Horrors, atrocities, crimes against humanity; none of this should surprise anyone as Israel breaks the peace accord with mass death and terror, for these terms define the Zionist cause, the state of Israel, and the Netanyahu regime.
If history teaches us anything, it is that victims of abuse and of Holocausts both public and private are in danger of becoming abusers themselves once they have seized power. This is why liberation movements become tyrannies as a predictable phase of revolutionary struggle, especially anticolonial revolutions as a consequence of the imposed conditions of struggle.
Security is an illusion but one which is extravagantly profitable and useful in the centralization of power to authority and carceral states of force and control.
All states are embodied violence.
There is but one escape from the recursive cycles of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, and this is love.
How shall we welcome the Stranger? Here is the great question of how to be human together which disambiguates fascist tyranny from democracy as a free society of equals who are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s humanity.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
As written by William Christou in The Guardian, in an article entitled The deadliest 10 minutes in decades: Lebanese reel from Israeli strikes that killed hundreds: Beirut residents and officials say civilians were main casualties in operation that bombed 100-plus targets in 10 minutes; “It took Israel only 10 minutes to carry out one of the worst mass-killings in Lebanon since the end of the country’s civil war in 1990.
Omar Rakha heard the war planes but did not feel the explosions; it was only when he woke up face down on the street, bleeding, that he understood what had happened: the building next to his in the Barbour neighbourhood of central Beirut had been destroyed by two Israeli bombs. He then ran through the flaming wreckage to find his sister, screaming.
Shaden Fakih, a 24-year-old calisthenics trainer, also ran towards the impact site; his friend Mahmoud was inside the struck building. He could only get so close; the multistorey building was a pile of burning rubble. Fakih began to pull people out of the apartments in front of the site, carrying in his arms an old woman who could not walk. There was no sign of Mahmoud and the neighbourhood – once thought to be safe from Israeli bombs – felt like a war zone.
Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah was in the emergency room when the casualties began to arrive. Among the wounded were children pulled from under the rubble; many arrived alone, without parents, their identities unknown. “The youngest was an 11-month-old. I had to operate on him just to relieve some pressure in the head,” said Abu-Sittah, who works as a surgeon at the American University of Beirut Medical College (AUBMC).
The flood of wounded came after Israel bombed more than 100 targets across Lebanon in those 10 minutes on Wednesday, killing more than 300 people and wounding 1,165, according to an initial count by Lebanon’s civil defence. The death toll, which was expected to rise as more bodies were found, was higher than Beirut’s 2020 port explosion – one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in human history.
The Israeli military said it had hit Hezbollah “command and control centres” in the bombing campaign, which it dubbed “Operation Eternal Darkness”.
But residents and Lebanese officials said the strikes, which used 1,000lb bombs in densely packed residential areas of Beirut, mainly killed civilians. Lebanon’s prime minister, Nawaf Salam, accused Israel in a statement of targeting “densely populated residential neighbourhoods” and killing unarmed civilians in breach of international law.
Abu-Sittah said most of the people were wounded in a very short period of time, which was “intentional to flood the health system”, and he compared the aftermath to the mass casualty events he saw while working in Gaza.
The AUBMC received about 70 wounded people all at once; many critically injured, according to Dr Firass Abiad, a surgeon and Lebanon’s former health minister. Crush injuries, lots of elderly people, a woman who had to have both her legs amputated – Abiad rattled off the toll of the day in a tired voice.
“There was a 90-year-old who I just left a bit ago. He passed away from his wounds … There was nothing we could do,” Abiad said. “These are civilians who, without any warning, their whole apartment building was flattened. So you can imagine the severity of injuries that we’re getting.”
First responders in Barbour worked to find people trapped under the rubble. Firefighters sprayed water on the smouldering remains of the building while forklifts lifted crumpled cars to clear the road for ambulances. An emergency worker on the scene said they had not yet found any survivors, only pieces of people.
A man FaceTimed his son, showing him a crumpled car. “You said it was a Volkswagen?” he said, haplessly looking at the crowd around him as he inspected the car. Its badge had been blown off the bumper and the twisted metal left the car unrecognisable.
Rakha watched as the civil defence worked. “I really didn’t think something like this would happen here. Nothing like this happened in the last war [and] because of that all of the refugees came here for safety,” the 38-year-old supermarket owner said, his head wrapped in a blood-stained bandage.
Barbour, like many of the areas in Beirut that Israel struck on Wednesday, is a mixed neighbourhood where Hezbollah enjoys little support. As more than 1.1 million people were displaced by Israeli bombing over the last month, schools in Barbour opened their doors to shelter the fleeing families.
The neighbourhood had not previously been considered within the scope of Israel’s war in Lebanon. But Israel’s military suggested on Wednesday that such areas had now become targets, claiming they had been infiltrated by Hezbollah fighters.
Israel’s Arabic language spokesperson Avichay Adraee said on Wednesday: “Recently, the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] observed the terrorist group Hezbollah began leaving the Shiite strongholds in the suburbs and repositioning itself towards northern Beirut and the mixed areas of the city.” He vowed that Israel would “continue to pursue” Hezbollah fighters wherever they might be located.
The Israeli military’s statements and bombing erased any hope that the ceasefire with Iran might also halt the war in Lebanon. The war, which started after Hezbollah launched rockets at Israel on 2 March prompting an Israeli bombing campaign and invasion of Lebanon, has left around 1,800 people dead and 5,873 wounded in Lebanon.
Barbour’s residents rejected Israel’s explanation of its attacks, saying the strikes were driving even Hezbollah’s critics towards the group.
Fakih said: “It’s getting ridiculous. There’s no Hezbollah here, the Israelis are just getting happy when they bomb people, it’s not about Hezbollah.
“Just stop bombing us. If you want to kill Hezbollah, go for it, but don’t kill civilians, because you’re creating anger in us against Israel and we will have to act like Hezbollah just to defend our country. But I don’t want to do that, I just want to live in peace.”
As night fell, people began to take stock of the dizzying, bloody day. Pictures of dust-covered babies pulled out from under rubble circulated on WhatsApp groups as people searched for their relatives.
People shared a selfie of a smiling elderly couple, Mohammed and Khatoun Karshat, desperately asking if anyone had seen them after they went missing in one of the strikes. Their bodies were found under the rubble late in the night, and people kept sharing their selfie, now in memoriam.
Fakih lingered by the impact site in Barbour as rescuers worked. It had been hours and he had not heard from his friend Mahmoud; his calls went to voicemail.
“It’s been the worst day since the war started,” Fakih said. “And what I’m most sad about is that my pretty Lebanon, our beautiful Lebanon, soon it will all be brought down to the ground.”
As written by Peter Beaumont in The Guardian, In an article entitled Did Israel attack Lebanon to spoil Iran war ceasefire?; “What was the point of Israel’s surprise mass strikes on Lebanon that killed more than 300 people and drew widespread international condemnation?
Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other officials have claimed the largest strike against Hezbollah during the month-long war against Iran was carefully aimed at members of the armed group, but the attacks appeared to be as much a piece of violent spectacle to benefit Netanyahu as militarily useful.
Others have speculated that the attack – without warning and initially hitting more than 100 targets in 10 minutes including in densely populated residential areas in central Beirut – was aimed at undermining the US-Iran ceasefire that many see as being imposed on an unhappy Netanyahu.
The version being briefed in the Israeli media is that Hezbollah had sought to move command posts to civilian areas outside its historical centres, such as the sprawling Dahieh suburb, to better conceal and protect them – a claim Israel has previously made about Hamas in Gaza.
But the huge scale of the attack, combined with the lack of the warning and the details of some of those killed – including the Hezbollah secretary general Naim Qassem’s nephew and personal adviser Ali Yusuf Harshi – could point to something more ambitious: a failed attempt to kill Qassem himself. His predecessor, Hassan Nasrallah, was assassinated by Israel in 2024.
What is clear is that in the half-baked ceasefire negotiations conducted by Donald Trump and his coterie of amateur diplomats, the question of Israel’s war in Lebanon against a proxy of Tehran has – deliberately or not – been left ticking like a timebomb.
The Israeli strikes came despite the fact that Hezbollah had said it had been “notified of a ceasefire” and had been “committed to it since this morning”, according to Lebanese political sources.
By Thursday, Hezbollah and Israel were trading heavy fire again.
Netanyahu’s justification for such a horrific attack on civilian centres hours after the ceasefire had been announced appeared thin at least. His boasts about killing an aide to Qassem and his insistence of Israel’s right to continuing striking in Lebanon suggested to some that it was an attempt to act as a spoiler in a ceasefire he had argued against.
Instead, Israeli officials – despite believing that the wider ceasefire may collapse – appear to believe that they have at least two weeks to continue operations in Lebanon as talks between Iran and the US are due to continue.
The irony not lost on observers is that it is Israel’s continued fighting that could collapse a deal, with senior Iranian figures warning of a response against Israel on Thursday. The president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said the Israeli strikes on Lebanon violated the ceasefire agreement and would render negotiations meaningless.
The Soufan Center thinktank in New York said: “Even if Lebanon was formally outside the deal, the scale of Israel’s strikes was likely to be viewed as escalatory, nonetheless. Israel’s strikes can be understood both as an effort to drive a wedge between Iran and its proxies and as a response to being allegedly sidelined in the original ceasefire discussions.”
In its newsletter, the thinktank added: “The Wall Street Journal reported that Israel was informed of the deal only at the last minute and ‘wasn’t happy’. Netanyahu now seems determined to pursue a scorched earth policy in Lebanon, even if – or perhaps especially because – it might scuttle the ceasefire deal.
“At the same time, Iran is likely seeking to exploit and widen any existing tensions between the United States and Israel in an effort to divide the two allies.”
For Marion Messmer, the director of the international security programme at Chatham House, Israel’s strikes on Lebanon point to a deeper issue: Washington’s difficulty in managing its relationship with Israel, its ally in the war against Iran.
In a briefing, Messmer wrote: “Israel’s insistence that its military action in Lebanon is not part of the agreement reveals a key vulnerability and shows the limits of the US ability to manage its allies: the ongoing bombing campaigns in Lebanon could undermine the ceasefire overall and keep the US trapped in a conflict it is now seeking to exit.
“After weeks of President Trump being furious with European allies for not sufficiently supporting the US, it now appears to be the alliance relationship with Israel that provides more of a risk to US interests in the Middle East.”
Underlining questions about the purpose and timing of Wednesday’s strikes are claims that the Israel Defense Forces’ own assessment is that – despite Israel’s latest invasion into southern Lebanon and its bombing campaign – disarming or defeating Hezbollah is unrealistic.”
As I wrote in my post of March 26 2026, Israel Restarts the Cycle of Violence in Lebanon: Echoes and Reflections of 1982 in 2026; “Israel’s war of imperial conquest and dominion of her neighbors, purchased with American blood and treasure, now has four theatres; Palestine, Iran, her allies among the Arab-American Alliance and the remaining nations of Iran’s Axis of Resistance in peripheral conflicts, and Lebanon.
Because America refuses to use Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction to disarm the Zionist regime regardless of its endless crimes as our taxes buy the deaths of children and other innocent civilians, an event of fracture and disruption which has triggered our abandonment of the idea of universal human rights and signaled the collapse of democracy and our global civilization built on the values and principles of the Enlightenment and embodied in our founding documents, Israel now wages Total War against her neighbors to create an Empire of Greater Israel.
America has failed to leash our dog Israel, and its roaming about savagely attacking all and sundry because there are no consequences for evil. This is what the idea of Israel will mean to history and the world; an example of what can happen when a nation no longer believes in good and evil or in human rights. For to a Zionist only fellow Jews are truly human.
No matter where you begin with hierarchies of belonging and otherness, elite membership and dehumanization, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
References
The Stranger trailer
News of the War
The deadliest 10 minutes in decades: Lebanese reel from Israeli strikes that killed hundreds
9 أبريل 2026: الجبهة اللبنانية في الحرب الإسرائيلية-الأمريكية ضد إيران، وحرب الغزو من أجل إقامة “إمبراطورية إسرائيل الكبرى”
أهوال، وفظائع، وجرائم ضد الإنسانية؛ لا شيء من هذا ينبغي أن يثير دهشة أحد، في الوقت الذي تنقض فيه إسرائيل اتفاق السلام عبر إشاعة الموت الجماعي والرعب؛ إذ إن هذه المصطلحات هي التي تُعرّف القضية الصهيونية، ودولة إسرائيل، ونظام نتنياهو.
وإذا كان التاريخ يُعلّمنا شيئاً، فهو أن ضحايا الإساءة وضحايا المحارق —سواء كانت علنية أم خاصة— يواجهون خطر التحول هم أنفسهم إلى مُسيئين بمجرد أن يمسكوا بزمام السلطة. ولهذا السبب تتحول حركات التحرر إلى أنظمة استبدادية، في مرحلة يمكن التنبؤ بها ضمن مسار النضال الثوري؛ ولا سيما الثورات المناهضة للاستعمار، وذلك كنتيجة حتمية للظروف المفروضة التي تحكم طبيعة هذا النضال.
إن الأمن ليس سوى وهم؛ ولكنه وهمٌ مُدرٌّ لأرباح طائلة، ومفيد للغاية في عملية تركيز السلطة في يد الدولة، وفي ترسيخ نمط “الدولة السجنية” القائمة على القوة والسيطرة.
إن جميع الدول، في جوهرها، ليست سوى تجسيد للعنف.
ولا يوجد سوى مخرج واحد من تلك الحلقات المتكررة —التي تشبه “حلقة فاغنر” الأوبرالية— والمتمحورة حول الخوف والسلطة والقوة؛ وهذا المخرج هو: الحب.
كيف ينبغي لنا أن نستقبل “الغريب”؟ هذا هو السؤال الجوهري حول كيفية العيش كبشرٍ معاً؛ وهو السؤال الذي يضع حداً فاصلاً ويميز بوضوح بين الاستبداد الفاشي، وبين الديمقراطية باعتبارها مجتمعاً حراً يتألف من متساوين، يتقاسمون ملكية الدولة، ويضمن كل منهم إنسانية الآخر.
وفي نهاية المطاف، كل ما يهم حقاً هو ما نفعله بخوفنا، وكيف نستخدم ما نمتلكه من قوة؛ لذا… اصنعوا شيئاً جميلاً بقوتكم.
Hebrew
9 באפריל 2026 החזית הלבנונית של ישראל-אמריקה מלחמת איראן וכיבוש אימפריה של ארץ ישראל השלמה
זוועות, מעשי זוועה, פשעים נגד האנושות; שום דבר מזה לא צריך להפתיע אף אחד, שכן ישראל מפרה את הסכם השלום עם מוות המוני וטרור, שכן מונחים אלה מגדירים את המטרה הציונית, מדינת ישראל ואת משטר נתניהו.
אם ההיסטוריה מלמדת אותנו משהו, זה שקורבנות של התעללות ושואה, הן ציבורית והן פרטית, נמצאים בסכנה להפוך למתעללים בעצמם לאחר שתפסו את השלטון. זו הסיבה שתנועות שחרור הופכות לעריצות כשלב צפוי של מאבק מהפכני, במיוחד מהפכות אנטי-קולוניאליות כתוצאה מתנאי המאבק המוטלים.
ביטחון הוא אשליה, אך אשליה רווחית ושימושית להפליא בריכוז הכוח לסמכות ובמצבי כוח ושליטה כלואים. כל המדינות הן אלימות מגולמת.
יש רק מפלט אחד מהמחזורים הרקורסיביים של טבעת הפחד, הכוח והכוח הווגנרית, וזו אהבה.
כיצד נקבל את פני הזר? הנה השאלה הגדולה כיצד להיות בני אדם יחד, אשר מבדילה בין עריצות פשיסטית לבין דמוקרטיה כחברה חופשית של שווים, שהם בעלים משותפים של המדינה וערבים לאנושיות זה של זה.
בסופו של דבר, כל מה שחשוב הוא מה אנחנו עושים עם הפחד שלנו ואיך אנחנו משתמשים בכוח שלנו; לעשות משהו יפה עם הכוח שלך.
Albert Camus, on his birthday November 7 2025 revision
The works of Albert Camus have become foundational to me personally and to our civilization, studied in every high school in America as core curriculum and by anyone else pursuing an education; these include the great novels The Stranger, The Fall, and The Plague, as well as the philosophical essays in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, and The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt.
Sartre completely misses the point of Camus’ radical skepticism, though in his review of The Stranger as compared to its coda The Myth of Sisyphus Sartre easily recognizes the edifice of ideas on which Camus has built his system, an extension of Rousseau and Nietzsche.
Albert Camus constructed his philosophy as a direct reply to his model Dostoevsky’s arguments in The Demons, was influenced by Augustine, and as a literary stylist was influenced by the poetry of Rene Char and, a most singular decision for an ars poetica, modeled his prose on American noir crime fiction. As an Absurdist he belongs to the tradition of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Ionesco, and Beckett.
