the new Trump administration, such as the removal of agency websites, the firing of FOIA staff and the dismantling of the Open Government Federal Advisory Committee.

It is likely these efforts will escalate the secrecy creep and allow it to trickle down to the state and local levels. It is important to note, though, that declining transparency is a long-term trend that transcends any one president or political party. The federal government reached its absolute low in full compliance with FOIA last year, under the Biden administration.

It’s easy to point fingers at one politician, but perhaps wiser to look at the entire system, which many scholars say is broken and should be reimagined.

German sociologist Max Weber posited that secrecy is the natural tendency for bureaucracy if left unchecked. For decades, news companies, particularly in Florida, pushed back against that secrecy through public pressure and litigation.

With that opposing force weakened, if not disappearing, what or who will replace it?

Nonprofit groups have filled some of the gap, and independent online news sites are growing and enforcing public record laws.

But will it be enough? Ultimately, it is up to the citizenry. If the people don’t cherish and demand transparent government, then the politicians certainly won’t, whether in Florida or the rest of the country.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Secrecy Creep: How the Sun is Setting on Government Transparency in Florida and the Rest of the US appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Florida Department of Transportation – Public Domain

Florida, the “Sunshine State,” once known as a beacon of government transparency, is growing ever darker, and the clouds are spreading throughout the United States.

From March 16-22, 2025, the nation celebrates the 20th anniversary of national Sunshine Week, which originated in Florida, historically home to the most transparent and accountable governments in the country.

Times have changed.

At the University of Florida Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project, my colleagues and I have researched and taught about the freedom of information since 1977. We monitor the state of open, accountable government, and our research findings do not bode well for democracy – in Florida and throughout the U.S.

But first, let’s look back to sunnier days.

Sun rises

Florida enacted its first version of a public records law in 1909, the sixth state to do so. The movement was led by Nebraska in 1866 and Montana in 1895. Florida’s law was repealed in the 1950s and then returned in 1967 as the Sunshine Law.

“Sunshine” was equated with the state’s nickname but also the concept of government transparency – lighting the dark recesses of secrecy. The Sunshine Law also played on a famous quote by former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis that “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”

Something unique happened in Florida then. Transparency took hold.

Journalists such as Pete Weitzel at the Miami Herald pushed hard for governments to operate more transparently, building momentum through the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. They and other media groups helped launch, with US$11,000, the Florida Freedom of Information Clearinghouse in 1977 at the University of Florida. The journalism college assigned a professor and grad student to monitor public record denials, open meeting closures and court cases, and to alert newspaper editors to secrecy legislation. This effort created a culture of transparency, including among elected leaders.

Journalists successfully pushed for a constitutional amendmentin the early 1990s, which required transparency across the state and required a two-thirds vote from the state Legislature to adopt exemptions to the law.

Several provisions of Florida public records law stood out:

• Attorney fee-shifting is mandatory. If a citizen is denied government information, sues and prevails, the agency is required to pay the person’s attorney fees. Our research indicates that this is one of the most important elements in public record laws to encourage compliance.

• The definition of a public record is broad, even applying to documents created by a private person or contractor acting on behalf of the government. Applying the law to private actors is unique in the U.S., and even in the world.

• Governing bodies face strict requirements to deliberate in public. Just two officials communicating with each other constitutes an official meeting and must be announced ahead of time, allowing for public attendance. Most states require a quorum, or majority, of the governing body to be considered an official meeting.

The nonprofit Florida First Amendment Foundation was launched in 1985 to promote government transparency and hired its first paid employee, Barbara Petersen, in 1995, to monitor secrecy legislation, train public employees and aid people trying to get information. The organization banded with the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors to create Sunshine Sunday each March to promote the right to know. This event went national in 2005 as Sunshine Week.

All these factors led Florida to become known as the most transparent state in the nation.

Increasing clouds

Fast forward to 2025, and we see an entirely different climate in Florida.

The decline of newspapers has meant fewer reporters pushing for records, fewer editors advocating for transparency, and fewer owners suing government agencies.

