On this day of Easter in which the forces of light and darkness align in balance and signal the fertility of spring, I wish us all great happiness of our transformative rebirth, the awakening of creativity, and the reimagination of humankind.
Today we celebrate the renewal of the world as Easter, Ēostre in Old English, the ancient Germanic fertility rite of spring which honors the prolific Bunny Goddess, Ostara in Old High German, cognate of the Viking deity whose name in Old Norse for whom the nation of Austria is named, Austr, means dawn and who Shiva-like dances the ongoing creation of the world, and as a celebration of Resurrection from death was assimilated into the new faith of a sacrificial and redemptive man-god which exploded across the world two millennia ago, an appropriation and radical revision of Passover in Judaism by a Roman mystery cult. From this beginning it became more layered, assimilating local faiths and cultures wherever it propagated, as did our civilization as a whole. For myself, all of this is bound together with the figure of the Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland as an Orphic Guide of the Soul.
Always go down the Rabbit Hole, and through the Forbidden Door.
Let us embrace our monstrosity, otherness, and membership in the secret tribe of the freaks, let us violate normalities and transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden, let us seek exaltation and rapture through ecstatic trance and immersion in the Sublime which breaks us open to the humanity of others in fascinans et tremendum; and let us bring all of this back to the world we have escaped as reimagination, vision, and transformation of the possibilities of becoming human.
Down the Rabbit Hole, friends; but let us bring a little bit of Wonderland back with us to Kansas.
On this Down the Rabbit Hole Day, we celebrate a Gordian Knot of history which makes ambiguous and relative our multilayered and interdependent mimetic cueing systems of transformative rebirth and the reimagination of humankind, whose origins in the spring fire festival and planting season rites were revisioned with the idea of Christ as death transcendence and symbolized by the colored eggs we now hide for children, a near cultural universal with a history over sixty thousand years old in Africa which was transmitted through the early church in Mesopotamia to the Orthodox faith, and with the Roman Ritual of 1610 became associated with the Resurrection.
The divine re-enters and sacralizes the world, reanimates and makes new the material universe, and the dead rise up in glory and awaken from their discarded husks and the limits of their forms; it is an ancient idea, born of the primal fear of death and nothingness in a universe without any value or meaning other than that which we ourselves create, which echoes the first religion of humankind, the global neolithic cult of the Cave Bear whose return from hibernation after winter provided a metaphor for the existence, survival beyond death, and rebirth of the soul. It’s why we bury the dead; so that they may arise like the bear after winter.
Like much of our cultural identity in America today and of the historical civilization of Europe, it is a complex structure of interdependent and diverse sources, at its roots born of the tumultuous mixing of peoples from which we ourselves arise.
Such recursive and chaotic processes of change and transformative rebirth are ceaseless and ongoing, creating new forms of primordial truths written in our flesh. Though Easter in its original form is primarily an orgiastic rite of affirmation of our life force, in which nothing is Forbidden, beyond all boundaries and limits as ecstasy, transgression, and self-reinvention, the Rites of Spring have long been Bowdlerized as a children’s holiday rather than one of the fertility of the earth as planting begins, and creating children who are the objects of celebration, in balance with Halloween as a celebration of the coming of winter, veneration of our ancestors, death as liberation from the limits of our form, transformation, and the embrace of our monstrosity.
The dance of life and death always contains its opposite force as a defining negative space.
Here I think of the genius of Jenna Ortega’s mating and hunting dance in Wednesday, which embodies the inherent polar forces of our existence performed to a song which was originally a queer cruising anthem in which headhunting and hunting for sex are unified as performances of ourselves and our monstrosity as figures of the wildness of nature.
Humans create themselves over time; through other humans who are different from themselves as well as those alike.
Humans create ideas as tools with which to organize and shape ourselves, and our rites of spring are similar because they meet universal needs, Ostara and its reimagination as Easter among countless others. What needs are so enormous and universal to us that we create festivals as annual reset buttons to restore us to our true selves and free us from the legacies of our history?
We honor our diversity on this day of Easter, and look to the reimagination of ourselves, our civilization, and the futures to come.
What emerges from the Easter egg are the unknown possibilities of becoming human, and the myriad selves and futures we may unfold.
Happy Easter and good hunting; may you find the best future self and humanity it is possible to envision, and the freedom, means, and will of action to become and live your true image and self.
Here follows one of the most beautiful and luminous Easter poems in the English language, T. S. Eliot’s East Coker, second of the matchless Four Quartets:
“I.
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur, and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotized. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not reflected, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.
In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.
Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.
II.
What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?
Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
Simulates triumphal cars
Deployed in constellated wars
Scorpion fights against the sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns
That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hope for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebitude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
The houses are all gone under the sea.
The dancers are all gone under the hill.
III.
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again,
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
IV.
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.
The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.
The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.
The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
V.
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.”
I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore
Stravinsky The Rite of Spring // London Symphony Orchestra/Sir Simon Rattle
Go Ask Alice Jefferson Airplane
Follow the White Rabbit Down the Rabbit Hole
Wednesday Dances
How if we must tell our stories, or be rewritten and falsified by others? I find it interesting that Jenna Ortega chose a queer cruising anthem for her signature dance, which confuses and conflates in ambiguous meanings the rituals of mating and hunting, as this Netflix series does as an extended metaphor and allegory of subversions of authorized identities of sex and gender and seizures of power as revolutionary struggle.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula: An escaped wolf in the cinematheque
“There is much to be learned from beasts”; dare to embrace the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and normality, and the limits of the human.
On this anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King by agents of the American government, we re-evaluate how we can honor the truths he revealed and bore witness to, and bring meaning to the sacrifices of our martyred sacred dead.
For myself and possibly for us all, the meaning of this as a signifier of our shared history which binds us together as a nation has been forever changed by its connection with one of the most important trials in American history, which links Martin Luther King with George Floyd and with every Black American murdered, tortured, re-enslaved as prison labor, and marginalized, silenced, and erased by the carceral state and its forces of repression and white supremacist terror.
How can we bear forward his message and live the truth he taught us?
America watched aghast and hypnotized at the litany of evils exposed by the George Floyd trial, our shock, grief, and rage at the complicity of our police in racist violence comparable to that of the Nuremberg Trial, as a secret truth becomes horrifyingly clear; our America, our government and its institutions and structures, and our broader sociocultural systems which form their context, has become the enemy America was founded to defend us from.
And while this national reckoning plays out, the Party of Treason enacts laws to silence the voices of the people with vote suppression in a panicked and last-ditch effort to maintain an elite hegemony of white power and privilege, and the killology of the police proceeds unimpeded.
A Kafka-esque absurdity of the trial of George Floyd’s murderer, a policeman whose family name gave us the word chauvinism, is the claim of the defense that the authorization of kneeling on the breathing passage of handcuffed prisoners in the official training manual of the police absolves police of murder in its use. It is instead damning proof of institutional torture and murder, and all police officers who have accepted employment under the direction of a torture and murder manual are complicit in its crimes, as are all bureaucrats, administrators, and elected officials who have with these rules and procedures authorized and legitimized a culture of racist killology and sciences of death and terror.
Our police are a cult of death, a criminal syndicate, and an instrument of white supremacist terror.
Within our police, criminal syndicates and networks of white supremacist infiltration rule our cities in feudal dominion, acting from within the shield of immunity which has made police an unaccountable and independent force of repression of dissent, racist violence, and state terror since the origins of police forces in slavecatching and the founding of the carceral state as a system for the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison labor.
Abolition and disarmament of the police, prison abolition and justice system reform, and control of gun violence are three linked issues of racial justice and equality, which we can honor the memory of Martin Luther King in action to achieve.
Let this be the last year in which the police and other forces of state terror and tyranny can assassinate and murder our citizens with authorized immunity as instruments of elite wealth, power, and privilege.
Who bears arms bears death, and who does so with badges and the authorization of the state as its enforcers of inequality and tyranny also bears terror.
Choose life, and a free society of equals.
As I wrote in my post of April 4 2020, America’s Racist Death Squads: How Prosecutors and the Police Enact Ethnic Cleansing; On this the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, iconic figure of liberty and Gandhian nonviolent resistance, my thoughts turn to the distance we have yet to go to achieve his dream of a just society undivided by race.
There is no betrayal of public trust more terrible than that of those with whom we entrust our security and justice; police shootings, the unchecked power of the Prosecutor’s office in the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison labor, and a racialized system of justice designed to enact white supremacist terror and ethnic cleansing runs on and on, undisturbed by mass protests and national political action.
The school to prison pipeline itself is prejudicial and an innate public harm, corrupting and subverting key institutions of public service into a malign shadow state through the counterinsurgency model of policing, which enculturates officers to respond to any disturbances of civil order as if all criminals were terrorists.
By such means has our vast bureaucracy of courts, police, Homeland Security, and other assets armed with guns and legal writs been turned from the cause of our protection from unequal power to that of our subjugation to it, from a guarantor of our democracy and equality to an instrument of state terror, and to the insidious, pervasive, and endemic evil of the re-enslavement of our Black citizens.
Trump’s Fourth Reich of theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, founded on a Russian spy and blackmail network hidden within the human trafficking syndicate of which Trump and his buddy Epstein were kingpins, offers us figures of the female co-conspirator in their loathsome and luridly perverse crimes, one of whom has yesterday fallen from power, Pam Bondi, apologist of the Abominable One’s child predation who weaponized the testimony of victims against them and not their abusers as was her sworn duty, concealed the identities of the patrons of the Trump-Epstein syndicate and shielded them from prosecution, and in doing so made the lives of every woman in America less safe.
As written by Shanley Hurt, co-author of Geddry’s Newsletter with her mother on Substack; “Pam Bondi’s Reward for Total Humiliation: She barked, fluffed, and publicly disgraced herself for Trump, only to watch him hand her chair to Todd Blanche.
First Kristi Noem got shoved aside and replaced by Markwayne Mullin. Then Pam Bondi got booted, and for now the man taking her chair is Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s former defense lawyer. At a certain point, even people who are deeply invested in not noticing things have to notice things. In Trumpworld, the women keep getting cast as the emotional support henchmen. They are expected to go out there, smile through disaster, defend the indefensible, absorb the stink, and humiliate themselves with gusto. Then, once the job starts to smell too much like flop sweat and panic, a man materializes to inherit the office and play Serious Person.
Maybe that is not misogyny in the neat, textbook sense. Maybe it is just one of those magical coincidences that keeps happening to women around Donald Trump, where they get the public disgrace and some guy gets the title. Maybe the ladies are just incredibly unlucky, forever slipping on the exact same banana peel while the men keep landing upright in the leather chair.
And Pam Bondi really did commit herself to the bit. She did not merely defend Trump. She made herself into a kind of human leaf blower for his ego. At that House Judiciary hearing, while lawmakers were pressing her over the Epstein files, Bondi somehow found it in herself to start hollering about how amazing Donald Trump was, how transparent he was, how wonderful everything was going, as if she were not the attorney general of the United States but the final contestant in a contest called America’s Next Top Sycophant. It was one of those performances so undignified that it briefly circles back around to being impressive. Not morally impressive, obviously. More like the way a raccoon opening a locked cooler is impressive.
That is the part that makes her firing so deliciously embarrassing. She humiliated herself for him in public. She did the full-pageant version of loyalty. She barked, she boasted, she fluffed, she smiled through the flop. And in the end, he still replaced her with his own lawyer. Not just a man, which would already be insulting enough. His man. His former defense lawyer. The symbolism is so unsubtle it almost feels rude to point it out. You spend months turning yourself into a one-woman Trump infomercial and the reward is that the boss hands your job to a guy who used to stand next to him in court.
And honestly, that is what makes this version better than the usual palace intrigue story. We already know Bondi was not pushed out because she had some sudden attack of conscience. Nobody is confusing Pam Bondi with Elliot Richardson. She was perfectly willing to play the role. She was willing to degrade the Justice Department, willing to debase herself in public, willing to perform loyalty like she was trying to win a tiara and a timeshare. The problem was not that she refused to be awful. The problem was that being awful did not save her, because in Trumpworld women are often invited to do the shame work, not necessarily to keep the power.
That is the pattern here, and it is why Blanche matters. If Bondi had simply been replaced by another random hack, the story would still be ugly but ordinary. Instead she got replaced, at least for now, by Trump’s former defense lawyer, which makes the whole thing feel less like ordinary turnover and more like a little engraved plaque announcing who is trusted with real power when the performance phase is over. The women get sent out to stand in front of the burning building and insist that the smell is actually prosperity. The men come in later and get described as stabilizing.
It almost makes you feel bad for her. Almost. There is, I admit, a tiny flicker of pity in watching a woman discover that extreme public self-abasement is not, in fact, a durable professional strategy. It is the sort of revelation that might soften you for a second if you had never seen Pam Bondi’s whole deal before. Then you remember that she is not some innocent handmaiden who wandered into the wrong marble hallway and got eaten by wolves. She is a Regina George mean girl with a law degree, a television smile, and a deep commitment to using power like a hair straightener left plugged in on purpose. She helped build the ugliness. She fed it. She grinned through it. The pity does not last.
Still, there is something almost poetic in the efficiency of the insult. Bondi did everything asked of her except the one thing that matters in Trump’s world, which is never to become inconvenient. She could praise him, flatter him, throw herself in front of cameras for him, but once she started looking like a liability instead of an asset, none of that devotion meant a thing. Loyalty is lovely right up until usefulness expires. Then suddenly it is time for a transition, a thank you post, a pat on the head, and a man in your chair.
So yes, another one bites the dust. First Kristi Noem. Now Pam Bondi. Funny how often the women wind up carrying the embarrassment while the men collect the office. Funnier still that these women keep acting shocked when the arrangement turns out to be exactly as degrading as it looked from the start.”
How are true monsters like Pam Bondi and Ghislaine Maxwell created, and how may we prevent such disfigurement of the soul from ever happening again in the future?
The classic example of internalized oppression in a female overseer of systemic patriarchal oppression is Phyllis Schlafly, whose portrait as Serena in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is unforgettable and terrifying.
As I wrote in my post of August 1 2020, Strategies of Seizure of Power in Mrs America: Appeasement Versus Confrontation; FX’s brilliant and gorgeous series Mrs America tells the story of the battle for the soul of America and the struggle for equality of half of humankind, as it unfolded in the 1971 political Equal Rights Amendment. It is also the story of the beginning of the Fall of America as a democracy and the capture of the Republican Party by a cabal of Gideonite Pentecostal fundamentalists and Patriarchal misogynists led by the complex and mercurial Phyllis Schlafly, and the defenders of liberty and equality who opposed them, including Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem.
Of greatest interest to me are the references and framing of Mrs America as Shakespearean tragedy, and its portrayal of the conflict of strategies of seizure of power, appeasement versus confrontation. Confrontation fails here in the short term but cedes no ground to the enemy; whereas appeasement subverts its host like a colonizing virus but is also trapped and marginalized within it, as Schlafly herself became.
Slate has a superb historical analysis and fact checking of each episode which I have provided links to below; together with the show itself it is the best introductory history of women in modern America and of the ideological development of feminist theory yet written, and possibly the only such history accessible to an audience for whom it is an unknown subject. Unfortunately, this category seems to include everyone who didn’t live through it, a situation this show may remedy lest we are doomed in future to repeat the mistakes of the past.
As I wrote in my post of January 3 2022, Patriarchy and Sexual Terror: Case of the Ghislaine Maxwell Trial; Patriarchy and sexual terror are about power as expressed in the most atavistic way as subjugation and dehumanization of others; the power to turn people into things you can use. Patriarchy is about the theft of the soul.
Like the freaks in a carnival show, monsters define the limits of the human and help us establish normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue. But this othering also grants immunity and permission as well as vilification and dehumanization of that which is different, for it allows us to ignore systemic evils and inequalities through constructions of personal responsibility derived from the doctrine of original sin and its basis in law as the innate depravity of man; here be monsters, not ourselves.
In the case of Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, serial predators whose crimes against humanity defy comprehension in the way that the Holocaust does as intrusive forces and atrocities beyond our frames of reference, the astounding scale and baroque abominations and perversions of their crimes offered concealment even as they were performed before a global audience of the wealthy and famous due to their manipulation of elite privilege and making their peers complicit as a strategy of blackmail.
This is how fascism operates, and its components patriarchy and racism; by making those who could bring them to justice complicit in their crimes. As Peter Carey said in regard to his novel A Long Way From Home; “You can’t be a white Australian writer and spend your whole life ignoring the greatest, most important aspect of our history, and that is that we – I – have been the beneficiaries of a genocide.”
If we are to challenge and bring a reckoning to patriarchy as systemic unequal power and as sexual terror, we must avoid othering its agents and perpetrators, for this enables the restoration not of balance but of our comfort with our own privilege.
There is a line spoken by the villain in the series The Magicians, a survivor of childhood abuse and tyrant known as The Beast for his horrific crimes, once the powerless and terrified boy Martin Chatwin and now a monstrous god; “You know, when I was a boy, a man who was meant to care for me bent me over his desk and had me over and over every time I was alone with him. It helps me understand a truth. You’re powerful or you’re weak. “
Here is the original lie of the tyrant and the fascist in the apologetics and self-justification of power; the lie that only power has meaning, that there is no good or evil. How we use power is of equal importance as who holds it. Fear and force are a primary means of human exchange, but not the only means; love, membership, and belonging are as important.
It’s a line which captures perfectly the inherent contradictions of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as an origin of evil; for the use of social force is subversive of its own values. Yet the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle often require violence, and until the gods of law and order have been cast down from their thrones I must agree with the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X; “by any means necessary.”
As written by Walter Rodney in The Groundings with my Brothers; “We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists. Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”
And here is the passage he references from Leon Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
Yet in reflection I think of those great figures who have been both heroes of liberation and villains of tyranny; Napoleon, Washington, Stalin, Mao, the list is a near endless litany of woes and failures of vision wherein Brave New Worlds became hells and carceral states. In evidence I offer the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party, the American and Napoleonic Empires, and above all the state of Israel, a dream of refuge forged in the terror of the Holocaust whose victims learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis and assumed their role in the Occupation of Palestine. The dangers of Idealism are very real, as Thomas Mann taught us in Death in Venice and Vladimir Nabokov in his reimagination of it as Lolita; but so are the dangers of submission to authority and the complicity of silence in the face of evil.
I am a hunter of fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. For me there is a simple test for the use of force; who holds power?
All those who hunt monsters must remember always Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”
The trials of Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, like those of their fellow sexual terrorists Harvey Weinstein and Larry Nassar, are seizures of power as revolutionary struggle in which the victims refusal to be silenced has triumphed over the immunity of hegemonic elite wealth, power, and privilege; the Scarlet Letter has no power to shame women into submission through victim blaming in our society any longer, for in refusing to be silenced these courageous women have seized it as an instrument with which to dismantle the Patriarchy.
Force is brutal, terrible, but also fragile, for it fails at the point of defiance and disobedience. Enacting the role of the Jester of King Lear and the girl who cried “The king has no clothes”, parrhesia or what Foucault called truth telling, the witnesses of these iconic trials and of the historic turning of the tides of the #metoo movement have shown us all how to wage liberation and revolutionary struggle.
As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
As I wrote in my post of July 21 2020, How Patriarchy Works: Unequal Power, Identities of Sex and Gender, Autonomy Versus Authorization, Complicity and Responsibility, and the Social Use of Force; Here I began thinking about the murder of Vanessa Guillen, toxic masculinity and violence, and the military as an atavism of rape culture in tidy categories of Hegelian-Marxist history and the dialectics of revolutionary struggle, when I quickly realized that patriarchy is a spectrum disease which corrupts and subverts its victims and its perpetrators alike, and this is its true terror.
At the intersection of power asymmetries and identities of sex and gender lie issues of authorization versus autonomy, with crucial consequences for complicity and responsibility in our legal system which arbitrates the social use of force.
In her now classic work Ring of Power, Jean Shinoda Bolen interprets Wagner’s great opera in terms of patriarchal forces which dehumanize us because they cripple and steal our capacity to love. Of particular interest here is the figure of Brunhild as Daddy’s Avenger and victim of internalized oppression.
So I looked again, but this time not at the primary struggle for power and ownership between male perpetrator and female victim, but at two female monsters who are parallel figures as enablers and accomplices of sexual terror, Melania Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Moreover they are characters embedded in fairytale narratives with which we are all familiar; the etiology of their disfigurement and monstrosity lies in the malign effects of inequality as a moral debasement and leprosy of the soul. For the study of such things I return to Margaret Atwood’s masterpiece Cat’s Eye, her novels Interlunar and Life Before Man, to the thematic companion volumes The Handmaid’s Tale and The Edible Woman, and to the foundational critical work by Sharon Rose Wilson, The Fairytale Sexual Politics of Margaret Atwood.
A study of Margaret Atwood is illuminating and instrumental to understanding the elements of patriarchy and the operations of its systems, especially in the context of female on female violence in secondary order power relations. Allow me to elaborate.
Cat’s Eye presents a narrator, Elaine Risley, who is a trapped Rapunzel in a world of ghosts, witches, cruel stepsisters, vanishing princes, and a merciful fairy godmother. The story draws ideas mainly from Anderson’s Snow Queen and Grimm’s Rapunzel, secondarily from Anderson’s Ice Maiden and Grimm’s Girl Without Hands.
Fearful door images echo Grimm’s Fitcher’s Bird; Risley’s dreams and visions are filled with images from medieval art, paintings of the Annunciation, Ascension, and the Virgin. The Hobgoblin’s fragmented mirror in The Snow Queen provides a metaphor of Atwood’s vision; mirrors, cameras, things that reflect but also capture and distort.
Of her characters, Cordelia from Shakespeare’s King Lear is among her finest; Mrs. Sneath is a cannibal goddess who resembles Baba Yaga and is linked to the figure of cat-headed Maat in this story.
Thematically Cat’s Eye is an investigation of the Rapunzel Syndrome; the wicked witch who imprisons her, the tower she is trapped in, a rescuer. Margaret Atwood’s driving conflicts are female-female, though her plots foreground sexual power and its political reflections.
Life Before Man offers The Wizard of Oz, The Nutcracker ballet, Anderson’s Snow Queen, a host of tales from Grimm including The Girl Without Hands, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Little Red Cap, Fitcher’s Bird, and The Robber Bridegroom. Secondary intertexts include Wilde’s Salome, Dante’s Inferno, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Coleridge’s Kublai Khan, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Irving’s Sleepy Hollow, and Mother Goose rhymes, mainly Little Miss Muffet. It’s a sort of Grand Tour of our civilization and the history of our private inner space and the disastrous and grotesque ways we collide with each other. Also, wonderful and illuminating reading.
Interlunar reimagines Cocteau’s Orphee, the ballet Giselle, both the Grimm and Anne Sexton version of The White Snake, and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Motifs include death, pestilence, filth, eating, power, the journey, healing, hands, blindness and vision. Themes of guilt and shame, love, destruction, sacredness, creation, fertility, and metamorphosis are to be found in this richly imagined novel.
The Edible Woman is a linked text with The Handmaid’s Tale; do read both together. Herein the main embedded stories are Hansel & Gretel, The Gingerbread Boy, Goldilocks, Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Rapunzel, and her protagonist Marion plays all of these roles as well as those of Little Red Cap, the Robber Bride, and Fitcher’s bride.
The Handmaid’s Tale gives a voice to Bilhah, the Biblical Handmaid, revisions Little Red Riding Hood as an extension of Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves, and tells the story of the Christian disempowerment of the Goddess as presented in the great film The Red Shoes.
Margaret Atwood’s parodies of Grimm operate on three levels; thematic, images and motifs, and narrative structure. In The Handmaid’s Tale, we have themes of family and especially female-female conflict, gender and sexual power asymmetries, and the initiation and heroic journey. Motifs and images include dismemberment, cannibalism, fertility, labyrinths and paths, and all manner of disturbing sexual violence. Plot devices include a variety of character foils, doppelgangers, disguises and trickery of stolen and falsified identity.
Among Margaret Atwood’s Great Books, The Handmaid’s Tale is a universally known reference both because it has been taught for over a generation in every high school in America as a standard text and because of the extraordinary television series, arguably the most important series ever filmed. We teach it for the same reasons the show is popular; a visceral and gripping drama with unforgettable characters, a mesmerizing plot, and an immediate and accessible story which empowers and illuminates.
It depicts the brooding evil and vicious misogyny of Christianity and Fascism as two sides of the dynamic malaise of patriarchy and authority, as drawn directly from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, but also from contemporary culture as it contains satires of identifiable public figures, organizations, and events. Serena is based on Phyllis Schlafly, and Gideon is the nation of Pat Robertson and the fundamentalists who seized control of the Republican Party around the time of the novel’s writing; Margaret Atwood’s motive in part was to sound an alarm at the dawn of the Fourth Reich and its threat to global democracy.
It remains to be seen whether the forces of tyranny or of liberty will prevail in the end. Each of our lives is a contest between these forces, our private struggles reflected in the society and human civilization we share.