Far from nihilistic, Camus references Nicholaus of Cusa on the Conservation of Ignorance and parallels the mission of Godel in his mathematical proof of the Infinite; his conclusions are diametrically opposite those of Sartre, and therein lies all the difference. Like Plato and Aristotle or Freud and Jung, they share a common ground of ideas but face the world Janus-like as dyadic forces, divided by questions of political and philosophical ideology. Neither is entirely comprehensible without the other.
The Absurdism of Camus borders on a NeoPlatonism aligned with that of Iris Murdoch and the Pauline Absurdism of Flannery O’Connor; I always directed students to his remarks in the lecture he gave to the Jesuits, “the difference between us is, you have hope.”
Albert Camus used hope in a special context, for in that lecture on hope and faith Camus seizes the problem directly; hope is ambiguous, relative, a Rashomon Gate of contingency and multiplicities of meaning, and like its myth in Pandora’s Box both a gift and a curse.
As Jean Genet said to me in Beirut 1982, when we were trapped by Israeli soldiers in a burning house, moments before we expected to be burned alive having refused to come out and surrender, “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.” It is a principle of action by which I have lived for forty years now.
Herein lies a gate which opens not to Dante’s Inferno, but to freedom and self-ownership as authenticity, and to seizure of power from authorized identities, the boundaries of the Forbidden and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, marked by a sign bearing the famous warning; “Abandon hope, all you who enter here.”
Always go through the Forbidden Door.
Albert Camus shares many of the sources and references of Vladimir Nabokov and his theme of the flaws of Idealism which led him to mistrust any state which centralizes power and authority and enforces virtue, including both fascism and Stalin’s totalitarian perversion of communism; this became the cause of the fragmentation of the postwar intellectual Left as typified in the sensational and iconic rupture between Sartre and Camus.
I believe the origin of evil is in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, not in an innate depravity of man or evil impulse or personal sin but in the systems and structures of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, in generalized and overwhelming fear shaped by authority in service to power through divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of membership and belonging, especially in fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Camus offers us a similar schema of revolutionary struggle and liberation based on the primary value of freedom which hinges on two key ideas; hope and the unknown.
Unknowability defines the Infinite and our relationship to it, but also the boundaries of ourselves and the limits of the human beyond the flags of our skin; one recalls the thought experiment known as The Spear of Archytus. He throws the spear, and where it lands defines the limits of knowledge, the area that can be mapped. Then he does it again; doubling the known. And so on; but no matter how much we learn, the Unknown remains as vast as before. St Thomas of Cusa articulates the idea further, and Godel used it as proof of the Infinite though his Theorem only proves the limits of knowledge. This I call the Conservation of Ignorance, which as with Camus I hold as the First Principle of any future epistemology.
We who live among the dragons on the maps of our topologies of becoming human, in the blank spaces of unknowns marked Here Be Dragons where all things become possible, know that the total freedom of a universe empty of any meaning or value but that which we create, a universe without Laws to bind us, with no imposed purpose, is not a terror but an endless joy. And we call to you with songs of freedom and agency and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, songs which say; Come dance with us.
How is this of use to the audience Camus wrote for, the freedom fighter who resists and yields not, beyond hope of victory or survival? How do we find the will to claw our way out of the ruins of civilization and make yet another Last Stand? How answer overwhelming force and the unwinnable fight?
Albert Camus forged an ideology of rebellion which locates freedom not in the transformative change of systemic and structural externalities which determine the imposed conditions of struggle, but within us as a condition of being; we resist to claim ourselves, to seize ownership of our own moment, and in this primary human act we become Unconquered. By our choosing to be free we achieve our freedom, for who cannot be compelled is free.
Here also is a great secret of power; no one has power over us unless we give it to them, and power is hollow and brittle, for the tyranny of brutal repression and a carceral state of force and control fails when met with disbelief and disobedience.
So also is authority delegitimized when we no longer trust and believe in it; when we perform the four primary duties of a citizen in forging a free society of equals; question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority.
For authority defines an unequal relationship, and as such there is no just authority.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. Of those who would enslave us and claim the throne of the Great and Powerful Oz, whether tyrant or god, we may say with Dorothy; “You’re just an old humbug.”
We are the inheritors of Prometheus, undaunted by the threat of punishment and death, for in our defiance of authority and refusal to submit we are victorious over those who would dehumanize, falsify, commodify, and subjugate us.
Let us give to those who would steal our souls to power the mechanisms of their own wealth, power, and privilege the only reply it merits; Never Again.
Albert Camus, a reading list
A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning, by Robert Zaretsky
Fifty one years ago this April, America launched Operation Condor, a global campaign to destabilize and repress socialist governments and movements, wage imperial conquest and dominion, impose and enforce capitalism as a hegemonic system of colonial oppression, and authorize and institutionalize its apex predators and its elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege.
This remains relevant to us today because it is the origin of many of the push forces driving waves of refugees to our border, and the horrific humanitarian crisis and test of our democracy created by American imperialism. So too with many European democracies, as migration is created and weaponized by fascists in service to power and the subversion of democracy.
Migration is a word which conceals both the conditions which trigger it and our own complicity in creating them as consequences of our decades long policies of colonialism, anticommunist military adventurism, and economic, political, and cultural warfare; ecological devastation with its drought, plagues, floods, and famine, the sixth age of extinction and the death of the seas, poverty, slavery, and social and political destabilization, an age of tyranny and state terror, genocide and ethnic cleansing, weaponized faith and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, and multigenerational wars.
In terms of refugees fleeing to America for safety and survival as well as liberty and equality we are mainly speaking of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, though the hell zone of Columbia and Venezuela now accounts for many, and with the collapse of central authority in Mexico and its degeneration into a region of warlords, oligarchs, and feudal crime syndicates we have refugees from Mexico itself as well as the traditional seasonal laborers.
Globally we have refugees of imperial wars of dominion, genocides, and civilizational collapse weaponized by tyrants to shift Europe toward fascist regimes, mainly by America’s key regional ally Turkey in Erdogan’s conflict with Russia for dominion of the Middle East and of Libya and the Mediterranean from which came the Third World War now ongoing in several theatres of conflict, a strategy established by the American model of Operation Condor which created conditions for the capture of the Republican Party in 1980 by a theocratic cabal under the crusader’s banner of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, and then America with the Stolen Elections of 2016 and 2024 by the Fourth Reich.
Migrant labor is slave labor; this is the great truth America has never confronted and must now answer for in the suffering masses at our border. Entire sectors of our economy run on it; agriculture in which labor becomes a strategic resource as we starve without it, but also child and elder care, hospitality, and some manufacture. America’s wealth and power is created for us by others to whom we export the real costs of production, others who must remain invisible and exploitable as unregulated illegal labor to wring every ounce of value from them for our elites. Thus we weaponize economic disparity in service to power and privilege, and create and maintain hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and white supremacy.
In this crucial year of world-historical significance with the unrestrained sabotage of the institutions of the state by Traitor Trump and his clown show of freaks, white supremacist terrorists, theocratic patriarchal sexual terrorists, and amoral grifters, which I believe will determine the fate of humankind for the next several centuries and offers us possible futures of either an Age of Tyranny or a United Humankind, the issue of immigration will be among the binary choices which will continue to inform, motivate, and shape human being, meaning, and value.
Interests of elite hegemonies of wealth and power converge here with those of racial privilege and white supremacy in historic toxicity, in parallel with the rise of the carceral state and militarized police as an instrument for the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison labor and the repression of the Civil Rights Movement, and have done so from their origins. One such origin point is America’s appropriation, concealment, and instrumentalization of Nazi war criminals in the repression of dissent and the conquest of the world.
The Fourth Reich of which Trump is a figurehead did not emerge from nothing like Athena from the head of Zeus, but was an invention of American imperialism. As such its history and character as a global threat to democracy can be studied in the crisis of refugees and migration to which it has given birth, and in the legacies of our nation’s use of fascism as an instrument of dominion in the Americas and everywhere on earth, for as we were using it to conquer others, it was using us to seize the United States of America and the world.
As I wrote in my post of February 18 2020, Guatemala: Our Heart of Darkness; As we abduct and lockdown refugees in concentration camps and secret prisons, and drive others back into a Mexico whose government is supine before the power of its criminal organizations which our gun industry has armed, we must reflect on the causes of this historic mass migration from Central America’s Dry Corridor of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua; why is this happening, and what can be done to fix the problems which are driving it?
Drought and famine caused by global warming and climate change are clear immediate causes and triggering stressors of the current migration, as articulated by José García Escobar and Melisa Rabanales in The Guardian; “Martina García grinds just enough maize kernels to make a handful of tortillas which she serves to her children and grandson for breakfast with a sprinkling of salt.
García, 40, must ration the family’s last few sacks of tiny corncobs after drought and prolonged heatwaves linked to the climate emergency devastated crops across Guatemala.
As a result, record numbers of subsistence farming families are going hungry: health officials registered more than 15,300 cases of acute malnutrition in children under five last year – up nearly 24% from 2018. It’s the highest number of acute malnutrition cases since 2015, when a severe drought destroyed harvests across Central America.
Rural communities in the Dry Corridor – a region which stretches through Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua – are bearing the brunt, with impoverished indigenous families like García’s in Jocotán, among the hardest hit.
“I’m lucky if I can find pumpkin flowers,” said the emaciated García. “But we mostly just eat tortillas.”
After an irregular rainy season and an unpromising harvest, almost 80% of maize grown in Guatemala’s highland region was lost, according to Oxfam. All that remains for many families are tiny corncobs studded with discoloured grains that look like rotten teeth.
In October 2109, a baby in a nearby community died after not eating for many days. At least 33,000 children need urgent medical treatment due to acute malnutrition, according to Oxfam Guatemala.
Central America is one of the world’s most dangerous regions outside a warzone, where a toxic mix of violence, poverty and corruption has forced millions to flee north in search of security.
Now, drought, famine and the battle for dwindling natural resources are increasingly being recognized as major factors in the exodus.
And it seems to be getting worse: 2019 was the driest year in a decade with only 65 days of rain, according to Guatemala’s National Institute of Seismology, Volcanology, Meteorology and Hydrology. Guatemala’s subsistence farmers depend on rainfall – which is increasingly erratic – and most lack alternative sources of water.
Around one million Guatemalans – 15% of the population – are currently unable to meet their daily food requirements, according to the World Food Programme (WFP).
Amid the growing threat of famine, almost 265,000 Guatemalans migrants searching for work, safety and food security were detained at the US southern border in 2019 – a 130% increase on the previous fiscal year.
Worsening hunger across the region is a factor in the rise in migrant caravans trying to reach the US overland, according to both analysts and migrants themselves.
The caravans have been met with repression and hostility by Mexican and American authorities who accuse the migrants and refugees of political subversion and criminality.
Hunger is not a new phenomenon in Guatemala: at least 60% of the population live in poverty, hundreds of thousands rely on food aid, and almost 50% of children suffer stunted physical and cognitive development due to chronic malnourishment.
But experts warn that the additional burden of extreme weather is overwhelming these communities, which have been long ignored and repressed by the government.
For García, the situation is desperate: food aid has yet to reach her canton, so once the maize runs out in March, she must find backbreaking work picking coffee – or else risk starvation. There’s no guarantee she’ll even find work, as a leaf-eating fungus known as roya – which thrives in warm conditions – has also devastated coffee crops.
García, who’s weak from chronic hunger, said: “I’ll get paid $4 a day. But if I pick less than 46kg, I won’t get paid.”
These conditions have worsened longstanding issues of endemic poverty and pervasive violence and criminality, legacies of historical colonialism and American imperialist and capitalist policies and interventions, which I have described in my post of September 4 2019; There is an interesting connection between the chaos we created in Central America which is driving a mass exodus of immigration to our borders and the conspiracy theory of Islamic replacement of Europeans which inspires white Christian Identity nationalism, our greatest terrorist threat today; many of the white supremacists who ruled Algeria as a colony of France, mainly former Nazi soldiers who joined the Foreign Legion after the end of World War Two, were after its fall in 1962 hired by the government of the United States to rule El Salvador and Guatemala as puppet regimes to protect our corporate profits.
With them came the same ideology and dream of a homeland and asylum for escaped Nazis, and a secure base of operations and launchpoint for the Fourth Reich, as with those who fled the fall of the colony of Algeria as a white ethnostate to France and blamed Charles de Gaulle for its abandonment, and whose descendants now form the core of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front.
Among the direct effects of the secret partnership between America and our former Nazi adversaries include:
The 1954 seizure of Guatemala by Eisenhower’s CI.A., which replaced a Marxist who had seized land owned by United Fruit and redistributed it to Indian peasants with a furniture salesman from Honduras, Castillo Armas. During the course of this coup America bombed Guatemala City, killed 9,000 communists, disbanded the unions, drove off the squatters, drew up a blacklist of some 70,000 leftists, built death squads and secret prisons, gave torture and brigandage free reign, created an enduring political front, the MLN, and started making a profit from our plantations.
The 1961 seizure of Guatemala by C.I.A. officer Willauer leading 200 men, a Harvard lawyer who had flown as Chennault’s first officer with the Flying Tigers in China. Guatemala was the staging area for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Throughout the 1960-63 period of a civil war which continued until 1996, America crushed a pro-Castro rebellion using six C.I.A. bombers, exiled Cuban shock troops, and Green Berets who used the opportunity to test counterinsurgency theories later used in Vietnam.
The 1974 accession of an officer of Armas named Alarcon to the Presidency of Guatemala, who institutionalized the MLN, declaring “I am a fascist, and I have tried to model my party on the Spanish Falange.” He was, of course, a C.I.A. agent. Nixon once brought him along on his annual pilgrimage to consult with what he called his spiritual advisor, the infamous Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele.
The 1982 seizure of power and Presidency of Rios Montt, an evangelical Sunday school teacher and personal friend of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who suspended the constitution, replaced the courts with secret tribunals, escalated the scorched earth warfare, torture, and disappearances of his predecessors, and one thing more. During this the most terrible period of civil war throughout Central America, when Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were in fact a single nation ruled by remnants of the Nazis we had transplanted from French Algeria as American puppet regimes, and with the full authority of Ronald Reagan, Rios Montt weaponized Protestantism against encroaching Catholic Liberation theology.
This was among the first of my chosen fights, conflicts which I traveled to join in liberation struggle, in the wake of my summer of resistance against the Israeli Siege of Beirut in the summer of 1982. After my Baccalaureate graduation the next spring, I embarked on what became a years-long routine of international solidarity and revolution during my summers from various grad schools and teaching high school, and America’s imperial wars in support of tyranny and terror in central America and against liberation movements, especially the Mayan Genocide in Guatemala, was among the most horrific of atrocities which I was called to oppose.
During the 18 months of the Mayan Genocide, in which his death squads killed 3,000 people each month and annihilated 600 villages, Montt also instituted a system of forced labor in concentration camps modeled on the Apartheid system of South Africa and ruled by terror using former British police and Protestant Orange Militia units hired from Belfast, a mercenary force who had splendidly legal Hong Kong passports courtesy of the Thatcher government.
During over 35 years of civil war in Guatemala including Rios Montt’s genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the native Indians, about half a million Indians were killed, over one million conscripted into military service and used against their own people, tens of thousands driven into Mexico as refugees, and most of the rest worked to death in the concentration camps. No American Army came to liberate them; they were not white, and no one cared so long as the profits flowed. Guatemala is America’s Belgian Congo; our heart of darkness.
I think of this every day as I eat my morning banana, for each one is the living form of a silent cry, the ghost of a tear, the memory of atrocity and horror, a thing like many others of fragile beauty and fleeting pleasure won by brutality and the theft of hope, pain and blood and death made manifest. For the dead and for wrongs past I can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged and the future that must be redeemed.
The 1981 founding of ARENA in El Salvador and the 1982-3 Presidency of Roberto D’Aubuisson Arrieta, son of one of the original French Algerian OAS/Afrika Corps legionnaires and immigrants and leader of death squads since 1972, when he was trained at the US School of the Americas, often called a school for war criminals. During the peak of the civil war in 1983-84, about 8,000 people were killed every month in El Salvador.
The 1963-75 Honduran coup and military dictatorship of Arellano, for whose regime the term Banana Republic was coined, and of course the conduct of the Contra War beginning in 1980, which included the 1984 Honduran invasion of Nicaragua supported by 5,500 American troops.
Together Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were ruled for over a generation by America through our puppet tyrants and the ARENA and MLN parties we created. But there is more; much more, of which I will mention only four more brief examples here.
The 1964-85 rule of Brazil by the Arena Party and its legacy of torture and state terror which was ended by the total bankruptcy of the nation due to policies of privatization, deregulation, and corruption as exported by the Chicago Boys to Latin America generally as imperialist economic warfare.