Copy charges related to getting public records create barriers for average citizens. Research shows that providing fee waiverswould increase accessibility without significant costs.

Through the years, legislators became emboldened to pass more exemptions to the Florida Sunshine Law – more than 1,100 and growing. Some of those exemptions were focused on protecting personal privacy – for example, in reaction to journalists requesting the autopsy file of NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt after his 2001 death.

Fear of terrorists following 9/11 led to a flurry of exemptions, such as hiding records about crop dusters to prevent al-Qaida from hijacking planes to spread anthrax.

Companies profiting from public records sparked another backlash. For example, some companies acquired public mugshots, posted them online and allowed people to have them removed for a price. Some attorneys gamed the fee-shifting provision, submitting public record requests that would be difficult to fulfill, sued immediately and then settled with agencies for thousands of dollars.

Elected leaders turned against transparency, Petersen, who now directs the Florida Center for Government Accountability, told me recently. One of the prominent examples she points to is Gov. Ron DeSantis’ refusal to disclose his travel expense records.

I hear it every week – calls from journalists and others stymied by state and local government agencies. They often cite high copy fees for public records, claims of exemptions and outright ghosting by agencies. One reporter encountered Miami city commissioners sworn in at a private ceremony. Another challenged Tallahassee police refusing to provide information about an officer-involved shooting. A college journalism student was told she had to pay $1,665 for records about Florida dams that could fail and ended up pleading with the government to “free the dam records.”

One of my studies from 2019 indicated that, on average, if you requested a public record in Florida, you would receive it about 39% of the time. That placed the state 31st in the nation, the bottom half.

More recent data from the nonprofit MuckRock reports Florida’s percentage declining – as of February 2025, to 35%.

Bobby Block, current director of the Florida First Amendment Foundation, wrote in February that “There was a time when Florida set the gold standard for open government. … Those days are over.”

Not just Florida

Florida is reflective of a national trend – a secrecy creepspreading throughout the country, culminating in transparency deserts in cities big and small.

The United States is losing its reputation as a leader in open, accountable government. Its federal Freedom of Information Act, often known as FOIA, ranks 78th in strength out of 140 nations, and continuously drops as new countries adopt better laws. An information commissioner from Africa told me a few months ago that he and his colleagues laugh at the United States’ weak FOIA law, referring to it as a “toothless poodle.”

On average, according to our research, if you asked for a public record in America 10 years ago, you would get it about half the time. Now, it’s down to about a third of the time, and just 12% at the federal level.

Even the U.S. Department of Justice’s own statistics show a similar decline in full release of records, and the average response time has nearly doubled over the same period, from 21 to 40 days.

What happens when compliance reaches 0%?

Aside from the ramifications on democracy itself, every American will feel the pain in their pocketbooks and everyday lives.

Studies show that public record laws lead to cleaner drinking water, safer restaurants, better-informed school choice, less corruption, saved tax dollars and a lower chance of sex offenders reoffending.

According to Stanford economist James Hamilton, for every dollar spent on public-records journalism, society benefits $287in saved lives and more efficient government.

Some transparency advocates have raised the alarm on actions taken by the new Trump administration, such as the removal of agency websites, the firing of FOIA staff and the dismantling of the Open Government Federal Advisory Committee.

It is likely these efforts will escalate the secrecy creep and allow it to trickle down to the state and local levels. It is important to note, though, that declining transparency is a long-term trend that transcends any one president or political party. The federal government reached its absolute low in full compliance with FOIA last year, under the Biden administration.

It’s easy to point fingers at one politician, but perhaps wiser to look at the entire system, which many scholars say is broken and should be reimagined.

German sociologist Max Weber posited that secrecy is the natural tendency for bureaucracy if left unchecked. For decades, news companies, particularly in Florida, pushed back against that secrecy through public pressure and litigation.

With that opposing force weakened, if not disappearing, what or who will replace it?

Nonprofit groups have filled some of the gap, and independent online news sites are growing and enforcing public record laws.