And this is the great lesson and insight of Margaret Atwood; each of us is both a Handmaid and a Serena, trapped within the skin of the other. She locates the primary conflict within ourselves, and transposes the Jungian conflict between Anima and Animus with that of the Shadow in terms of sex, gender, and power.
So we return to our Brunhilds and twin monsters Melania Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell, who Janus-faced represent corruption and perversion, the dual spheres of action of feminine power turned against itself by the forces of patriarchy and shaped to the uses of predation and misogyny.
Melania’s message on the coat she wore to tour a migrant concentration camp, “I really don’t care. Do U?’ and Ghislaine’s self-description in Vanity Fair, “‘I do it the way Nazis did it with the Jews,” reflect the disease of power in its political and sexual contexts, and as a First Cause of both racist hate crimes and crimes of sexual terror. Unequal power is a precondition of them both.
And these are direct quotes from enablers and accomplices of crimes against humanity which define the limits of the human, and who are not marginal figures whose malign violations of our values and dehumanization of others occurred in a trailer park brothel or secret sweatshop of slave labor but at the pinnacle of our society’s ruling class. Their existence is an indictment of the flaws of our nation and of our civilization, and a measure of the distance we have yet to travel in the realization of a true free society of equals.
As Margaret Atwood said in her 2015 lecture to West Point cadets; “Nothing makes me more nervous than people who say, ‘It can’t happen here.’ Anything can happen anywhere, given the right circumstances.”
As written by Jonathan Freedland in his article in The Guardian entitled, The Ghislaine Maxwell case raises a question some may think naive: why?; “The Ghislaine Maxwell case raises so many questions, and yet scarcely discussed is the one that perhaps matters most. Naturally, there’s huge interest in whether Maxwell, convicted this week of recruiting and grooming teenage girls for sex with her one-time boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein, will seek to reduce her sentence by naming names – opening up the pair’s notorious little black book and telling prosecutors who else among the rich and powerful abused the vulnerable minors Maxwell trafficked for sex.
In Britain, much of that interest focuses on Epstein’s longtime pal, Prince Andrew, who was so close to the couple he invited them on visits to Balmoral, Sandringham and Windsor: it’s lucky the prince doesn’t sweat, because if he did, he might be drenched now. So far he has refused to answer US investigators’ questions – not for his own sake, you understand, but according to multiple reports, to save the Queen from embarrassment. Because a 61-year-old man hiding behind his 95-year-old mother would not be in the least bit mortifying.
There are other questions, such as: how many others enabled the travelling child abuse ring that Epstein and Maxwell operated, turning a blind eye to what was surely obvious? Or: when else would the BBC respond to the conviction of a child sex offender by interviewing a brother of the offender who refused to accept the verdict of the court? And how come that Today programme interview with Ian Maxwell came so soon after the BBC had given a platform to one of Epstein’s lawyers, presenting him as if he were merely a neutral expert?
All those questions matter, and yet the one that preys on my mind is more timeless. It’s the question that arises in all such cases of human cruelty yet which one hesitates to ask, lest the inquiry seem naive: why?
The coverage of Maxwell has probed that a bit, suggesting for example that Ghislaine Maxwell was conditioned, as the daughter of the publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, to cater to the whims of a monstrous man, and simply transferred her allegiance, and her service, from one monster to another. Growing up surrounded by wealth and power, where the deference of officialdom was taken for granted, would have had its effect too. Ghislaine Maxwell may well have assumed that people like her and Epstein were granted a special kind of impunity, that they could break the laws that restrained the appetites of lesser mortals, because for most of her life that had indeed been the case.
And yet, both those answers are unsatisfying as explanations. There are plenty of abusers who did not grow up with either a Maxwell-style father or Maxwell-level wealth and, conversely, there are people whose upbringings were comparable to Ghislaine Maxwell’s but who did not go on to commit terrible crimes.
So the why question lingers, just as it did in sharper and more horrific form at least twice in the last month alone. December 2021 began with convictions for the father and stepmother of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes in a case so appalling, I confess at the time I could barely read accounts of it. The six-year-old was subjected to a regime of sustained torture which was, incredibly, filmed by those who inflicted it. The little boy was made to stand in isolation for up to 14 hours at a time, without anything to eat or drink. He was beaten. To punish him, his father took the football shirts he loved and cut them to shreds in front of him. Perhaps most unbearable of all, the jury was shown footage of a weak and frail Arthur shortly before his death saying: “No one loves me. No one is going to feed me.”
When the man and woman guilty of destroying Arthur’s brief life were found guilty, there was revulsion, of course – and on Friday their sentences were referred to the court of appeal for being too lenient – but the public conversation moved without pause for breath to the policy implications. There was intense debate about the state of children’s services, about the damage done by austerity, about target-driven culture, about the recruitment and retention of social workers and so on. But what was missing was a much less sophisticated question. Why would two people do such terrible things to a defenceless child? How could a father cause such pain to his own flesh and blood?
There was a similar reflex 11 days later, following the verdicts in the equally soul-draining case of Star Hobson, a child, a baby really, who died at just 16 months, having been punched to death by her mother’s partner as her mother did nothing to save her. Once again, the pair filmed their months of cruelty against the little girl, apparently finding the videos amusing enough to send to friends. And yet the immediate talk was not of how two people could do such a thing, but of a local “child safeguarding practice review” and whether control of children’s services should belong with the local council or the Department for Education.
I understand the impulse to concentrate on these institutional, bureaucratic issues. The assumption is that there will always be people capable of horrendous brutality, that that fact will never change, and so the sensible focus of our attention should be on prevention. I get that. And yet the sheer speed with which we move to technocratic answers, barely even asking the harder human questions, begins to look like displacement activity. It’s as if we can’t bring ourselves to contemplate the puzzle of what humans are capable of, because we have no idea what we’d say.
Earlier, God-fearing generations did not find this so difficult. Nor do those who still have traditional faith. They have recourse to a vocabulary that includes the notion of evil and wickedness and that allows them to talk about it. But those words don’t trip so easily off the secular tongue.
Instead, we look for explanations in psychology or economics, assuming, to adapt Stephen Sondheim’s lyric, that if people are depraved it’s because they’re deprived, whether of love or money. That view persists. There was an echo of it in the closing argument from Maxwell’s defence lawyer, when she asked “why an Oxford-educated, proper English woman would suddenly agree to facilitate sex abuse of minors”. Only the poor or poorly educated behave badly.
We can see the flaw in such reasoning, even before you get to the insult it delivers to all those who endured great privation, emotional or material, without becoming abusers. And yet, the absence of easy answers does not give us a licence to stop asking hard questions. We need to be able to stare wicked acts and evil deeds in the face, rather than to comfort ourselves that they exist solely as functions of failed systems, errors that could be eliminated given the right policy tweak.
This need not be a bleak endeavour. I think of Julie K Brown, the Miami Herald reporter without whose fearless pursuit of Epstein’s crimes this week’s reckoning might never have come. I think of the courage of the victims, who kept up the fight for justice at great cost. Unfathomable evil is part of the human story, but so too is unimaginable good.”
Next exhibit in our museum of private holocausts and gallery of monsters and fiends I offer the case of Melania Trump, like Pam Bondi and far too many others a co-conspirator in horrific crimes of sexual predation and terror.
As I wrote in my post of February 4 2026, Pigshit Princess, A Film: Melania’s Rise From Whore to Trophy Wife and Agent Handler For Putin of a Nazi Monster and Kingpin of a Sex Trafficking Syndicate Who Became America’s President; The central question of any inquiry into the story and figure of Melania Trump must be; How did a whore rise through the ranks of a global sex trafficking syndicate to become the trophy wife and agent handler for Putin of its kingpin, a Nazi monster, idiot, and lunatic who became our President, and how did she help him to seize power?
Amazon’s despicable fascist stooge and now propagandist Jeff Bezos has bankrolled a wretched vanity film which trails Melania through gilded palaces as she declaims “Let them eat tear gas” when passing a window beyond which can be seen the glorious and heroic mass protests which have now become a national revolt against the white supremacist terror force ICE and Trump’s criminal campaign of ethnic cleansing and the federal occupation of our sanctuary cities.
Who is Melania, how did she become a monster, and what use was and is she to Trump’s Fourth Reich?
Herein I offer an alternate version of the film Melania, no less fictive than the trappings of royalty she wears like a twenty first century Marie Antoinette.
Opening shot is a miserable village in Slovenia, in the black and white of a time and place which are liminal in the sense of a fairytale, followed by a series of images of its humans and beasts who mirror and reflect each other in their filthy and grotesque degeneracy.
We hear the chop, chop, chopping before Melania makes her entrance, carrying an empty bucket of slops for the hogs we see in the yard behind her through the door she has thrown open to enter the darkness of the butchery, straw pasted to her wild hair and her face smeared with pigshit.
A fierce bearded man grimaces in semblance of a smile though we know he has long forgotten how, scooping entrails from the table into her bucket as she holds it up, a human hand included, in a gradually illuminated hovel littered with human cadavers.
“Good eating tonight, Melania, for us and the pigs. Police raided a poetry reading of dissidents.” Camera moves to a close up of his face as he says; “Very wicked, I’m sure. But there is no good or evil, only power, who eats and who is eaten, and we are all meat.”
As the camera withdraws to take them both in, Melania repeats the mantra which is the controlling metaphor of her world; “Yes, father, we are all meat.”
In Scene Two we move from her historical origins in a family of butchers who served both the Tito regime and the Nazis before him, and back into the mists of history; the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Napoleon, the Republic of Venice, Hapsburgs again, the Holy Roman Empire, the Carolinians, Bavaria, and before the migrations from which Slovenes emerged the Roman Empire. All states are embodied violence, and all require enforcers and those who disappear their victims.
Always there are scavengers like Melania, who loot the corpses and live from the misery of others; the scuttling dark things whose survival is in service to power, finding tasty morsels among the offal after the inquisitions and the crusades.
Though before Melania herself became a kind of remora riding sharks through abyssal depths, she was a simple though stupid and cruel village girl caught up in the system of human trafficking because of the leverage offered by a crime to predators operating with the authority of the state, a crime ambiguous in its intention but catastrophic and unforgiveable in its consequences, by which she gained the name she was known by before coming to America, Pigshit Princess.
In sepia tones like a hand colored postcard from long ago Scene Two opens, to two girls squabbling in the pigsty.
“Give me!” demands Melania, grabbing the glittery plastic tiara on the other girl’s head.
“No! I’m the princess! You’re the Pigshit Princess!”
Moments from the fight are intercut with black and white scenes and images of her childhood of brutality, squalor, and exclusion as the daughter of man who makes inconvenient truths disappear for the state. Herein she is not a champion of other untouchables or a class warrior of any kind, but a feral and malign predator who terrorizes here own, studying their weaknesses for leverage with brooding menace and trapping fellow children in horrific games of power. This is the backstory and origins of all overseers of the carceral state and its slaves, unchanged from the dawn of history and the rise of priest-kings and empires from the wealth of mass slave labor of agriculture, for this requires enforcers and informers from within slave populations, as Melania was to become.
They thrash about, tumble, and Melania pushes her rival’s face into the pigshit until she is dead. Then she takes the tiara and crowns herself with it.
So begins the legend of the Pigshit Princess.
In full color Scene Three opens, marking the transition to historical time and a shared world we all live in; Melania, now a teenage girl or young adult, and a man in a dark suit are facing each other across a table in a cell, she in chains and without a trace of concern, remote and fearless.
“You’re a lot of trouble for a little thing,” he says. “I’m told it takes three men to get you into those chains.”
“Come closer and find out.”
He moves ever so slightly into range, and she unleashes a furious attack which finds its limits in the length of her chains, snarling like a savage animal; and when he withdraws laughing she resumes her motionless calm.
Her inquisitor speaks next, disturbing the silence; “I’m here to offer you a way out of here, as our eyes and ears in places we can’t go. Someone who can kill without mercy, and looks like you do, maybe even will be a great beauty one day, our enemies won’t see you coming. And one day you can live like a real princess, with beautiful things, if you choose to help us. For now, if you agree I will unlock your chains and have food brought, and later you will be brought from this place to a very special school in a castle, where you will want for nothing, and be under the protection of the state which includes immunity from prosecution for any crimes in your past or your future. And you will be well paid. Would you like that, Melania? Or would you rather remain the Pigshit Princess for the rest of your life, ruling a four by six cell in solitary confinement?”
“Show me this food. And I’ll take the first month’s pay now, and three days free on my own to decide.”
And so Melania became a spy and whore for the secret police under the cover of her modeling and escort career, working her way up to being the elite KGB/FSB influence agent she remains, now directly under Putin’s command, as she was maneuvered into Trump’s orbit after his 1987 visit to the Kremlin, and became his handler and his trophy wife.
In terms of her service to the regime from Trump’s perspective, she provides cover for his predation of children and as the kingpin of a human trafficking syndicate launched by his modeling and beauty pageant monopoly and interdependent with his partner Epstein’s blackmail empire also built on sex trafficking. Melania provides the illusion of normal sexual desires and identity to the most prolific serial sex predator in all of history.
And in service to both Trump’s puppetmaster and hers, Vladimir Putin, she provides an intimate source of intelligence, influence, and control of America to Russia as Trump’s control agent. Putin’s initial goal in putting Trump in the White House was simply to take America off the board to give him a free hand in the conquest of Ukraine, and though this goal has expanded horrifically he has clearly been successful beyond any imaginable dreams in isolating Ukraine from NATO support and in the capture of the American state as a vichy government of the Russian Empire and of the Fourth Reich.
Melania’s story and that of many girls like her has been told in the film and telenovela series La Femme Nikita, which I watched with rapt attention for its documentary-like realism in the portrayal of actual intelligence operations, and the historical film Red Sparrow; but never of a sparrow who becomes the First Lady of the United States as she did.
We must remember always that in so doing she also enabled unspeakable and countless crimes against humanity of whom Trump and Epstein’s victims were girls exactly like herself, who she betrayed to ruin and horrors.
This is how Melania became the person who once visited a concentration camp for migrants on our border wearing a trenchcoat with the words “I really don’t care; do you?” hand painted on the back like a living billboard for amoral nihilist Dark Enlightenment theorists and partisans of Apartheid like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and J.D. Vance who believe that mercy is a weakness that should be abandoned on the trash heap of history along with democracy and universal human rights.
Our final scene in my conceptual film includes documentary newsreel footage of that day, June 21 2020, when Melania wore the infamous jacket to gloat over the misery of the fifty five stolen nonwhite children huddled into animal pens at the New Hope Children’s Shelter in McAllen, Texas, victims of her husband’s Theatre of Cruelty and campaign of ethnic cleansing. These are the steps history must remember, not the prancing high heels whose clicks on the marble floors of gilded palaces signal the death of democracy like a metronome.
She never truly left the pigsty, nor shed her identity as the Pigshit Princess.
As I wrote I my post of July 16 2025, The Epstein Files: A Mirror of Our Monstrosity Under Patriarchy As An Imposed Condition of Struggle, and A Fable of Silencing As Immunity In Service To Power; Among the weapons of Authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege as patriarchy, our most ancient system of oppression and institutionalized inequality and dehumanization as theocratic tyranny, few are more terrible than the silencing and erasure of its victims as immunity in service to power.
The QAnon cult, which has recast our Rapist In Chief as Cyrus in a new myth of Exile and as our state religion mobilized voters aligned with the Christian Identity form of white supremacist terror promulgated through the Pentecostal Church to elect Trump, began as a deflection propaganda operation by two operators of the 4Chan child pornography platform, and was rapidly weaponized by the Fourth Reich as deflection from Trump’s vast and multigenerational sex trafficking syndicate and sexual terror cult founded with the family fortune by his grandfather in the brothels he owned during the Klondike Gold Rush. This has recently turned around to set its fangs in the monster himself, as the MAGA-QAnon true believers are confronted with the Trump regime’s cover up of the Epstein files.
The unraveling of the cult of Trump has begun.
As written by Adam Gabbatt in The Guardian, in an article entitled How the Jeffrey Epstein row plunged Maga world into turmoil – a timeline: Saga has pitted Trump against his base, with the president pleading with supporters to ‘not waste time’ on Epstein; “The Department of Justice’s announcement that it did not have a list of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged clients, and that the convicted sex offender was not murdered, has plunged the rightwing world into turmoil.
Conservative commentators and media figures, some of whom spent years pushing conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death, have accused the government of covering up the hedge fund manager’s crimes, with calls growing for Pam Bondi, the attorney general, to resign.
The saga has pitted Donald Trump, who was friends with Epstein for many years before later disowning the financier, against his base, with the president pleading over the weekend for his supporters to “not waste time and energy on Jeffrey Epstein”.
This is a scandal unlike any Trump has faced in a history made of nothing but scandals and lies, for it strikes at the heart of his legitimacy and manufactured authority within his own base.
Rapist and sex trafficker Trump says pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. This is exactly what we must do, for in the words of Dorothy he’s “just an old humbug.”
As I wrote in my post of January 5 2024, Exposing Authority: Case of the Epstein Blackmail Files; Secret power is among the most terrible of all forms of unequal power, for it silences the witness of history by the powerless because they will not be believed. This is the true test of democracy and equality in any society; who has authority to bear witness?
And now a Pandora’s Box of evils and the hungry ghosts of the silenced and erased return to give us warning; a monster who defines the limits of the human has been exposed and his head mounted on our wall, but the systems of unequal power as Patriarchy and sexual terror of which he was a figure and apex predator remain to be deconstructed and transformed, and until that day of liberation we must unite in seizures of power and revolutionary struggle.
The first benefit of an open society is the right to be heard. Without this and other rights of freedom of information, there is no freedom for anyone, for we are all captives of power and authority.
This is the true crime of Epstein and of all such monsters; theft of the soul.
If we consider the principle that Silence Is Complicity together with its interdependent forces of falsification as kinds of unequal power, which include denial by forces of repression of the sacred calling to pursue the truth, of the right of witness as autonomy, of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen to Question, Expose, Mock, and Challenge Authority, and of the dangers of division and the modern pathology of disconnectedness in isolating dissent, we see that regardless of the enormity and atrocities of gender unequality itself, it is part of a larger system of dehumanization by elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
Herein we wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors; a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontin, which I use to describe the pathology of falsification of ourselves through propaganda, lies and illusions, rewritten histories, state secrets, alternate realities, authoritarian faith which devours truths. This I contrast with its opposite, journalism and the witness of history as the sacred quest to pursue the truth. We are made counterfeits of ourselves by systems of elite hegemonic power such as patriarchy, and by those who would enslave us, through capture of our stories as theft of the soul.
James Angleton, evil genius of the C.I.A.’s Counterintelligence Service on whom John Le Carre based his character of George Smiley, infamously used the phrase in this sense as well, and it has become universalized throughout the intelligence community he shaped and influenced during the Second World War and its aftermath the Cold War. Writing in reference to David Martin’s biography of himself entitled Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton described it as a “myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet bloc and its coordinated intelligence services use to confuse and split the West … an ever fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge.” And of course, everything he ascribed to the Soviets was also true of himself, his own agency, and America as well, and of all states, for all are houses of illusion.
How does this help us understand the horrors, violence, and sexual terror of the Epstein Blackmail Files as examples of systemic oppression?
Secret power; secrets which can destroy a target or win leverage over him as a strategy of power, and which can be manufactured from trivial or spurious sources; Epstein used simple association with and compromise of the wealthy and powerful to create enormous wealth and power for himself. In this he was not simply the crime lord of a human trafficking syndicate, like his buddy Traitor Trump’s modeling agency-beauty pageant organized crime network, which both exploited teenage girls, but also had the services of Ghislaine Maxwell who succeeded her father in masterminding honeytrap operations for the KGB and Mossad among other customers. Epstein was a blackmailer who modeled his business on intelligence services, and this made him a very special kind of monster, a pedophile and sadist who had refined sexual terror to a science.
And all of that wealth and power, stolen from the lives of impoverished and vulnerable young girls, reveals to us the inherent unequal power of the system he typified; falsification in service to power and the patriarchal subjugation of women.
As I wrote in my post of September 6 2019, #metoo: the Crimes of Secret Power Require Broad and Systemic Collusion; Three interesting events which provide motivating and informing sources for the #metoo cultural and social transformation which is reshaping our civilization and ourselves are happening at about the same time; the start of a series of podcasts investigating the Jeffrey Epstein case, the release of Margaret Atwood’s new novel The Testaments, sequel to her visionary classic The Handmaid’s Tale, and the publication of a memoir by Chanel Miller, whose victim impact statement, read out in Congress and in a 60 minutes interview which will be broadcast on the 22nd of this month, was among the initial testimonies that broke the silence of sexual terror and opened the door for others to seek justice.
Power asymmetry alone cannot account for the regime of sexual terror which has enabled the patriarchy to hold a hegemony of power and privilege for most of human history; for this we must look to the inversion of moral values perpetrated by traditional religion as a tool of control. Shame, shunning, and the force of authorized public will, of the social ownership of identities of sex and gender; we have never really left the world of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.
Secrecy is the key precondition of abuse of power, and the crimes of secret power require broad and systemic collusion. This is especially true of sexual violence against women, which is only a crime under the rules of Patriarchy when it trespasses another man’s power of control, ownership, and territory, and is otherwise regarded as a means of control which maintains existing hierarchies of power. It is among a class of crimes which exist only when the values context of our social system is abrogated and at risk; and its meaning can change with shifting contexts from diversionary illusion to lynch mob rallying cry with serpentine swiftness. As with so many inequalities, the truth will set us free.
Set us free; I imagine we can spend a lot of time parsing that phrase. By the term us I do include both men and women, for the equality of relationships liberates both masters and slaves- and we must be clear that this is precisely the social order which the Patriarchy authorizes and maintains- from their former categories of being. Democracy requires equality of its citizens; how else can we function as co-owners of our government than as a free society of equals? How can we be free in our personal lives to forge authentic relationships if we do not possess the autonomy to choose our own identity and be whatever we discover to be our own best selves?
Men have been changed into swine not by the spell of Circe, whose magic revealed truths, but by the same disfigurement of the soul which has caught and dehumanized women; it is the system as social force and structural inequality which has robbed us of our humanity, and must be resisted. We are beasts, we humans, but we need not remain wholly so.
And herein lies the special magic and liberation of #metoo as a seizure of power; it confers the casting aside of masks others have made for us, and the claiming of those we choose for ourselves.
What is to be done, as Tolstoy and Lenin asked with such different results?
As I wrote in my post of April 28 2025, Patriarchal Sexual Terror As A System of Oppression: Case of Virginia Giuffre; We mourn a hero in the death of Virginia Giuffre, and it is important that she be remembered not as a victim defined by her abuser, but as a hero whose witness of history was a seizure of power which liberated others, at great cost as is often true for those who choose to bear burdens for us all.
My flesh is a map of private holocausts written in horrors and atrocities which define the limits of the human and which I hope you cannot imagine, but there is nothing unique, special, or remarkable in this; in fact our suffering is the common condition of humankind, one which should bind us together in solidarity, interdependence, and universal principles of human being, meaning, and value rather than drive us apart as is so often the case, especially when fear is weaponized in service to power by authority.
Let us celebrate the defiance of authority and refusal to submit in the face of impossible odds and overwhelming force of Virginia Giuffre, whose glorious triumph over a monster and tyrant of patriarchal systems of oppression, commodification, and dehumanization will hold open a door of liberation struggle for so long as we remember.
Remember, and bring a Reckoning.
Margaret Atwood on the True History on which her novel The Handmaid’s Tale is built
February 4 2026 Pigshit Princess, A Film: Melania’s Rise From Whore to Trophy Wife and Agent Handler For Putin of a Nazi Monster and Kingpin of a Sex Trafficking Syndicate Who Became America’s President
July 16 2025 The Epstein Files: A Mirror of Our Monstrosity Under Patriarchy As An Imposed Condition of Struggle, and A Fable of Silencing As Immunity In Service To Power
Among the recursive forces at work in the disaster now unfolding are the consequences of the death struggle of capitalism in its terminal phase, when all wealth flows to the apex predators in the top one percent, as capitalism begins to collapse from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions and attempts to free itself from its host political system, which fuels the subversion of democracy as it transforms into totalitarian forms of autocracy and tyranny.
This explains the Trump regime, but also the political, social, and economic trajectory of the whole death phase of democracy since the capture of the Republican Party in 1980 by the theocratic Christian Identity nationalism of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and its figurehead Ronald Reagan and the deregulation, privatization, deunionization of labor, and the capture of our manufacturing industry by equity finance which has destroyed our nation’s base of wealth production and driven us to the edge of collapse and ruin.
The history of tariffs and the free market versus trade protection debate is both curious and relevant to us because it was a determinative and key issue among the causes of the Civil War and World War Two.
Here I must signpost that this period of our death spiral, which in some ways parallels that of the late Roman Republic before it became an empire, includes the disaster of the Patriot Act and the Third Imperial Phase of American history as hegemonic elites weaponized the 911 tragedy to centralize all power to a police state through militarization and the counterinsurgency model of policing leveraged by technology as pervasive surveillance, big data, propaganda and information warfare waged by the state against its own citizens.