The 1976 military coup in Argentina and the civil war which followed, during which some 20,000 persons were disappeared. Of our earlier involvements; Peron had been a protégé of Franco and Mussolini, and Evita was assassinated not by us but by Vatican Intelligence with radiation poisoning due to Peron’s campaign against the Church. The Vatican also ran the Swiss escape route used by Otto Skorzeny and other SS officers at the fall of the Third Reich whom we later hired. The most brazen flattery I have ever heard directed toward Oliver North was to compare him to Skorzeny.
The 1973 assassination of Allende in Chile and support of the monstrous Pinochet regime which killed as many as one in every hundred of its citizens.
Regarding Mexico, we long ago seized Texas and California, drew a line in the sand to weaponize disparity and create a mass resource of illegal and therefore exploitable quasi slave labor, and now call aliens everyone on the wrong side of it who comes here to pick the fruit, wash the dishes, and clean the toilets that our own nephews and nieces, children and grandchildren, would laugh in your face at the suggestion they get their hands dirty doing themselves.
Fascism is a sin of pride whose effects reverberate still, propagating outward in ever-widening circles as a force of contagion like the ripples of a stone cast into a pond. And we are all complicit in it, who call ourselves Americans.
We must make a better future than we have the past.
Operation Condor and the Pinochet regime, a reading list
The Condor Years: How Pinochet And His Allies Brought Terrorism To Three Continents, John Dinges
6 de abril de 2025 Cómo el imperialismo estadounidense creó nuestra crisis humanitaria en la frontera: consecuencias de la Operación Cóndor
Este abril se cumplen cuarenta y nueve años de que Estados Unidos lanzó la Operación Cóndor, una campaña global para desestabilizar y reprimir gobiernos y movimientos socialistas, emprender la conquista y el dominio imperial, imponer y hacer cumplir el capitalismo como sistema hegemónico y autorizar e institucionalizar a sus principales depredadores y sus jerarquías de élite. de riqueza, poder y privilegios.
Esto sigue siendo relevante para nosotros hoy porque es el origen de muchas de las fuerzas de empuje que impulsan oleadas de refugiados hacia nuestra frontera, y de la horrible crisis humanitaria y prueba de nuestra democracia creada por el imperialismo estadounidense.
Migración es una palabra que oculta tanto las condiciones que la desencadenan como nuestra propia complicidad en crearlas como consecuencia de nuestras décadas de políticas de colonialismo, aventurerismo militar anticomunista y guerra económica, política y cultural; devastación ecológica con su sequía, plagas, inundaciones y hambrunas, la sexta era de extinción y muerte de los mares, pobreza, esclavitud y desestabilización social y política, una era de tiranía y terror estatal, genocidio y limpieza étnica, fe armada y su terror sexual patriarcal y guerras multigeneracionales.
En términos de refugiados que huyen a Estados Unidos en busca de seguridad y supervivencia, así como de libertad e igualdad, estamos hablando principalmente de Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras y Nicaragua, aunque la zona infernal de Colombia y Venezuela ahora representa a muchos, y con el colapso de la región central autoridad en México y su degeneración en una región de señores de la guerra, oligarcas y sindicatos del crimen feudal, tenemos refugiados del propio México, así como trabajadores estacionales tradicionales.
A nivel mundial tenemos refugiados de guerras imperiales de dominio, genocidios y colapso de civilizaciones, armados por tiranos para hacer que Europa se dirija hacia regímenes fascistas, principalmente por Turquía, el principal aliado regional de Estados Unidos, en el conflicto de Erdogan con Rusia por el dominio de Siria y Libia, del que surgió la Tercera Guerra Mundial. Ahora en curso en diez teatros de conflicto, una estrategia establecida por el modelo estadounidense de Operación Cóndor que creó las condiciones para la captura del Partido Republicano en 1980 y luego de Estados Unidos con las Elecciones Robadas de 2016 por el Cuarto Reich.
El trabajo migrante es trabajo esclavo; Esta es la gran verdad que Estados Unidos nunca ha enfrentado y por la que ahora debe responder ante las masas que sufren en nuestra frontera. Sectores enteros de nuestra economía funcionan con él; agricultura en la que la mano de obra se convierte en un recurso estratégico mientras nos morimos de hambre sin ella, pero también el cuidado de niños y ancianos, la hospitalidad y algunas manufacturas. La riqueza y el poder de Estados Unidos son creados para nosotros por otros a quienes exportamos los costos reales de producción, otros que deben permanecer invisibles y explotables como mano de obra ilegal no regulada para exprimirles hasta el último gramo de valor para nuestras elites. De esta manera utilizamos la disparidad económica como arma al servicio del poder y los privilegios, y creamos y mantenemos jerarquías de alteridad excluyente y supremacía blanca.
En este año electoral crucial de importancia histórica mundial, que creo determinará el destino de la humanidad durante los próximos siglos y nos ofrece posibles futuros de una Era de Tiranía o de una Humanidad Unida, la cuestión de la inmigración estará entre las cuestiones binarias elecciones que continuarán informando, motivando y dando forma al ser humano, su significado y su valor.
Los intereses de las hegemonías de riqueza y poder de las élites convergen aquí con los del privilegio racial y la supremacía blanca en una toxicidad histórica, en paralelo con el surgimiento del estado carcelario y la policía militarizada como instrumento para volver a esclavizar a los ciudadanos negros como trabajadores penitenciarios y la represión del Movimiento por los Derechos Civiles, y lo han hecho desde sus orígenes. Uno de esos puntos de origen es la apropiación, el ocultamiento y la instrumentalización por parte de Estados Unidos de los criminales de guerra nazis en la represión de la disidencia y la conquista del mundo.
El Cuarto Reich del que Trump es una figura decorativa no surgió de la nada como Atenea de la cabeza de Zeus, sino que fue una invención del imperialismo estadounidense. Como tal, su historia y su carácter como amenaza global a la democracia pueden estudiarse en la crisis de refugiados y migraciones que ha dado origen, y en los legados del uso del fascismo por parte de nuestra nación como instrumento de dominio en las Américas y en todas partes del mundo. la tierra, porque así como la usábamos para conquistar a otros, ella nos estaba usando a nosotros para apoderarnos de los Estados Unidos de América y del mundo.
Como escribí en mi publicación del 18 de febrero de 2020, Guatemala: Nuestro Corazón de Tinieblas; Mientras secuestramos y encerramos a refugiados en campos de concentración y prisiones secretas, y expulsamos a otros de regreso a un México cuyo gobierno está inactivo ante el poder de sus organizaciones criminales, debemos reflexionar sobre las causas de esta histórica migración masiva desde el Corredor Seco de Guatemala en Centroamérica. , El Salvador, Honduras y Nicaragua; ¿Por qué sucede esto y qué se puede hacer para solucionar el problema?
¿Problemas que lo están impulsando?
La sequía y la hambruna causadas por el calentamiento global y el cambio climático son causas inmediatas claras y factores estresantes desencadenantes de la migración actual, como lo expresaron José García Escobar y Melisa Rabanales en The Guardian; “Martina García muele suficientes granos de maíz para hacer un puñado de tortillas que sirve a sus hijos y a su nieto en el desayuno con un poco de sal.
García, de 40 años, debe racionar los últimos sacos de diminutas mazorcas de maíz de la familia después de que la sequía y las prolongadas olas de calor relacionadas con la emergencia climática devastaran los cultivos en toda Guatemala.
Como resultado, un número récord de familias de agricultores de subsistencia pasan hambre: los funcionarios de salud registraron más de 15.300 casos de desnutrición aguda en niños menores de cinco años el año pasado, casi un 24% más que en 2018. Es el número más alto de casos de desnutrición aguda desde 2015, cuando Una grave sequía destruyó las cosechas en toda Centroamérica.
Las comunidades rurales del Corredor Seco –una región que se extiende a lo largo de Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras y Nicaragua– son las más afectadas, y las familias indígenas empobrecidas como la de García en Jocotán se encuentran entre las más afectadas.
“Tengo suerte si puedo encontrar flores de calabaza”, dijo el demacrado García. “Pero la mayoría de las veces solo comemos tortillas”.
Según Oxfam, después de una temporada de lluvias irregular y una cosecha poco prometedora, casi el 80% del maíz cultivado en la región montañosa de Guatemala se perdió. Lo único que les queda a muchas familias son pequeñas mazorcas de maíz salpicadas de granos descoloridos que parecen dientes podridos.
En octubre de 2109, un bebé de una comunidad cercana murió después de no comer durante muchos días. Al menos 33.000 niños necesitan tratamiento médico urgente debido a la desnutrición aguda, según Oxfam Guatemala.
Centroamérica es una de las regiones más peligrosas del mundo fuera de una zona de guerra, donde una mezcla tóxica de violencia, pobreza y corrupción ha obligado a millones de personas a huir al norte en busca de seguridad.
Ahora, la sequía, la hambruna y la batalla por los menguantes recursos naturales se reconocen cada vez más como factores importantes del éxodo.
Y parece estar empeorando: 2019 fue el año más seco en una década con solo 65 días de lluvia, según el Instituto Nacional de Sismología, Vulcanología, Meteorología e Hidrología de Guatemala. Los agricultores de subsistencia de Guatemala dependen de las precipitaciones –que son cada vez más erráticas– y la mayoría carece de fuentes alternativas de agua.
Según el Programa Mundial de Alimentos (PMA), alrededor de un millón de guatemaltecos (el 15% de la población) actualmente no pueden satisfacer sus necesidades alimentarias diarias.
En medio de la creciente amenaza de hambruna, casi 265.000 migrantes guatemaltecos que buscaban trabajo, seguridad y seguridad alimentaria fueron detenidos en la frontera sur de Estados Unidos en 2019, un aumento del 130% con respecto al año fiscal anterior.
El empeoramiento del hambre en la región es un factor en el aumento de las caravanas de migrantes que intentan llegar a Estados Unidos por tierra, según analistas y los propios migrantes.
Las caravanas han sido recibidas con represión y hostilidad por parte de las autoridades mexicanas y estadounidenses, que acusan a los migrantes y refugiados de subversión política y criminalidad.
El hambre no es un fenómeno nuevo en Guatemala: al menos el 60% de la población vive en la pobreza, cientos de miles dependen de la ayuda alimentaria y casi el 50% de los niños sufren un retraso en su desarrollo físico y cognitivo debido a la desnutrición crónica.
Pero los expertos advierten que la carga adicional del clima extremo está abrumando a estas comunidades, que durante mucho tiempo han sido ignoradas y reprimidas por el gobierno.
Para García, la situación es desesperada: la ayuda alimentaria aún no ha llegado a su cantón, por lo que una vez que se acabe el maíz en marzo, deberá encontrar un trabajo agotador recogiendo café, o correr el riesgo de morir de hambre. No hay garantía de que encuentre trabajo, ya que un hongo que se alimenta de hojas conocido como roya, que prospera en condiciones cálidas, también ha devastado los cultivos de café.
García, que está débil por el hambre crónica, dijo: “Me pagarán 4 dólares al día. Pero si recojo menos de 46 kg, no me pagarán”.
Estas condiciones han empeorado problemas de larga data de pobreza endémica y violencia y criminalidad generalizadas, legados del colonialismo histórico y de las políticas e intervenciones imperialistas y capitalistas estadounidenses, que describí en mi publicación del 4 de septiembre de 2019; Existe una conexión interesante entre el caos que creamos en Centroamérica, que está provocando un éxodo masivo de inmigración a nuestras fronteras, y la teoría de la conspiración del reemplazo islámico de los europeos que inspira nuestra mayor amenaza terrorista hoy; Muchos de los supremacistas blancos que gobernaron Argelia como colonia de Francia, principalmente ex soldados nazis que se unieron a la Legión Extranjera después del final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, fueron contratados después de su caída en 1962 por el gobierno de los Estados Unidos para gobernar El Salvador y Guatemala como regímenes títeres para proteger nuestras ganancias corporativas.
Con ellos vino la misma ideología y el mismo sueño de una patria y asilo para los nazis fugitivos, y una base segura de operaciones y punto de lanzamiento para el Cuarto Reich, como ocurre con aquellos que huyeron de la caída de la colonia de Argelia como etnoestado blanco a Francia y culparon a Charles de Gaulle por su abandono, y cuyos descendientes ahora forman el núcleo del Frente Nacional de Jean-Marie Le Pen. .
Entre los efectos directos de la asociación secreta entre Estados Unidos y nuestros antiguos adversarios nazis se incluyen:
La toma de Guatemala en 1954 por la CIA de Eisenhower, que reemplazó a un marxista que se había apoderado de tierras propiedad de la United Fruit y las redistribuyó entre campesinos indios con un vendedor de muebles de Honduras, Castillo Armas. Durante el curso de este golpe, Estados Unidos bombardeó la ciudad de Guatemala, mató a 9.000 comunistas, disolvió los sindicatos, expulsó a los ocupantes ilegales, elaboró una lista negra de unos 70.000 izquierdistas, construyó escuadrones de la muerte y prisiones secretas, dio rienda suelta a la tortura y el bandolerismo, creó una sociedad duradera. frente político, el MLN, y empezamos a sacar provecho de nuestras plantaciones.
La toma de Guatemala en 1961 por la C.I.A. El oficial Willauer al frente de 200 hombres, un abogado de Harvard que había volado como primer oficial de Chennault con los Flying Tigers en China. Guatemala fue el escenario de la invasión de Bahía de Cochinos a Cuba. A lo largo del período 1960-63 de una guerra civil que continuó hasta 1996, Estados Unidos aplastó una rebelión pro Castro utilizando seis agentes de la CIA. bombarderos, tropas de choque cubanas exiliadas y boinas verdes que aprovecharon la oportunidad para probar teorías de contrainsurgencia utilizadas más tarde en Vietnam.
El ascenso en 1974 de un oficial de Armas llamado Alarcón a la Presidencia de Guatemala, quien institucionalizó el MLN, declarando “Soy un fascista y he tratado de modelar mi partido según la Falange Española”. Era, por supuesto, un agente de la CIA. agente. Nixon lo llevó una vez a su peregrinación anual para consultar con lo que llamó su consejero espiritual, el infame criminal de guerra nazi Josef Mengele.
La toma del poder y la presidencia en 1982 de Ríos Montt, un maestro evangélico de escuela dominical y amigo personal de Jerry Falwell y Pat Robertson, quien suspendió la constitución, reemplazó las cortes por tribunales secretos, intensificó la guerra de tierra arrasada, la tortura y las desapariciones de sus predecesores y una cosa más. Durante este, el período más terrible de la guerra civil en toda Centroamérica, cuando Guatemala, El Salvador y Honduras eran de hecho una sola nación gobernada por restos de los nazis que habíamos trasplantado de la Argelia francesa como regímenes títeres estadounidenses, y con la plena autoridad de Ronald Reagan y Ríos Montt utilizaron al protestantismo como arma contra la invasión de la teología católica de la liberación.
Durante los 18 meses del genocidio maya, en el que sus escuadrones de la muerte mataron a 3.000 personas cada mes y aniquilaron 600 aldeas, también instituyó un sistema de trabajos forzados en campos de concentración inspirados en el sistema de apartheid de Sudáfrica y gobernados por el terror utilizando a antiguos británicos. unidades de policía y de la Milicia Naranja Protestante contratadas en Belfast, una fuerza mercenaria que tenía pasaportes de Hong Kong espléndidamente legales, cortesía del gobierno de Thatcher.
Durante más de 35 años de guerra civil en Guatemala, incluida la campaña genocida de limpieza étnica de Ríos Montt contra los indios nativos, alrededor de medio millón de indios fueron asesinados, más de un millón fueron reclutados para el servicio militar y utilizados contra su propio pueblo, y decenas de miles fueron expulsados a México. como refugiados, y la mayoría del resto trabajó hasta morir en los campos de concentración. Ningún ejército americano vino a liberarlos; no eran blancos y a nadie le importaba mientras las ganancias fluyeran. Guatemala es el Congo belga de Estados Unidos; nuestro corazón de oscuridad.
Pienso en esto todos los días mientras como mi plátano matutino, porque cada uno es la forma viva de un llanto silencioso, el fantasma de una lágrima, el recuerdo de la atrocidad y el horror, algo como muchos otros de frágil belleza y fugaz placer conquistado. por la brutalidad y el robo de la esperanza, el dolor, la sangre y la muerte se manifiestan. Por los muertos y por los agravios del pasado nada puedo hacer; son los vivos quienes deben ser vengados y el futuro el que debe ser redimido.