But will it be enough? Ultimately, it is up to the citizenry. If the people don’t cherish and demand transparent government, then the politicians certainly won’t, whether in Florida or the rest of the country.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Secrecy Creep: How the Sun is Setting on Government Transparency in Florida and the Rest of the US appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Palestinian Authority Yitzhak Rabin, Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat at the Oslo Accords signing ceremony on 13 September 1993. Image Wikipedia.

The ongoing Israeli military assault on Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank is part of a larger Israeli ethnic cleansing plan, a systematic effort to forcibly displace Palestinians from their homes and erase their historical and national identity. As the world watches in silence, the relentless incursions into these camps—home to some of the most vulnerable Palestinian communities—are reducing entire neighborhoods to rubble, killing civilians, and forcing thousands to flee.

Meanwhile and as Israel wages a brutal genocidal campaign, the Palestinian Authority (PA) stands idly by, unwilling to defend its people. Worse yet, on Monday, March 10, 2025. the PA security forces carried out Israel’s bidding assassinating seasoned Jenin fighter Abdul-Rahman Abu Muna.

The refugee camps of Jenin, Nur Shams, Balata, and others have long been the heart of Palestinian resistance. Housing Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed from their homes in 1948, and today, they stand as grim reminders of Israel’s original sin—the Nakba. Through generations, the Palestinian camp has become a powerful symbol of Palestinian identity, embodying the deep-rooted longing to Palestine. The camp is not just a physical space—it represents a collective memory, a repository of cultural heritage, and a reminder of the ongoing struggle for self-determination and homeland restoration. Thus, their erasure—much like the destruction of their original villages in 1948 historical Palestine—has become an Israeli obsession aimed at wiping out their existence.

The Israeli war on the camps is not about security. In reality, what is unfolding is a merciless campaign of destruction, aimed at crushing the spirit of Palestinian resistance and making life unbearable for those who dare to remain. Demolishing homes, roads are torn apart, electricity and water supplies are severed, and entire communities are left in ruins. Israel destroys civilian infrastructure, not for military tactical objectives, but purely to make life unbearable for residents, ensuring that even those who survive are left with an unlivable environment. This collective punishment is a blatant war crime under international law.

The ongoing assault on Palestinian refugee camps is not just about military strategy—it is deeply tied to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Endless War for Political Survival. Facing corruption charges and mounting political pressure, Netanyahu has relied on endless war and heightened violence to maintain his fragile coalition of right-wing and racist factions. By escalating attacks on Palestinians, he ensures the continued support of ultranationalist and Jewish racist groups who demand harsher measures against the occupied population. This cycle of aggression is a deliberate strategy to prolong his grip on power at the expense of Palestinian lives.

The core issue is not just the military assaults but the very nature of the Israeli occupation and the hordes of violent settlers who terrorize Palestinian communities with impunity. The expansion of illegal Jewish-only colonies, backed by the Israeli military, has emboldened Jewish supremacists to carry out attacks against Palestinians, including arson, physical assaults, and even outright murder. This settler-colonial project aims to replace Palestinian existence with a network of Jewish-only colonies, erasing any hope for a Palestinian state.

Israel’s strategy of targeting refugee camps is part of this broader policy. The destruction of Jenin camp in 2002 was supposed to end Palestinian resistance, yet it did not. Two decades later, Israel is fighting the progeny of those it murdered more than 20 years ago, repeating the same failed strategy and hoping that this new wave of destruction will achieve what past massacres could not. But history has shown that Palestinian resilience cannot be broken by military force. As in 2002, a new destruction will not erase the Palestinian struggle—it will only fuel the determination of a people who refuse to disappear.

While Israel carries out these atrocities, the Palestinian Authority remains paralyzed, offering nothing but empty words of condemnation. The PA, which was established through the Oslo Accords with the promise of leading Palestinians toward ­­­statehood, has instead become an enforcer of Israeli security serving as an administrative subcontractor rather than a true representative government. Its continued security coordination with Israel, even as refugee camps are emptied of their inhabitants, is nothing short of a betrayal.