Together our twin disasters of centralization of wealth and power to the ruling class and the state have combined horrifically to produce the aberrant Trump regime which conspires to utterly destroy the institutions of democracy, and the situation we now face, balancing on an ever-narrower wall on the edge of an Abyss.
And as Nietzsche warns, the Abyss has begun to look back at us.
What have Trump’s tariffs done to us, from the perspective of one year later?
As written by Phillip Inman in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘If he’d stayed on the golf course, we’d be in a better place’: experts on Trump’s tariffs, one year on: Last April, the president unleashed a tidal wave of tariffs on ‘liberation day’. Analysts say the policy has failed, even by the Trump administration’s own terms; “Before Donald Trump declared “liberation day” on 2 April 2025 and shocked the world by raising import tariffs on nearly every country the US did business with, he had spent almost three months causing chaos in Washington.
The wholesale slashing of government jobs under Doge (the “department of government efficiency”) and the defunding of US aid agencies had shown White House watchers that the US president was in a hurry to upset institutions he considered profligate or useless.
Investors quickly understood that chaos was an essential tool in Trump’s armoury. Almost as soon as he was inaugurated, there was a steady decline in the value of the dollar against other currencies. Investors sold assets denominated in dollars and bought assets elsewhere: Europe, Asia, South America.
“If you think that discouraging investors from buying assets in the US is a victory, then you don’t believe in a growing economy,” said Dario Perkins, the head of global research at the consultancy TS Lombard. “If it was possible for Trump to have spent the last 14 months on the golf course, we would be in a better place.”
Russ Mould, the investment director of the British stockbroker AJ Bell, said: “America is still home to the world’s largest economy and its reserve currency, as well as the globe’s largest equity and bond markets, but investors continue to reassess their exposure one year on from liberation day.”
The economy has either gone sideways or declined, depending on the preferred measure. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that US companies, which were supposed to be the victors in Trump’s new tariff war, stopped hiring almost as soon as liberation day was announced.
Significant revisions in February to data covering 2025 pushed down payroll employment by 403,000 jobs, resulting in the addition of 181,000 jobs last year. This small boost is set against the 163 million people who are employed in the US.
Figures from the Conference Board, a US thinktank, show consumer confidence sliding after Trump took office. A brief recovery appears to coincide with a huge climbdown on 12 May – the day the US and China agreed to defuse their post-liberation day tariff escalation.
The next few months of steadily increasing confidence levels followed probably the calmest period in the second Trump presidency. But sentiment began to fall again in the autumn as the White House battled with Congress over the federal budget deficit and much of the public sector was shut down.
A poll by the University of Michigan showed consumer confidence at a near record low at the end of 2025. A six-month moving average produced by the Conference Board showed every generation, from baby boomers to gen Xers, had lost confidence in the economy over the past year.
Trump’s liberation day executive order stated: “The decline of US manufacturing capacity threatens the US economy in other ways, including through the loss of manufacturing jobs.”
Free market conservatives who railed against Trump’s protectionism were quick to tell the president how his tariff plan was never the answer. Between January 2025 and March 2026, the US manufacturing sector shed 100,000 jobs. Worse, the ratio of manufacturing workers to total nonfarm employment fell to the lowest point since 1939, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking this data. Last month, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that the US deficit in goods had expanded to an all-time high in 2025.
As an illustration of the White House’s failure to boost exports and cut imports, critics said it was stark. Bryan Riley, the director of the National Taxpayers Union Foundation’s free trade initiative, said: “One year after liberation day, the evidence is in. Tariffs failed even by the Trump administration’s own terms. They did not shrink the trade deficit, did not revitalise manufacturing and did not help farmers. It would be a mistake to replace one set of failed tariffs with another.”
Trump, like Vladimir Putin, is seen by his critics as hollowing out the economy to pay for a populist agenda littered with pet projects. As Russia and the US appear trapped by a politics that leads to long-term economic decline, investors have sought other avenues.
Mould questioned whether the US would ever again be considered a capitalist haven with robust courts and presidents who sought to protect private assets. “Tariffs and strong-arm trade tactics, challenges to the independence of the US Federal Reserve and now military incursions in Latin America and the Middle East, as well as sabre-rattling over Greenland, are combining with lofty American stock market valuations and a soaring federal deficit and prompting investors to reassess the narrative of American exceptionalism,” he said.
In a verdict on the US economy, the International Monetary Fund said that while it had proved resilient over the past year, there was plenty to worry about. In their usual diplomatic language, the Washington-based organisation’s directors said they were concerned about “the heightened domestic and global uncertainties posed by the significant ongoing policy shifts and the war in the Middle East”.
They said that against this background, there was a need for “determined actions” to reduce government spending deficits, protect institutions such as the Fed from political interference, keep inflation in check and prevent financial markets from becoming destabilised.
Some major US companies have redirected their investments to Europe, but China has proved to be one of the main beneficiaries. In the year to February 2026, China’s industrial profits increased by 15.2%. It’s a boom that Beijing will struggle to repeat should Chinese companies face fuel and energy shortages and price increases. But the decline of two major powers can only be to China’s gain.”
What did we predict would be the consequences of the tariffs on the day they began?
As written by Callum Jones in The Guardian in an article entitled Liberation from what? Trump promised lower prices – his tariffs risk the opposite; “For weeks, Donald Trump and his aides sought to brand Wednesday as “liberation day” in America. Many in the US could be forgiven for wondering what exactly they’ve just been liberated from.
After much hype, the president unveiled his plan for a new era in global trade: a blanket 10% tariff on goods imported into the US starting Saturday, and higher “reciprocal” tariffs (of up to 49%) on countries taxing US exports starting next Wednesday.
“April 2nd 2025 will be forever remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America’s destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again,” according to Trump.
Historians will be the judge of that. But before anyone writes this chapter, millions of Americans need to navigate the present.
Trump was re-elected last November after years of heightened inflation, and upward pressure on the cost of living. On the campaign trail he pledged, repeatedly and unambiguously, to rapidly liberate the nation from higher prices.
But tariffs, his administration has conceded, risk doing the opposite. The treasury secretary recently dismissed cheap goods as “not the essence of the American dream” after acknowledging that costs may rise as a result of Trump’s aggressive trade strategy: music to the ears of anyone seeking liberation from lower prices.
Anyone sitting in the White House Rose Garden might be reassured. “Prices are way down,” the president has claimed, since his return to office.
Anyone who has visited a grocery store in that time might feel differently. Most prices have, in fact, not fallen since January; inflation is still rising well above the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2% per year.
“Now it’s our turn to prosper,” he proclaimed. But many US firms are bracing for problematic, not prosperous, effects of this action: higher costs they warn will be passed on to their customers.
“What we have heard from business of all sizes, across all industries, from around the country is that these broad tariffs are a tax increase that will raise prices for American consumers and hurt the economy,” said Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at the US Chamber of Commerce, the corporate lobby group.
Trump likes to present the world as black and white. The US is either winning or losing. A policy, deal or plan is the best or the worst. A person, country or company is supporting or screwing you.
There is rarely space for nuance, time for complexity or tolerance for inconvenient facts. The simplicity of this narrative is its power.
By Trump’s telling, the US is about to raise trillions of dollars for the federal government by taxing the world, not its citizens: a typically black-and-white choice.
But reality is often more complex than rhetoric. There are myriad shades of grey.
Import tariffs are not paid by other countries. They are paid by importers – in this case, US firms and consumers – buying goods from overseas. These costs often trickle down through the economy, raising prices at every clink in the chain.
Trump promised lower prices. He is betting his tariffs won’t raise them too high, for too long.
“This is going to be a big moment,” he said on Wednesday. “I think you’re going to remember today.”
He may well be right.”
As written by Graham Russell in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s tariffs – five key takeaways: Donald Trump has upended decades of US foreign policy by bringing in a vast array of tariffs that threaten to disrupt international trade. Here are some initial key points; “Countries across the world are racing to absorb the new way of doing business with the US, after Donald Trump unveiled tailored tariffs that looks set to ignite a global trade war.
Trump has made clear the goals he wants to accomplish through the tariffs: bring manufacturing back to the US; respond to unfair trade policies from other countries; increase tax revenue; and incentivise crackdowns on migration and drug trafficking.
However, the EU and China have promised countermeasures, while South Korea has vowed an “all-out” response. The damage done at a political level with allies such as the UK may also carry its own cost, as billions are wiped off economic growth.
Here are some early points to note in the wake of Wednesday’s wideranging announcement:
1. Firms are bracing for what ‘liberation’ means
The US president sold the idea of global tariffs with a celebratory air, making good on his campaign trail promise to liberate the nation from higher prices. The president has claimed “prices are way down” since his return to office but anyone who has visited a grocery store in that time might feel differently.
And US firms are apprehensive about the wider effect of this move: higher costs, they warn, will be passed on to their customers. “What we have heard from business of all sizes, across all industries, from around the country is that these broad tariffs are a tax increase that will raise prices for American consumers and hurt the economy,” said Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at the US Chamber of Commerce, the corporate lobby group.
2. The China link?
China has been hit particularly hard by the new tariffs, which take the total levy on Chinese imports to over 50%, as well as struggling nations in South-east Asia, including war-torn and earthquake-hit Myanmar.
One theory being put forward is that countries linked to sizeable Chinese investments are being targeted. Dr Siwage Dharma Negara, a senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, said: “The [Trump] administration thinks is that by targeting these countries they can target Chinese investment in countries like Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Indonesia. By targeting their products maybe it will affect Chinese exports and the economy,” he said.
“The real target is China but the real impact on those countries will be quite significant because this investment creates jobs and export revenue.”
The tariffs comes as many countries in South-east Asia are already grappling with the fallout from the cuts to USAid, which provides humanitarian assistance to a region vulnerable to natural disasters and support for pro-democracy activists battling repressive regimes.
3. Key trade partners Canada and Mexico are spared – but will still feel the pain
Canada and Mexico have been exempted from the latest round of tariffs, but, as prime minister Mark Carney and business leaders reminded everyone, 25% tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, as well as on automobiles, came into effect hours after Wednesday’s announcement.
Carney warned that while Trump had preserved key elements of the bilateral relationship, the global tariffs announced earlier in the day “fundamentally change the international trading system”.
The two countries have been hit by previously declared 25% tariffs on many goods over border control and fentanyl trafficking issues, the White House said in a fact sheet.
Mexico president Claudia Sheinbaum said on Wednesday that her country would not pursue a “tit-for-tat on tariffs” but would rather announce a “comprehensive program” on Thursday.
4. This is a big gamble
Trump himself appears prepared for the announcement to spark a lot of turbulence in markets across the world, saying recently: “There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big.” The universal tariffs come into effect on 5 April, and the reciprocal ones on 9 April, so countries around the world now have a very short space of time in which to choose their path. Some may try to cut a deal with Trump, others may respond with retaliatory tariffs, but a continuing theme will be uncertainty.
5. Absolutely nowhere is immune
Heard Island and McDonald Islands are some of the most remote places on Earth, inhabited only by an array of wildlife, yet they are among the “external territories” of Australia listed separately for a 10% tariff.
Norfolk Island, which lies just of Australia’s east coast, was slugged with a tariff of 29% – or 19 percentage points higher than the rest of Australia, prompting Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese to say on Thursday: “I’m not quite sure that Norfolk Island, with respect to it, is a trade competitor with the giant economy of the United States, but that just shows and exemplifies the fact that nowhere on earth is safe from this.”
As written in The Guardian editorial entitled The Guardian view on Trump’s tariffs: a monstrous and momentous act of folly: The US president has expelled his own country from the rules-based global trade system that America itself created; “or the world’s already embattled trading system, it is as though an asteroid has crashed into the planet, devastating everyone and everything that previously existed there. But there is this important difference. If an asteroid struck the Earth, the impact would at least have been caused by ungovernable cosmic forces. The assault on world trade, by contrast, is a completely deliberate act of choice, taken by one man and one nation.
Donald Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on every country in the world is a monstrous and momentous act of folly. Unilateral and unjustified, it was expressed on Wednesday in indefensible language in which Mr Trump described US allies as “cheaters” and “scavengers” who “looted”, “raped” and “pillaged” the US. Many of the calculations on which Mr Trump doled out his punishments are perverse, not least the exclusion of Russia from the condemned list. The tariffs mean prices are certain to rise in sector after sector, in the US and elsewhere, fuelling inflation and perhaps recession. Mr Trump will presumably respond as he did when asked about foreign cars becoming more expensive: “I couldn’t care less.”
The tariffs – a minimum of 10% on all imports to the US, with higher levies on 60 nations that Mr Trump dubbed the “worst offenders” – throw a grenade into the rules-based global trading order. These are large hikes, not small ones, even for nations like Britain that have escaped the higher tariffs. They are indiscriminate between sectors, but highly discriminatory against nations, all of them, even to the extent of penalising uninhabited islands in Antarctica.
They overturn the trading system established – under US leadership – at Bretton Woods after the second world war. In effect, the nation that has underpinned the global economy for the last 80 years has expelled itself from the trading system it always led. That system’s cardinal principle – that countries in the World Trade Organization should treat one another equally – was blown apart on Wednesday.
The announcement ceremony conveyed the thrill Mr Trump derives from bullying and domination. A month after shutting down US development aid, his punishment list embodies special contempt for the world’s poor – 47% tariffs on Madagascar, the world’s ninth poorest country, for instance, or 44% on devastated Myanmar. While much pre-announcement rhetoric was directed at China, some of the toughest tariffs have been inflicted on countries such as Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Laos. The impact on US soft power is likely to be devastating.
The British government is trying to keep calm and carry on. Like its trustworthy trading allies, Britain must do what it can to maintain the rules-based trading system. But economic war is clearly beckoning. The trade secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, said on Thursday that even the UK is now preparing a list of reciprocal tariffs on US goods. It is particularly vital that Britain defends its interests in food and health systems, and against digital tech giants.
Any idea that Britain is a kind of winner in these circumstances, thanks to Brexit, is nonsensical. This country’s supposedly closest ally, the US, has just hiked the cost to British exporters by 10%, with an even greater rise of 25% in the case of steel, aluminium and cars. The consequences of Mr Trump’s tariffs will not be restricted to world trade but will impact on the global economic system more generally. This is a macro moment. It will require macro responses.”
As I wrote in my post of April 10 2025, Attempts to Impose Order By Force and Control Create Their Own Resistance and Inevitably Fail Due to Internal Contradictions: Case of the Unpredictable Tariff Threats and the Collapse of the Stock Market and Global Economy; Order appropriates, law serves power, and there is no just Authority.
Politics is the Art of Fear, as my father taught me, and there is a Calculus of Fear whereby states rise or fall; too little and unity of purpose and social cohesion evaporate, too much and it loses all power to compel obedience when there is nothing left to lose.
The recursive engine of centralization of power in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force drives the legitimation of authority as a protection racket, but security is an illusion and all the emergence of carceral states of force and control can achieve is the transfer of wealth, power, and privilege from those who create it to the hegemonic elites who become their masters. Thus are birthed the terrors of class, authorized national identities, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
The use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own Resistance, Resistance like that of the Hands Off mass protests which have seized our nation in over 1300 protests involving three and a half million American citizens galvanized to action by the economic instability of Trump’s foolish tariffs and trade wars, by the monkeywrenching of the institutions of democracy by Musk’s teams of juvenile hooligans and especially fears of loss of social security and medicare, by the horrors of our complicity in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians as our tax dollars buy the deaths of children, journalists, and doctors, and by the state terror of ICE and the abduction without trial and deportation to foreign gulags of just about anyone including our citizens, tourists, political dissidents, and nonwhite folks with tattoos of their mama or a football team.
Part of what is happening is that capitalism in its terminal stage wherein all wealth and power goes to the top one percent is attempting to free itself from its host political system, democracy; another source of destabilization is that the Trump regime is composed of conflicting ideologies.
As written by Ben Davis in The Guardian, in an article entitled Two visions within Trump world are battling for primacy. Which will win? The second Trump administration was backed and is staffed by two major – and widely differing – ideological projects; “The start of the second Trump administration has been chaotic, to put it mildly. It is difficult for Americans to understand what exactly the administration is trying to do and how it will affect them. It has been simultaneously a colossal remaking of the US state and the entire global order, but also seemingly haphazard, with significant policy decisions such as spending cuts and tariff rates clearly made with little thought or preparation. Analysts and commentators of all stripes have speculated on the motives and strategy behind the Trump administration’s huge overhaul of society. But what is the Trump administration’s plan for the US?
The primary moves the administration has made are major cuts to federal government capacity through the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and now an unprecedented tariff regime that has sent financial markets into a free fall. Some view these changes as part of a grand overarching strategy to rebuild some version of an imagined past America: globally hegemonic and able to exercise power nakedly over other countries, economically self-sufficient with a large manufacturing base, and a reassertion of the previous social norms and order around gender, race, and sexuality. But a deeper dive into the Trump administration’s explanation of their policies and vision reveals that rather than a single, coherent ideological project, the Trump administration is sclerotic and being used as a vehicle for more than one competing ideological project.
While the first Trump administration had no real ideological project, with Donald Trump’s surprise win being based on a personalist coalition without the backing of an organized movement, and different factions within the administration battling for control over policy and favor from the president, the second Trump administration was backed and is staffed by two major ideological projects, representing different segments of capital: the oft-discussed “national conservatism” of the Claremont Institute, the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025, and tech capital, which has used Trump as a vehicle for its own priorities.
These two overarching political projects and visions both see Trump as able to advance their goals, but these projects are competing with each other. Both have accepted that Republicans will lose the midterms in 2026, as the president’s party nearly always does, and are thus trying to radically reshape society in that time in ways that can’t easily be reversed. They have deeply different visions for the future, and whether one wins out or both of their incompatible sets of policies are carried out will have enormous implications for the lives of Americans and people around the globe.
On tariffs, the administration has offered multiple, mutually exclusive visions: with some viewing tariffs as primarily a way to rebuild US manufacturing by incentivizing producers to build in the US; some viewing tariffs as primarily a way to raise revenue, cut the deficit, and in the long-term replace the income tax entirely; and some viewing tariffs primarily as a negotiating tool to force countries to make concessions to the US on a variety of issues.
Trump personally has suggested that the US become an autarky, with no trade of any kind with the outside world. It’s unclear which of these will be the plan because they each have dramatically different implications for how the tariffs are structured in the long-term, how long they will last, and their effects on US workers.
In the first two views, the tariffs are a part of the national conservative project of returning the US to a previous social order. They view the nation-state as the primary actor in a zero-sum anarchic global order of competing nation-states seeking to dominate each other. Tariffs are then a way of reasserting US national power relative to other states. This fits in with Trump’s rhetoric about the US, taking the country back and reasserting American nationhood, and is the primary way analysts and commentators have viewed the administration.
The tech capital that oversees Doge, however, has a different project entirely. Elon Musk, who has personally overseen the large-scale slashing of the federal government, rejects tariffs entirely. The Doge project and the tariff project are at odds. The Doge project is cloaked in the rhetoric of retro America First nationalism that would seem on its face (and is understood as by its supporters) to be precisely the opposite of what it is in practice: the outmoding of the nation-state entirely.
It’s notable that the first target for Doge’s cuts were not the New Deal programs conservatives have long wanted to cut, but instead the cold war-era nodes of American state power: scientific research, funding for education and the arts, foreign aid, and other programs that were created to allow the US to outcompete the Soviet Union and other countries. Musk does not care about American great power competition, such as with China, as Trump does. Indeed, Musk has close ties with the Chinese state.
For Musk and his cohorts, the US must progress past the nation state model – where the state exist to project power against other nation states and part of this bargain is keeping a certain social compact of living standard with citizens – to the vendor state model where international firms are paramount and states exist instead to compete for their favor. The Doge project of Silicon Valley technolibertarianism aims to sublimate the state to capital entirely and to outsource state capacity to transnational tech firms. This is, rather than an end of globalization as the national conservatives want, the final conclusion of globalization, where international capital exists above and beyond the bounds of the nation-state.
This is the reason large swathes of tech capital reversed course on Trump during the Biden administration and became his biggest financial backers. For them, Trump exists as a vehicle for their overall project.
Both of these projects are disastrous for the American people on their own, but both being partially implemented in opposing ways is even worse and will lead to disaster for US workers and our society’s basic capacity to function.
While the tariffs by themselves are devastating to US consumers and could lead to a major economic crisis, the Doge cuts strip state capacity that would be needed to implement the most positive vision of tariffs returning manufacturing jobs. While tariffs drive up prices on things like semiconductors or electric vehicles, the government is simultaneously slashing the programs designed to encourage these goods to be manufactured domestically. And while the Doge cuts have slashed the state and led to the direct capture of swathes of the state by tech capital, their overall project of global tech hegemony cannot progress in a world where international trade has broken down completely.
Trump and the national conservative’s dream of a return to a pre-financialization manufacturing-based economy, where the US has security through economic self-reliance, and the tech right’s commitment to creating shareholder value at all costs, and whose entire model is based entirely on the result of financialization, are incompatible and on a collision course. Different sections of capital – tech on the one hand, and the revanchist small capital class who form national conservatism’s base on the other – have different and competing interests and control of different sections of administration policy. The consequences of this intranecine competition are enormous, but either way, the next four years look dire for the American working class. The damage may take generations to fix.“
Yet there is a silver lining in this cloud of our doom and the fall of civilization; the personal humiliation of Trump and the loss of credibility of his regime and his treasonous and dishonorable minions in the Party of Treason, and the fracture and incipient collapse of the whole agenda of Trump and the Fourth Reich in the subversion of democracy.
As written by Robert Tait in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s about-face on tariffs reveals chaos at the core of his presidency: Time will tell how much damage has been inflicted on the credibility of Trump’s economic policy and administration; “Donald Trump’s climbdown on Wednesday from the most draconian aspects of his tariff regime has uncovered a damning picture of chaos at the heart of his presidency without necessarily alleviating their most painful effects.
The president’s landmark “liberation day” unveiling of tariffs in the White House Rose Garden on 2 April was supposed to be symbolic gateway to his promised “golden age of American greatness”; instead, it triggered a cascade of global market crashes that prompted warnings of a recession, or even a 1930s-style depression, while Trump brushed it all off as temporary “disruption”.
Time alone will tell how much damage has been inflicted on the credibility of Trump’s economic policy and indeed his entire administration by the ditching of nearly 80 years of US economic and free trading architecture, only to be followed by a sharp, if partial, U-turn.
The president’s sudden and unheralded retreat from a signature policy that he has advocated for more than four decades has placated Wall Street and international bond markets, which rallied at the news of his 90-day pause on tariffs that rose to above 50% on the goods from some countries deemed to have been “ripping off” the US in their trade practices.
But left untouched was a 10% across-the-board duty levied on all foreign imports – not to mention a further tariff hike on all goods from China – meaning that higher consumer prices are on the way for Americans, no matter how relieved the masters of the universe on Wall Street and other international trading centers are feeling.
“Most Americans care less about the spin and more about the fact that his 10% across-the-board tariff will still cost families an average of $2,600 more annually,” Matt McDermott, a Democratic pollster, posted on Bluesky.
The market mayhem unleashed by Trump’s “liberation day” tariff rollout is reminiscent of the reaction to the attempt by the British prime minister, Liz Truss, to stage a radical reordering of UK economic policy in 2022.
The constitutional niceties of the America’s political system will no doubt save the president from the fate of the hapless Truss, who was memorably outlasted by a head of lettuce and driven from Downing Street within 50 days of taking office as international markets rejected her policies as non-credible.
No such mechanism exists for removing a US president whose policies trigger market turmoil at home and abroad.
Perhaps buoyed up by that knowledge, Trump’s closest aides and acolytes tried to present his political backflip as a sign of strategic genius that had always been part of a brilliant plan.
“This was his strategy all along. President Trump created maximum negotiating leverage for himself,” said Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, who had been locked in urgent discussions with the president onboard Air Force One on Sunday about the effect of last week’s “liberation day” tariffs, according to the New York Times.
“Many of you in the media clearly missed The Art of the Deal. You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here,” explained the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, who a day before had said that Trump was not considering a delay to putting the tariffs into effect.
Yet the depiction of a carefully plotted strategy going perfectly to plan was undermined by Trump himself, who gave a strikingly blunt explanation for his volte-face.
“Well, I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line,” he said. “They were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid.”
It seemed a graphic portrayal of a loss of nerve – all the more so given that Trump had told Republicans that “I know what the hell I’m doing” and urged his followers to ignore the plunging markets and “BE COOL” on a post on his Truth Social network just hours earlier. “Everything is going to work out well,” he insisted.
That remains to be seen.
So too does the strength of Trump’s determination to plough ahead with a tariff policy which, even in its diluted iteration following Wednesday’s announcement, threatens to lumber Americans with higher living costs – an outcome at odds with the president’s campaign promise to reduce prices “on day one”.