La fundación de ARENA en El Salvador en 1981 y la presidencia entre 1982 y 1983 de Roberto D’Aubuisson Arrieta, hijo de uno de los legionarios e inmigrantes originales del Cuerpo Africano/OEA argelino francés y líder de escuadrones de la muerte desde 1972, cuando fue entrenado en el Escuela de las Américas de Estados Unidos, a menudo llamada escuela para criminales de guerra. Durante el pico de la guerra civil en 1983-84, alrededor de 8.000 personas fueron asesinadas cada mes en El Salvador.
El golpe de estado hondureño de 1963-75 y la dictadura militar de Arellano, para cuyo régimen se acuñó el término República Bananera, y, por supuesto, la conducción de la Guerra de la Contra a partir de 1980, que incluyó la invasión hondureña de Nicaragua en 1984, apoyada por 5.500 tropas estadounidenses.
Juntos, Guatemala, El Salvador y Honduras fueron gobernados durante más de una generación por Estados Unidos a través de nuestros tiranos títeres y los partidos ARENA y MLN que creamos. Pero hay más; mucho más, de los cuales mencionaré aquí sólo cuatro breves ejemplos más.
El gobierno de Brasil de 1964-85 por el Partido Arena y su legado de tortura y terror estatal que terminó con la bancarrota total de la nación debido a las políticas de privatización, desregulación y corrupción exportadas por los Chicago Boys a América Latina en general como Guerra económica imperialista.
El golpe militar de 1976 en Argentina y la guerra civil que le siguió, durante la cual desaparecieron unas 20.000 personas. De nuestras participaciones anteriores; Perón había sido un protegido de Franco y Mussolini, y Evita fue asesinada no por nosotros sino por la Inteligencia del Vaticano con envenenamiento por radiación debido a la campaña de Perón contra la Iglesia. El Vaticano también dirigió la ruta de escape suiza utilizada por Otto Skorzeny y otros oficiales de las SS durante la caída del Tercer Reich a quienes contratamos más tarde. El halago más descarado que he oído jamás dirigido a Oliver North fue compararlo con Skorzeny.
El asesinato de Allende en Chile en 1973 y el apoyo al monstruoso régimen de Pinochet que mató a uno de cada cien de sus ciudadanos.
En cuanto a México, hace mucho tiempo nos apoderamos de Texas y California, trazamos una línea en la arena para convertir la disparidad en un arma y crear un recurso masivo de mano de obra cuasi esclava ilegal y, por lo tanto, explotable, y ahora llamamos extranjeros a todos los que están en el lado equivocado y vienen aquí a elegir. la fruta, lavar los platos y limpiar los baños que nuestros propios sobrinos y sobrinas, hijos y nietos, se reirían en tu cara ante la sugerencia de que se ensucien las manos haciéndolo ellos mismos.
El fascismo es un pecado de orgullo cuyos efectos todavía reverberan, propagándose hacia afuera en círculos cada vez más amplios como una fuerza de contagio como las ondas de una piedra arrojada a un estanque. Y de ello somos cómplices todos los que nos llamamos americanos.
Cowering in his benighted palace of fake gold and seized with abyssal nightmares of the crimes against humanity and cruelties he might commit, our pathetic and infantile Rapist In Chief Trump lashes out with obscene tantrums of hate and rage against a nation which defies him, and as he waits for his handlers to change his diapers sends forth a message of doom as if he were not President but Pharoah; “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
In his confusion Trump describes the strike on Karg Island as the obliteration of Iran which he believes he ordered.
As events unfolded, Trump immediately caved and agreed to Iran’s terms for a provisional ceasefire instead of raining nuclear doom on humankind, the trigger event being a massive call within Congress to remove him from office through invoking the 25th amendment. Trump Always Chickens Out when his bluff is called, as we well know from history; but this does not absolve him of his crimes in authorizing the death of a civilization.
Here is proof of intention to commit war crimes as he authorizes the annihilation of a people, of the Iranians as a volk mind you and not of the state of Iran as a theocracy whose collapse I would gladly celebrate as liberation, proof of the nature of his many crimes against humanity as hate crimes motivated by white supremacist ideology.
Yet he has not been arrested and sent to Nuremberg for trial.
Here also is proof of his unfitness to govern, of his imbecile lunacy for which he merits removal from office.
Yet he remains in the White House and not a madhouse.
And because we have not held Trump accountable for his crimes, here finally is proof that America is a failed state, that democracy is no longer viable when it cannot defend itself from capture by a monster.
This has been true during both the entire Second Trump Regime of the Fourth Reich, and can be denied no longer; but it need not remain so.
Not if we unite in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s rights as citizens and as human beings to seize our liberty from those who would enslave us and bring the Restoration of America as a free society of equals.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As written by Robert Reich in an article entitled Trump has really, seriously, frighteningly lost his mind; “Friends, Trump told reporters yesterday that unless Iran reopens the Strait of Hormuz, “every bridge in Iran will be decimated” and “every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again,” adding that “the entire country can be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night.”
What about international law, which makes it a war crime to destroy civilian infrastructure? What about Trump’s repeated assurance that the United States has already “obliterated” the danger Iran poses?
The biggest absurdity here is that Trump is now focusing his war’s endgame on Iran’s willingness to open the strait. But the strait was open before Trump attacked Iran on February 28. Iran blocked it in retaliation for that attack.
Iran said it will reopen the strait only if it gets a guarantee that it will not be attacked again, if Israel ends its strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the U.S. lifts all economic sanctions on Iran. Sounds as if Iran believes it has more bargaining power now than it did before Trump began his war.
Trump also made a stunning admission. “If it were up to me,” he said, “I’d take the oil, I’d keep the oil, it would bring plenty of money.” But he’s not going to do that, he said, because “unfortunately the American people would like to see us come home.”
Hello? Trump is already blaming the American public for his failure to achieve his objectives in Iran?
The problem isn’t that the American public wants this war to end. It does, but most of the public was against the war from its start.
The basic problem is we have a commander-in-chief who took the nation into this unwinnable war for reasons he never articulated, without a strategy for how to respond if Iran did the expected and closed the strait in retaliation, and without an exit strategy if Iran doesn’t surrender.
What if Iran refuses to reopen the strait by Trump’s deadline? Has he really thought through the consequences if he goes through with his threat — likely thousands of Iranian civilians deaths? And what then? Has he thought through what happens if he doesn’t go through with his threat and loses still more credibility?
The problem underlying all this is we have a president who is no longer thinking straight. As Senator Chris Murphy posted, Trump “is completely, utterly unhinged. He’s already killed thousands. He’s going to kill thousands more.”
How do we deal with this underlying problem? Murphy suggests the 25th Amendment, section four of which authorizes the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet, or the vice president and a majority of an “other body” created by Congress, to declare a president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Doing so would elevate the vice president to acting president.
It won’t happen soon, but if Trump continues to deteriorate — subjecting Americans to ever-higher prices and ever-greater dangers — Republicans won’t have any alternative. Neither will America.”
All of this was true before Trump authorized the destruction of Iran, civilians and all.
As written by Mary Geddry of Oregon’s Bay Area news; “Trump posted one of the most deranged and openly authoritarian statements of the conflict so far: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!” It was the language of apocalypse delivered like reality TV promotion: mass death as spectacle, regime change as a punchline, and the destruction of an entire society treated as a possible prelude to something “revolutionarily wonderful.” This is a man fantasizing about annihilation while pretending to bless the people who would suffer under it.
The appalling part is not only the threat itself, but the theatricality of it. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” is apocalyptic spectacle. It turns the possible destruction of millions of lives into a dramatic reveal, then pivots almost immediately to “Complete and Total Regime Change,” as though civilizational annihilation and political opportunity are just two exciting features in the same premium war package. Then comes the grotesque little shrug: “maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?” It is the kind of phrase you reach for only if you have entirely detached the human consequences from the words leaving your mouth. Even the closing line, “God Bless the Great People of Iran!”, makes it darker, not softer, a fake note of sympathy tacked onto a vision of obliteration. It is blood-soaked grandiosity, genocidal-adjacent rhetoric delivered with the breezy confidence of a man who thinks devastation is just another marketing campaign.”
As written by Gregory Svirnovskiy in Politico, in an article entitled Trump threatens ‘whole civilization will die tonight’ ahead of Iran deadline; “President Donald Trump threatened the death of an entire civilization in a Tuesday morning post on Truth Social, the latest violent warning for the Iranian regime ahead of an 8 p.m. deadline for reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
Tuesday night may well be “one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World,” he wrote.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he wrote. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?”
The president’s increasingly dire warnings come after he has suggested strikes would hit bridges, desalination plants and energy targets — which could include civilian infrastructure that, if attacked deliberately, could constitute a war crime. Pentagon war planners are revising a list of energy sites, POLITICO previously reported, strikes can target to include ones that provide fuel for civilians and the military as a likely workaround to avoid war crime accusations.
Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz — a critical waterway for the transit of 20 percent of the world’s oil — soon after the U.S. began to strike the country in a joint operation with Israel in February.
The president is now conditioning an end to the war on the reopening of the strait. “Until then, we are blasting Iran into oblivion or, as they say, back to the Stone Ages!!!” he wrote last week on social media.
Trump has also skewered U.S. allies — including NATO — for balking at his calls to help reopen the strait. But he’s trained the bulk of his threats at Tehran.
“We have a plan because of the power of our military where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow night, where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding, and never to be used again,” Trump said on Monday.
Also on Monday, the president told reporters that negotiations between U.S. and Iranian interlocutors were ongoing “in good faith.” Reopening the strait, he said, is a “very big priority.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. struck dozens of military targets on Iran’s Kharg Island overnight — including bunkers, radars and ammunition storage sites — while avoiding oil infrastructure, according to Vice President JD Vance and a U.S. official who was granted anonymity to provide additional details.
Vance told reporters in Hungary on Tuesday that the strikes did not represent a change in strategy for the U.S. because they were focusing exclusively on military targets.
“The president’s deadline … has been followed by us and everybody else,” he said. “And he said very clearly, we’re not going to strike energy and infrastructure targets until the Iranians either make a proposal that we can get behind or don’t make a proposal. But he’s given them until Tuesday, at eight o’clock.”
Global oil prices have skyrocketed in the wake of the Strait’s closure. Domestically, the price of gas has rocketed up ahead of the midterm elections, which could spell disaster for the GOP.
Trump, meanwhile, has developed a penchant for talking about the conflict in a variety of settings — including, in one instance, in front of a costumed bunny at the annual White House Easter egg roll on Monday.
“They’re capable fighters, they’re very tough people,” he told an audience of parents and children. “And there are others like that. You don’t mind when the enemy is weak, but that enemy is strong. Not so strong like they were about a month ago — I can tell you, in fact, right now they are not too strong at all in my opinion. But we’re soon going to find out, aren’t we?”
Much has been written of the unfitness of Trump as both a mentally retarded imbecile and as a lunatic; here follows my own diagnosis of him and of the peril his particular kinds of unfitness represent for the nation; as I wrote in my post of 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.”
Next I must quote myself out of chronological order as I applied Waite’s methods to a second set of parallel lives on October 28 2019, Trump and al-Baghdadi: parallel lives and reflections; “The personal and historical forces which create tyrants and monsters among us have been a lifelong study of mine, aspects of a curiosity regarding the origins and nature of evil born of Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird and focused by the classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, both of which I read as a junior in high school. Thus I became fascinated by the intersections of literature, philosophy, history, and psychology.
Also out of order per a timeline but next in thematic rank, October 19 2019, Trump the predator exposed in All the President’s Women; “How do you spell Trump? Treason. Racism. Untruth. Misogyny. Predator.
Hey Republicans, thanks for showing us what’s under your masks.
You know, I can understand how the Fourth Reich conspiracy of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, Nazified Klan white supremacists, and their plutocrat and foreign puppetmasters might claim the first four parts of the Trump program of subversion of democracy with defiant pride amongst themselves, but that last one baffles me. Its as if the whole Republican Party decided to adopt a new nickname on their first day of prison, and started introducing themselves as Short Eyes.
Its all recounted in horrific detail in All The President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator by Barry Levine & Monique El-Faizy; the casual sexual assaults committed in an arrogance of power and privilege which echoes the aristocratic Right of Seigneur, perversions of cruelty and ownership of others as a form of dominion which are extensions of his psychopathy, and among the most terrible signs of his inhumanity and amorality his acquisition of a beauty pageant monopoly for the purpose of access to underage girls.
Trump’s whole life purpose and goal is to perv Miss America. Republicans, are you really going to claim that legacy as your own? Are the rest of us going to let it go unchallenged?
Let us unite together in this purpose; to restore the honor and morality of America, and vote Trump out of our government.”
And as I wrote on September 13 2019, Trump’s foreign policy: sabotage of America’s global hegemony of power and privilege; “After three years of idiocy and madness, pathological lies and perversions, what is the legacy of Trump and his monkeywrenching of America?
Childstealing and whatever Trump and his Epstein buddies did which required the disappearance of witnesses and hundreds of missing migrant children.
Use of white supremacist terrorists as deniable assets to enable the theft of our freedoms and the transformation of our democracy into a police state of totalitarian force and surveillance.
Campaigns of racist ethnic cleansing and genocide against nonwhite immigrants and Muslims.
I could go on, but what is the point? What norms and values of America have Trump and the Republicans not violated? In domestic policy the Trump administration has been a disaster it will take a generation to recover from, if America survives at all.
As regards foreign policy, Trump has alienated our allies and emboldened our enemies, damaged our credibility and poisoned our diplomatic relations.
We have surrendered our ideals and our leadership of the world as its primary guarantor of democracy and human rights, and won nothing in return. I’m surprised anyone accepts our money; certainly the words of our President are meaningless and worth nothing.”
In my post of September 16 2019, Trump’s New World Order: madness and tyranny; “ 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.
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.
America now has a common cause with many nations of the world in overcoming fascist tyranny and rescuing democracy and the rule of law, of defeating the imperial conquest and subjugation of the earth by Trump and other figureheads of the Fourth Reich, and in the liberation of humankind and the restoration of the sovereignty of citizens.”
And finally, herein is the text of my post in celebration of the start of the Impeachment process on September 24 2019, America rediscovers its values: the impeachment of Pennywise; ”Jubilation in the streets as America rediscovers its values and begins the impeachment of Pennywise, demonic clown and cannibalistic monster who dwells beneath the human face of Trump, a mask of flesh stolen from the abducted and enslaved women in the brothels his grandfather built the Trump family fortune on during the Alaska Gold Rush, and who today carries forward the legacy of terror and misogyny he was raised with, whose election should be de-certified as the coup of a foreign power and whose Presidency has no legitimacy.
History will remember Trump as the standard bearer of the global Fourth Reich and its assault on democracy, stealer of children for his vile and twisted purposes, author of genocidal ethnic cleansing and builder of concentration camps, pathological liar and ignorant fool, whose alliance of xenophobic racists and white supremacists, Christian Identity fanatics and other Gideonite fundamentalists who dream of the restoration of the Patriarchy under medieval Biblical law as a tyranny of the Elect, and amoral Plutocrats out to loot America for all the wealth they can send offshore while sabotaging our economy and driving our nation into collapse, thereby removing the major guarantor of freedom and human rights in the world and opening everything to exploitation.
A full accounting of the treasons and crimes of Trump and his Republican conspirators would fill a thousand pages and more, would roll on like the endless night litany of the death of God during an Orthodox Easter service; but this is the moment of its end, wherein the chanting turns to rapture and joy at the break of dawn, for Nancy Pelosi and the power brokers of the Democratic Party have rummaged around in Pandora’s Box and found at last our hope, calling for impeachment and the restoration of the rule of law just at the point of no return, before the legitimacy of our government and the values on which it is built, freedom, equality, truth, and justice, are forever lost and America falls to fascism and tyranny, and with it the world descends into a second Dark Age.
It took a millennia to emerge from the last one; civilization may not be recoverable again, should it fall under conditions of fascism and totalitarian regimes of absolute state power and surveillance, war, ethnostates and genocides, and unbridled extractive plunder of the earth. And this we must resist.
Therefore celebrate with me the call for impeachment, and prepare ourselves for the great struggle ahead to make it real, to reawaken America’s values and to save democracy and universal human rights throughout the world.”
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.”
As written by George Conway in 2019 in The Atlantic, in an article entitled Unfit for Office: Donald Trump’s narcissism makes it impossible for him to carry out the duties of the presidency in the way the Constitution requires.; “n a third-down play last season, the Washington Redskins quarterback Alex Smith stood in shotgun formation, five yards behind the line of scrimmage. As he called his signals, a Houston Texans cornerback, Kareem Jackson, suddenly sprinted forward from a position four yards behind the defensive line.
Jackson’s timing was perfect. The ball was snapped. The Texans’ left defensive end, J.J. Watt, sprinted to the outside, taking the Redskins’ right tackle with him. The defensive tackle on Watt’s right rushed to the inside, taking the offensive right guard with him. The result was a huge gap in the Redskins’ line, through which Jackson could run unblocked. He quickly sacked Smith, for a loss of 13 yards.