At a time when the Palestinian people long for real leadership, the PA has shown itself to be an institution of self-preservation, more concerned with maintaining its own grip on power than resisting a malevolent occupation. It has failed to mobilize international support, and failed to take any meaningful action to stop Israel’s aggression. The reality is clear: the Palestinian Authority is complicit in the suffering of its own people through its inaction and its continued subservience to Israeli dictates. Worse still, the PA refuses to intervene because its leadership is more focused on protecting the privileges and VIP status granted to them under Israeli occupation. Rather than safeguarding Palestinian lives, the PA’s primary concern has become maintaining its elite class’s access to special permits, security arrangements, and economic benefits that Israel doles out to ensure its cooperation.

If the PA continues on this trajectory, it will cease to have any role in shaping the future of Palestine. The people will inevitably turn elsewhere for leadership—whether to civil society organizations, local resistance groups, or new political movements that truly represent their aspirations. The Palestinian cause does not need an institution that stands on the sidelines while its people are ethnically cleansed; it needs a leadership that will fight for its survival and sovereignty.

The Israeli destruction of Palestinian refugee camps is not just a military operation; it is a calculated strategy of population displacement. By forcing thousands to flee, Israel is laying the groundwork for a West Bank emptied of Palestinians, paving the way for further annexation and settlement expansion. This is a slow-motion ethnic cleansing that the Palestinian leadership cannot afford to ignore.

The United Nations, human rights organizations, and the world at large must hold Israel accountable for its crimes and pressure the Palestinian Authority to end its complicity. If the PA continues to stand idly by as its people are being ethnically cleansed, it will descend into irrelevance and its leadership will ultimately fade into the dustbin of history.

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Photograph Source: SWinxy – CC BY 4.0

As chants of ‘No ICE, No KKK, No Fascist USA!’ echoed through downtown Manhattan on 10 March 2025, I spoke to a person named Richard who had been marching just ahead of me. He declined to give his last name but was eager to speak his piece.

‘We need to be out in the streets and say “This will not fly. This will not happen on our watch”’, he said.

The state kidnapping and imminent deportation of recently graduated Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil had brought both Richard and me out into those streets.

Khalil was detained by the U.S. government on Saturday, 8 March, at his university-owned residence after returning from an Iftar dinner with his wife, who is a US citizen and eight months pregnant. According to information from the US Immigration & Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), Khalil was being held in a detention centre in Jena, Louisiana, as of 11 March 2025.

The Palestinian student, born in 1995, was a visible participant throughout 2024 in the Columbia students’ protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. As a result, he has now been accused of ‘pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity’ by the president of the United States on the social media platform the latter owns.

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s indecency until at least 12 March 2025 but Khalil’s future in the United States beyond that is uncertain.

‘We need to remember what Mahmoud was harassed by Zionists and then arrested by [the Department of Homeland Security] for. It was for protesting Israel’s genocide of his own people, of the Palestinian people,’ Miriam Osman, an organiser with Palestinian Youth Movement, told Al Jazeera. The Department of Homeland Security is the cabinet-level body in the US that houses ICE.

Khalil’s arrest comes amidst an alarming rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States that many link to the US president’s words and actions and land sales in the West Bank by Zionist organizations targeting US citizens.

The Trump administration is attempting to deport Khalil, who graduated from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs in December 2024. This is despite the fact that Khalil holds permanent residence in the United States.

According to anonymous government sources cited by the New York Times, he is accused of “presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences,” an obscure provision in the primary US immigration law that practitioners have not seen used to justify a deportation in living memory.

An hour previous to the march, framed by the austere government buildings that surround downtown New York City’s Federal Plaza, about 1,000 people had gathered for a demonstration.

The numbers in Federal Plaza were not themselves massive by the standards of the past two years of Palestine protests in New York City. But those assembled represented a much larger group of people; over 2 million have signed a petition as of 11 March 2025 to ‘demand the immediate release of Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil from [immigration] detention and a reversal to Columbia University’s protocol permitting [immigration enforcement agents] on campus without a warrant.’