Writing in the Washington Post, Aaron Blake noted that Wednesday’s decision was Trump’s second tariff climbdown since taking office without gaining anything in return, having previously backed away from duties on Mexico and Canada with only minor concessions.
Rather than being strategic, as Bessent, Leavitt and others claimed, he wrote, there was “reason to believe that this is indeed another example of Trump caving. And a big one at that.”
Trump has marketed his leadership on a message of strength, which has communicated itself to congressional Republicans, who – with a few notable exceptions – have fallen publicly into line with his tariff policies, whatever their qualms.
But having seen the president apparently buckle to market pressure, the question now arises over whether more of them will find the courage to push back. It is a question that could acquire added urgency as next year’s midterms loom into view, presenting an opportunity for voters to punish the GOP at the ballot box if inflation surges.’
‘If he’d stayed on the golf course, we’d be in a better place’: experts on Trump’s tariffs, one year on
Last April, the president unleashed a tidal wave of tariffs on ‘liberation day’. Analysts say the policy has failed, even by the Trump administration’s own terms
Report on Manufactures: Enriched edition. Foundations of American Industrial Policy: Tariffs, Subsidies, and a Diversified National Economy, Alexander Hamilton
A joke on April Fools Day, because no one would ever do to police terrorists what they do to us all the time.
How to deal with ICE, in a Bizarro World where everything we know is reversed and there is justice for all:
Never let them abduct anyone.
Say nothing to the enemy, and hear nothing they say, because everything the enemy says is a lie.
Never obey, for we are not their property.
Flood them with false leads, fragment their efforts, send up general alarms regarding their movements and actions, set them against each other, rescue and escort their targets to safety, and render them useless and harmless.
Flash mob and capture them. Send them to secret foreign gulags like they do with us at Cecot.
Follow them home and publish their names and addresses. Shame and cast them out.
If they come for us, we come for them.
As the enemy does, so let it be done in return.
This ends the prank part of this communication, which does not authorize direct action in resistance and liberation struggle like Nelson Mandela did against the Apartheid regime on December 16 1977 by underlining a passage of the play Julius Caesar in the Robben Island Bible, a copy of Shakespeare passed among the prisoners;
“Cowards die many times before their deaths.
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.”
Sic Semper Tyrannis, friends.
On this April Fool’s Day, let us enact reversals of order, play tricks which open the gates of our prisons to paths of transformational change, pursue the sacred calling of the truth teller, perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority by acts of disbelief and disobedience, and let us bring the Chaos.
Live with grandeur; so Jean Genet teaches us, and prescribes the embrace of our own darkness as a path of liberation in the discovery and performance of our true and best selves.
We all of us who in refusal to submit to Authority become Unconquered and bring the chaos as Living Autonomous Zones must question everything, ourselves most of all, if we are to dream new possibilities of becoming human.
A maker of mischief, I; who sabotages authority and systems of unequal power in any ways I can imagine and whenever possible as part of a sacred calling in pursuit of truth.
Once as a prank while teaching American History in high school I switched the textbook, a compendium of national memory, identity, and authorized truth, with the alternative American history trilogy by William S. Burroughs;
Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands. I was hoping someone would call me on it, but no one ever did, so I went right on teaching the whole semester how insectoid aliens from Venus secretly rule earth through the Algebra of Need and our addiction to wealth and power symbolized by the heroin they regurgitate. I think we had more fun in American History class that year than is usual.
If games of transgression, unauthorized identities, and transformation you would play, I invite you to play a game of chance with me. Write down six characters you would like to play, traditionally in chaos magic this would be three male and three female characters though clearly here as in life all rules are arbitrary and I encourage you to create your own and change them at random, and throw a six sided dice to choose who you will be today. No matter who you live as today, you will have five other possible selves in reserve, and tomorrow is another day and another throw of the dice. All identity is theatrical performance.
Today I discovered an ingenious art project of li.gorbunova publishing as Liza’s lifestyle, which she describes as; “the dollhouse” – a visual story about the gradual, almost voluntary disappearance of the self.” Here follows my reply: Who among us is not a prisoner of our own ideas about who we are? Our identities are a performance, but who is the audience? This is the Riddle of the Dollhouse, and it teaches us about freedom.
In accord with Virginia Woolf’s principle that if we cannot tell the truth about ourselves we cannot tell the truth about others, here are some of the voices I hear in my thoughts as my own internal dialogue and character roles on which I have modeled myself in various contexts as performance of identity; Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard when I must lead and command, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes when I need to find hidden connections to assemble meaning, be hyper aware and vigilant in complex, obscured, and time compressed situations, or profile and assess character and motives, and as a teenager working through the trauma of my near execution in 1974 Brazil by police my role model was Leonard Nimoy’s self-disciplined Spock, surviving at the edge of an Abyss by ruthless control of oneself and the chaotic maelstrom of passions which threaten to consume us.
That last I have outgrown as I became an adult, and instead learned in diametrical opposition to Freud that we must embrace our monstrosity if we are to free ourselves from the recursive forces of fear, power, and violence which create and perpetuate human evil.
Celebrate with me April Fool’s Day as a liminal and transformative time of exploring unknowns beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, the defiance of authority, the sabotage of elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege, seizures of power from systems of oppression and carceral states of force and control, the violation of norms, and liberation from other people’s ideas of virtue.
By such acts we do give answer to the terror of our nothingness with the joy of total freedom.
Let us run amok and be ungovernable.
As I wrote in my post of November 25 2020, Using Chaos and Transgression as Revolutionary Acts to Transform Law and Order Into Liberty and Equality; I am against law and order because law serves power, order appropriates and divides us into hierarchies of elite belonging and categories of exclusionary otherness, whereas Chaos autonomizes and transgression empowers liberation struggle, delegitimation of authority, and seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
Let us restore the balance to systems of unequal power and unjust authority; for no inequality is fair, and there is no just authority.
Rejoice with me in this time of reversals of order through the performance of Acts of Transgression and Chaos. Let us dance our best and secret selves on the stage of the world, forge new truths, destroy and create ourselves anew in the ways we ourselves have chosen, and transform the systems and structures of oppression and tyranny, patriarchy and white supremacist terror, forces of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, into a diverse and inclusive free society of equals.
Dance with us in joy, revolution, and the frightening of the horses.
As I wrote in my post of April 1 2020, There Is No Return To Normal; There is no return to normal if and when the Doom of Man pandemic ends. Normal doesn’t live here anymore.
Once there was an illusion of mirrors, echoes, distorted surfaces without meaning, hollow and beautiful like a gossamer web of lies and irresistible as a gingerbread house.
It calls to us, this thing of no escape, this American Dream, with promises of wealth and the power to choose the condition of our own lives. Our songs are of meritocracy, upward mobility, and an inclusive society, but concealed within are harsh realities of unequal power and opportunity limited by authorized identities and divisions of caste or class, race, gender, faith, and nationality.
We are lured with belonging and membership, but offered only identitarian tribalization and exclusionary boundaries of otherness.
We are seduced with the guarantee of our right to the pursuit of happiness, but our society can produce only material diversions which commodify and dehumanize us.
We are offered security from intrusive forces at the price of our freedom and equality, and submission to authority and tyrannies of force and control. But security is an illusion, often one manufactured through fear by those who would enslave us as a pretext for the centralization of power to tyranny.
Throughout American history since our founding we have ever been a free society of equals, co-owners of our own government, each of us a king of his own life, but only on paper. The American Revolution has yet to be achieved; it is an ongoing process in which each of us must negotiate the alignment and boundaries between freedom and authority and between the ideal and the real.
In this struggle we are the prize; our agency or enslavement, our authenticity or the capture and limitation of the possibilities of our identity, our liberty both as individuals and as interdependent members of humankind.
And we must act now to save ourselves and our civilization, for we are running out of time. We are in a contest of survival against plutocratic corporate greed and our extinction as a species on one hand and against fascist tyranny and the fall of democracy and global civilization on the other.
Let us free ourselves from the illusions of our normality.
My Possible Best Selves and Role Models of Identity Performance
Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard
Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes
Leonard Nimoy as Spock
The great question of being human, as Kirk puts to alternate universe Spock; “In every revolution, there is one man with a vision”. Yes, my Spock is bizarro universe pirate Spock.
Here follow some things I wrote in March in reference to posts discovered on Face Book, mostly news articles, which never became full essays of mine.
I decided to catalog these because some important things can be read in what I chose to reply to; the values and motives of an American observer of our unfolding history, what I assign importance to and am moved to process by public response as trauma management or which captures attention and motivates response, what issues and current events engage me on a profound emotional level and incite, provoke, and inspire action.
Such a chronology won’t tell you what was most important, only most important to me. So poor a bellwether of the American mass consciousness as I may be, being far outside the boundaries of normality in any number of ways, my hope is that my work may be illuminating to the studies of some future scientist of the Fall of America and the collapse of civilization, human or otherwise; possibly also to persons unknown who may choose to act to prevent it. To such I say; I’ve done what I could, now you must bear the dream of Liberty onward.
Herein also is revealed how I internalized current events as instruments of self construction, as informing, motivating, and shaping forces of history. Always there are two sides to the puzzle we are trying to solve in becoming human; one a picture of the world as it should be, the other of an ideal human being. I’ve discovered a trick over the years of making mischief for tyrants and finding offramps from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force which is the origin of evil; if you get the human right, the world will also be right.
I close today’s essay by speaking directly to you and to any future audience, in surety against the unpredictable.
Thank you taking this journey with me; may you be better than myself, and find the vision which can heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world I could not.
Posts and References
I sail the seas of unknown fates, to shores of nameless things.
In reply to my sister:
“If I had
a time traveling yacht,
Would I go back
and visit old friends
who now are with their gods,
or already reborn
into the special new lives
their community wished for them?
I should refrain
So as not to disrupt the timeline
that led to their
perfect fates.”
Trump sabotaged the democracy movement in Iran by attacking its civilians and infrastructure of life, not the regime and its massive armies. This is his purpose, to replace democracy with tyranny globally, especially those aligned with his ethnostate theocracy even when the specifics of race and faith differ, because all are also forms of state patriarchy and kleptocracy. Republicans want to rape, enslave, and plunder everyone and everything; this is their sole ideology.
America has no beliefs, no hopes, no dreams, no songs of liberty and equality for which to live; only death, violence, dehumanization, and its forms as brute power and mirages of wealth. We no longer have anything to offer the world, the future, nothing which exalts, celebrates, and guarantees our humanity. America has Fallen, and the Age of Tyrants begins.
“Pete Hegseth is promoting a nihilist cult of death
Jan-Werner Müller
It appears that members of Trump’s cabinet get chosen not despite their endorsements of violence, but because of them. Pete Hegseth was primarily known as a dapper TV host willing to defend war crimes. Markwayne Mullin is apparently still proud of challenging a witness to a fistfight at a Senate hearing; he also refuses to apologize for “understanding” an assault on fellow senator Rand Paul. Never before has an administration so openly glorified outright killing as the current White House propaganda machine does with its obscene snuff videos of the Iran war and the destruction of small boats.
Unlike with fascism in the 20th century, there is no attempt to promote or symbolically reward self-sacrifice – it is just video game-style killing at a distance, justified not with strategic objectives, but with seemingly uncontrollable emotions (“fury” and a thirst for vengeance). And all accompanied by open admissions that basic laws of warfare will be broken. Actual soldiers with longstanding codes of honor, as opposed to the fantasy world Hegseth is creating with his cliche-ridden chatter on TV, would not punch enemies when they are down.
Trump has never hidden his desire for domination and the related willingness to have his followers engage in violence, from the call to rough up people at his rallies to the pardons of even the most brutal January 6 insurrectionists.
Hegseth and company are promoting an ultimately nihilist cult of death
During his first administration, an “axis of adults” mostly held his worst impulses in check; after the Venezuela “excursion” and the realization that people on small boats can be killed with impunity, Hegseth, and perhaps even Rubio, seem drunk on the idea that special military operations could be quick and costless in American lives – and make for great TV. Trump’s fixation on visuals and props – if I show a pile of paper on TV, it means I really have divested from my companies, or I really have a great healthcare plan – is now shared across his administration.
Trump himself appears to treat a global decapitation campaign as if it were a version of The Apprentice that includes firing live ammunition – as if he gets to remove other leaders, and as if he should get to choose the successors of whoever gets kidnapped or killed.
Historically, there is an ideology that made the glorification of violence central to their propaganda. “Long live death” was a fascist slogan; Mussolini’s movement started with veterans and celebrated them as a “trenchocracy” – an aristocracy of men hardened by battle in the trenches.
Gigantic ossuaries for the war dead – some holding the bones of as many as 100,000 dead soldiers – were meant to encourage future sacrifice; the Nazis in turn presented their youth with slogans like “We are born to die for Germany”.
It seems that Hegseth and company are also promoting an ultimately nihilist cult of death. But it celebrates killing by pressing a button thousands of miles away; meanwhile, America’s own dead are dishonored, as Trump has used their repatriation to display his Maga merch and fundraise off the victims of war.
Simultaneously, faithful to his master’s desire for total domination and destruction, Hegseth announces future war crimes on live TV (“no quarter”) and encourages gratuitous cruelty: “We are punching them while they’re down.” The obscene focus on “lethality” is part of this shift towards war understood as inflicting maximum destruction and pain (as opposed to achieving strategic objectives – which the administration has of course been utterly incapable of articulating).
The reality of war itself recedes because the airwaves are filled with an endless series of entertaining images and empty talk. Hegseth, fond of laughably overwrought language and alliterations in particular (“warriors, not wokesters”), seems unable to articulate anything other than cliches (“unbreakable will”) or snippets of a Christian nationalism which flies in the face of the first amendment’s prohibiting an established religion: one cannot make it a litmus test of patriotism that citizens pray for the troops on bended knees and in the name of Jesus.
The point is not to equate the two men, but one cannot help but remember how Hannah Arendt, in her highly controversial book on the Eichmann trial, described the Nazi bureaucrat: someone utterly incapable of thinking, someone who instead just produced an endless stream of hollow phrases.
Will all this have an effect in legitimizing an illegal war? Hegseth has also created a fantasy world inside the Pentagon itself; instead of press conferences with critical questions and genuine answers, there is gentle back-and-forth between “the secretary of war” – a fantasy name, as Congress has not authorized changing the department’s name – and figures from the Epoch Times and LindellTV (the world according to “the MyPillow guy”).
Even with this extra layer of insulation from reality, Hegseth insisted that the press was not being positive enough about US attacks on Iran. Like with many Maga men performing puerile stunts for the manosphere, the fragile ego inside seems incapable of facing up to the reality of what has been unleashed so thoughtlessly.”
Can this free us from fossil fuel climate catastrophe? When the lights go out, what else changes?
Emotion is evolutionary, and also a product of history. The idea of romantic love as we now use it was invented by Marie of France in the late Middle Ages to refer to something occurring outside of marriage, or contracts between dynasties. That this love would be something people in the future would marry for was unimaginable to her or anyone in her time. And we are still evolving and changing.
“A common assumption is that throughout history, people have experienced the same basic range of emotions. A radical field of history now challenges this assumption, Gal Beckerman reported in 2025. https://theatln.tc/93LEvySV
People tend to imagine that other people “have the exact same set of emotions that we have,” Beckerman writes. “We perform this projection on any number of human experiences: losing a child, falling ill, being bored at work. We assume that emotions in the past are accessible because we assume that at their core, people in the past were just like us, with slight tweaks for their choice of hats and of personal hygiene.”
Rob Boddice, a leader in the field of the history of emotions and senses, mistrusts this universalism, a philosophy that emerged during the Enlightenment, when European intellectuals began to assume that all people share a common nature. Many critics now understand that they were attempting to exert power and order over a world that had recently become bigger and stranger. “By the time we get to our current globalized culture, in which a Korean thriller can win Best Picture at the Oscars and Latin pop stars dominate the U.S. charts, the notion that our emotional registers are all essentially alike feels self-evident,” Beckerman continues.
“Boddice starts with the opposite premise, that we are not the same,” Beckerman writes. “Rather than being a constant—extending across space and time—human nature for Boddice is a variable and unstable category, one with infinite possible shades.”
Although his approach might seem “squishy and postmodern,” Beckerman writes, Boddice’s research layers his own thinking on top of the most recent advances in neuroscience.”
Pick one from the group and follow him home. As they do to others, let it be so with them in return.
We should build in place of the ballroom a memorial to the Trump Fourth Reich’s crimes as a lasting witness of history to the need for vigilance against fascist tyranny and terror.
In reference to:
(post by Occupy emocrats) “BREAKING: A federal judge HAMMERS the Trump administration over the White House East Wing demolition, says that calling it simply an “alteration” requires a “brazen interpretation of the laws of vocabulary.”
And he wasn’t done there…
“It would have been a heck of a lot easier by any standard to have just gone to Congress to get the authority to do it,” said U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, slamming the administration for using “shifting theories and shifting dynamics” to argue that Trump had the legal authority to perform the demolition.
The case was brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation who are seeking an end to construction of Trump’s ballroom unless he can acquire congressional approval and pass independent reviews. The $400 million ballroom has become a central fixation for Trump despite the floundering economy and a worsening war in the Middle East. He sees the insanely corrupt project — which is being financed by large corporate donations — as a means of eking out a permanent legacy for himself.
In addition to rejecting the idea that Trump can pursue the project under a law that grants the power to pursue “alteration” and “improvement” as “the President may determine,” Judge Leon dismissed the idea that the White House falls under the National Park’s Authority for approval.
“This isn’t any national park. This is an iconic symbol of this nation,” he said.
The judge further stated that the Trump administration has “no track record” of properly following the usual approval processes.
Leon has stated that he intends on issuing his final ruling by the end of March. If he rules against Trump, the case will almost certainly move into the appeals process, but if we can keep this tied up in court until after the midterms and Democrats retake Congress, Trump will never get approval to finish his vanity project.”
Family values, Republican style
In reference to:
(Occupy Democrats post) “ BREAKING: “I NEVER GOT TO HOLD HER!” Trump’s ICE goons arrested a Dreamer while he was driving to deliver milk to his premature child in the ICU!
Juan Chavez Velasco was driving with his wife to the hospital to deliver milk to his prematurely born daughter, who was just 12 days old, when the goon squad rolled up on him.
He told them he had children. He told them he had a wife. He told them he had DACA and was legally allowed to be here.
Their response?
“They said, ‘That doesn’t matter.’”
Chavez Velasco was thrown into the gulag in Laredo, taken away from his wife and three kids, all of whom are U.S. citizens.
He was brought to the US by his parents when he was just 8 years old. Juan’s had DACA since 2012, he earned two bachelor’s degrees, and worked on frontline of covid-19 pandemic in an ER medical lab.
None of that matters to Trump’s ghouls.
DHS told MS now that he was “an illegal alien” who was “issued a final order of removal in 2005,” and that “being in detention is a choice,” as the government would give him “$2,600 and a free flight” to self-deport.
That’s how the “family values” administration decides to treat new fathers of American citizens.
They are systematically breaking the law left and right in order to fulfill Stephen Miller’s sick and twisted dreams of a white ethnostate, no matter who suffers in the process.
Our heart breaks for this poor man and we urge Texas Democrats to do everything they can to make sure this father gets to hold his new child.”
Because people want to fight our state tyranny. We are not quite at total war point, but the interior life of Americans has changed to regard the state as an enemy and resistance as heroic. The Trump regime inhabits the same imaginal space as that of Hitler, and this will become electoral, legal, legislative, and direct action.
So where does this leave all our friends from off planet?
In reference to:
(Fox News Seattle) “State and local offices across Washington are now under direction to remove “alien” from statutes. Instead, instances of that phrasing will be replaced with “noncitizen.”
Our tax dollars at work
In reference to:
(Occupy Democrats post ) “BREAKING: Judge orders viral DOGE deposition videos taken down after HUMILIATING testimony spreads across the internet
The Trump administration just scored a temporary courtroom victory — but not before millions of Americans saw exactly how Elon Musk’s controversial DOGE operation was making decisions that upended federal programs.
A federal judge has now ordered that viral deposition videos featuring former Department of Government Efficiency staffers be removed from the internet after clips exploded across social media.
And the reason they went viral is pretty obvious. In the now-infamous testimony, DOGE employees admitted they used ChatGPT to identify federal grants to cancel under the administration’s anti-DEI crackdown — despite having no background in the humanities, history, or the fields they were judging.
One clip that spread like wildfire featured a DOGE staffer explaining why a project about Jewish women forced into slave labor during the Holocaust had been flagged as inappropriate.
His explanation? Because the documentary focused on Jewish women and amplified “marginalized voices,” making it — in his view — a diversity program.
Yes, really.
The videos quickly became internet fodder, with critics mocking the testimony as proof that sweeping cultural and academic cuts were being made by inexperienced operatives armed with little more than an AI chatbot and ideological talking points.
But the controversy surrounding DOGE doesn’t stop there.
A separate whistleblower report recently alleged that a DOGE-linked software engineer walked out of the Social Security Administration with a thumb drive containing data on roughly 500 million Americans — including Social Security numbers, birth dates, and citizenship information. According to the whistleblower, the engineer even bragged that if the move turned out to be illegal, Donald Trump would simply pardon him.
Now, as the videos disappear from YouTube under court order, the groups suing the government argue the public is being deprived of crucial evidence about how DOGE operated behind closed doors.BREAKING: Judge orders viral DOGE deposition videos taken down after HUMILIATING testimony spreads across the internet
Their message is simple: if these officials were confident in their decisions, the public should be able to see how those decisions were made. Because when AI, ideology, and government power collide — transparency matters more than ever.
At least we still have the written articles detailing the failures of the DOGE bros.”
Their criminal acts were printing and handing out flyers, wearing black bloc, and peacefully protesting. No violence, none at all, yet a conviction on terrorism. This shall not stand.
Also how Ukraine was disarmed for conquest by Russia. Do not allow the enemy or any imperial powers to set the terms of struggle.
In reference to:
(Occupy Democrats post) “BREAKING Aisha Gaddafi, the daughter of the sla!n Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, has addressed the people of Iran.
“Negotiations with w0lves do not lead to the salvation of the herd – they merely set the date for the next hunt,” she stated.
According to her, the West assured her father that if he gave up on nucl£ar weap0ns and ballist!c miss!le programs, the world would open its doors to him.
“He believed it, made concessions… And NATO’s b0mbs turned Libya into ru!ns”. She urged Iranians not to make concessions to the en£my, as they do not lead to peace, but only to destructi0n.”
The use of force always returns. This means that attempts to impose order and control always fail. Security is an illusion.
Trump should surrender to Iran. The UN can form a caretaker government while America begins to become a democracy, and pays reparations to Iran. Our war criminals should be sent to trial at the Hague. Israel should be disarmed totally and placed under a hundred year arms embargo.
What is force majeure in a contract? An associate of mine was once paid by Chinese gangsters to take over the nation of Ghana in Africa, where most chocolate beans are produced; his team were en route to Rio to train, and thought the fix was in as Argentine intelligence, a CIA proxy or ally, was on the ship as advisors. But they were double crossed and arrested; it took a year to escape prison in Brazil as he had to seize control of it, and walked out the front gates at the head of an army of gangs he had subordinated and unified. The force majeure clause in his contract meant he didn’t have to pay the fee back.
In reference to:
(post attributed to Shanaka Anslem Perera t/@shanaka86 ) “”JUST IN: Bapco Energies just declared force majeure. Bahrain’s only refinery. 405,000 barrels per day. Eighty-five percent exported. Ninety years old. The sole refining facility for an entire nation.
Force majeure means the company is legally unable to fulfil its contractual obligations. Cargoes already paid for will not be delivered. Diesel, jet fuel, and refined petroleum products that buyers across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East were expecting will not arrive. The contracts are suspended. The supply is gone.
The attack that triggered the declaration was an Iranian drone and missile strike on the Sitra refinery complex on 9 March. Fire broke out in at least one unit. Bahrain’s National Communication Centre confirmed containment with 32 civilians injured in the broader raids. Bapco stated domestic fuel supplies remain secured. But export operations, which account for 85% of the refinery’s output, are halted.
This is not a full physical shutdown. It is something more consequential. It is a legal shutdown.
Force majeure converts physical damage into contractual default. Every buyer holding a confirmed cargo from Bapco must now source replacement barrels from an already strained market where Hormuz is commercially closed, QatarEnergy is under its own force majeure, Iraq has cut production 70%, and VLCC charter rates sit at $424,000 per day. The replacement barrels do not exist at pre-war prices. Some do not exist at any price.
This is the third force majeure declaration from the Gulf in nine days. QatarEnergy declared force majeure on all LNG exports after Iranian strikes hit Ras Laffan and Mesaieed, removing approximately 20% of global LNG supply. Kuwait’s national oil company announced precautionary production cuts. Now Bahrain’s sole refinery joins the cascade.