Special-teams players began taking the field for the punt. But Smith didn’t get up. He rolled flat onto his back, pulled off his helmet, and covered his face with his hands. He was clearly in excruciating pain. The slow-motion replay immediately showed the television audience why: As Smith was tackled, his right leg had buckled sharply above the ankle, with his foot rotating significantly away from any direction in which a human foot ought to point. The play-by-play announcer Greg Gumbel said grimly, “We’ll be back,” and the network abruptly cut to a break. There was nothing more to say.
Even without the benefit of medical training, and even without conducting a physical examination, viewers knew what had happened. They may not have known what the bones were called or what treatment would be required, but they knew more than enough, and they knew what really mattered: Smith had broken his leg, very badly. They knew that even if they were not orthopedists, did not have a medical degree, and had never cracked open a copy of Gray’s Anatomy. They could tell—they were certain—something was seriously wrong.
And so it is, or ought to be, with Donald Trump. You don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and you don’t need to be a mental-health professional to see that something’s very seriously off with Trump—particularly after nearly three years of watching his erratic and abnormal behavior in the White House. Questions about Trump’s psychological stability have mounted throughout his presidency. But those questions have been coming even more frequently amid a recent escalation in Trump’s bizarre behavior, as the pressures of his upcoming reelection campaign, a possibly deteriorating economy, and now a full-blown impeachment inquiry have mounted. And the questioners have included those who have worked most closely with him.
No president in recent memory—and likely no president ever—has prompted more discussion about his mental stability and connection with reality. Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly is said to have described him as “unhinged,” and “off the rails,” and to have called the White House “Crazytown” because of Trump’s unbalanced state. Trump’s former deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, once reportedly discussed recruiting Cabinet members to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, the Constitution’s provision addressing presidential disability, including mental disability.
Rosenstein denies that claim, but it is not the only such account. A senior administration official, writing anonymously in The New York Times last September, described how, “given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment”—but “no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis.” And NBC News last week quoted someone familiar with current discussions in the White House warning that there is “increasing wariness that, as this impeachment inquiry drags out, the likelihood increases that the president could respond erratically and become ‘unmanageable.’” In September, a former White House official offered a similar assessment to a Business Insider reporter: “No one knows what to expect from him anymore,” because “his mood changes from one minute to the next based on some headline or tweet, and the next thing you know his entire schedule gets tossed out the window. He’s losing his shit.”
Even a major investment bank has gotten into the mix, albeit in a roundabout way: JPMorgan Chase has created a “Volfefe Index”—named after Trump’s bizarre May 2017 “covfefe” tweet—designed to quantify the effect that Trump’s impulsive tweets have on interest-rate volatility. The bank’s press release understatedly observed that its “volatility fair value model” shows that “the president’s remarks on this social media platform [have] played a statistically significant role in elevating implied volatility.”
The president isn’t simply volatile and erratic, however—he’s also incapable of consistently telling the truth. Those who work closely with him, and who aren’t in denial, must deal with Trump’s lying about serious matters virtually every day. But as one former official put it, they “are used to the president saying things that aren’t true,” and have inured themselves to it. Trump’s own former communications director Anthony Scaramucci has on multiple occasions described Trump as a liar, once saying, “We … know he’s telling lies,” so “if you want me to say he’s a liar, I’m happy to say he’s a liar.” He went on to address Trump directly: “You should probably dial down the lying because you don’t need to … So dial that down, and you’ll be doing a lot better.”
That was good advice, but clearly wishful thinking. Trump simply can’t dial down the lying, or turn it off—even, his own attorneys suggest, when false statements may be punished as crimes. A lawyer who has represented him in business disputes once told me that Trump couldn’t sensibly be allowed to speak with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, because Trump would “lie his ass off”—in effect, that Trump simply wasn’t capable of telling the truth, about anything, and that if he ever spoke to a prosecutor, he’d talk himself into jail.
Trump’s lawyers in the Russia investigation clearly agreed: As Bob Woodward recounts at length in his book Fear, members of Trump’s criminal-defense team fought both Trump and Mueller tooth and nail to keep Trump from being interviewed by the Office of Special Counsel. A practice testimonial session ended with Trump spouting wild, baseless assertions in a rage. Woodward quotes Trump’s outside counsel John Dowd as saying that Trump “just made something up” in response to one question. “That’s his nature.” Woodward also recounts Dowd’s thinking when he argued to Trump that the president was “not really capable” of answering Mueller’s questions face to face. Dowd had “to dress it up as much as possible, to say, it’s not your fault … He could not say what he knew was true: ‘You’re a fucking liar.’ That was the problem.” (Dowd disputes this account.) Which raises the question: If Trump can’t tell the truth even when it counts most, with legal jeopardy on the line and lawyers there to help prepare him, is he able to apprehend the truth at all?
Behavior like this is unusual, a point that journalists across the political spectrum have made. “This is not normal,” Megan McArdle wrote in late August. “And I don’t mean that as in, ‘Trump is violating the shibboleths of the Washington establishment.’ I mean that as in, ‘This is not normal for a functioning adult.’” James Fallows observed, also in August, that Trump is having “episodes of what would be called outright lunacy, if they occurred in any other setting,” and that if he “were in virtually any other position of responsibility, action would already be under way to remove him from that role.”
Trump’s erratic behavior has long been the subject of political criticism, late-night-television jokes, and even speculation about whether it’s part of some incomprehensible, multidimensional strategic game. But it’s relevant to whether he’s fit for the office he holds. Simply put, Trump’s ingrained and extreme behavioral characteristics make it impossible for him to carry out the duties of the presidency in the way the Constitution requires. To see why first requires a look at what the Constitution demands of a president, and then an examination of how Trump’s behavioral characteristics preclude his ability to fulfill those demands.
The Framers of the Constitution expected the presidency to be occupied by special individuals, selfless people of the highest character and ability. They intended the Electoral College to be a truly deliberative body, not the largely ceremonial institution it has become today. Because the Electoral College, unlike Congress and the state legislatures, wouldn’t be a permanent body, and because it involved diffuse selections made in the various states, they hoped it would help avoid “cabal, intrigue and corruption,” as Alexander Hamilton put it in “Federalist No. 68,” and deter interference from “these most deadly adversaries of republican government,” especially “from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.”
Though the Constitution’s drafters could hardly have foreseen how the system would evolve, they certainly knew the kind of person they wanted it to produce. “The process of election affords a moral certainty,” Hamilton wrote, “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” “Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity,” might suffice for someone to be elected to the governorship of a state, but not the presidency. Election would “require other talents, and a different kind of merit,” to gain “the esteem and confidence of the whole Union,” or enough of it to win the presidency. As a result, there would be “a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.” This was the Framers’ goal in designing the system that would make “the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided.”
Hamilton’s use of the word trust in The Federalist Papers to describe the presidency was no accident. The Framers intended that the president “be like a fiduciary, who must pursue the public interest in good faith republican fashion rather than pursuing his self-interest, and who must diligently and steadily execute Congress’s commands,” as a recent Harvard Law Review article puts it. The concept is akin to the law of private fiduciaries, which governs trustees of trusts and directors and officers of corporations, an area that has been central to my legal practice as a corporate litigator. “Indeed,” as the Harvard Law Review article explains, “one might argue that what presents to us as private fiduciary law today had some of its genesis in the law of public officeholding.” The overarching principle is that a fiduciary—say, the CEO of a corporation—when acting on behalf of a corporation, has to act in the corporation’s best interests. Likewise, a trustee of a trust must use the assets for the benefit of the beneficiary, and not himself (a fundamental rule, incidentally, that Trump apparently couldn’t adhere to with his own charitable foundation).
In providing for a national chief executive, the Framers incorporated the very similar law of public officeholding into his duties in two places in the Constitution—in Article II, Section 3 (the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”), and in Article II, Section 1, Clause 8, which requires the president to “solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States.” That language—particularly the words faithfully execute—was in 1787 “very commonly associated with the performance of public and private offices,” the Harvard Law Review article points out, and “anyone experienced in law or government” at that time would have recognized what it meant, “because it was so basic to … the law of executive officeholding.” In a nutshell, while carrying out his official duties, a president has to put the country, not himself, first; he must faithfully follow and enforce the law; and he must act with the utmost care in doing all that.
But can Trump do all that? Does his personality allow him to? Answering those questions doesn’t require mental-health expertise, nor does it really require a diagnosis. You can make the argument for Trump’s unfitness without assessing his mental health: Like James Fallows, for example, you could just ask whether Trump would have been allowed to retain any other job in light of his bizarre conduct. At the same time, the presence of a mental disorder or disturbance doesn’t necessarily translate to incapacity; to suggest otherwise would unfairly stigmatize tens of millions of Americans. Someone battling a serious psychological ailment can unquestionably function well, and even nobly, in high public office—including as president. The country, in fact, has seen it: Abraham Lincoln endured “no mere case of the blues”; he suffered such “terrible melancholly,” said one of his contemporaries, that “he never dare[d] carry a knife in his pocket.” Many historians speculate that he suffered from what we would now diagnose as clinical depression. Yet Lincoln’s mechanisms for coping with his lifelong affliction may have supplied him with the vision, the creativity, and the moral fortitude to save the nation, to achieve for it a new birth of freedom. As a writer in this magazine once put it: Lincoln’s “political vision drew power from personal experience … Prepared for defeat, and even for humiliation, he insisted on seeing the truth of both his personal circumstances and the national condition. And where the optimists of his time would fail, he would succeed, envisioning and articulating a durable idea of free society.”
More than a diagnosis, what truly matters, as Lincoln’s case shows, is the president’s behavioral characteristics and personality traits. And understanding how people behave and think is not the sole province of professionals; we all do it every day, with family members, co-workers, and others. Nevertheless, how the mental-health community goes about categorizing those characteristics and traits can provide helpful guidance to laypeople by structuring our thinking about them.
And that’s where the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders comes into play. The DSM, now in its fifth edition, “contains descriptions, symptoms, and other criteria for diagnosing mental disorders,” and serves as the country’s “authoritative guide to the diagnosis of mental disorders.” What’s useful for nonprofessionals is that, for the most part, it’s written in plain English, and its criteria consist largely of observable behaviors—words and actions.
That’s especially true of its criteria for personality disorders—they don’t require a person to lie on a couch and confess his or her innermost thoughts. They turn on how a person behaves in the wild, so to speak. If anything, a patient’s confessions in an office may disadvantage a clinician, because patients can and do conceal from clinicians central aspects of their true selves. If you can observe people going about their everyday business, you’ll know a lot more about how they act and behave.
And Donald Trump, as president of the United States, is probably the most observable and observed person in the world. I’ve personally met and spoken with him only a few times, but anyone who knows him will tell you that Trump, in a way, has no facade: What you see of him publicly is what you get all the time, although you may get more of it in private. Any intelligent person who watches Trump closely on television, and pays careful attention to his words on Twitter and in the press, should be able to tell you as much about his behavior as a mental-health professional could.
One scholarly paper has suggested that accounts of a person’s behavior from laypeople who observe him might be more accurate than information from a clinical interview, and that this is especially true when considering two personality disorders in particular—what the DSM calls narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder. These two disorders just happen to be the ones that have most commonly been ascribed to Trump by mental-health professionals over the past four years. Of these two disorders, the more commonly discussed when it comes to Trump is narcissistic personality disorder, or NPD—pathological narcissism. It’s also more important in considering Trump’s fitness for office, because it touches directly upon whether Trump has the capacity to put anyone’s interests—including the country’s and the Constitution’s—above his own.
Narcissus, the Greek mythological figure, was a boy who fell so in love with his own reflection in a pool of water that, according to one version of the story, he jumped in and drowned. Psychiatrists and psychologists now use the term narcissism to describe feelings of self-importance and self-love. As Craig Malkin, a clinical psychologist who has written extensively on the subject, has explained, narcissism is a trait that, to some extent, all human beings have: “the drive to feel special, to stand out from … other[s] … to feel exceptional or unique.”
A certain amount of narcissism is healthy, and helpful—it brings with it confidence, optimism, and boldness. Someone with more than an average amount of narcissism may be called a narcissist. Many politicians, and many celebrities, could be considered narcissists; presidents seem especially likely to “rank high in extroverted narcissism,” Malkin writes, although they have varied greatly in the degree of their narcissism. But extreme narcissism can be pathological, an illness—and potentially a danger, as it was for Narcissus. “Pathological narcissism begins when people become so addicted to feeling special that, just like with any drug, they’ll do anything to get their ‘high,’ including lie, steal, cheat, betray, and even hurt those closest to them,” Malkin says.
The “fundamental life goal” of an extreme narcissist “is to promote the greatness of the self, for all to see,” the psychologist Dan P. McAdams wrote in The Atlantic. To many mental-health professionals, Donald Trump provides a perfect example of such extreme, pathological narcissism: One clinical psychologist told Vanity Fair that he considers Trump such a “classic” pathological narcissist that he is actually “archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example” of the characteristics of the disorder he displays. “Otherwise,” this clinician explained, “I would have had to hire actors and write vignettes. He’s like a dream come true.” Another clinical psychologist said that Trump displays “textbook narcissistic personality disorder.”
Not everyone agrees that Trump meets the diagnostic criteria for NPD. Allen Frances, a psychiatrist who helped write the disorder’s entry in the DSM, has argued that a mental “disturbance” becomes a “disorder” only when, as the DSM puts it, the affliction “causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.” The idea behind this threshold is to separate “mild forms” of problems from pathological ones, “in the absence of clear biological markers or clinically useful measurements of severity for many mental disorders.”
In Frances’s view, that dividing line disqualifies Trump from having a disorder, particularly NPD. Trump “may be a world-class narcissist,” he has written, “but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder. Mr. Trump causes severe distress rather than experiencing it and has been richly rewarded, rather than punished, for his grandiosity, self-absorption and lack of empathy.”
But from the perspective of the public at large, the debate over whether Trump meets the clinical diagnostic criteria for NPD—or whether psychiatrists can and should answer that question without directly examining him—is beside the point. The goal of a diagnosis is to help a clinician guide treatment. The question facing the public is very different: Does the president of the United States exhibit a consistent pattern of behavior that suggests he is incapable of properly discharging the duties of his office?
Even Trump’s own allies recognize the degree of his narcissism. When he launched racist attacks on four congresswomen of color, Senator Lindsey Graham explained, “That’s just the way he is. It’s more narcissism than anything else.” So, too, do skeptics of assigning a clinical diagnosis. “No one is denying,” Frances told Rolling Stone, “that he is as narcissistic an individual as one is ever likely to encounter.” The president’s exceptional narcissism is his defining characteristic—and understanding that is crucial to evaluating his fitness for office.
The DSM-5 describes its conception of pathological narcissism this way: “The essential feature of narcissistic personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy that begins by early adulthood and is present in a variety of contexts.” The manual sets out nine diagnostic criteria that are indicative of the disorder, but only five of the nine need be present for a diagnosis of NPD to be made. Here are the nine:
1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).
2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
3. Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions).
4. Requires excessive admiration.
5. Has a sense of entitlement (i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations).
6. Is interpersonally exploitative (i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends)
7. Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings or needs of others.
8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.
9. Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.
These criteria are accompanied by explanatory notes that seem relevant here: “Vulnerability in self-esteem makes individuals with narcissistic personality disorder very sensitive to ‘injury’ from criticism or defeat.” And “criticism may haunt these individuals and may leave them feeling humiliated, degraded, hollow and empty. They may react with disdain, rage, or defiant counterattack.” The manual warns, moreover, that “interpersonal relations are typically impaired because of problems derived from entitlement, the need for admiration, and the relative disregard for the sensitivities of others.” And, the DSM-5 adds, “though overweening ambition and confidence may lead to high achievement, performance may be disrupted because of intolerance of criticism or defeat.”
The diagnostic criteria offer a useful framework for understanding the most remarkable features of Donald Trump’s personality, and of his presidency. (1) Exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements? (2) Preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance? (3) Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and should only associate with other special or high-status people? That’s Trump, to a T. As Trump himself might put it, he exaggerates accomplishments better than anyone. In July, he described himself in a tweet as “so great looking and smart, a true Stable Genius!” (Exclamation point his, of course.) That “stable genius” self-description is one that Trump has repeated over and over again—even though he has trouble with spelling, doesn’t know the difference between a hyphen and an apostrophe, doesn’t appear to understand fractions, needs basic geography lessons, speaks at the level of a fourth grader, and engages in “serial misuse of public language” and “cannot write sentences,” and even though members of his own administration have variously considered him to be a “moron,” an “idiot,” a “dope,” “dumb as shit,” and a person with the intelligence of a “kindergartener” or a “fifth or sixth grader” or an “11-year-old child.”