Moreover, the protest brought out a wider swathe of community and movement organisations than many pro-Palestine protests in the New York City area, ranging from anti-Zionist organisations like Palestinian Youth Movement and Jewish Voice for Peace to political groups like ANSWER Coalition and Democratic Socialists of America to local immigrant rights bodies. These groups have been active in the protests that began since October 2023 against the genocide in Gaza. Mahmoud Khalil was part of those protests.

‘The Trump regime… is endangering Jewish people and using the guise of fighting antisemitism to dismantle our Constitutionally protected rights to free speech and dissent’, said Jewish Voice for Peace in a statement on its website.

Numerous speakers at the rally emphasised the need to organise against Zionism and against Trump in daily life. One protester was already living that; she declined to be formally interviewed but said that she had been on her way home from a doctor’s appointment when she learned of the demonstration and felt compelled to attend.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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Image by Shubham Dhage.

As Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the cabal of plutocratic billionaires that the President calls his cabinet pursue their self-interested agenda, they are telling Americans that they need to prepare to sacrifice and feel economic pain for the good of society.

Why is it that the least advantaged in our society are always the ones asked to sacrifice for the greater good?

Trump’s speech to Congress foretold economic pain for Americans. Supposedly, tariffs, budget costs, layoffs and the elimination of the already decimated social welfare net will be good for America in the long run. It will require sacrifice by farmers, laborers, people of color, and anyone who buys products or receives services from the government.

Perhaps sacrifice is occasionally necessary. Yet it never seems that the rich are the ones who are asked to sacrifice,

At one time the demand to ask the poor and the middle class to sacrifice was called trickle-down economics under the Reagan administration. Tax cuts for the rich, coupled with a loosening of the regular regulatory system and cuts to the social welfare system would eventually trickle down and benefit all Americans.

Then the call for the poor to sacrifice for the country was called free trade under the Clinton administration. Yet again, the argument was that by opening borders with free trade America would prosper, even though some in manufacturing and among the poor, the working class, and the people of color would have to sacrifice.

Then it was the demand under the Obama administration that people lose their homes so that we could afford to bail out the too big to fail banks.

The result of all those sacrifices were to produce an America with a gap between the rich and poor greater than we’ve seen in American history. It was to produce an America in where nearly one out of six children lived in poverty, where economic mobility has nearly come to a halt, and the American dream of homeownership has become something that only a few can hope for.

Many years ago, philosopher John Rawls wrote his book A Theory of Justice. He argued that disinterested individuals constructing the rules of societal justice would agree to two principles. The first would be like liberty consistent with the same liberty for everybody else. Two, what came to be known as the difference principle, specified that inequalities should be treated as arbitrary unless they work first to the advantage of the least advantaged person in our society.

Rawls’ book was a call for both political liberty and a challenge regarding the economy and social welfare. The challenge was to say inequalities were presumptively impermissible unless one could show that they were first advantageous to those who were poor. Yet in the more than fifty years since his book was published, social policy has gone the other way. It has gone not to presuming inequalities are impermissible, and that the poor should not be to ask to sacrifice first, but that instead the poor should be asked to sacrifice ahead of the rich, ahead of the affluent, and that the inequalities in our society are somehow reflective of some basic principles of justice.

Trump’s declaration that there will be pain for those who can least shoulder it is yet the latest manifestation of a series of social policies over the last half century that have wrecked the ship of American democracy. They are doing damage to the very framework of what has come to knit our society together Somehow it is the belief that making people’s lives miserable will motivate them to work harder, when in fact, making people more secure, economically, socially and politically, is what motivates people to work harder than what makes us all prosper.

In the end, Trump musk and his cabal of billionaires have adopted a modern-day Marie Antoinette view of the world. When Marie Antoinette was once told there was not enough bread to feed the French masses, she remarked: “Let them eat cake.” Perhaps now the adage for Trump fittingly would be: “Let them eat eggs.”

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