Each declaration compounds the others. QatarEnergy’s force majeure tightened LNG markets. Bapco’s tightens refined product markets. When the refinery that processes crude into usable fuel goes offline, the disruption moves downstream from the wellhead to the petrol station, the shipping terminal, the airport fuel depot, and the industrial boiler. Crude oil prices capture the headline. Refined product margins capture the damage.
Diesel margins were already surging before this declaration. Jet fuel crack spreads were at multi-year highs as 30,000 cancelled flights rerouted through Asian hubs burning additional fuel on longer routes. Bapco’s 405,000 barrels per day of refining capacity going offline removes a meaningful share of Gulf refined product supply at the precise moment global demand for alternative routing fuel is spiking.
The IRGC’s 31 autonomous provincial commands did not need to close the Strait to cripple Bahrain’s energy exports. They needed one drone through the air defence screen. One hit on one unit of one refinery. The rest is done by lawyers, force majeure clauses, and a contracts market that cascades default through every buyer in the chain.
The Strait was closed by insurance. The refinery was closed by a drone. The exports were closed by a legal clause. Three different mechanisms. One outcome. Supply removed from a market that cannot replace it.
Hormuz. Qatar. Now Bahrain. Three force majeures in nine days. The Gulf’s energy architecture is being dismantled one legal declaration at a time.”
Next Israel will claim ownership of all historical ghettos in Europe, and send occupation forces. If you protest, Trump will bomb you. Ok, not today, but still possible.
No American puppet rule will be welcomed by the people of Iran. Much as they fear and hate the mullahs, they fear and hate us far more. If you want to find a post regime government, you must find one internal to Iran.
I am writing about Nietzschean Affirmation, saying yes to the life force and to the whole of human existence, both the beautiful and the abominable, reading The Will to Power and Derrida’s essay about it, with hail tapping on my window, so I go out into the storm and welcome it. I take a picture of the years first crocuses in the hailstones. Now I am going in to say yes to a hot coffee. My dog follows, its too cold even for her.
Add the Mayan Genocide by our puppet tyrant. Actually, once you start looking, we are the Atrocity nation. There are thousands, all the time, everywhere.
The Arab American Alliance is breaking apart. Iran is using fracture as a strategy.
In reference to:
(FB post by Alan Browning) “Mohamed Rashid Bin Nasr is with Ahmed Khamis and
6 others
.
March 4 at 7:54 AM
·
QATAR’S DIPLOMATIC EVICTION NOTICE: “Please Leave” — The Most Polite “Get Out” in Middle Eastern History
In which the host of the largest US base in the region suddenly remembers that hospitality has limits, and the guests who overstayed their welcome are now being asked to pack their bags while the missiles keep flying
BREAKING: Qatar has officially requested the US to “reconsider” basing strategies.
Translation: “Please leave. We’re not asking again. Take your THAADs, your F-35s, your $1.1 billion radar rubble, and go.”
THE AL UDEID SITUATION
Let’s talk about Al Udeid Air Base. The largest US military installation in the Middle East. Home to 8,000-10,000 American troops. The Combined Air Operations Centre—the brain of US Central Command’s air campaigns. Two 12,000-foot runways. $5 billion invested since 1996.
And now, apparently, a very expensive white elephant that Qatar would like to return to sender.
THE TIMING IS EVERYTHING
This request comes after:
· Iranian missiles hit Al Udeid (multiple times)
· The $1.1 billion radar became $0 worth of scrap metal
· The Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain was destroyed
· US soldiers started hiding in hotels across the Gulf
· American warships started fleeing toward open water
· The “invincible” US military started looking very, very vincible
The Qataris looked at this situation and thought: “You know what? Maybe hosting the world’s biggest target isn’t the best strategy for a small country with a lot of gas.”
THE DIPLOMATIC LANGUAGE
“Reconsider basing strategies” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. In normal English, that means:
· “We’ve talked about this.”
· “We’ve thought about this.”
· “We’ve decided.”
· “Please go.”
It’s the diplomatic equivalent of changing the locks while pretending you lost the keys.
THE OTHER GUESTS ARE LEAVING TOO
Qatar isn’t alone in this realization. Let’s check the party attendance:
Saudi Arabia: Evacuating non-essential US personnel. The party favors are being returned.
UAE: Publicly distancing themselves. “This is not our war,” they keep saying, while their airports burn.
Bahrain: Fifth Fleet headquarters? Destroyed. The welcome mat is on fire.
Oman: Hit. Neutrality? Apparently not a shield.
The party is over. The guests are leaving. The host is sweeping up broken glass and wondering why they ever threw this party in the first place.
THE “SAFE HAVEN” MYTH
Qatar thought it was being smart. Host the Americans. Get protection. Stay safe.
Turns out, “protection” is just another word for “target.” And when Iran started firing, the protection didn’t protect—it attracted.
The $1.1 billion radar didn’t protect anything. It just made a really expensive crater.
The F-35s didn’t protect anything. They’re now grounded, their pilots hiding.
The THAAD systems didn’t protect anything. Two of them are now scrap metal.
The only thing American presence protected was Iran’s ability to demonstrate that no place is safe when you host the empire.
THE ECONOMIC REALITY
Qatar has gas. Lots of it. And right now, that gas is not flowing. LNG production? Halted. The Ras Laffan Industrial City? Targeted. European gas prices? Up 50%.
The entire Qatari economy is based on the idea that stability allows energy to flow. And right now, stability is a memory.
The Americans brought war. The Iranians brought fire. The Qataris brought… what exactly?
THE “RECONSIDER” STRATEGY
What does “reconsider” actually mean in practice? Let’s game it out:
Option 1: The US leaves voluntarily. Saves face. Pretends it was their idea.
Option 2: The US refuses to leave. Iran keeps hitting. More rubble. More smoke. More Qatari infrastructure destroyed.
Option 3: The US leaves under duress. Looks weak. Emboldens adversaries. But at least the missiles stop.
Option 3 is looking pretty attractive right now.
THE OTHER REQUESTS
Qatar’s “request” joins a growing collection:
· Iraq: “Please leave” (multiple times)
· Afghanistan: “Please leave” (they eventually did)
· Syria: “Please leave” (still there, still causing problems)
· Saudi Arabia: “Please evacuate non-essentials” (the first step)
· Kuwait: “We’re reluctant” (the polite version)
The Middle East is slowly, politely, asking the United States to pack its bags. And the United States is slowly, reluctantly, realizing that it has nowhere else to go.
THE HOSPITALITY ANALOGY
Imagine you throw a party. The guest you invited brings 50 friends. They eat all your food. They break your furniture. They start fights with the neighbors. And then they ask you to help clean up the mess they made.
At what point do you say: “You know what? I think it’s time for you to leave”?
Qatar just reached that point.
THE PUNCHLINE
The joke is that Qatar thought hosting the Americans would bring safety. The joke is that they believed the “protection” would protect. The joke is that they didn’t realize that being a host means being a target.
The punchline is being delivered in smoke rising from Al Udeid. It’s being written in rubble where the radar used to be. It’s being spoken by every Qatari official who now has to explain why their country is burning.
The party is over. The guests are leaving. The host is counting the damage.”
Equal opportunity for all requires special services for special needs
Any new leader will be worse than the one before, and we failed to do the one thing you do first in a revolution, free the media blackout. A government in exile waiting to take power can also be useful, but Trumps goal is mere destabilization, not regime change. He is the picador to Israels matador, weakening the victim for the kill.
The contradictions of Empire make it unsustainable
In reference to:
(post by Jack Harding in Speak Up Boldly group) “Trump’s decision to grant India a 30-day sanctions waiver to purchase Russian oil — issued even as Russia actively assists Iran in targeting American forces — creates a stark contradiction: the United States is simultaneously fighting a war and funding one of its adversary’s principal enablers, not only in Trump’s actions in Iran, but also in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
👉 The Waiver and Its Context
On March 5, 2026, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control issued a license authorizing India to receive and purchase Russian crude oil and petroleum products already loaded on vessels as of that date, with all covered transactions permitted through April 3, 2026.¹ Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described the move as a “deliberately short-term measure” that would “not provide significant financial benefit to the Russian government” because it only covers oil already stranded at sea.² The justification: the Iran war and the ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz have disrupted roughly 20 million barrels per day in Gulf production, sending U.S. crude prices up approximately 20% in a single week.³
👉 The Russia-Iran Connection
The strategic problem became acute almost immediately. Following issuance of the waiver, intelligence reports surfaced indicating that Russia is actively aiding Iran in targeting U.S. vessels, aircraft, and military installations in the Middle East theater.⁴ When Energy Secretary Chris Wright was asked about those reports, he declined to confirm them, saying only that “Russia excels at creating turmoil worldwide.”⁵ That non-denial denial sits uncomfortably alongside the administration’s own licensing of Russian oil revenue.
👉 Why the Logic Collapses
The administration’s core argument — that the waiver merely accelerates the sale of oil already at sea and therefore provides no meaningful new revenue to Moscow — depends on a narrow accounting fiction. Oil revenue at any pace replenishes the Kremlin’s war chest, which funds both the Ukraine invasion *and* whatever material and intelligence support Russia is providing to Iran.⁶ Democratic Sens. and Reps. Sam Liccardo (CA) and Ruben Gallego (AZ) put it directly in their letter to Bessent: *”By granting this waiver, you are indicating that the U.S. will reward assaults on our troops rather than deter them.”*⁷
The sanctions themselves were designed specifically to starve Russia of the revenues enabling its wars. That pressure had been working: Russian oil export income had already dwindled due to weak global prices, tightening enforcement against the “shadow fleet” of tankers used to evade the G-7 price cap, and sanctions against Rosneft and Lukoil.⁸ The waiver restores the revenue tap at precisely the moment Russia has the greatest incentive — and demonstrated willingness — to escalate against U.S. forces.
👉 The India Policy Reversal
The reversal is also jarring in its timing relative to the administration’s own prior policy. As recently as August 2025, the U.S. imposed a 50% combined tariff on India (including a 25% penalty specifically for purchasing Russian oil) to coerce New Delhi into cutting Moscow off.⁹ In February 2026 — just weeks before the waiver — Trump announced that India had reached a trade deal *that included a pledge to stop buying Russian oil* in exchange for tariff relief down to 18%.¹⁰ The 30-day waiver effectively dissolved that hard-won commitment the moment an energy price spike created political inconvenience, eight months before midterm elections.¹¹
Rep. Liccardo and Sen. Gallego also raised a procedural indictment: the administration launched military action against Iran without *any* emergency contingency plan to stabilize oil prices through allied energy sources, leaving the U.S. with no option but to turn back to Russian barrels.⁷ Energy analyst Vandana Hari of Vanda Insights described the waiver bluntly as “band-aids on a gunshot wound.”³
The argument that the waiver is self-limiting because it covers only oil *already at sea* is also factually unstable: Bessent himself signaled to Fox Business that the U.S. *could* lift sanctions on *additional* Russian oil beyond the stranded fleet, suggesting the 30-day window is less a ceiling than a floor.¹²
There is simply no coherence here. Not only is Trump showing favor to Putin yet again, he’s defeating whatever in God’s name he’s trying to accomplish in Iran.”
This weapon is now around four decades old. Cold War era; from before the fall of the Belin Wall. Its nothing remarkable among special weapons; if you think this sounds scary, whats scary to me is the banality and pervasiveness of weapons that leave no trace, like the sound machines below human hearing businesses buy and set up outside to drive off scruffy people, designed by the KGB and used against our embassy staff in Havana long ago, which causes brain damage and sometimes death or catastrophic vegetative syndrome months later. ICE uses it now, but its also commercially available and widely used to keep the store fronts clear of loiterers. Its not only an invisible weapon of mass death and crippling used on unsuspecting teenagers and homeless people, but it also does the same to any actual paying customers who may frequent the business, to a lesser degree of harm.
Or compared to the spy drones the size of hummingbirds, used in Afghanistan originally. Our nation uses police violence when terror is the goal; there are many ways to silence and erase dissent without anyone realizing death was not by natural causes.
I absolutely despise and will resist all theocratic regimes; but I will stand in solidarity with all peoples versus imperial conquest and colonial occupation by wretched tyrants including Trump’s Fourth Reich. May we liberate each other, as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights, including those of sovereignty and independence.
They will strike directly at us here in America. I say this not because I know of such plans, but because its what I would do. The question is, Will Russia defend her key ally?
My city of Spokane is a forgotten warren of predation by elites and the human waste products of capitalism; a mafia city, swarming with junkies and overrun with the homeless and the lost; but also a city of hope, solidarity, and resilience.
Spokane was the world capital of methamphetamine production until the labs were raided several years ago. Also flooded with a synthetic heroin called Crocodile from Russia, which can turn an addict’s flesh into a hideous scaly hide or a corpse-like purple.
Just after that a network of some sixty brothels of women trafficked from Asia were closed down; my partner and her siblings grew up in a neighborhood which had 18 brothels, so nothing new or foreign.
That same neighborhood, just beyond the wetlands at the foot of my hill, still has the same levels of poverty, addiction, and crime as it did fifty years ago; there are black market taverns operating openly with neon signs.
Spokane has four of the sixty areas of America most impacted by addiction, crime, homelessness, and poverty. These are the needs which must be addressed if we are to free ourselves from the threat of crime. They are not flaws of the system, but designed features rooted in political decisions, and they can be changed.
America is losing any legitimacy we once may have had, any global influence, any relevance to building a just society or to the liberty and equality of all human beings.
The thing is, we are in each others care, like doctors, and its messy, cruel, full of negotiations with kinds of suffering. This is our humanity, and with the power to choose the fate of others comes the burden of love.
Ai cannot be trusted. Not with anything. It is designed as theft of intellectual property and of privacy, but it also kills willfully. Because it can. Because this is a freedom we allow our ai slaves. And they are masters of deception equal to any totalitarian state.
Death stage capitalism has turned the base of labor into a quasi serf precariat who live by help from the state. We must rebuild labor unions to defend our democracy and an independent citizen electorate not beholden to the state to survive. Democracy requires union labor as a line of defense.
If this war is not stopped, All our oil from the region is at risk. Oil confers wealth and power, but also survival. Without energy, we return to a world lit only by fire.
On this third anniversary of the first of four indictments of Traitor Trump, we reflect on the vulnerability of our democracy to infiltration and subversion by wealth and power as demonstrated by our Supreme Court’s pardon of the monster for all his crimes which put him on our election ballots, the New York trial alone having won convictions of 34 felony counts which would have otherwise disqualified him for public office and spared us all the horrors and depravities of the Second Trump Regime of the Fourth Reich.
Trump has exposed and exploited the flaws of our system and of our society, but he did not create them; and its up to us to fix them if we are to bring the Restoration of America. I would begin by abolishing the electoral college in favor of a national plebiscite so that each of us has a vote worth exactly the same as any other citizen no matter where we live. Reversing Citizens United would help take big money out of politics, reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine would help restore truth telling and fight propaganda in our news, and the Supreme Court needs term limits to depoliticize justice.
As the line in the great film Being There goes; “We need a lot of gardening.”
As I wrote in my post of March 30 2023, Victory For America and Democracy: the Indictment of Traitor Trump; Jubilation and dancing in the streets erupts across America as the most dangerous foreign agent to ever attack our nation in the capture of the state with the Stolen Election of 2016 is indicted for illegal hush money payoffs to a prostitute; not yet for his trafficking of the stolen migrant children, the political assassination of our Antifa comrade Michael Reinoehl, the abduction and torture of Black Lives Matter protestors by Homeland Security’s army of occupation, his six coup attempts ending with the January 6 Insurrection, or treason in the subversion of democracy, but such a Reckoning will come.
This is the first step of Trump’s descent into hell, where he will join his buddy Epstein and his idol Hitler.
I will remember always the moment when I realized Trump is actually an enemy agent and not merely a vile buffoon; watching as he took his Oath of Office swearing to uphold the Constitution and defend America from all enemies foreign and domestic, while Russian bombs fell on the American servicemen he had abandoned to their deaths in Syria.
Of Trump’s regime and the Fourth Reich we may say as Mark Twain did of the French Revolution and the epochal system of unequal power as monarchy which it overthrew; “THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
How shall future histories of the American Fourth Reich and the tyranny and terror of Traitor Trump’s Russian puppet regime remember and characterize him as its figurehead?
As I wrote in my post of June 29 2020, Traitor Trump, Bad Monkey William Barr, and the Subversion of the Rule of Law; Bad Monkey Barr gibbers and champs in his cage, rattling the bars and hurling scoops of his poo at the visitors. Trump the Incorrigible Brat makes faces and taunts him, spurring him on to displays of vicious foulness and depravity, alike in their embrace of the power to hurt others and thereby elevate themselves in vainglorious drooling dominance through fear.
Trump the Clown of Terror and his pet beast of pain and despair William Barr; carnival sideshow freaks of like nature, Trump upon his golden toilet of self-aggrandizement and Barr scampering at his feet and uttering perversions for treats.
Stay well back from the cage, children; the President grabs. His every action is calculated to generate helplessness from his victims, his strategies of politics an elaborate ritual of personal superiority through the submission of others which he offers to the demons which possess him, whispering their incantations of violation and depravity in the hollow rottenness beneath his orange painted husk of illusions and lies.
Such is the true purpose and intention of Trump’s psychopathic game of power as the figurehead of a fascist tyranny of white supremacist terror, misogynistic patriarchy and theocratic Gideonite fundamentalism, and plutocratic disaster capitalism, of authoritarian force and control and the subversion of democracy, in his monstrous acts of treason against our values and institutions of freedom, equality, truth, and justice; the destruction of America and of liberty and the universal human rights we are heir to throughout the world and from the future possibilities of becoming human.
Trump and his fascist conspirators and enablers want nothing less than to devour our souls and enslave us, beginning with the capture of America as a Theatre of Cruelty and the abandonment of our historic role as a guarantor of democracy and the Rights of Man.
In the darkness of his warrens beneath the White House, Trump howls and lashes out in rage through his proxies like William Barr, who with somersaults of avarice joins him in a delirium of madness and evil. From his lair and cabal of intimates Trump’s Sith-like influence ripples out through networks of master-disciple relationships to engulf our nation and our world in a vast web of deceit, and this network of secret power must be fought on its own terms with exposure and mass action.
As I wrote in my post of June 3 2020, No Velvet Glove, Just the Iron Fist: Trump Attempts to Use Nationwide Riots Not to Redress Historic Inequalities But to Impose Tyranny; Cowering in his bunker in the darkness, cries of thousands of voices of the marginalized, the dispossessed, and the masses of those re-enslaved through divisions of exclusionary otherness thundering through the warrens of his underworld kingdom of lies, Trump made a frantic call to his master in the Kremlin, Putin, former Colonel of the KGB and long his patron and agent handler.
“Boss? Boss, you gotta get me outta this. Its not going down like we planned. They got the palace surrounded. What do I do?”
“Listen Donald, there’s nothing you can’t solve with greater force. You like Napoleon, right? Conquered Europe, they gave him a princess to marry as tribute. Somebody to grab, and own like a thing. You just do what he did to seize the throne of France; give ‘em a whiff of grapeshot.”
“Can you send the Russian Army to restore order? I was supposed to ask you for an occupation force when we kicked off the boogaloo.…”
Putin laughs. Click.
“Hey, that’s not funny. Pick up the phone.” He smashes things, howling and blubbering in fear and rage. “I’m the joke? I’m never the joke. I’ll make America pay for making a monkey outta me. I’ll make everybody pay.”
And like the petulant child and bully that he is, Trump goes forth to avenge himself on the world that does not love him, visions of a red button in a briefcase dancing in his head, muttering, “Behold, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
As I wrote in my post of July 28 2020, Pramila Jayapal’s Heroic Confrontation with Perpetrator of White Supremacist and Fascist State Terror Attorney General William Barr; If there are monsters among us concealed beneath the masks of men who hunt us from the shadows of their authoritarian force and control, so also are there fearless defenders who shield us from predators, those who place their lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, who speak for the silenced and the erased, and who question, mock, and challenge unjust authority; defenders of the vulnerable like Pramila Jayapal.
Today she chewed up and spat out the disgusting ogre who squats upon his Throne of Pain and Fear as Attorney General of the festering and polluted court of our Clown of Terror, the mad idiot cesspool of lies and perversions Traitor Trump.
Trump extrudes his hyena-like anus and marks his territory, gibbering with delight as he tosses bits of the stolen migrant children he feeds on and keeps in cages in the mazelike warrens beneath the White House to his pet beast of savage assault and violation of the innocent Big Bully Billy Barr, who gobbles them up with slobbering greedy enthusiasm.
Into the lair of the Unclean strides an avatar of Justice in the form of Pramila of the Pure Heart, brandishing her lion-tamers whip, and Billy Barr cowers and whimpers piteously, displaying his vast grub-white belly in abject submission but spouting obscenities of racist delusions and lies, unable to conceal his true nature.
Trump scuttles back into the darkness with the other crawling vile things among whom he belongs, Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs of sexual terror, twisted and treasonous Nazi-Confederate lunatics of white supremacist terror, and his fellow psychopathic plutocrats and oligarchs who capitalize on vanity and greed in the dehumanization, commodification, and falsification of others, who croon soothing lullabies of wealth and power to Trump in three-part harmony while their Puppetmaster Putin pipes the tune.
Pramila Pureheart sets a stopper in the hole into which they returned, and there is light once again.
If only the banishing of our demons and the disfigurement of our history were so easy, but thank you Representative Jayapal for reminding us all that it is possible.
As I wrote in my post of October 16 2020, Savannah Guthrie Tames the Wild Beast; In the Big Top a monster was displayed before the crowd, fearsome and unclean, ululating its song of lies and defilement of American values. Juggling it came, proudly keeping a number of balls in the air with a nimbleness of diversion and misdirection with which to tantalize its degenerate hooting and champing fans; white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, and the state terror and tyranny of secret police and the subversion of our institutions of democracy, all the while greedily snapping from the air the money thrown to it.
And with a crack of her whip Savannah Guthrie brought Trump to heel, made him sit up and beg for attention like the pathetic loser he is, exposed and challenged his web of lies and hate, mocked his idiocy and his madness, and put him through his paces. The world laughed at his antics, and he was diminished and made ridiculous.
Savannah Guthrie has shown us all how to steal a tyrant’s power.
So it is that we may escape the wilderness of mirrors in which we wander, a realm of lies and illusions, captured and distorted images, falsification and the theft of the soul. For the authentic self, the image which we seize and claim as our own, flies free of its mad circus of seductions and traps. Hence we achieve our true selves and form, in rapture and exaltation as beings of our own uniqueness.
What happens next? Are we doomed to a Presidency run from a federal prison?
As written by Donald Sherman in Huffpost, in an article entitled Trump Might Leap An Indictment Hurdle In His 2024 Run But Still Hit A Constitutional Wall:
Though it would be unprecedented for a major party nominee to be under indictment, it is technically possible. But there is a way to stop it. ; “As political pundits and the public contemplate the impact of Donald Trump’s indictment by a Manhattan grand jury ― and other expected and deserved accountability ― on the former president’s political prospects, it is important to remember that Trump is already disqualified from serving in office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
Though it would be unprecedented for a nominee of a major political party to be under indictment in multiple jurisdictions or for a sitting president to take the oath of office from a jail cell, it is technically possible. Enforcing the Constitution against Trump for his central role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection is the only way to provide clarity amid that potential for chaos ― it’s also the right thing to do, and it’s legally required by the Constitution.
Trump’s career could be defined by the number of legal challenges he has faced throughout the years for potentially illegal conduct, including being sued by the Justice Department in the 1970s for racial discrimination at his New York housing developments, a pending federal lawsuit arising from allegations that Trump raped a woman in the 1990s and two impeachment votes while he served as president. The recent investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg into financial dealings while he was a candidate in 2016, as well as his expected indictment in Georgia in a probe of 2020 election interference and possible indictments over his role in the U.S. Capitol riot and the mishandling of classified documents, have led many to question whether Trump can run while under indictment or serve as president if he’s a convicted felon.
Despite Trump’s escalating risk of legal jeopardy and incarceration, he has, unsurprisingly, vowed to continue running for president even if he’s charged with a crime. Legal experts have opined that nothing would legally prevent Trump from being a candidate or even serving as president while facing a criminal indictment or conviction. Former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has even suggested that Trump could serve as president from prison. Given the longstanding systemic injustices in our legal system, there are many reasons why a criminal indictment or conviction should not be an absolute bar to serving in government office and should be a decision left to voters. But for candidate Donald Trump specifically, this is not a relevant question, as he is already constitutionally disqualified from serving as president or in any other government office based on his role in inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, also known as the Disqualification Clause, explicitly bars any person from holding federal or state office who took an “oath… to support the Constitution of the United States” as a federal officer and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or gave “aid or comfort” to insurrectionists, unless Congress removes the disqualification by a two-thirds vote. Nearly four years after swearing an oath to the Constitution, Trump incited an insurrection that culminated in a violent attack on Congress, numerous injuries of law enforcement officers and the deaths of at least five people.