Trump wants everyone to know: He’s “the super genius of all time,” one of “the smartest people anywhere in the world.” Not only that, but he considers himself a hero of sorts. He avoided military service, yet claims he would have run, unarmed, into a school during a mass shooting. Speaking to a group of emergency medical workers who had lost friends and colleagues on 9/11, he claimed, falsely, to have “spent a lot of time down there with you,” while generously allowing that “I’m not considering myself a first responder.” He has spoken, perhaps jokingly, perhaps not, about awarding himself the Medal of Honor.
Trump claims to be an expert—the world’s greatest—in anything and everything. As one video mash-up shows, Trump has at various times claimed—in all seriousness—that no one knows more than he does about: taxes, income, construction, campaign finance, drones, technology, infrastructure, work visas, the Islamic State, “things” generally, environmental-impact statements, Facebook, renewable energy, polls, courts, steelworkers, golf, banks, trade, nuclear weapons, tax law, lawsuits, currency devaluation, money, “the system,” debt, and politicians. Trump described his admission as a transfer student into Wharton’s undergraduate program as “super genius stuff,” even though he didn’t strike the admissions officer who approved his candidacy as a “genius,” let alone a “super genius”; Trump claimed to have “heard I was first in my class” at Wharton, despite the fact that his name didn’t appear on the dean’s list there, or in the commencement program’s list of graduates receiving honors. And Trump, through an invented spokesman, even lied his way onto the Forbes 400.
(4) Requires excessive admiration? Last Thanksgiving, Trump was asked what he was most thankful for. His answer: himself, of course. A number of years ago, he made a video for Forbes in which he interviewed two of his children. The interview topic: how great they thought Donald Trump was. When his own father died, in 1999, Trump gave one of the eulogies. As Alan Marcus, a former Trump adviser, recounted the story to Timothy O’Brien, he began “more or less like this: ‘I was in my Trump Tower apartment reading about how I was having the greatest year in my career in The New York Times when the security desk called to say my brother Robert was coming upstairs’”—an introductory line that provoked “‘an audible gasp’ from mourners stunned by Trump’s self-regard.” According to a Rolling Stone article, other eulogists spoke about the deceased, but Trump “used the time to talk about his own accomplishments and to make it clear that, in his mind, his father’s best achievement was producing him, Donald.” The author of a book about the Trump family described the funeral as one that “wasn’t about Fred Trump,” but rather “was an opportunity to do some brand burnishing by Donald, for Donald. Throughout his remarks, the first-person singular pronouns—I and me and mine—far outnumbered he and his. Even at his own father’s funeral, Donald Trump couldn’t cede the limelight.”
And he still can’t. Here’s a man who holds rallies with no elections in sight, so that he can bask in his supporters’ cheers; even when elections are near, and he’s supposed to be helping other candidates, he consistently keeps the focus on himself. He loves to watch replays of himself at the rallies, and “luxuriates in the moments he believes are evidence of his brilliance.” In July, after his controversial, publicly funded, campaign-style Independence Day celebration, Trump tweeted, “Our Country is the envy of the World. Thank you, Mr. President!” In February 2017, Trump was given a private tour of the newly opened National Museum of African American History and Culture, and paused in front of an exhibit on the Dutch role in the slave trade. He turned to the museum’s director and said, “You know, they love me in the Netherlands.”
(5) A sense of entitlement? (9) Arrogant, haughty behaviors? Trump is the man who, on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, said, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything you want”—including grabbing women by their genitals. He’s the man who also once said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” (8) Envious of others? Here’s a man so unable to stand the praise received by a respected war hero and statesman, Senator John McCain, that he has continued to attack McCain months after McCain’s death; his jealousy led White House staff to direct the Pentagon to keep a destroyer called the USS John S. McCain out of Trump’s line of sight during a presidential visit to an American naval base in Japan. And Trump, despite being president, still seems envious of President Barack Obama. (6) Interpersonally exploitative? Just watch the Access Hollywood tape, or ask any of the hundreds of contractors and employees Trump the businessman allegedly stiffed, or speak with any of the two dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, sexual assault, or rape. (Trump has denied all their claims.)
Finally, (7) Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings or needs of others? One of the most striking aspects of Trump’s personality is his utter and complete lack of empathy. By empathy, psychologists and psychiatrists mean the ability to understand or relate to what someone else is experiencing—the capacity to envision someone else’s feelings, perceptions, and thoughts.
The notorious lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn, who once counseled Trump, said that “Donald pisses ice water,” and indeed, examples of Trump’s utter lack of normal human empathy abound. Trump himself has told the story of a charity ball—an “incredible ball”—he once held at Mar-a-Lago for the Red Cross. “So what happens is, this guy falls off right on his face, hits his head, and I thought he died … His wife is screaming—she’s sitting right next to him, and she’s screaming.” By his own account, Trump’s concern wasn’t the poor man’s well-being or his wife’s. It was the bloody mess on his expensive floor. “You know, beautiful marble floor, didn’t look like it. It changed color. Became very red … I said, ‘Oh, my God, that’s disgusting,’ and I turned away. I couldn’t, you know, he was right in front of me and I turned away.” Trump describes himself as saying, after the injured man was hauled away on a makeshift stretcher, “‘Get that blood cleaned up! It’s disgusting!’ The next day, I forgot to call [the man] to say is he okay … It’s just not my thing.”
And then there was 9/11. Trump gave an extraordinary call-in interview to a metropolitan–New York television station just hours after the Twin Towers collapsed. He was asked whether one of his downtown buildings, 40 Wall Street, had suffered any damage. Trump’s immediate response was to brag about the building’s brand-new ranking among New York skyscrapers: “40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest—and then when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second-tallest. And now it’s the tallest.” (This wasn’t even true—a building a block away from Trump’s, 70 Pine Street, was a little taller.)
That human empathy isn’t Trump’s thing has been demonstrated time and again during his presidency as well. In October 2017, he reportedly told the widow of a serviceman killed in action “something to the effect that ‘he knew what he was getting into when he signed up, but I guess it hurts anyway.’” (Trump later claimed that this account was “fabricated … Sad!” and that “I have proof,” but of course he never produced any.) On a less macabre note, on Christmas Eve last year, Trump took calls on NORAD’s Santa Tracker phone line, which children call to find out where Santa Claus is as he makes his rounds. Trump asked a 7-year-old girl from South Carolina: “Are you still a believer in Santa? Because at 7, it’s marginal, right?”
According to Woodward’s Fear, when Trump’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, resigned, he found out about his replacement when he saw a tweet from Trump saying that he had appointed John Kelly as the new chief of staff—moments after Priebus and Trump had spoken about waiting to announce the news. Kelly was appalled, and that night apologetically told Priebus, “I’d never do this to you. I’d never been offered this job until the tweet came out. I would have told you.” His predecessor, though, wasn’t surprised. “It made no sense, Priebus realized, unless you understood … ‘The president has zero psychological ability to recognize empathy or pity in any way.’”
Priebus apparently isn’t the only White House staffer to have learned this; in February 2018, when Trump met with survivors of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting and their loved ones, his communications aide actually gave him a note card that made clear that “the president needed to be reminded to show compassion and understanding to traumatized survivors,” as The New York Times put it. The empathy cheat sheet contained a reminder to say such things as “I hear you.” One aide to President Obama told the Times that had she and her colleagues given their boss such a reminder card, “he would have looked at us like we were crazy people.”
Most recently, in July of this year, in a stunning scene captured on video, Trump met in the Oval Office with the human-rights activist Nadia Murad, a Yazidi Iraqi who had been captured, raped, and tortured by the Islamic State, and had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for speaking out about the plight of the Yazidis and other victims of genocide and religious persecution. Her voice breaking, she implored the president of the United States to help her people return safely to Iraq. Trump could barely look her in the eye. She told him that ISIS had murdered her mother and six brothers. Trump, apparently not paying much attention, asked, “Where are they now?” “They killed them,” she said once again. “They are in the mass grave in Sinjar, and I’m still fighting just to live in safety.” Trump, who has publicly said that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, seemed interested in the conversation only at the end, when he asked Murad about why she won the prize.
Another equally unforgettable video documents Trump visiting Puerto Rico shortly after Hurricane Maria, tossing rolls of paper towels into a crowd of victims. He later responded vindictively to charges that his administration hadn’t done enough to help the island, prompting the mayor of San Juan to observe that Trump had “augmented” Puerto Rico’s “devastating human crisis … because he made it about himself, not about saving our lives,” and because “when expected to show empathy he showed disdain and lack of respect.”
In October 2018, a gunman burst into Shabbat morning services at a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh and sprayed worshippers with semiautomatic-rifle and pistol fire. Eleven people died. Three days later, the president and first lady visited the community, and the day after that, the first thing Trump tweeted about the visit was this: “Melania and I were treated very nicely yesterday in Pittsburgh. The Office of the President was shown great respect on a very sad & solemn day. We were treated so warmly. Small protest was not seen by us, staged far away. The Fake News stories were just the opposite—Disgraceful!” Similarly, after gunmen killed dozens in the span of a single August weekend in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, Trump went on a one-day sympathy tour that was marked by attacks on his hosts and on political enemies, and an obsessive focus on himself.
What kind of human being, let alone politician, would engage in such unempathetic, self-centered behavior while memorializing such horrible tragedies? Only the most narcissistic person imaginable—or a person whose narcissism would be difficult to imagine if we hadn’t seen it ourselves. The evidence of Trump’s narcissism is overwhelming—indeed, it would be a gargantuan task to try to marshal all of it, especially as it mounts each and every day.
Yet pathological narcissism is not the only personality disorder that Trump’s behavior clearly indicates. A second disorder also frequently ascribed to Trump by professionals is sociopathy—what the DSM-5 calls antisocial personality disorder. As described by Lance Dodes, a former assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, “sociopathy is among the most severe mental disturbances.” Central to sociopathy is a complete lack of empathy—along with “an absence of guilt.” Sociopaths engage in “intentional manipulation, and controlling or even sadistically harming others for personal power or gratification. People with sociopathic traits have a flaw in the basic nature of human beings … They are lacking an essential part of being human.” For its part, the DSM-5 states that the “essential feature of antisocial personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.”
The question of whether Trump can serve as a national fiduciary turns more on his narcissistic tendencies than his sociopathic ones, but Trump’s sociopathic characteristics sufficiently intertwine with his narcissistic ones that they deserve mention here. These include, to quote the DSM-5, “deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others.” Trump’s deceitfulness—his lying—has become the stuff of legend; journalists track his “false and misleading claims” as president by the thousands upon thousands. Aliases? For years, Trump would call journalists while posing as imaginary PR men, “John Barron” and “John Miller,” so that he could plant false stories about being wealthy, brilliant, and sexually accomplished. Trump was, and remains, a con artist: Think of Trump University, which even Trump’s own employees described as a scam (and which sparked a lawsuit that resulted in a $25 million settlement, although with no admission of wrongdoing). There’s ACN, an alleged Ponzi scheme Trump promoted, and from which he made millions (he, his company, and his family deny the allegations of fraud); and the border wall that hasn’t been built and that Mexico’s never going to pay for. Trump is a pathological liar if ever there was one.
Other criteria for antisocial personality disorder include “failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest”; “impulsivity or failure to plan ahead”; and “lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.” Check, check, and check: As for social norms and lawful behaviors, there are all the accusations of sexual misconduct. Also relevant is what the Mueller report says about Trump’s efforts to derail the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the last presidential election. And given what federal prosecutors in New York said about his role in directing hush money to be paid to the porn star Stormy Daniels, a strong case can be made that Trump has committed multiple acts of obstruction of justice and criminal violations of campaign-finance laws. Were he not president, and were it not for two Justice Department opinions holding that a sitting president cannot be indicted, he might well be facing criminal charges now.
As for impulsivity, that essentially describes what gets him into trouble most: It was his “impulsiveness—actually, total recklessness”—that came close to destroying him in the 1980s. In “response to his surging celebrity,” Trump, “acquisitive to the point of recklessness,” engaged in “a series of manic, ill-advised ventures” that “nearly did him in,” Politico reported. His impulsiveness has buffeted his presidency as well: Think of his first ordering, then calling off, the bombing of Iran in June, and his aborted meeting with the Taliban at Camp David just last month. And remember the racist tweets he sent in mid-July in which he told four nonwhite representatives—three of whom were born in the United States—to “go back” to the “countries” they “originally came from.” Those tweets were apparently triggered by something he saw on TV.
Or consider his impetuous, unvetted personnel decisions, such as his failed selection of Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, the former White House physician, as Veterans Affairs secretary, and his choice of Representative John Ratcliffe as director of national intelligence. It was just so on The Apprentice, where editors and producers found that “Trump was frequently unprepared” for tapings, and frequently fired strong contestants “on a whim,” which required them “to ‘reverse engineer’ the episode, scouring hundreds of hours of footage … in an attempt to assemble an artificial version of history in which Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip decision made sense.” One editor remarked that he found “it strangely validating that they’re doing the same thing in the White House.” Trump sees none of this as a problem; to the contrary, he prides himself on following his instincts, once telling an interviewer: “I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody’s brain can ever tell me.”
And lack of remorse? That’s a hallmark of sociopathy, and goes hand in hand with a lack of human conscience. In a narcissistic sociopath, it’s intertwined with a lack of empathy. Trump hardly ever shows remorse, or apologizes, for anything. The one exception: With his presidential candidacy on the line in early October 2016, Trump expressed regret for the Access Hollywood video. But within weeks, almost as soon as the campaign was over, Trump began claiming, to multiple people, that the video may have been doctored—a preposterous lie, especially since he had acknowledged that the voice was his, others had confirmed this as well, and there was no evidence of tampering. “We don’t think that was my voice,” he said to a senator. The “we,” no doubt, was a lie as well.
Again, as with his narcissism, all this evidence of Trump’s sociopathy only begins to tell the tale. The bottom line is that this is a man who, over and over and over again, has indifferently mused about the possibility of killing 10 million or so people in Afghanistan to end the war there, while allowing that “I’m not looking to kill 10 million people”—as though this were a realistic but merely less preferred option than, say, raising import tariffs on chewing gum. As a 1997 profile of Trump in The New Yorker put it, Trump has “an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.”
In a way, Trump’s sociopathic tendencies are simply an extension of his extreme narcissism. Take the pathological lying. Extreme narcissists aren’t necessarily pathological liars, but they can be, and when they are, the lying supports the narcissism. As Lance Dodes has put it, “People like Donald Trump who have severe narcissistic disturbances can’t tolerate being criticized, so the more they are challenged in this essential way, the more out of control they become.” In particular, “They change reality to suit themselves in their own mind.” Although Trump “lies because of his sociopathic tendencies,” telling falsehoods to fool others, Dodes argues, he also lies to himself, to protect himself from narcissistic injury. And so Donald Trump has lied about his net worth, the size of the crowd at his inauguration, and supposed voter fraud in the 2016 election.
The latter kind of lying, Dodes says, “is in a way more serious,” because it can indicate “a loose grip on reality”—and it may well tell us where Trump is headed in the face of impeachment hearings. Lying to prevent narcissistic injury can metastasize to a more significant loss of touch with reality. As Craig Malkin puts it, when pathological narcissists “can’t let go of their need to be admired or recognized, they have to bend or invent a reality in which they remain special,” and they “can lose touch with reality in subtle ways that become extremely dangerous over time.” They can become “dangerously psychotic,” and “it’s just not always obvious until it’s too late.”
Experts haven’t suggested that Trump is psychotic, but many have contended that his narcissism and sociopathy are so inordinate that he fits the bill for “malignant narcissism.” Malignant narcissism isn’t recognized as an official diagnosis; it’s a descriptive term coined by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, and expanded upon by another psychoanalyst, Otto Kernberg, to refer to an extreme mix of narcissism and sociopathy, with a degree of paranoia and sadism mixed in. One psychoanalyst explains that “the malignant narcissist is pathologically grandiose, lacking in conscience and behavioural regulation with characteristic demonstrations of joyful cruelty and sadism.” In the view of some in the mental-health community, such as John Gartner, Trump “exhibits all four” components of malignant narcissism: “narcissism, paranoia, antisocial personality and sadism.”
Mental-health professionals have raised a variety of other concerns about Trump’s mental state; the last worth specifically mentioning here is the possibility that, apart from any personality disorder, he may be suffering cognitive decline. This is a serious matter: Trump seems to be continually slurring words, and recently misread teleprompters to say that the Continental Army secured airports during the American Revolutionary War, and to say that the shooting in Dayton had occurred in Toledo. His overall level of articulateness today doesn’t come close to what he exhibits in decades-old television clips. But that could be caused by ordinary age-related decline, stress, or other factors; to know whether something else is going on, according to experts, would require a full neuropsychological work-up, of the kind that Trump hasn’t yet had and, one supposes, isn’t about to agree to.