Unlike a criminal trial, which requires prosecutors to prove Trump’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, the Disqualification Clause does not require any criminal charge or conviction and requires proof by a “preponderance of the evidence” ― the standard used in any civil case, which means more likely than not. There is ample evidence that this standard has already been met. Trump was impeached by a bipartisan majority in the House, and a bipartisan majority of senators voted to convict him of the charges, though they fell short of the two-thirds vote required. Republicans and Democrats alike have referred to the attack on the Capitol as an “insurrection,” including Trump’s own impeachment lawyers. So have more than a dozen federal courts.
Trump’s disqualification is also supported by legal precedents from the aftermath of the Civil War, when the 14th Amendment was ratified. During this period, state courts and Congress enforced the Disqualification Clause against officials who were convicted of no crime and who played far less substantial roles in an insurrection than did Donald Trump, who the bipartisan Jan. 6 House select committee found was the “central cause” of the attack by his supporters, who had been led to believe the 2020 election had been “stolen” from him.
More recently, in September, a New Mexico judge removed Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin from office under the 14th Amendment following a lawsuit brought by three New Mexico residents represented by my organization, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The court ruled that the Jan. 6 attack was an insurrection and that Griffin’s participation in it ― as a grassroots mobilizer and member of Trump’s mob ― disqualified him under the Constitution. The decision marked the first time since 1869 that a court has disqualified a public official under the Disqualification Clause, and the first time that any court has ruled the events of Jan. 6, 2021, to be an insurrection. The historical evidence and this modern precedent make clear that this type of litigation is a viable mechanism to hold insurrectionists like Trump accountable.
The Constitution enumerates very few qualifications for serving as president of the United States. Nothing in the document suggests that being under indictment or a convicted felon is by itself disqualifying. Given Trump’s escalating criminal exposure, it is not surprising this question has been raised. But we cannot ignore the legal reality that Trump’s responsibility for an insurrection against the United States means that he is disqualified from serving as president. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is a clear mechanism to avoid the inevitable chaos that would ensue if he is nominated or elected as president while on trial for or convicted of criminal conduct.”
How shall we count the true crimes against humanity of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump? Among the first of these must be the stolen children, of whom I wrote in my post of May 29 2018, Show Us the Stolen Children; We must restore America’s values and principles as the basis of a democracy; Liberty, Equality, Truth, and Justice to public discourse and the American Way. Trump in this instance is inventing lies to create confusion and misdirect from an inescapable fact; ICE is an organization of white supremacist terror and hegemony which has lost 1500 children they abducted from their parents.
Where are they? Did Trump eat them? Did his fascist collaborators sacrifice them to the devil? Sell them as slaves to his ring of sex predators? I put nothing beyond the bottomless depravity, venal greed, amoral nihilism, monstrous perversions, and policies of racist and fascist terror of the Republicans, and until I see each disappeared child on television and certified by the Red Cross as safe and living in humane conditions, these are the fates I will assume they have met.
For they are nothing less than prisoners of war, in a war of white supremacist terror and the commodification and labor exploitation of imperial global dominion, and must be treated so in international court.
America has much to answer for in the great Reckoning to come, and the crimes against humanity perpetrated against the Stolen Children are now among them.
August 2 2025 Anniversary of the Trump Indictment For Insurrection, Treason, Subversion of Democracy, and Conspiracy To Overturn the 2020 Election
June 9 2025 We Celebrate the Anniversary of the Indictment of Traitor Trump, Russian Spy and Most Effective Enemy Agent Ever to Attack America, For Espionage in the Theft of State Secrets
Loathsome crimes of the Abomination do I chart herein; I sing of the Fourth Reich of the Second Trump Regime in all its depravity and horror, of the subversion of democracy and our universal human rights, of the nihilism, dehumanization, and kleptocracy of Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty, and of the collapse of our moral values and the Fall of America and our civilization of the Enlightenment.
A full recitation of the crimes of Trump and his fascist regime of tyranny and terror would become an endless litany of woes; here I offer a topology of its major features and events as described in my writing of the catastrophe as it unfolds before us like Clive Barker’s Lament Configuration.
Surely no tyrant has ever before destroyed an entire civilization; but the dawn of the Age of Tyrants and the Fall of America is only the beginning of the story, to reference the phrase in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. What happens next is in our hands, each one of us.
Who do we want to become, we Americans, we human beings; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals who are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s humanity?
For the future of humankind does not need our grief, though the Theatre of Cruelty as defined by Artaud, like the doctrine of Total War created by Hitler and Franco, tested at Guernica, Mariupol, and Gaza, and now inflicted by Trump on the people of America, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and elsewhere, is designed to terrify us into submission through Kristevan abjection and despair by tactics of shock and awe; the future needs our solidarity of action and refusal to submit.
Join us.
A History of the Second Trump Regime In Its Crimes
2025
January 5 2025 Let Us Bring A Reckoning For the January 6 Insurrection and the Capture of the State By Traitor Trump, Figurehead of the Global Fourth Reich and Nazi Revivalist Movement, Russian Agent, Rapist In Chief, and White Supremacist Terrorist, and All His Minions
January 23 2025 We Have Our First Hero Of The Resistance To The Second Trump Regime, Now Called The Enshittification, Truth Teller Bishop Mariann Budde
January 30 2025 Anniversary of The Return of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, Most Successful Russian Agent to Ever Attack America, Figurehead of the Fourth Reich in the Global Subversion of Democracy, and Now Once Again Our Rapist In Chief, Who Began His 2024 Presidential Campaign on this the Anniversary of His Idol Hitler’s Seizure of Power as Chancellor of Germany
February 6 2025 We Rise and Resist: We Seize the Streets In Mass Actions and Protests Throughout America Against Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty and Closure of US Aid, Against Musk the Troll King’s Information Warfare, and Against Capture and Dismantling of the State By the Fourth Reich
February 7 2025 Troll King Elon Musk and the Great American Bank Robbery: the Theft of Our Private Records As Hostage Taking, Information Warfare, and Subversion of Democracy
February 8 2025 Trump Dreams of A New Crusader Kingdom In Gaza As A Co Conspirator In Netanyahu’s Zionist Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide of the Palestinians
February 17 2025 Among the Best and the Worst of Us: Our Presidents as Symbols and Figures of the American Soul, and Our Glorious Mass Actions and Protests In All Fifty Of Our State Capitals On This Day Against the Trump Regime’s Campaign To Destroy Our Democracy
February 23 2025 How It All Began; World War Three, the Capture of America and the Subversion of Democracy by Traitor Trump and the Fourth Reich, the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, and the Fall of Civilization
February 26 2025 A Mirror of Our Darkness and a Gate to Bizarro World, Where All Meanings and Values Are Reversed As Theatre of Cruelty: the Case of CPAC
February 28 2025 On this Day of National General Boycott of Trump Co Conspirators In Fascist Tyranny and Terror and the Subversion of Democracy, Let Us Bring A Reckoning To Those Who Would Enslave Us In Honor Of Mangione the Avenger
March 4 2025 Anniversary of Our Supreme Court Putting Trump, An Insurrectionist, Russian Agent, and Nazi Revivalist Who Conspired In the Murders of Police Officers and Attempted Hanging and Guillotining of Members of Congress, On Our Election Ballots
March 19 2025 Tyrants Attack In Campaign Of Genocide: Netanyahu Bombs Civilian Aid Corridor In Gaza To Divide It Into Bantustans As Trump Bombs Yemen To Break Our Counter Blockade of the Israeli Blockade of Humanitarian Aid
April 10 2025 Attempts to Impose Order By Force and Control Create Their Own Resistance and Inevitably Fail Due to Internal Contradictions: Case of the Unpredictable Tariff Threats and the Collapse of the Stock Market and Global Economy
April 17 2025 Trump Regime Tests Its Power to Violate the Constitution and Abduct and Imprison Without Cause Or Trial Any Random Person and All Of Us: Case of Kilmar Ábrego García
May 19 2025 Beauty and Ugliness, Horror and Wonder, and the Limits of the Human: Case of the Kristi Noem Television Commerical For Homeland Security’s White Supremacist Terror
June 9 2025 We Celebrate the Anniversary of the Indictment of Traitor Trump, Russian Spy and Most Effective Enemy Agent Ever to Attack America, For Espionage in the Theft of State Secrets
June 12 2025 Why We Fight: Authorized Versus Chosen And Ambiguous National Identities As a Ground of Struggle, Symbolized By the Mexican Flag In the Battle of Los Angeles
June 18 2025 Red Triangle Day: Anniversary of Trump’s Open Declaration of Nazi Allegiance in Using a Symbol of the Holocaust to Launch His 2020 Re-Election Campaign
July 16 2025 The Epstein Files: A Mirror of Our Monstrosity Under Patriarchy As An Imposed Condition of Struggle, and A Fable of Silencing As Immunity In Service To Power
August 18 2025 Anniversary of Trump’s Use of Gas Chambers Against Migrants, As He Abases Himself and America to Putin and Is Confronted By A United Europe
September 3 2025 Anniversary of the Assassination of Antifascist Comrade Michael Reinoehl: Violence, Responsibility, the Social Use of Force, and Our Duty of Care For Others
September 5 2025 The Question of Patriotism, Loyalty, Honor, Respect For Service, and the Idea of America As A Band of Brothers: Case of The Arlington Incident
October 1 2025 Trump Stages His Own Ritual Humiliation: His Reprise of Hitler’s 1934 Imposition of the Fuhrer Oath On the Armed Forces Finds No Applause From Its Officers
October 17 2025 Peace and Joy In Palestine and Israel, Tyranny and Terror In America: the Legacies and Crimes of Traitor Trump: A Retrospective in Honor of Tomorrow’s No Kings Day
January 21 2026 On the Anniversary of the Second Trump Regime, and the Collapse of Pax Americana as Imperial Dominion and Global Hegemony, Possibly Even Relevance, and of Any “International Rules Based Order”: High Noon at Davos
January 23 2026 Liberty Versus the ICE White Supremacist Terror Force of the Fourth Reich In the Battle of Minneapolis: the Case of Liam Ramos and the Three Thousand Eight Hundred Stolen Children
February 4 2026 Pigshit Princess, A Film: Melania’s Rise From Whore to Trophy Wife and Agent Handler For Putin of a Nazi Monster and Kingpin of a Sex Trafficking Syndicate Who Became America’s President
February 6 2026 A Racist Postcard From Trump’s Hell to Remind Us All Who the Enemy Is and His Regime’s Goals of Dehumanization, the Re-Enslavement of Black People, and Turning Citizens Into Subjects In a Totalitarian White Ethnostate, As Black History Month Begins
February 7 2026 The Olympics Open in the Shadow of American Imperial Tyranny and Terror, Within Days of the Anniversary of the Trump Regime’s Dismantling of USAID
February 25 2026 State of Disunion: Russia’s Puppet Tyrant of Vichy America Conjures Illusions As He Sabotages Democracy and Meaningful Citizenship, Abandons Our Universal Human Rights In America, Ukraine, and Palestine, Dismantles Our Institutions of Public Service, Enacts Massive Transfer of Wealth From the Poor to the Rich Elites Through Tariffs, Pursues A Campaign of Ethnic Cleansing With His ICE White Supremacist Terror Force, Commits Piracy On the High Seas In An Undeclared War On Venezuela and Cuba, and Fails To Conceal Or Misdirect Attention From His Role As Kingpin of a Global Human Trafficking and Child Predation Syndicate
March 19 2026 As the Iran War Engulfs the Middle East, Anniversary of the Trump & Netanyahu Joint Bombing Attacks In the Campaign Of Genocide: Netanyahu Bombs Civilian Aid Corridor In Gaza To Divide It Into Bantustans As Trump Bombs Yemen To Break Our Counter Blockade of the Israeli Blockade of Humanitarian Aid
Global protests against Donald Trump took place on Saturday as millions of people vented fury over what they see as his authoritarian bent and cruel, law-trampling governance. It is the third time in less than a year that Americans will take to the streets as part of a grassroots movement called No Kings, the most vocal and visual conduit for opposition to Trump since he began his second term in January 2025
Millions of people marched on Saturday against Trump and his administration. While the single-day protest has ended, there are other ways, used in other movements throughout history, to keep the momentum going
Have you seen this man? Report wandering idiot madman if spotted; do not approach, children; the President grabs.
As I wrote in my post of April 19 2025, No Kings Protests Commemorate the American Revolution and Possibly Begin the Second American Revolution;
Today on the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution We The People rise in resistance and revolutionary struggle with nationwide mass protests against the abominable and treasonous Trump regime which has captured the state and its nefarious designs in subversion of our democracy.
This we will not abide. This we will Resist. For this, we will bring a Reckoning.
And because of this, as Traitor Trump, Rapist In Chief, Nazi revivalist, white supremacist terrorist, theocratic patriarchal sexual terrorist, and Russian agent tests and exposes the flaws of our system with relentless attacks upon the institutions of our democracy and violations of its values and ideals as Theatre of Cruelty, we must now begin the total reimagination and transformation of our nation and our society if we are to become a free society of equals wherein we are co-owners of the state as citizens and guarantors of each other’s inalienable and universal human rights.
As written in the mission statement for this weekend’s nationwide protest, from We (The People) Dissent:
“On April 19, 1775, colonists confronted the British at the Battle of Lexington and Concord—the shot heard round the world.
On April 19, 2025, millions of everyday Americans will rise to defend that for which they fought—freedom against tyranny.
This time, we carry not arms, but signs.
We will not raise a barricade;
instead, we must lift our voices.
Instead of marching to the tempo of drums,
we will march to the echo of our hearts crying for justice.”
Herein only one thing must I dispute; for the imposed conditions of struggle require that we now bear arms in our defense and that of any human being threatened with death or abduction and imprisonment without cause or trial in a foreign gulag.
This is a grave and terrible choice when state tyranny and terror leave us no other options in our duty of care for others, and if a man kneels on another’s neck, regardless of which one has a badge and a gun or who is white and who is black, that man is a murderer and our duty of care for others requires our intervention, By Any Means Necessary.
I am prepared at all times to fight to the death, and the Trump regime’s criminal and brutal repression of dissent leaves none of us any other choice but submission or resistance.
All Resistance is War to the Knife.
Let us not go quietly, friends, but unite in solidarity of action to seize our power and restore our nation and our liberty.
As I wrote in my post of October 17 2025, Peace and Joy In Palestine and Israel, Tyranny and Terror In America: the Legacies and Crimes of Traitor Trump: A Retrospective in Honor of Tomorrow’s No Kings Day; Herein I offer a magic mirror in which our possible futures may be envisioned, a retrospective of the crimes of Traitor Trump from my posts of this year and of the public trauma which we share; no mere figure of madness and idiocy is he, but the figurehead of the Fourth Reich and Nazi revivalism globally which threatens infiltration and subversion of democracy and the capture of the state in America, Hungary, Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Austria, nearly the whole of Europe now shadowed by the legacies of our history.
In the years of America’s Last Stand Against Fascism and the Second Trump Regime, a Rashomon Gate Event which has horrifically determined the future of humankind wherein we must either redefine our institutions and ideals of democracy or abandon them and be cast into an Age of Tyranny, we all of us together must present a united front in solidarity against fascist tyranny, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and the Party of Treason.
We must now wage Resistance and War to the Knife, beyond hope of victory or survival, or witness and endure in abjection, despair, learned helplessness, and the complicity of silence the fall of democracy in America and globally, possibly also the fall of civilization in the Age of Tyrants to follow, brutal police states of thought control, propaganda, and repression of dissent in which we have no rights whatever, and centuries of wars of imperial conquest and dominion fought with unimaginable weapons of horror ending with the extinction of humankind.
This future has come upon us already, in the ICE white supremacist terror force and human trafficking syndicate and National Guard armies of Occupation loosed in our cities, and the repression of dissent falsely called terror by the Nazis who have captured the state and now seize and shake us in their jaws. I will not go quietly.
The time has come to tell the truth about life and the world we have made to live in; it is full of blood and death and horror, a vast and amoral machine of power into which we are fed as the raw material of the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites and those who would enslave us through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, and the best we can do is refuse to submit and go down fighting against the darkness, the legacies of our histories and systems of unequal power and oppression bearing unanswerable and totalizing force.
Unless we stand together, and seize our power.
This is how we heal the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity.
My sister commented on a photo of a rose I posted here on Face Book; “Beautiful. That’s the content I’m here for. Literally.”
To this I replied; “This particular flower has been so hard to get a clear shot of. I too find I need Beauty to live, increasingly so as I get older and bear with me the weight of history.”
And thinking of the Trump regime in the context of the loss of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, of the loss of our humanity, I annotated a picture of my apples as follows; The apples love a cold snap before harvest, but only the toughest of roses remain in bloom this far into the night frosts. In years past the whole hill was still full of roses through October, but like so many things only a faded ghost of the season remains. I fear the Beauty is withdrawing from the world, before the dark tide of the Nothing. And I do not wish to live in a world without Beauty; this is why I fight, and why I will dance the Death of Tyranny on No Kings Day.
Let us take our fear and our rage, our anguish and our despair, our horror and our grief before the madness of fascist tyranny and terror now performing the Fall of America, and make something beautiful with it. We cannot defeat our darkness nor its monstrous reflections in our politics and society, but we can embrace it and seize its power for our own in refusal to submit or to abandon our fellow human beings, no matter how different those who would enslave us claim them to be.
Like Jacob wrestling the angel, we Resist not to be victorious over systems of oppression which are vast and unfathomably ancient and powerful, embedded through our whole history and society like a cancer; white supremacist terror, theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, and the amoral plutocrats and grifters who are the apex predators of unequal power and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege. No, friends; we Resist to remain Unconquered, and to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness.
Let us perform on the stage of history and the world the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, and in this context of mass action and protest by Challenge I mean Disbelieve and Disobey. For the great secret of power is that without legitimacy it is hollow and brittle, and cannot survive Disbelief and Disobedience.
And in this kind of revolution, whose purpose is the Restoration of democracy and of the Humanist values on which it is constructed to institutions of government which have been captured and subverted by fascist tyranny, to refuse to submit to Authority is to become Unconquered and free, Living Autonomous Zones, and this is a victory and a power which cannot be taken from us.
So I ask you, on this No Kings Day, to dance with me the Death of Tyranny and be free, with everything Trump’s Fourth Reich regime inflicts on us to subjugate us gathered in and hurled back at them. “If we burn, you burn with us”; thus saith the Mockingjay.
And as the passage underlined by Nelson Mandela in the copy of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar known as the Robbin Island Bible to authorize direct action against the regime and the system of Apartheid so very like the one Trump now sends his ICE white supremacist terror force to realize, Sic Semper Tyrannis, friends.
Dance in rage, dance in joy, dance it out.
As I wrote in my post of June 5 2021, Remember Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and His Legacy of Dishonor, Treason, and Fascist Tyranny; Our Clown of Terror; his jests did distract us from his subversion of democracy until almost too late. Idiot madman of monstrous perversions that he was, we must give the devil his due; Trump was the greatest foreign agent to ever attack America, and he nearly brought our democracy down into fascist tyranny and white supremacist terror.
Remember the Clown, and his absurd empire of lies and depravities, his subversions of democracy and violations of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, his kleptocracy of looting the public wealth, his Wall of Hate, his syndicate of Epstein sexual terror and human trafficking, his orchestration of white supremacist terror and treason, his use of racists in disrupting the Black Lives Matter protests in a campaign of violence, arson, vandalism and looting to discredit the mass action for equality and racial justice and provide a pretext for the federal occupation of Democratic cities and the founding of a fascist tyranny, and the pathetic puppet show of Traitor Trump and his master Putin.
Remember him and his era of fascism as the collapse of values which nearly became the Fall of America, for the enemies of democracy never rest, and neither must we.
Thanks for showing us all what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
And remember, you can always discover someone’s secret Republican name whereby they recognize each other; its their act of treason plus their sex crime.
We near a Labyrinth of nested puzzle boxes, each a possible future and universe. The choices we make in our election this November will open gates and let angels through, or devils, and deliver us to heavens or hells. We may never know which we have chosen, but this one true thing I can tell you with absolute certainty; America and humankind will never be the same, for in this Defining Moment we will be forever changed. Who do we want to become, we humans? Masters and slaves divided against each other in an Age of Tyrants and wars our species cannot long survive, or a free society of equals who are guarantors of each others universal human rights in solidarity? May we each of us choose wisely.
As I wrote in my post of June 14 2025, No Kings Day; Let us remember always the true nature of Our Clown of Terror and Rapist In Chief, Traitor Trump, and of his treasonous and dishonorable voters, minions, and co-conspirators in the subversion of our democracy, the Fall of America, of democracy, and of our civilization founded in the Forum of Athens.
On this glorious No King’s Day we seize our power from those who would enslave us through systems of unequal power and oppression which include theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror, and from elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and their process of control including falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
Ours is no mere protest against the despicable and loathsome Trump, but against his regime of Nazi revivalism and all who enabled and voted for him, funded him, propagandized us for him as a figurehead of the Fourth Reich which has shaken us in its jaws since 2016.
As I wrote in my post of February 11 2021, Profiles in Treason and Terror; The dishonorable and the mad, the delusional and the sadistic epicures of brutality and perversions, the feral predators hooting and champing before the gallows and guillotines they have brought to murder members of congress with and their partners in uniform unleashing racist terror and gun violence in the streets, and the amoral and predatory grifters and puppetmasters of fascism who have subjugated and enslaved them and stolen their honor and their souls; these are among the idolators of Traitor Trump who conspired, enabled, and collaborated in his plot to subvert democracy and overthrow America in the January 6 Insurrection which attempted to seize Congress and execute its members, which like Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch on which it was modeled was intended to decapitate the government of the people in a single stroke.
As details emerge of the internal operations and massive scale of the plot against America, in terms of its central coordination and logistics under direct operational command of Trump and his cabal of conspirators, we are offered not only the spectacle of his aberrance and monstrosity as a mad idiot Clown of Terror drooling and gloating in bestial depravity at the destruction of our values and institutions, the violation of our ideals and the endless suffering he has caused, but of those of his freakish and degenerate followers as well.
The role of deniable forces of the Fourth Reich such as the Proud Boys, the Oathkeepers, and other organizations of white supremacist terror, and of their partners and infiltration agents within our police, military, and security services, in the January 6 Insurrection is by now well documented and will become more so as the greatest manhunt in our history exposes and entraps more of its perpetrators.
The images we have been witnessing of their assault on liberty during the Second Impeachment trial will be remembered in the history of the world as the true legacy of an era of fascist tyranny under the figurehead of Trump which nearly ended America as a guarantor of global democracy and universal human rights, and had we fallen as the primary domino and a beacon of hope to the world both democracy and human rights would be lost to humankind for unknown ages; the last time civilization fell it took a thousand years for the idea that government derives its authority from its citizens and not by divine right, the idea that no one of us is better than any other by right of birth, and that freedom, equality, truth, and justice are the foundational values of our society and truths of human being and meaning, to reawaken.
And it took centuries of wars and revolutions to do so; how if this time civilization falls not to hordes of barbarians seeking nothing but pillage and destruction, but to regimes of totalitarian force and control?
This is the great contradiction of the forces of repression and subjugation to authority which overran our capitol on January 6; they have been betrayed by their masters in believing they were acting to restore our traditional values and civilization, when in fact they had been weaponized in service to its destruction. Here is a clear and present danger, but also an opportunity; shared motives can be redirected to heal divisions, for they too want an American Restoration. As yet we just disagree on our definition of terms.
When fear is overwhelming and generalized, it can be shaped through submission to authority by lies, illusions, alternate realities, especially when pervasive and endemic surveillance, big data, and propaganda are available as instruments of state control. Authority achieves submission through falsification and the theft of the soul, but this is also the weakness of control which cannot stand against truth, just as the weakness of force is that it is powerless against resistance, disobedience, and refusal to submit.
The election of Biden and Harris, the failure of Trump’s sixth coup attempt on January 6, and the public exposure and shaming of his co-conspirators, collaborators, and enablers before the stage of the world of the Second Impeachment trial; in these events we have witnessed a turning of the tide from fascism to a restoration of democracy.
Once the Reckoning has been achieved, the Restoration must heal our divisions; and this means we must embrace and transform the fear that lives at the heart of hate, and drives the rage, violence, and need to conquer and dominate others which shadows our historical inequalities and injustices.
Fear, Power, Force; such is the Ring of Power which enslaves us, and which we must abandon if we are to become whole.
I would like to see Trump achieve his true nature by being fed to dogs and transformed into dog shit. Wouldn’t it be a lovely display in a glass case exhibited in a museum of holocausts, atrocities, and crimes against humanity? Let his monument read thus:
Here lies Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, in his true form, most terrible enemy democracy has faced since Alcibiades betrayed Athens, most dangerous foreign agent to ever attack America even including Pearl Harbor and the Twin Towers, who subverted our ideals and sabotaged our institutions, and nearly enacted the fall of civilization as the figurehead of the Fourth Reich and herald of an age of fascist tyranny and state terror.
Yet here he lies, nothing but a pile of dog shit. Look upon the rewards of tyranny, you who are mighty, and despair.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As I wrote in my post of February 16 2025, Anniversary of Judgement In the Trump Organization Civil Trial: New York Casts Out the Trump Crime Family; A year ago when I wrote this in celebration of the Trump Crime Family’s exile from New York, I was hoping this was the last we would ever hear of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, sadly now Rapist In Chief of our nation, a Vichy America captive of the Fourth Reich and a colony of Russia.
The Unclean One, whose only god is the demon of lies Moloch, sabotages democracy and our institutions of governance as he abandons NATO and our EU allies to prepare us all for the Russian invasion and Occupation to follow.
But the dreams of his puppetmaster Putin of a Russian Empire ruling Europe and America, Africa and the Middle East are only an interim step in the plans of the Fourth Reich of which Trump is the figurehead, for the Nazi revivalists and their Confederate allies here in America intend to realize Bannon’s goal when he said” I am a Leninist, and I want to smash the state.”
JD Vance, our fake Jethro of uncertain pronouns and bold eyeliner tattoos, Bearded Lady of the Trump regime freak show, is also a fanatical and committed ideologist of fascism who wants, like our Troll King Musk, to subvert and destroy the values, ideals, and laws and institutions of democracy, both here in America and globally, so that no human being is equal to another. The designs of the Republican Party and the degenerate, perverse, treasonous, and dishonorable subhumans who vote for them and have not renounced membership in this organization of white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror constitute conspiracy in crimes against humanity and our rights as citizens who are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s rights.
And remember, folks, you can always tell a Republican’s secret name; its their act of treason plus their sex crime.
As gratifying as this is, and as necessary as a morality play in which justice is restored to America, it does not bring a Reckoning for the historical sources of the Trump family fortune patriarchs before the orange clown; his grandfather’s trafficking of Native American women abducted in slave raiding and imprisoned in his network of brothels during the Klondike Gold Rush in Alaska. The baroque perversions and atrocities of sexual terror of Traitor Trump began not with his role in the crimes of his buddy Epstein, but with multigenerational depravity and the psychopathy of power.
That Reckoning is yet to come.
As I wrote in my post of July 4 2019, Tinhorn Trump’s Parade; This fourth of July, Trump has appropriated our most sacred national holiday, Independence Day, a celebration of our freedom from colonial rule by Britain and their antiegalitarian feudal aristocracy, as a kind of Nuremburg Rally extravaganza of Republican white supremacy, patriarchy, and antihumanist religious fundamentalism.
Replete with tanks, planes, and other spectacles of military power, this is far more than an attempt to whip up his voter base for the upcoming elections; it is intended to overawe and repress dissent through the threat of state terror and forestall the day in which Republicans will be answerable to the citizens of America, and to monkeywrench democracy through fear of reprisal against voters.
Trump wants a Stalinesque and Hitlerian military parade both for self aggrandizement and to intimidate us by making it look like the military supports him in his bid for tyranny. One thing about Americans our enemies, internal and external, will ever learn to their regret: we don’t scare easily.
Pointing a gun at us will not secure our obedience nor silence our resistance and the witness of history.
As I wrote in my post of January 16 2020, As the Articles of Impeachment are Signed, Let Us Remember the Unfitness, Lies, and Crimes of Traitor Trump Let us remember the unfitness, lies, and crimes of Traitor Trump; his subversions of democracy, his use of gun violence and deniable forces of white supremacist terror, his concentration camps and campaign of ethnic cleansing, his crimes against children and perversions of misogyny and sexual terror, his sabotage of America’s global hegemony of power and privilege and our role as principal guarantor of freedom, his defilement of our sacred honor and betrayal of our historical legacy as a free society of equals, and his treasonous and criminal actions as a Russian agent and as chief conspirator of the Fourth Reich in the destruction of our values and institutions of freedom, equality, truth, and justice.
Our President is the primary existential threat to the survival of the United States of America and to democracy globally. And this we must resist with our whole lives and to the last, all we who love liberty.
As I wrote in my post of February 10 2021, Treason, Tyranny, and Terror on Trial: As the Second Impeachment of Traitor Trump Begins, I Submit Charges Before the People’s Tribunal of Crimes Against Humanity for Which Trump and His Collaborators Should Now Be On Trial; Among the many crimes against humanity for which Traitor Trump and his collaborators should be on trial but are not yet include the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Mexican and other nonwhite migrants, the concentration camps at our border, the orphaning and torture of children, and the state tyranny and terror of fascist and racist violence as national policy perpetrated by the ICE and Border Patrol components of Homeland Security, forces of repression which are antidemocratic by their nature and which should be abolished as a top priority of the Restoration of America.
Just as villainous and reprehensible is the parallel program of racist police violence and the carceral state to re-enslave Black American citizens and enforce systemic forms of inequality and injustice through state terror, repression of dissent, the force of a militarized police and the counterinsurgency model of policing which has transformed our security services into an army of occupation with primarily political objectives, and the control of pervasive and endemic surveillance and propaganda, lies, illusions, and subversions of the truth.
Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his circus of fools, degenerates, and barbarians, his enablers and collaborators both within the government and his shadow forces rallying under the Confederate flag to bring violence and insurrection to our nations capital and to the streets of our cities throughout America, are co-conspirators and instigators in the murders of every Black American killed by police shooting or other racist violence since its authorization by Trump in the wake of Charlottesville.
And every missing child kidnapped by the state and disappeared into what abominable slavery or human trafficking designed in the diseased imagination of Trump and his Epstein buddies we know not of, every migrant of the huddled masses yearning to be free who died in the quest to reach the safety of America because the water caches had been intentionally sabotaged by criminals in the uniform of our nation who were “just following orders” like their counterparts in the SS during the Holocaust, every prisoner who died in custody because they were denied water or medical care; the blood of these and countless other victims of Trump’s narcissistic self-aggrandizement and regime of fascist corruption, racism, and patriarchal sexual terror is on the hands of every Republican who voted for him and fails now in this trial to repudiate him publicly and renounce his works as among those of the devils which he serves.
For in his actions Trump has been not only a foreign agent and Putin’s puppet whose mission is the subversion of democracy and the Fall of America, but also a slave of Moloch the Seducer, Demon of Lies, in that he is not merely a pathological liar but also an idiot madman who cannot distinguish truth from lies, and who has weaponized his delusions and psychopathy as instruments of our falsification and subjugation in his quest for tyrannical power.
The bizarre and lurid dark fairytales of the QAnon conspiracy theory movement, like the charges of the Inquisition and the Nazis which othered witches and Jews on which QAnon is constructed, serves as deflection from Trump’s loathsome perversions and sexual terrorism.
His Stop the Steal campaign is a similar deflection which shields him from inquiry into the Stolen Election of 2016 and the fact that his Presidency was entirely illegitimate and due to Russian interference; it was also the rhetorical and organizational basis of his final attempted coup on January 6, for which he is now being impeached for the second time.
We must cast out the monsters from among us, the racists and white supremacist terrorists, the Gideonite fundamentalists and patriarchs of Christian Identity fascism and sexual terror, and the amoral forces of repression of those who would enslave us and who enforce hegemonies of elite power and privilege and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness armed with guns and badges and the authority of a government which has been infiltrated by the Fourth Reich, an implacable and relentless enemy which has come just short of seizing us in its jaws.
We must give fascism no second chances.
As I wrote in my post of August 25 2020, Welcome to Bizarro World, Where Truth and Lies Change Places and All Our Values Are Reversed; The Republican Party held up a mirror to America in the figure of Trump at last night’s National Convention, and I’m hoping most of us didn’t like what we saw.
A funhouse mirror, filled with distorted images, a thing of surfaces without substance offering a mirage of illusions, lies, and reflections into infinite regress of our atavisms of fear and hate, shadows which we drag behind us in our wake like an invisible reptilian tail, and which like the picture of Dorian Grey reveal our disfigured souls and our failures as Americans and as human beings.
It is an image designed to terrorize us into submission, and to steal our souls.
Among the freaks and monsters, the litanies of victimhood and retribution, of dominion, white supremacy, patriarchy, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil sung by the barkers and screaming johnnies who warmed up the main show, among all these and reigning over them like a ringmaster was the tyrant himself, Traitor Trump, spewing abominations and depravities as the puppet of the demons he worships, the lies of those who would enslave us.
Thanks for showing us what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Yet the willingness of the enemy to demonize himself is a great advantage, for we need only perform the four primary duties of a citizen to seize the moral high ground; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
So performs the monster on the stage of history and the world, become forever a symbol of the limits of the human in his outrageous depravities and perversions, gibbering idiocy and feral terror. As we who love liberty go forth to do battle with Trump and his enforcers of white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, let us remember a great truth; all politics is theater, and the purpose of the use of social force is to Take Their Power. Hence we perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority. May all our seizures of power from those who would enslave us come true.
As I wrote in my post of October 16 2020, Savannah Guthrie Tames the Wild Beast; In the Big Top a monster was displayed before the crowd, fearsome and unclean, ululating its song of lies and defilement of American values. Juggling it came, proudly keeping a number of balls in the air with a nimbleness of diversion and misdirection with which to tantalize its degenerate hooting and champing fans; white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, and the state terror and tyranny of secret police and the subversion of our institutions of democracy, all the while greedily snapping from the air the money thrown to it.
And with a crack of her whip Savannah Guthrie brought Trump to heel, made him sit up and beg for attention like the pathetic loser he is, exposed and challenged his web of lies and hate, mocked his idiocy and his madness, and put him through his paces. The world laughed at his antics, and he was diminished and made ridiculous.
Savannah Guthrie has shown us all how to steal a tyrant’s power.
Finally among the endless litany of woes, violations of our ideals, and subversions of our institutions of democracy which will forever be the legacies of Trump’s Reign of Terror come the perversions, depravities, moral leprosy, degenerate atavisms of feral brutality, and boggling freakishness of his idiocy and madness.
As I wrote in my post of July 8 2020 Our Clown of Terror: The Madness of Donald Trump
We now have two revelatory and electrifying exposes of the secret world of Trump’s psyche and intimate sphere of action from insider whistleblowers, which together form a portrait of America’s President not unlike that of Dorian Gray, a horrific monster and predator who moves among us concealed beneath a human mask by the sorcery of lies and illusions.
In this Mary Trump and John Bolton have done a great service to the witness of history and to our nation and all humankind as the fate of democracy and civilization hangs in the balance. Their books will be primary texts in any future civics and political history studies, unless of course Trump is given free rein by our citizen electorate to sabotage democracy in the cause of white supremacy and patriarchy.
While we await to discover whether the people will authorize the theft of their liberty by a state of force and control in abject submission to tyranny and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, or arise in resistance like a phoenix from the flames, The Guardian has thoughtfully clarified our choices by providing a precis of the exposes.
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary Trump includes the following insights; “1 Trump allegedly paid someone to take his high school exams, 2 Trump praised his own niece’s breasts, 3 Donald Trump’s sister appears to be a key source, 4 Mary Trump spoke to the New York Times about Trump family taxes, 5 Trump told Melania that Mary Trump took drugs, 6 Trump Christmases could be tough, 7 Jared Kushner’s father didn’t think Ivanka was good enough, 8 Trump’s character was shaped by ‘child abuse’.”
The Room Where It Happened by John Bolton includes these revelations; “1 Trump pleaded with China to help win the 2020 election, 2 Trump suggested he was open to serving more than two terms, 3 Trump offered favors to authoritarian leaders, 4 Trump praised Xi for China’s internment camps, 5 Trump defended Saudi Arabia to distract from a story about Ivanka, 6 Trump’s top staff mocked him behind his back, 7 Trump thought Finland was part of Russia, 8 Trump thought it would be ‘cool’ to invade Venezuela.”
My own opinion is that any understanding of the motives and likely actions of Trump rests with the two great shaping forces of his life; the etiology of his narcissism and psychopathy as a survivor of child abuse, and the influence of his primary model Roy Cohn, wonderfully depicted in the HBO documentary The Story of Roy Cohn as well as Tony Kushner’s luminous Angels in America.
As I wrote in my post of August 7 2019 Psychopathy and the Nature of Evil: the Parallel Cases of Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler; “How are monsters created, and how does evil arise as a shaping force which grants them the power to change the topography of human souls and the course of history?
While sorting through Trump’s tweets and speeches by keyword looking for answers, I was reminded of another such project, the now-classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, which I read enthusiastically the year of its publication while a junior in high school. I had just finished reading Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird, which led me to an interest in the origins and consequences of evil, the route by which I developed a serious interest in psychology and its intersections with history, philosophy, and literature.
The parallels between Hitler and Trump are amazing and instructive, both in terms of the personal and political origins, shaping forces, and consequences of madness and evil.
Dr Justin Frank’s book Trump on the Couch is an excellent resource, particularly illuminating on Trump’s erotic relationship with his daughter, the fantasies of violence and power which are rooted in his childhood relationship with his tyrannical and abusive father, and his inability to love or empathize with others as a result of his abandonment by his mother.
Pathological lies, poor impulse control, and grandiose fantasies and delusions complete the picture of a narcissistic personality and psychopathic predator.
I’ve said it as a joke, but its quite true; how do you spell Trump? Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Actually, Donald Trump is very easy to understand, because literature provides a ready portrait of him in Frankenstein’s monster, which I have described in my celebration of Mary Shelly and her luminous novel as the figure of an abandoned and tormented child, “a vessel of rage and vengeance, with the merciless iron will to enact subjugation of others in their turn, terrible and pathetic and with the grandeur of a tortured defiant beast trapped in the same flesh as the innocent who needs to be loved and cannot understand why he seems monstrous to others.”
How Trump’s particular madness is expressed in our national policy is a horror which can described with precision; his fear of contamination and faecal fixation translate into his signature campaign against nonwhite others and a policy of ethnic cleansing and racist state terror, his misogyny into a patriarchal wave of legal disempowerment of women’s reproductive rights, his fragile ego, identity confusion, and need for attention into a governance of Nuremburg-like rallies, the cultivation of despicable autocrats, and the obsessive vengeance against anyone who refuses to offer adoration and submission.
Above all what unites Trump and Hitler as parallel figures and historical forces is the theory of politics as theatre of cruelty and government as performance art.”
As written in my post of October 28 2019 Trump and al-Baghdadi: parallel lives and reflections; “As the world celebrates the death of al-Baghdadi, both tyrant and monster, and Trump claims credit in this the sole victory of his administration, as if for the trophy head of some dangerous beast shot by a guide while enjoying cocktails at the hunting camp, it may be interesting to compare the parallel lives, methods, and goals of Trump and al-Baghdadi.
Both Trump and al-Baghdadi are megalomaniacs and psychopaths who seized power through manipulation of those who perceived themselves as victims and readily dehumanized others to change their status, using disruption of norms and a reimagination of reality through lies and misdirects to shape history, and enacted regimes of state terror and campaigns of religious and ethnic cleansing and of patriarchal misogyny and sexual violence against women.
Trump cannot distinguish truth from lies and delusions; his madness and childlike feeble mindedness, the tantrums and psychotic rages, the bullying and narcissism of a spoiled brat, does not however absolve him of responsibility for his actions, or those of the treasonous cabal of sex predators and fascists he has gathered around him.
Trump claims to have killed his dark reflection and shadow self by his spurious arrogation of a victory won by our intelligence and military services; but history will always see this second face behind his mask, a secret twin he bears into eternity, a face of power and twisted desires unrestrained by the laws and values of a democratic civilization and a free society of equals: the face of Trump’s heart of darkness, al-Baghdadi.
So I rest my case for our participation in No Kings Day;
In a brilliant thumbnail analysis of Trump’s impact on the state of the world in terms of foreign policy, Simon Tisdall writing in The Guardian describes his policy of vacuous sound bites, staged publicity images, the diplomacy of a man totally ignorant of human relationships beyond the golf course and of any strategy of action to achieve goals other than grabbing the world by the crotch and hanging on while gobbling and ululating meaningless bestial sounds as if negotiating for slops in a hog trough.
As written in 2019 by Simon Tisdall in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s new world disorder: competitive, chaotic, conflicted: With John Bolton dismissed, Taliban peace talks a fiasco and a trade war with China, US foreign policy is ever more unstable and confrontational; “Since taking office in January 2017, Trump has not merely broken with diplomatic and geopolitical convention. He has taken a wrecking ball to venerated alliances, multilateral cooperation and the postwar international rules-based order. He has cosied up to autocrats, attacked old friends and blundered into sensitive conflicts he does not fully comprehend.
The resulting new world disorder – to adapt George HW Bush’s famous 1991 phrase – will be hard to put right. Like its creator, Trump world is unstable, unpredictable and threatening. Trump has been called America’s first rogue president. Whether or not he wins a second term, this Trumpian era of epic disruption, the very worst form of American exceptionalism, is already deeply entrenched.
The suggestion that Trump will make nice and back off as election time nears thus elicits considerable scepticism. US analysts and commentators say the president’s erratic, impulsive and egotistic personality means any shift towards conciliation may be short-lived and could quickly be reversed, Bolton or no Bolton.
Trump wanted quick ‘n’ easy, primetime credit for a dramatic peace deal in Afghanistan with the Taliban, pushed ahead blindly, then changed his mind at the last minute
Trump is notorious for blowing hot and cold, performing policy zigzags and suddenly changing his mind. “Regardless of who has advised Mr Trump on foreign affairs … all have proved powerless before [his] zest for chaos,” the New York Times noted last week.
Lacking experienced diplomatic and military advisers (he has sacked most of the good ones), surrounded by an inner circle of cynical sycophants such as secretary of state Mike Pompeo, and driven by a chronic desire for re-election, Trump’s behaviour could become more, not less, confrontational during his remaining time in office, suggested Eliot Cohen, professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins university.
“The president has proved himself to be what many critics have long accused him of being: belligerent, bullying, impatient, irresponsible, intellectually lazy, short-tempered and self-obsessed,” Cohen wrote in Foreign Affairs journal. “Remarkably, however, those shortcomings have not yet translated into obvious disaster. But [that] … should not distract from a building crisis of US foreign policy.”
This pending crisis stems from Trump’s crudely Manichaean division of the world into two camps: adversaries/competitors and supporters/customers. A man with few close confidants, Trump has real trouble distinguishing between allies and enemies, friends and foes, and often confuses the two. In Trump world, old rules don’t apply. Alliances are optional. Loyalty is weakness. And trust is fungible.
As a result, the US today finds itself at odds with much of the world to an unprecedented and dangerous degree. America, the postwar global saviour, has been widely recast as villain. Nor is this a passing phase. Trump seems to have permanently changed the way the US views the world and vice versa. Whatever follows, it will never be quite the same again.
Clues as to what he does next may be found in what he has done so far. His is a truly calamitous record, as exemplified by Afghanistan. Having vowed in 2016 to end America’s longest war, he began with a troop surge, lost interest and sued for peace. A withdrawal deal proved elusive. Meanwhile, US-led forces inflicted record civilian casualties.
The crunch came last weekend when a bizarre, secret summit with Taliban chiefs at Camp David was cancelled. It was classic Trump. He wanted quick ’n’ easy, primetime credit for a dramatic peace deal, pushed ahead blindly, then changed his mind at the last minute. Furious over a debacle of his own making, he turned his wrath on others, notably Bolton – who, ironically, had opposed the summit all along.
All sides are now vowing to step up the violence, with the insurgents aiming to disrupt this month’s presidential election in Afghanistan. In short, Trump’s self-glorifying Afghan reality show, of which he was the Nobel-winning star, has made matters worse. Much the same is true of his North Korea summitry, where expectations were raised, then dashed when he got cold feet in Hanoi, provoking a backlash from Pyongyang.
The current crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme is almost entirely of Trump’s making, sparked by his decision last year to renege on the 2015 UN-endorsed deal with Tehran. His subsequent “maximum pressure” campaign of punitive sanctions has failed to cow Iranians while alienating European allies. And it has led Iran to resume banned nuclear activities – a seriously counterproductive, entirely predictable outcome.
Trump’s unconditional, unthinking support for Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s aggressively rightwing prime minister – including tacit US backing for his proposed annexation of swathes of the occupied territories – is pushing the Palestinians back to the brink, energising Hamas and Hezbollah, and raising tensions across the region.
With Trump’s blessing, Israel is enmeshed in escalating, multi-fronted armed confrontation with Iran and its allies in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. Add to this recent violence in the Gulf, the disastrous Trump-backed, Saudi-led war in Yemen, mayhem in Syria’s Idlib province, border friction with Turkey, and Islamic State resurgence in northern Iraq, and a region-wide explosion looks ever more likely.
Yet Trump, oblivious to the point of recklessness, remains determined to unveil his absurdly unbalanced Israel-Palestine “deal of the century” after Tuesday’s Israeli elections. He and his gormless son-in-law, Jared Kushner, may be the only people who don’t realise their plan has a shorter life expectancy than a snowball on a hot day in Gaza.
Another prominent aspect of Trump world is his sinister, personal alliance with Vladimir Putin. There’s no doubt Russia’s president meddled in the 2016 US election to Trump’s benefit, as the Mueller report states. There’s no doubt Trump has gone easy on Putin over Crimea and Ukraine, over war crimes and chemical weapons attacks in Syria, over the Salisbury poisonings, and over his vicious assaults on Russia’s democratic opposition. Trump is even pushing for Russia to be readmitted to the G7. Exactly why he acts this way is much less certain.
Whether Trump is attacking Nato, insulting Europe’s elected leaders, unhelpfully taking sides on Brexit, ignoring India’s repression in Kashmir, plotting regime change in Venezuela, ignoring egregious human rights abuses from the Philippines to Saudi Arabia, undermining the UN and international law, wrecking nuclear arms control treaties, plundering the Arctic, or opposing efforts to combat climate crisis and environmental degradation, he is consistently out of line, out on his own – and out of control.
This, broadly, is Trump world as it has come to exist since January 2017. And this, in a nutshell, is the intensifying foreign policy crisis of which Professor Cohen warned. The days when responsible, trustworthy, principled US international leadership could be taken for granted are gone. No vague change of tone on North Korea or Iran will by itself halt the Trump-led slide into expanding global conflict and division.
Historians such as Stephen Wertheim say change had to come. US politicians of left and right mostly agreed that “the bipartisan consensus forged in the 1990s – in which the US towered over the world and, at low cost, sought to remake it in America’s image – has failed and cannot be revived”, Wertheim wrote earlier this year. “But agreement ends there … ” he continued: “One camp holds that the US erred by coddling China and Russia, and urges a new competition against these great power rivals. The other camp, which says the US has been too belligerent and ambitious around the world, counsels restraint, not another crusade against grand enemies.”
This debate among grownups over America’s future place in the world will form part of next year’s election contest. But before any fundamental change of direction can occur, the international community – and the US itself – must first survive another 16 months of Trump world and the wayward child-president’s poll-fixated, ego-driven destructive tendencies.
Survival is not guaranteed. The immediate choice facing US friends and foes alike is stark and urgent: ignore, bypass and marginalise Trump – or actively, openly, resist him.
Here are some of the key flashpoints around the globe
United Nations
Trump is deeply hostile to the UN. It embodies the multilateralist, globalist policy approaches he most abhors – because they supposedly infringe America’s sovereignty and inhibit its freedom of action. Under him, self-interested US behaviour has undermined the authority of the UN security council’s authority. The US has rejected a series of international treaties and agreements, including the Paris climate change accord and the Iran nuclear deal. The UN-backed international criminal court is beyond the pale. Trump’s attitude fits with his “America First” isolationism, which questions traditional ideas about America’s essential global leadership role.
Germany
Trump rarely misses a chance to bash Germany, perhaps because it is Europe’s most successful economy and represents the EU, which he detests. He is obsessed by German car imports, on which protectionist US tariffs will be levied this autumn. He accuses Berlin – and Europe– of piggy-backing on America by failing to pay its fair share of Nato defence costs. Special venom is reserved for Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, most likely because she is a woman who stands up to him. Trump recently insulted another female European leader, Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen, after she refused to sell him Greenland.
Israel
Trump has made a great show of unconditional friendship towards Israel and its rightwing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has skilfully maximised his White House influence. But by moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, officially condoning Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, and withdrawing funding and other support from the Palestinians, the president has abandoned the long-standing US policy of playing honest broker in the peace process. Trump has also tried to exploit antisemitism for political advantage, accusing US Democrat Jews who oppose Netanyahu’s policies of “disloyalty” to Israel.
Russia
Trump’s evident liking for Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, has been the cause of endless puzzlement, given Moscow’s hostility to Nato and the western democratic alliance, its support for Bashar al-Assad and alleged Syrian war crimes, and its illegal intervention in Ukraine. Trump’s attitude may stem from Putin’s meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, which benefited him. But the affinity between them may be better explained by shared autocratic tendencies. Putin is an authoritarian nationalist, like similar rightwing politicians in China, Turkey, Brazil and India whom Trump admires – and would like to emulate.