But even that doesn’t exhaust all the mental-health issues possibly indicated by Trump’s behavior. His “mental state,” according to Justin A. Frank, a former clinical professor of psychiatry and physician who wrote a book about Trump’s psychology, “include[s] so many psychic afflictions” that a “working knowledge of psychiatric disorders is essential to understanding Trump.” Indeed, as Gartner puts it: “There are a lot of things wrong with him—and, together, they are a scary witch’s brew.”
This is a lot to digest. It would take entire books to catalog all of Trump’s behavioral abnormalities and try to explain them—some of which have already been written. But when you line up what the Framers expected of a president with all that we know about Donald Trump, his unfitness becomes obvious. The question is whether he can possibly act as a public fiduciary for the nation’s highest public trust. To borrow from the Harvard Law Review article, can he follow the “proscriptions against profit, bad faith, and self-dealing,” manifest “a strong concern about avoiding ultra vires action” (that is, action exceeding the president’s legal authority), and maintain “a duty of diligence and carefulness”? Given that Trump displays the extreme behavioral characteristics of a pathological narcissist, a sociopath, or a malignant narcissist—take your pick—it’s clear that he can’t.
To act as a fiduciary requires you to put someone else’s interests above your own, and Trump’s personality makes it impossible for him to do that. No president before him, at least in recent memory, has ever displayed such obsessive self-regard. For Trump, Trump always comes first. He places his interests over everyone else’s—including those of the nation whose laws he swore to faithfully execute. That’s not consistent with the duties of the president, whether considered from the standpoint of constitutional law or psychology.
Indeed, Trump’s view of his presidential powers can only be described as profoundly narcissistic, and his narcissism has compelled him to disregard the Framers’ vision of his constitutional duties in every respect. Bad faith? Trump has repeatedly used executive powers, threatened to use executive powers, or expressed the view that executive powers should be used to advance his personal interests and punish his political opponents. Thus, for example, he has placed restrictions on disaster aid to Puerto Rico in apparent response to criticism of him and his administration; directed the Pentagon to reconsider whether to award a $10 billion contract to Amazon because its CEO owns The Washington Post, whose coverage he doesn’t like; threatened to take “regulatory and legislative” action against Facebook, Google, and Twitter, because of their supposed “terrible bias” against him; tried to get White House staff to tell the Justice Department to try to block the merger between AT&T and Time Warner in order to punish CNN for its coverage; attacked his first attorney general for allowing the indictment of two Republican congressmen who had supported him; and ordered the revocation of the security clearance of a former CIA director who had criticized him.
And now, in just the past two weeks, we’ve seen the pièce de résistance of bad faith, the one that’s brought Trump to the verge of impeachment: Trump’s efforts to use his presidential authority to strong-arm a foreign nation, Ukraine, into digging up or concocting evidence in support of a preposterous conspiracy theory about one of his principal challengers for the presidency, former Vice President Joe Biden. As one political historian has put it, Trump’s use of his Article II authority to pursue vendettas is “both a sign of deep insecurity … and also just a litany of abuse of power,” and something no president has done “as consistently or as viciously as Trump has.”
Profit? Self-dealing? Look at the way Trump is using the presidency to advertise his real-estate holdings—most notably and recently, his apparent determination to hold the next G7 summit at the Trump Doral resort in Florida. Ultra vires? Trump has made the outrageous claim that the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want as president.” Consistent with that view, he has repeatedly suggested that, by executive order, he can overturn the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship—an utterly lawless assertion. His core constitutional obligations flow from Article II’s command that he faithfully execute the laws, yet he has told subordinates not to worry about violating the laws. According to one former senior administration official quoted in The New York Times, Trump’s “constant instinct all the time was: Just do it, and if we get sued, we get sued … Almost as if the first step is a lawsuit. I guess he thinks that because that’s how business worked for him in the private sector. But federal law is different, and there really isn’t a settling step when you break federal law.” Federal law is also different, one might add, because he’s in charge of upholding it.
Facing the approach of the 2020 election with not a single new mile of his border wall having been built, Trump, as reported in The Washington Post, has urged his aides to violate all manner of laws to expedite construction—environmental laws, contracting laws, constitutional limitations on the taking of private property—and “has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing” they commit along the way.
A duty of diligence and carefulness? Trump is purely impulsive, and incapable of planning or serious forethought, and his compulsion for lying has enervated any capacity for thoughtful analysis he may have ever had. He apparently won’t read anything; he himself has said, in regard to briefings, that he prefers to read “as little as possible”—despite occupying what David A. Graham calls “one of the most demanding jobs in the world” precisely because its “holder is expected to consume, digest, and absorb prodigious amounts of information via reading.”
And then there’s the question of honesty. Fiduciaries must be honest. The Framers understood, based upon the law of public officeholding in their time, that “faithful execution” of the laws requires “the absence of bad faith through honesty.” In the private realm, fiduciaries owe a duty of candor, of truth-telling; the standard of behavior was once memorably described by the renowned jurist Benjamin Cardozo as “not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive.” Today, in my own practice area of corporate litigation, corporate officers and directors, as fiduciaries, owe duties that include a duty to disclose material information truthfully and completely. Trump, whose lawyers wouldn’t dare allow him to speak to the special counsel lest he make a prosecutable false statement, couldn’t pass this standard to save his life.
Trump’s incapacity affects all manner of subjects addressed by the presidency, but can be seen most acutely in foreign affairs and national security. Presidential narcissism and personal ego have frequently displaced the national interest. Today, the most obvious—and stunning—example is his conduct toward Ukraine: While trying to pressure the Ukrainian president to restart an investigation against Biden, Trump ordered the withholding of vital military aid to that country, thus weakening its ability to withstand Russian aggression and undermining the interests of the United States. But the list goes on: Last summer, in a narcissistic effort at self-aggrandizement, Trump told the Pakistani prime minister about a conversation he had with the Indian prime minister—leading India to deny, indignantly, that any such conversation had ever taken place. Trump reportedly even lied about trade talks with China—announcing that phone calls had occurred that never occurred and that the Chinese denied took place—in an apparent attempt to pump up the stock market and take credit for it.
Trump’s penchant for vendettas also doesn’t stop at the water’s edge—American interests be damned. When confidential cables sent by the United Kingdom’s ambassador to his government were leaked, and were revealed to contain uncomplimentary (but obvious) observations about Trump’s ineptitude and emotional insecurity, and the dysfunction of his administration, Trump went on an extended Twitter tirade against the ambassador, calling him “wacky” and “a very stupid guy,” “a pompous fool,” and ultimately declared: “We will no longer deal with him.” When reports surfaced that Trump was interested in having the United States purchase Greenland from Denmark, and the Danish prime minister understandably described talk about such a purchase as “an absurd discussion” in light of Greenland’s position on the matter, Trump canceled a visit to Denmark, and then attacked the prime minister, calling her comments “nasty”; for good measure, he also attacked some of America’s NATO allies.
At the same time, Trump happily succumbs to flattery from America’s enemies; he received “beautiful … great letters” from North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, and therefore “fell in love” with him, and rewards him with kind words and meetings even as North Korea continues to develop new nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, Trump once said on television: “If he says great things about me, I’m going to say great things about him.”
Putin, of course, did more than say great things about Trump, which brings up what was, until the Ukraine scandal surfaced, the most significant way in which Trump’s extraordinary narcissism influenced his presidency—the Russia investigation. Trump made that investigation about himself, and in the course of doing so, committed what appear to be unmistakably criminal acts. At the outset, the Mueller investigation wasn’t about what Donald Trump had done during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. It was primarily an investigation about what the Russians had done to interfere with that election and to help the Trump campaign. At its core, it was a counterintelligence investigation—an effort to protect the country, to defend our democracy. An effort to find out exactly what a hostile foreign power had done to attack the United States, so that our nation could fight back, and so that it could take measures to ensure that such an attack never happened again.
But Trump didn’t see it that way. The Mueller report repeatedly describes Trump’s self-obsession, and his disregard for the national interest. Trump viewed “the intelligence community assessment of Russian interference as a threat to the legitimacy of his electoral victory.” He is said to have “viewed the Russia investigation as an attack on the legitimacy of his win.” He thought it would “tak[e] away from what he had accomplished.” The Washington Post has now reported, moreover, that in the Oval Office in May 2017, Trump told the Russian foreign minister and ambassador that he was unconcerned with Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
And so, contrary to his obligation to act in the nation’s interests rather than his own, and contrary to the criminal code, he repeatedly tried to obstruct the investigation—and therefore, ironically, put himself in the crosshairs of the investigation. Thanks to Trump’s narcissism, the special counsel was forced to devote an entire volume of his report—some 182 pages of single-spaced text—to Trump’s repeated and persistent efforts to derail the investigation. And persistent, Trump was. He tried to get Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had recused himself from the investigation, to violate ethics rules and unrecuse himself, so that he could get rid of the special counsel and limit the investigation to future election interference only. Trump tried to get his White House counsel to have the acting attorney general remove Mueller on a ridiculous pretext, prompting the counsel to threaten to resign. Trump tried to encourage witnesses to refuse to cooperate with the very government that Trump himself heads. As I’ve argued elsewhere, in his efforts to derail the Mueller investigation, Trump “did much more than this, but all of this is more than enough: He committed the crime of obstructing justice—multiple times.” Trump even obstructed justice about obstructing justice when he tried to get the White House counsel to write a false account of Trump’s efforts to remove Mueller.
All in all, Trump sought to impede and end a significant counterintelligence and criminal investigation—one of crucial importance to the nation—and did so for his own personal reasons. He did precisely the opposite of what his duties require. Indeed, he has shown utter contempt for his duties to the nation. How else could one describe the attitude Trump expressed when, sitting next to Vladimir Putin in late June, he was asked whether he would tell Putin not to interfere in the 2020 U.S. presidential election? Trump smirked, wagged his finger playfully at Putin, and said, “Don’t meddle in the election.” Putin smirked too. The Russian president was in on the joke—the punch line being how Trump treats America’s interests versus his own.
What constitutional mechanisms exist for dealing with a president who cannot or does not comply with his duties, and how should they take the president’s mental and behavioral characteristics into account? One mechanism discussed with great frequency during the past three years, including within the Trump administration, is Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. That provision allows the vice president to become “Acting President” when the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” But it doesn’t define what such an inability entails; essentially, it lets the vice president and the Cabinet, the president himself, and ultimately two-thirds of both houses of Congress decide.
Certainly it would cover a coma. Had the amendment been in effect in 1919 through 1921, it presumably could have been used to deal with President Woodrow Wilson. A severe stroke had rendered Wilson paralyzed on the left side, but he could still speak, and he could still sign documents with his right hand. Nevertheless, although Wilson had “relatively well preserved intellectual function,” the stroke rendered him “subject to ‘disorders of emotion, impaired impulse control, and defective judgment.’”
Sound judgment, of course, is what a president’s job is all about. And as Jeffrey Rosen has explained, “nothing in the text or original understanding of the amendment” would prevent the vice president, the Cabinet, or Congress from deciding that Trump has disorders of emotion, impaired impulse control, defective judgment, or other behavioral or psychological issues that keep him from carrying out his constitutional duties the way they were meant to be carried out.
The problem is one of mechanics. Section 4, quite understandably, was designed to be extremely difficult to implement. The vice president and a majority of the Cabinet can determine that the president isn’t able to carry out his duties; if so, the vice president immediately becomes acting president. But if the president doesn’t agree—and you know what Trump’s view will be, no matter what—then a constitutional game of ping-pong starts: The president can certify that he is capable, and he can reassume his authority after a four-day waiting period, unless the vice president and the Cabinet, within that period, recertify that the president can’t function. (As a new book on Section 4 explains, this waiting period exists in part because “a deranged President could do a lot of damage if he could retake power immediately,” and, in particular, he “would also be able to fire the Cabinet, which would prevent it from contesting his declaration of ability.”) If that happens, the vice president continues as acting president, and the whole matter gets kicked to Congress, which must assemble within 48 hours and decide within 21 days: If two-thirds of both houses agree that the president can’t function, then the vice president continues as acting president; if not, the president gets his authority back.
No matter how psychologically incapable of meeting his constitutional obligations Trump may be, that route is virtually certain not to work in this case. Would a vice president and department heads who have shamelessly slaked Trump’s narcissistic thirst at Cabinet meetings by praising his supposed greatness, and who of course owe their jobs to Trump, dare incur his wrath by sparking a constitutional crisis on the basis of what they must surely know about his unprecedented faults? Doubtful, to say the least. They would know full well that, if their decision weren’t sustained by Congress, the first thing that Trump would do after reassuming power would be to fire every department head who sought to have him sidelined. (He can’t fire Vice President Mike Pence, of course.) Which brings up the ultimate question upon which successful invocation of Section 4 would turn: whether two-thirds of both houses of Congress would vote to remove Trump. That’s harder than impeachment, which requires only a simple majority of the House in order to bring charges of impeachment to a trial in the Senate (which in turn can convict on a two-thirds vote).
And so it turns out that impeachment is a more practical mechanism for addressing the fact that Trump’s narcissism and sociopathy render him unable to comply with the obligations of his office. It’s also an appropriate mechanism, because the constitutional magic words (other than Treason and Bribery) that form the basis of an impeachment charge—high Crimes and Misdemeanors, found in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution—mean something other than, and more than, offenses in the criminal-statute books. High Crimes and Misdemeanors is a legal term of art, one that historically referred to breaches of duties—fiduciary duties—by public officeholders. In other words, the question of what constitutes an impeachable offense for a president coincides precisely with whether the president can execute his office in the faithful manner that the Constitution requires.
The phrase high Crimes and Misdemeanors was dropped into the draft Constitution on September 8, 1787, during the waning days of the Constitutional Convention. The discussion before the Convention’s Committee of Eleven was extremely brief. The extant version of what became Article II, Section 4 provided for impeachment merely for treason and bribery. George Mason objected, and proposed adding “maladministration.” Elbridge Gerry seconded Mason’s proposal, but James Madison objected that it was too vague. Gouverneur Morris chimed in, arguing that having a presidential election “every four years will prevent maladministration.” Mason moved to add, according to Madison’s notes, “other high crimes & misdemeanors (against the State).” The motion passed, eight to three. And so, as a result of that brief exchange, Article II of the Constitution of the United States provides that “the President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
As Yoni Appelbaum has observed in this magazine, “constitutional lawyers have been arguing about what counts as a ‘high crime’ or ‘misdemeanor’ ever since.” One of the most compelling arguments about the meaning of those words is that the Framers, in Article II’s command that a president faithfully execute his office, imposed upon him fiduciary obligations. As the constitutional historian Robert Natelson explained in the Federalist Society Review, the “founding generation [understood] ‘high … Misdemeanors’ to mean ‘breach of fiduciary duty.’” Eighteenth-century lawyers instead used terms such as breach of trust—which describes the same thing. “Parliamentary articles of impeachment explicitly and repetitively described the accused conduct as a breach of trust,” Natelson argues, and 18th-century British legal commentators explained how impeachment for “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” was warranted for all sorts of noncriminal violations that were, in essence, fiduciary breaches.
Just as the Framers viewed the presidency as fiduciary, they understood the offenses that might disqualify the incumbent as breaches of that fiduciary duty. And that may well be why the discussion of Morris’s suggestion was so brief—the drafters knew what the words historically meant, because, as a House Judiciary Committee report noted in 1974, “at the time of the Constitutional Convention the phrase ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors’ had been in use for over 400 years in impeachment proceedings in Parliament.” Certainly Alexander Hamilton knew by the time he penned “Federalist No. 65,” in which he explained that impeachment was for “those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”
What constitutes such an abuse or violation of trust is up to Congress to decide: First the House decides to bring impeachment charges, and then the Senate decides whether to convict on those charges. The process of impeachment by the House and removal by trial in the Senate is thus, in some ways, akin to indictment by a grand jury and trial by a petit jury. In other ways, it is quite different. As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz explain in their recent book on impeachment, “the Constitution explicitly states that Congress may not end a presidency unless the president has committed an impeachable offense. But nowhere does the Constitution state or otherwise imply that Congress must remove a president whenever that standard is met … In other words, it allows Congress to exercise judgment.” As Tribe and Matz argue, that judgment presents a “heavy burden,” and demands that Congress be “context-sensitive,” and achieve “an understanding of all relevant facts.” A president might breach his trust to the nation once in some small, inconsequential way and never repeat the misbehavior, and Congress could reasonably decide that the game is not worth the candle.
So the congressional judgment in the impeachment process necessarily includes the number and seriousness of offenses, and even extends well beyond those calculations. Congress must also, in particular, weigh the chances of recidivism; that possibility is precisely why the Constitution provides for removal as the principal sanction upon conviction on impeachment charges. As Charles Black Jr. explained in his classic 1974 book on impeachment, “We remove him principally because we fear he will do it again.” Or as George Mason put it during the Constitutional Convention, “Shall the man who has practised corruption … be suffered to escape punishment, by repeating his guilt?”
In short, now that the House of Representatives has embarked on an impeachment inquiry, one of the most important judgments it must make is whether any identified breaches of duty are likely to be repeated. And if a Senate trial comes to pass, that issue would become central as well to the decision to remove the president from office. That’s when Trump’s behavioral and psychological characteristics should—must—come into play. From the evidence, it appears that he simply can’t stop himself from putting his own interests above the nation’s. Any serious impeachment proceedings should consider not only the evidence and the substance of all impeachable offenses, but also the psychological factors that may be relevant to the motivations underlying those offenses. Congress should make extensive use of experts—psychologists and psychiatrists. Is Trump so narcissistic that he can’t help but use his office for his own personal ends? Is he so sociopathic that he can’t be trusted to follow, let alone faithfully execute, the law?
Congress should consider all this because that’s what the question of impeachment demands. But there’s another reason as well. The people have a right to know, and a need to see. Many people have watched all of Trump’s behavior, and they’ve drawn the obvious conclusion. They know something’s wrong, just as football fans knew that the downed quarterback had shattered his leg. Others have changed the channel, or looked away, or chosen to deny what they’ve seen. But if Congress does its job and presents the evidence, those who are in denial won’t be able to ignore the problem any longer. Not only because of the evidence itself, but because Donald Trump will respond in pathological ways—and in doing so, he’ll prove the points against him in ways almost no one will be able to ignore.”
And now its so much worse.
As I wrote in my post of October 2025, In This Halloween Season, Remember and Beware; Real Monsters Walk Among Us; Who is Donald Trump? Glowering, feral, with the dead eyes of a cornered but dangerous animal, his fake blond hair, fake history of success, and fake identity? Traitor Trump has been the cuckoo in our nest, ambush predator and pathological liar, rapist and enemy agent, worshipper of Moloch, Demon of Lies, and disciple of Adolf Hitler.
Who are we Americans, with our government a captive state by the Party of Treason’s confederacy of theocratic sexual terrorists, white supremacist terrorists, and the nihilistic grifters and carnival sideshow freaks who are its star performers?
In this Halloween season, as we enact seizures of power through embrace of our monstrosity and dancing our demons, let us remember and witness, expose and call out the real monsters who walk among us beneath their human masks; the secret Nazis who call themselves Republicans, loathsome and degenerate conspirators in theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror, moral lepers consumed and disfigured beyond the limits of the human by an ideology which infects and destroys its host like zombies or vampires.
Among the true horrors of the Trump regime’s Fourth Reich is the awareness and certainty that they live and are real, and may be anyone anywhere; a stranger in line behind us at the grocery, or next to us at a family dinner. But knowing this, we may be on guard and ready when those who would enslave us attack.
And when we go Trick or Treating, let no one go alone.
Of the Trump regime carnival freak show I have written in my post of January 31 2025, Trump Unfurls His Tongue of Lies; Trump unfurls his Tongue of Lies like a red carpet for celebrities of wickedness, marked with the sigil of the demon he worships and is possessed by; Moloch the Deceiver.
Pestilence comes forth wearing the zombie form of Robert F Kennedy Jr the Truly Awful, his brain eaten by a swarming mass of worms and bearing his Plague Doctor’s mask at the ready.
Here follows his comrade Civil War possessing the leering and drunken Christian Nationalist Pete Hegseth, dragging behind him the shadows of the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, patriarchy, and the Divine Right of Kings, bearing the Cross he wishes to nail us all to.
Famine appears as Tulsi Gabbard, Russian spy, collaborator in Assad’s regime of torture in Syria and in Putin’s atrocities of imperial conquest in Ukraine, whore of tyranny who seeks our ruin for the benefit of her evil paymasters, not to protect American interests and markets but to undermine and sell them off as we wither and become Hollow Men, gaunt and starving, consumed from within by the hunger and avarice which consumes them like the cannibal Wendigo while our enemies fatten as we die and become nothing, bearing a wizened apple doll like the picture of Dorian Gray as a sign of our future ruin and moral collapse and hissing serpentine curses like the figure of Hunger in the film Pan’s Labyrinth, a perfect allegory of the Trump regime.
Death of the state and nation of America arrives with the fanfare of trumpets as an all-conquering shadow of our darkness, fears and self-hatred and internalized oppression made manifest in the figure of the fake Jethro of questionable pronouns and tattooed eyeliner JD Vance, whose mission is the fall of the world order of democracy, the dismantling of the American state, and its replacement with a plutocracy of tyrant CEO’s wherein citizenship is meaningless and we are all slaves of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and white male privilege, bearing the manacles which symbolize terminal stage capitalism as it seeks to free itself of its host political system.
A parade of fools follows the Four Horsemen of Our American Apocalypse, each representing the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, their praises sung by the multi-headed beast of fascist propaganda led by X CEO Elon Musk and others yapping in chorus and jostling for position.
And last, crawling on his belly like a submissive dog, comes the husk of Rudy Giuliani, utterly vacuous and eaten from within by the demons he serves. Such is the fate of all who serve and are loyal to Traitor Trump, who serves and is loyal only to himself.
Truly, “Hell is empty and all the devils are here” as Ariel’s line in The Tempest goes, prancing and capering in their many guises.
In the audience the treasonous and dishonorable brutes of theocratic patriarchal sexual terror who voted for a Rapist In Chief that he may grant them permission for the same and of white supremacist terror who voted for a Nazi Revivalist that they may imagine themselves superior to anyone else in their wretchedness and degenerate villainy and enact genocide and slavery, both forms of power as subjugation and dehumanization of others born of fear and weaponized in service to the centralization of authority to a carceral state of force and control, hooting and champing and each bearing a sign and flaw of their subhuman degenerate nature, a tail or a horn, seize upon the prancing embodied lies with avarice and eat them up in the primary ritual of a Trump rally black mass.
Thus for an America and ideals of human being, meaning, and value rendered meaningless by misdirections and distortions of the truth, captured and lost in the myriad reflections, echoes, and false images of Trump’s funhouse mirrors of lies.
Lies are all Trump has; strip him of his Cloak of Illusions and Lies and his true nature as a monster and predator is revealed to the world.
This week Trump and his clown show caused a nationwide panic by defunding, deregulating, abolishing independent oversight, trying to force mass resignations of federal workers, and shutting down the government. Among the first side effects of the federal spending freeze was the medicare portal for payments going down which shut down our nation’s hospitals and healthcare system and the crash of a jet in Washington DC because no one was in the flight control tower or at the helm of the FAA. This is only the beginning of what a nation which abandons the institutions of state entirely looks like; the nation falls apart. And this is exactly what the Trump regime wants, as capital tries to free itself of its host political system.
We see you, enemies of democracy and humanity, and we will neither believe your lies not obey your commands.
And while our systems of oppression and unequal power are doomed and must inevitably collapse, our seizures of power and liberation struggle cannot be defeated while we disbelieve and disobey, refuse to submit and unite in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s rights as citizens and as human beings.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
What is the meaning of the Trump regime in the story of America and our future possibilities of becoming human as a free society of equals?
In all the madness of the ICE white supremacist terror force campaign of ethnic cleansing, repression of dissent, and theft of meaningful citizenship and our inalienable and universal human rights, and of the deranged perversions and assaults upon our liberty, equality, truth, and justice of our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump’s kleptocracy of state terror and tyranny, we must not forget that though he exploited the flaws of our society to orchestrate the Fall of America and of democracy throughout the world, he did not originate them.
Trump has revealed, tested, and hammered at our flaws, yet we remain unbroken and unconquered. This we should celebrate; having just held the most massive single day protest in our history with zero violence on the part of the protestors, engaged in electoral process and solidarity action as guarantors of each other’s rights, because our faith in one another and in the ideals on which our society is founded remain intact, though the institutions of our government may need radical and revolutionary change.
Trump and his cabal of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, white supremacist terrorists, and plutocratic robber barons have violated everything about America which is noble and true, plundered the public wealth, dehumanized and divided us, sabotaged and subverted the institutions of our freedom, equality, truth, and justice, betrayed our allies and emboldened our foes, lost the American hegemony of global power and privilege and our position as a guarantor of democracy and universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world.
Let us never forget the bottomless depravities, treasons, and amoral predation and greed of Trump’s many enablers and conspirators in the Fall of America as we struggle in the years ahead to reclaim our nation and our souls. We must hold them to account, but we must also reimagine our society and the many systemic and structural flaws by which we came to this broken and lost state.
In this time of darkness, our puppets will dance upon the stage of history and our imaginations, while a chiaroscuro of light as truth and democracy versus darkness as fascist tyranny and falsification, lies, illusions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, conspiracy theories and propaganda play for the kingdom of our souls and the fate of America and the world.
Who do we want to become, we humans? A free society of equals or a prison planet of masters and slaves?
Now begins a great Reckoning, and we shall see.
As I wrote in my post of January 21 2025, Horror On Opening Night As Deranged Idiot Clown Show Returns to White House; Depravities, violations, sadism, monstrosity; the horrors of opening night spew forth from the diseased and rotting mind of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, Rapist In Chief of a fallen America as our deranged idiot mascot of fascism and theocracy returns to the White House with his Theatre of Cruelty.
Elon Musk’s Nazi salutes typify the minions of the Clown and will be remembered forever as a symbol of the Party of Treason and the Deplorables who voted it into power, who slavering and ululating with mindless abandon cheer him on to greater performances of the grotesque and the bizarre.
After preening before the crowd and dropping his pants so that various wellwishers could kiss his grublike white butt, Trump grinned, leered, grunted like a pig and hopped up on a table to squat and excrete a mass of Executive Orders which like Thing One and Thing Two immediately set about creating chaos.
Then he summoned one of the migrant children he had stolen from their parents, cleverly tied up Shibari style and prodded along by handlers in KKK hoods with fireplace pokers, who made their prisoner jump through hoops like lion tamers to resounding applause. “Here’s my very first Executive Order, ladies and gentlemen; we’re going to round up all the migrants, only the ones who aren’t white mind you, just so nobody worries that we’re treating people unfairly because they’re not people, and we’re selling the bond of their labor on an open exchange so you can all buy some, everyone can buy some slaves, and you can do anything you want with them, anything at all, because I said so just now, and it doesn’t matter anyway because only our kind are really truly human. And you can forget about legal and illegal immigrants, or if they were born here or not, because it’s the bad blood I’m worried about and not what it says on paper, we’re just starting with the immigrants but don’t worry, we’ll get to the rest of them eventually”.
And the crowd laughed and threw money, which Trump snapped out of the air like a dog catching treats.
Trump’s America: Pan’s Labyrinth trailer
Trump’s Presidency: Patterns of Force, Star Trek season two episode 21
References
Step-by-Step: Inside the Failed US Raid on Isfahan
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
Throughout America and the world courageous students protest and occupy their universities in refusal to be silenced or made complicit in genocide, either by institutional profiteering on crimes against humanity through investments or by state sponsorship of war, tyranny, and terror.
On this third anniversary of the revolt of the intelligentsia who will one day serve or dismantle the vast machine of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege that is America as a captured state of the Fourth Reich, the universities whose purpose is to create a bureaucrat class for the perpetuation of class war and systems of oppression remain a ground of struggle between brutal police repression of dissent and the transnational solidarity of the people as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights.
Much of this rage is directed at Traitor Trump now as it was at Genocide Joe on this day in 2024, both of whom betrayed us and abandoned our ideals of universal human rights as our tax dollars buy the deaths of children, doctors, journalists, and other civilians in Israel’s Gaza War and imperial conquest of her neighbors, a war of imperial conquest and dominion now horrifically uncontained which engulfs Lebanon, Iran, and the whole of the Middle East as the Netanyahu and Trump regime conspire to found a Greater Israel.
But American complicity in Israeli war crimes and state terror and tyranny did not begin with Trump and Biden’s sock puppet Netanyahu in games of imperial dominion with Iran and Russia; it began generations ago in the wake of the Holocaust at the founding of the nation which was intended to protect us all from fascism, and has now has come round to become all that it once feared, reproducing the conditions of Auschwitz and the concentration camps throughout Israel itself and wherever its power can reach.
No matter where you begin with ideas of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Tonight the tyrants Trump and Netanyahu and their co conspirators and apologists of genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, imperial conquest and dominion, kleptocracy, abandonment of our universal human rights, and dehumanization will laugh and congratulate each other on the mad and criminal scheme to exterminate the Palestinians and build a riviera of casinos and luxury hotels on their graves, while throughout the Middle East real human beings will die horribly in cities become vast crematoriums.
In the words of the magnificent character of Lt Aldo Raine in Inglorious Basterds; “I can’t abide it. Can you abide it?”
Hope and a Prayer
This Passover, stand against genocide.
This Passover, stand with the children.
This Passover, turn not the Stranger from your door.
This Passover, chose love and not hate.
References
Trump-Netanyahu Gaza Plot: A Riviera on the graves of the Palestinians
Can You Abide It? Inglorious Basterds final scene
On the American Front, Spring of 2025
The US government is effectively kidnapping people for opposing genocide
I was nine years old, holding my mother’s hand in the front line of the divestiture protest against the University of California’s sponsorship of Israeli state terror and crimes against humanity in the Occupation of Palestine when Reagan ordered the police to open fire on the students on Bloody Thursday May 15 1969 in People’s Park Berkeley, the most terrible incident of state terror in American history since Wounded Knee.
Fifty six years, and we have learned nothing, changed nothing. There is but one rule in American politics; nobody messes with the grift.
Only Resistance and Revolution can bring the kind of change we need to free us from the legacies of our history and systems of oppression.
(In stark contrast with Genocide Joe and Traitor Trump, here is an American politician with heart, moral vision, and the courage to speak truth to power. Who will stand with us?)
Mr. Netanyahu, antisemitism is a vile and disgusting form of bigotry that has done unspeakable harm to millions.
Do not insult the intelligence of the American people by attempting to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies of your extremist and racist government. pic.twitter.com/CnM6oOrHKd
2 באפריל 2025 בפסח הזה, עמוד נגד רצח עם. בפסח הזה, עמוד עם הילדים: המחאות והכיבושים של השלום וההסרה
ברחבי אמריקה והעולם סטודנטים אמיצים מוחים וכובשים את האוניברסיטאות שלהם בסירוב להשתיק או להיות שותפים לרצח עם, אם על ידי רווח ממוסד על פשעים נגד האנושות באמצעות השקעות או על ידי חסות מדינה למלחמה, עריצות וטרור.
חלק גדול מהזעם הזה מופנה לטראמפ הבוגד עכשיו כפי שהיה לרצח העם ג’ו ביום הזה בשנה שעברה, ששניהם בגד בנו ונטש את האידיאלים שלנו של זכויות אדם אוניברסליות, כאשר כספי המס שלנו קונים את מותם של ילדים, רופאים, עיתונאים ואזרחים אחרים במלחמת עזה של ישראל ובכיבוש האימפריאלי של שכנותיה.
אבל שותפות אמריקאית בפשעי מלחמה ישראלים ובטרור ועריצות המדינה לא התחילה עם בובת הגרב של טראמפ וביידן נתניהו במשחקי שליטה אימפריאלית עם איראן ורוסיה; היא החלה לפני דורות בעקבות השואה עם הקמת האומה שנועדה להגן על כולנו מפני הפשיזם, וכעת הפכה לכל מה שפחדה ממנה, משחזרת את תנאי אושוויץ ומחנות הריכוז ברחבי ישראל עצמה ובכל מקום שכוחה יכול להגיע.
הלילה הרודנים טראמפ ונתניהו ושותפיהם הקושרים ומתנצלים של רצח עם, טיהור אתני, פשעי מלחמה, כיבוש ושליטה אימפריאלית, קלפטוקרטיה, נטישת זכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו ודה-הומניזציה יצחקו ויברכו זה את זה על התוכנית המטורפת והפושעת של בתי הקזינו והקברות שלהם, תוך השמדת בתי הקזינו והקברות שלהם. בעזה בני אדם אמיתיים ימותו בצורה נוראית בערים שיהפכו למשרפות עצומות.
במילותיה של דמותו המפוארת של סגן אלדו ריין ב-Inglory Basterds; “אני לא יכול לעמוד בזה. אתה יכול לעמוד בזה?”
תקווה ותפילה
בפסח הזה, עמוד נגד רצח עם.
בפסח הזה, עמדו עם הילדים.
בפסח הזה, אל תפנו את הזר מדלתכם. חג הפסח הזה, בחר באהבה ולא בשנאה
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
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March 4 at 7:54 AM
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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.
Torch of Liberty 