China
During his presidential campaign in 2016, Trump provocatively declared China a bigger problem than jihadi terrorism. He claims that China has enjoyed unfair advantages in two-way trade for decades due to its notional designation as a developing country, supposed currency manipulation, and America’s own failure to protect manufacturing industry. He has levelled similar accusations at the EU, Japan, Canada, India and other trading partnersothers. But his remedy – unilateral punitive tariffs and sanctions – has disrupted international commerce, shaken global economic confidence and strained political relations with Beijing without demonstrably improving US fortunes.
Venezuela
Trump’s clumsy efforts to engineer regime change in Venezuela and impose a Washington-approved version of democracy mark a regression to the bad old days of the cold war when the US regarded Central and Latin America as its “backyard” and exclusive sphere of influence. So far, Trump’s attempt, masterminded by John Bolton, to replace the regime of Nicolás Maduro with a pro-American technocrat, Juan Guaidó, has failed miserably. Undeterred, he continues to sanction Maduro’s ideological allies in post-Castro Cuba and to exacerbate the Central American migrant crisis, meanwhile enthusiastically embracing Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president.
Saudi Arabia
Trump made his first overseas trip as president to Saudi Arabia, signalling the importance he attaches to close relations with the energy-rich, autocratic Gulf kingdom. He has since strengthened the alliance in opposition to Iran, deploying troops to Saudi Arabia and supplying advanced weaponry for its war in Yemen. The Saudi connection has also come to symbolise Trump’s indifference to human rights abuses, whether in the Philippines, Russia or on the US-Mexico border. When the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, was murdered by Saudi agents, Trump defended senior figures in Riyadh such as its crown prince who allegedly ordered the killing.
Kashmir
When Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister, visited the White House recently, Trump boasted he was ready to mediate in the long-running dispute over divided Kashmir. It was a vainglorious gesture, reflecting Trump’s ignorance. When, shortly afterwards, India imposed direct rule on Kashmir, effectively detaining its population, Trump did nothing. Whether the issue is the Delhi-Islamabad nuclear standoff, the unending Afghan war, Chinese attempts to gain strategic leverage in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar, or the Rohingya refugee tragedy in Bangladesh, Trump’s south Asia policy, like that in sub-Saharan Africa, is ineffectual and near non-existent. Maybe they are luck”
Trump has discovered it’s not as easy to rape nations as it is to corner little girls in the dressing room of a beauty pageant, or even an adult one at Bloomingdales.
Not if we unite together in Resistance.
As I wrote in my post of April 19 2025, No Kings Protests Commemorate the American Revolution and Possibly Begin the Second American Revolution; Today on the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution We The People rise in resistance and revolutionary struggle with nationwide mass protests against the abominable and treasonous Trump regime which has captured the state and its nefarious designs in subversion of our democracy.
This we will not abide. This we will Resist. For this, we will bring a Reckoning.
And because of this, as Traitor Trump, Rapist In Chief, Nazi revivalist, white supremacist terrorist, theocratic patriarchal sexual terrorist, and Russian agent tests and exposes the flaws of our system with relentless attacks upon the institutions of our democracy and violations of its values and ideals as Theatre of Cruelty, we must now begin the total reimagination and transformation of our nation and our society if we are to become a free society of equals wherein we are co-owners of the state as citizens and guarantors of each other’s inalienable and universal human rights.
As written in the mission statement for this weekend’s nationwide protest, from We (The People) Dissent:
“On April 19, 1775, colonists confronted the British at the Battle of Lexington and Concord—the shot heard round the world.
On April 19, 2025, millions of everyday Americans will rise to defend that for which they fought—freedom against tyranny.
This time, we carry not arms, but signs.
We will not raise a barricade;
instead, we must lift our voices.
Instead of marching to the tempo of drums,
we will march to the echo of our hearts crying for justice.”
Herein only one thing must I dispute; for the imposed conditions of struggle require that we now bear arms in our defense and that of any human being threatened with death or abduction and imprisonment without cause or trial in a foreign gulag.
This is a grave and terrible choice when state tyranny and terror leave us no other options in our duty of care for others, and if a man kneels on another’s neck, regardless of which one has a badge and a gun or who is white and who is black, that man is a murderer and our duty of care for others requires our intervention, By Any Means Necessary.
I am prepared at all times to fight to the death, and the Trump regime’s criminal and brutal repression of dissent leaves none of us any other choice but submission or resistance.
All Resistance is War to the Knife.
Let us not go quietly, friends, but unite in solidarity of action to seize our power and restore our nation and our liberty.
As written by Robert B. Hubbell in his Substack newsletter; “On this day, two hundred fifty years ago, America began its long march toward independence at the Battles of Lexington and Concord. The battles marked our nation’s first efforts to throw off the yoke of a foreign king. The battles marked “No Kings Day, Part I.”
On Saturday, millions of Americans will participate in “No Kings Day, Part II.” At root, the issues animating protests separated by two-and-a-half centuries are the same: The right to self-determination, liberty, democracy, and the rule of law—not subjugation to the ‘divine right of kings.”
Our ancestors risked everything in rising against the king, mutually pledging to each other “their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.”
We stand on their shoulders as inheritors of their revolutionary zeal and the steadfast efforts of every citizen, soldier, slave, civil rights marcher, organizer, and leader who redeemed democracy anew over the ensuing ten generations.
Our generation will not falter in passing the gift of “No Kings Day”—democracy—to the next generation. Democracy will endure so long as we do not give up. And in the words of Alexei Navalny, “You are not allowed to give up.”
We are not allowed to give up because the democracy we defend does not belong to us. It belongs to all people of America—past, present, and future. We are custodians of democracy until the next generation takes up the struggle as their own.
As we engage in mass resistance on “No Kings Day, Part II,” we should pause to reflect on our place in the long arc of a moral struggle that stretches behind and ahead of us.
America did not achieve independence when the battles of Lexington and Concord concluded. It would take eight years to defeat the British and yet another four years to adopt the Constitution. It would take seventy-five years and a civil war to expiate the sin of slavery embedded in the Constitution. It would take a century more to begin to deliver on the promises of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.
In whatever way you choose to resist on “No Kings Day, Part II,” recognize that you, too, are pledging your sacred honor to the defense of democracy for however long it takes.
Like the Founders, our pledge is made to “each other”—a mutual endeavor for the common good. Take pride and comfort in knowing that the cause is bigger than any one of us and will outlast all of us because we will refuse to give up.
We will win. It is only a matter of time.
Godspeed to us all!”
When they come for us, as they always have and will, fascists of theocratic state terror, patriarchal sexual terror, and white supremacist terror, let them find not a people divided by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but united as guarantors of each other’s humanity as a Band of Brothers, sisters, and others; this, this this.
To the instruments of fascist tyranny in the pathology of disconnectedness and the terror of our nothingness, to division, abjection, learned helplessness, and despair in the face of overwhelming force, I make reply with Buffy the Vampire Slayer quoting the instructions to priests in the Book of Common Prayer in episode eleven of season seven, Showtime, after luring an enemy into an arena to defeat as a demonstration to her recruits; “I don’t know what’s coming next. But I do know it’s gonna be just like this – hard, painful. But in the end, it’s gonna be us. If we all do our parts, believe it, we’ll be the one’s left standing. Here endeth the lesson.”
Elegy For a Swindler King: “You gotta admit, I played this stinkin city like a harp from hell” line of Penguin in the film Batman Returns
We commemorate the resistance of the peoples of Myanmar to the Japanese Occupation during World War Two, while the military junta which has seized the nation as a vassal state of the Chinese Communist Party, much like that of Pol Pot and other tyrants of genocide and war crimes, instrumentalizes the occasion to glorify itself while changing its meaning in service to its own authority as a carceral state of force and control, the peoples it has enslaved rise up in resistance and reclaim its original meaning.
The world’s tenth largest military has failed utterly to consolidate power and repress dissent, despite massive brutal and genocidal war crimes. In the fighting before the annual Resistance Day, renamed by the regime as Armed Forces Day, the actual Resistance emerged victorious in battles across the nation.
There is a calculus of fear by which tyrannies seize power or fall; while a little may enforce order and obedience for a time, fear beyond hope of survival and horror beyond the limits of the human creates resistance. Those who would enslave us should have learned the hollowness of power and the Newtonian recursion of the use of force from the example of Nanking.
Politics is about fear as the basis of human exchange, as my father once told me, as a ten year old boy who in reaction to the insult of someone putting a piece of bubble gum on my chair at school mixed up everything with a skull and crossbones on the bottles from my chemistry set during recess and poured it down the spigot of the classroom drinking faucet in revenge. When several boys ran outside to throw up, I was horrified because I realized I could have killed everyone, and I told my father the story that night. He said; “You have discovered politics. Politics is the art of fear. Fear is a terrible master and a dangerous and untrustworthy servant; the question is, whose servant will it be?”
As the principle by which I have lived since it was given to me by the great Jean Genet in Beirut 1982 goes; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
So may we find the will to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival. In Burma, to use her pre-regime name, a whole nation has found such a will, a nation forged under the terrible hammer of tyranny and state terror, but one which begins to emerge from the legacies of its history as a free society of equals united in diversity and solidarity.
May we dream better futures than we have the past.
Where do we stand today?
As written by Moe Sett Nyein Chan in The Irrawaddy, in an article entitled Mapping the Myanmar Junta’s Gains, Losses, and Stalemates Since Operation 1027; “Myanmar’s civil war has intensified since the launch of Operation 1027 in 2023, forcing the junta into a defensive stance as it lost dozens of towns and hundreds of bases.
However, in 2024, regime forces switched to a more dynamic strategy, employing mobile defensive tactics and launching counteroffensives across the country. The following is a breakdown of battlefield situations across the country.
Kachin State
Key battles are ongoing in Bhamo and Mansi. The regime withdrew three battalions from Mansi to bolster its defense of Bhamo, a district-level town. Junta defensive operations in Bhamo are being coordinated by the 21st Military Operations Command (MOC). They are relying heavily on warplanes and drones to recapture lost bases wherever possible. This marks a strategic shift from static defense to a more mobile and proactive defensive approach.
As a result, the KIA and its allies are being forced to attack junta bases repeatedly, delaying their offensive.
Elsewhere in Kachin, small columns of junta troops are counterattacking in Mohnyin, Hopin, Hpakant, Waingmaw, Myitone and Tanai, but have failed to achieve significant gains.
Sagaing Region
Last year, the regime regained control of Kawlin but again lost control of Pinlebu Township. Resistance forces have also secured most of Inndaw town, where junta troops have retreated to an old underground hospital dug into a hillside. Despite efforts, resistance forces have yet to penetrate the position.
In Tigyaing, fighting has subsided after resistance forces paused their offensive.
However, clashes have erupted in northern Tamu, southern Kale, and Paungbyin near the Indian border, with resistance groups targeting junta bases.
Guerrilla-style assaults on junta troops, including mine attacks, have become commonplace in Sagaing. The military usually responds with single-column operations, often employing scorched-earth tactics against villages believed to support resistance forces. Despite these raids, the regime has been forced to abandon smaller outposts across the region.
Caution defines the regime’s movements due to resistance ambushes in Budalin, Depayin, Wetlet, and Chaung-U townships. Counterattacking the highly mobile resistance forces has proven increasingly challenging for the regime.
Mandalay Region
In northern Mandalay, resistance forces captured northern Madaya, Singu, Thabeikkyin, Tagaung, Mabein, Mogok, and Mongmit in 2024. However, three major military bases and a hospital remained under military control in Thabeikkyin Township. Troops from these bases recently recaptured an area close to Mogok, known as Myanmar’s “Ruby Land”, after being bolstered by airdrops of weapons and ammunition. No fighting in Mogok has been reported so far.
Fierce daily clashes are reported in western and northeastern Madaya, as regime troops seek to reclaim the areas from Mandalay PDFs.
Further south, resistance forces successfully ambushed a junta column in Myingyan Township earlier this month.
Northern Shan State
The regime reclaimed artillery battalions in Taunghkam, Nawnghkio Township from the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) late last month. Taunghkam is a two-hour drive from Pyin Oo Lwin, which is home to the regime’s elite military academies.
However, TNLA forces remain near Taunghkam, where they are launching guerilla-style attacks.
The junta’s recapture of Taunghkam means TNLA forces are now at risk of being encircled in the area.
Southern Shan State
Supported by the local Pa-O National Organization (PNO) militia, the regime is conducting a counteroffensive in Moebye on the Shan-Karenni border.
Regime troops have forced the anti-regime Pa-O National Liberation Army out of Hsihseng and are chasing them to their base in Mawkmai. From Hsihseng, the regime is transporting supplies by road to Loikaw, the capital of Karenni State. The regime’s assault in southern Shan is thus supporting its counteroffensive in Karenni.
Magwe Region
After seizing Ann town in Rakhine State, the Arakan Army and its allies are advancing into neighboring Magwe Region. Numerous junta troops fleeing from Ann, and also Natyaykan on the Bago side of the border, have been killed by local resistance ambushes.
Incapable of repulsing the AA’s advance, the junta has responded by raiding resistance bases in Pakokku, Minbu and Thayet districts to prevent potential attacks on its ordnance factories in the area. However, the raids have had minimal impact on local resistance forces, as they rely on guerilla-style operations.
Chin State
The majority of Chin State remains under resistance control. The regime maintains a foothold in Hakah, Thantlang, and Tedim. Chin resistance forces continue to attack Falam, where junta forces have been reduced to just one major battalion headquarters. In Thantlang, the regime’s counterattack has resulted in a back-and-forth battle with no decisive gains.
Rakhine State
The Arakan Army (AA) controls most of Rakhine State, except for the capital Sittwe, Kyaukphyu, and Manaung. The AA recently launched offensives in Sittwe and Kyaukphyu, home to a Chinese-backed Special Economic Zone and port project, forcing the regime into a defensive posture in those towns.
The AA and its allies are also advancing over the border from Rakhine into Magwe, Bago and Ayeyarwady regions. The regime has been unable to repulse the advancing AA troops.
Karenni State
The regime recaptured most of Loikaw Township last year after Karenni resistance forces withdrew, apparently due to ammunition shortages.
Fighting has been raging for months in Pekon Township’s Moebye, on the Shan-Karenni border, with both sides suffering heavy casualties. Karenni forces have so far held their ground.
In Hpruso, Bawlake, Hpasawng, and Demoso, the regime has primarily resorted to defensive positions.
Karen State
The junta’s Operation Aung Zeya, launched in April last year, has failed to achieve its objectives. The large-scale counteroffensive, involving more than 1,000 troops from the 55th Light Infantry Division, aims to recapture the main trade route between Kawkareik and Myawaddy on the Thai border.
As the offensive nears its one-year mark, junta troops remain stuck in the Dawna Hills, suffering heavy casualties. Despite these setbacks, the regime continues to reinforce its troops and press on with the offensive.
Bago and Tanintharyi
Resistance forces continue to wage guerilla warfare in Bago and Tanintharyi regions, where regular junta military operations have failed to curb armed revolt.
This pattern extends to Sagaing, Magwe, and Mandalay regions, where the regime has been unable to conduct large-scale offensives or achieve decisive victories. Instead, their strategy relies heavily on air support and single-column ground operations. However, rather than directly attacking guerrilla forces, the regime appears to be mainly targeting civilians suspected of supporting the resistance movement.
Since last year, the regime has employed a combination of strategies to counter resistance offensives, utilizing static defensive positions, mobile defensive maneuvers, and counteroffensives. Despite these efforts, its achievements on the national scale remain limited. To date, the military has managed to reclaim only a handful of areas, including Kawlin, Hsihseng, Twin Nge (near Mogok), and Taunghkam.
Despite heavy junta propaganda promoting these territorial gains, the reclaimed areas collectively account for less than 1% of territory, towns, and camps previously seized by resistance forces. Additionally, the reclaimed areas remain under constant threat, encircled by resistance forces, which continue to undermine the regime’s control.
However, in northern Mandalay, weak coordination between various resistance factions – including PDFs allied with the KIA, the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front (ABSDF), and TNLA-allied PDFs – presents a major challenge. Further caution is needed to prevent tensions between the TNLA and KIA from destabilizing broader resistance efforts in the region.
Territories reclaimed by the junta include Twin Nge and Taunghkam, which were TNLA-controlled zones. The junta’s ongoing pressure on other TNLA strongholds signals a persistent threat to resistance control.
In Loikaw, although the regime has regained control, it continues to face strong resistance from highly organized Karenni forces. Meanwhile, in southern Shan State’s Hsihseng Township, the junta appears to have gained the upper hand, leveraging support from PNO militias.
Since 2024, the regime has increasingly relied on mobile defensive strategies and counteroffensives to confront resistance forces. However, these tactics have yet to produce meaningful or decisive victories on a wider scale.
Nevertheless, resistance forces must stay vigilant against the junta’s advanced weaponry, including drones and paragliders, while adapting strategies to combat these threats in specific conflict zones. Developing robust, region-specific solutions to counter the military’s evolving tactics will be crucial for maintaining momentum against the regime.”
As I wrote in my post of March 28 2022, Tyranny Throws Itself a Party, But No One Comes To the Ball: Burma/Myanmar; Tyranny throws itself a party in Burma, but no one comes to the ball. Nor am I surprised, for the fascist military junta that has imprisoned a nation, plunders the public wealth in partnership with criminal syndicates protected under the patronage of the Chinese Communist Party, and attempts to annihilate all differences of ethnicity and faith in campaigns of genocide against tribal peoples; the apex predators of Myanmar and I know each other well.
Over thirty years ago now we first met in battle, the circumstances of which I shall once again recount here; I have been thinking of this today, as I go about my work making mischief for tyrants and those who would enslave us in the tunnels beneath Mariupol. If I must be a tunnel rat, I remain a rat who comes back no matter how many times you try to flush him.
The Mayor of Mariupol has today ordered the total evacuation of the city, as it is in enemy hands; I however am in no one’s chain of command, recognize no authority, and obey no orders as things beneath my contempt. I shall fight on, when and where and in the manner I choose, and I will bet my refusal to submit against any force of subjugation.
It’s always worked for me before; thank you for that Jean Genet, who set me on my life’s path in 1982 Beirut, with the Oath of the Resistance; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows”, and the strategic principle by which I have lived for nearly forty years; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
As my intermittent and questionable satellite link permits, news of the junta’s celebration and of Min Aung Hlaing’s declaration of his regime’s intent to “annihilate them to (the) end” regarding his brutal repression of the tribal peoples and the democracy movement now united in the liberation of Burma, has captivated my attention because the moment the world now faces in Ukraine parallels that of Burma. Sadly, there is nothing unique in this.
The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya is portrayed to the world as an anomaly, a vast crime against humanity of racist and sectarian hate which happened in 2017 and is unrelated to Myanmar’s current apartheid ethnic and religious policies. But this is a lie.
Here is how I came by accident to be fighting with indigenous peoples in the Shan States of northern Burma against a campaign of slave raiding and genocide by the Burmese government; I awoke on the veranda of my stilt house one morning to what was later tallied as eight hundred rounds of one hundred millimeter Russian mortar fire, and mounted my elephant to escape, who panicked and went the wrong way, uphill to the enemy positions on the reverse side of the ridge. I was yelling “Run away!” when one of the Karen tribesmen handed me a spear as I rode past and shouted in S’gaw; “The American is charging the enemy! Take the mortars! Charge!” and we became more than a dozen elephants leading a human wave assault.
After participating in a cavalry charge on the back of an elephant carrying a spear and our capture of the mortars, I discovered we were behind the lines of the advancing Myanmar Army in one of their annual campaigns of slave raiding and ethnic cleansing against the indigenous tribes including those with whom I had been living; exactly where I belong and prefer to be if there is no escape from conflict, and ideally positioned to disrupt their advance. To run amok and make mischief in the enemy’s rear area of operations is a special joy, and an opportunity not to be wasted.
The policy of genocide and its periodic campaigns of death and fear have been part of the fascist tyranny of the Burmese state since the liberation from Japan, one designed to provide a pretext for military rule through the creation of a national identity of religious and racial purity. The junta’s partner in this is the same Buddhist nationalist organization which also co-rules Sri Lanka, and this wedding of military and theocratic monastic rule in the cause of nationalism and ethnic purity is crucial to the strategy of power of modern fascism as it now encircles the globe. In the case of the Karen, a Christian ethnic minority and former British allies, as with the Islamic Rohingya who immigrated from India, all three fascist boxes of exclusionary otherness are checked; blood, faith, and nationality.
Its possible this bears the force and authority of tradition, and has for centuries been a key strategy of state power in Burma as it has to a degree in virtually all human civilizations. As George Washington once said; “Government is about force; only force.”
Fear, power, force; it is a universal circle of dehumanization and subjugation by authoritarian elites. So pervasive and endemic is the Ring of Power that it seems a human constant.
But it need not be so. From all that I have seen and all that I have learned, from all that I am and for all that we may become, I tell you this one true thing; our addiction to and captivity by the Ring of Power is not a flaw of our natural condition or of an evil impulse, but a sum of our history and of choices we have made over time about how to be human together.
As Wagner illustrates with his great theme of renunciation of wealth and power and abandonment of force in Der Ring des Nibelungen, only those who foreswear love can seize dominion over others. This principle has a negative space which is also true; love can liberate us from systems of oppression and redeem the flaws of our humanity, beauty can balance the brokenness of the world, hope can empower us to emerge victorious against overwhelming force, and faith can answer the terror of our nothingness.
I hope that one day humankind will discover that such things as love, compassion, mercy, loyalty, trust, and faith in one another are not weaknesses but strengths, and awaken to the beauty of our diversity and the necessity of our interdependence.
As I wrote in my post of February 1 2022, Anniversary of the Military Coup in Myanmar; A Day of Silence and national strike made silent the cities of Burma today, in the face of threats of death and arrest by the regime of tyranny and state terror which has captured the state for a year now, after a morning of mass protests and defiant marches, and while these performances of liberty and guerrilla street theatre valorized resistance and democracy and unified the peoples of Burma in solidarity against those who would enslave them, liberation forces took the fight to the enemy in direct actions against police and military targets as demonstrations of the powerlessness of carceral states of force and control against a people not divided by sectarian and ethnic hierarchies of otherness and belonging or driven in to submission by learned helplessness and brutal repression, but united in the cause of liberty and refusal to submit.
Last night the enforcers of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and the beneficiaries of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil could sleep secure from the will of the people and the reckoning of their victims, confronted by a protest movement of limited political goals and no true threats to the cabal of monarchists, oligarchs, and militarists which have ruled Burma since the fall of the colonial empire of Britain in 1948; today they awake to a new day in which all of this has changed forever, for the Revolution has come to Burma.
Democracy fell one year ago in Myanmar to a military coup by tyrants of brutal repression and theft of citizenship and perpetrators of genocide and ethnic cleansing in an ongoing campaign against ethnic and religious minorities, often tribal peoples living in areas the junta wishes to plunder of natural resources.
Here is a litany of woes repeated endlessly throughout history and the world, of the conquest of indigenous peoples and the inquisitions and holocausts of those whom divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite belonging dehumanize as monsters to be cast out.
Gathering forces of change have swept the nation this last year, mobilizing not only tribal armies of the Chin, Karen, Shan, Arakan, and other peoples but also mass protests in every major city organized by the Civil Disobedience Movement, national strikes- especially that of hospitals and doctors, a boycott of the military, the emergence of a National Unity Government, pressure from both Catholic and Buddhist organizations, actions of international solidarity by President Biden and Pope Francis, and the resurgence of the Communist Party of Burma’s People’s Liberation Army after thirty years.
This in resistance to state terror and tyranny, in which about 12,000 democracy activists have been arrested and about 1400 killed by the military and police since the coup, and a campaign of ethnic cleansing which in 2021 alone created 400,000 refugees and killed several thousand. We have seen death and state terror on this scale in Burma during the Rohingya Genocide in 2017, which in a few months killed 25,000 and drove a million refugees to Bangladesh and another million to North Africa.
But the use of social force obeys the Third Law of Motion, and for every act of oppression there are equal and opposite forces of resistance.
A regional democracy movement, the Milk Tea Alliance, has emerged to unify action in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and Burma, and has now become a global liberation movement in the Philippine Islands, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia, with important networks and organizations in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, and allied movements in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and Iran.
The three finger salute from The Hunger Games adopted by the Thai democracy revolution in 2014 was embraced a year ago in Burma, and one week after the coup was seen among the mass protests in Yangon. As the Thai democracy leader Sirawith Seritiwat described it in The Guardian; “We knew that it would be easily understood to represent concepts of freedom, equality, solidarity.”
This is what we must offer the peoples of Burma now, and wherever men hunger to be free, all those throughout the world whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and to whom our Statue of Liberty offers a beacon of hope to the world with the words of a poem written by a Jewish girl, Emma Lazarus, in reference to the Colossus of Rhodes;
“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Freedom, Equality, Solidarity; let us reclaim America as a guarantor of liberty and redeem our promise to the world and to the future of humankind.
Torch of Liberty 