Seven years ago in October of 2018 I founded my publication Torch of Liberty to create actionable policy, strategy, and ideological guidance, and to provide intelligence briefings to the constellation of networks of alliance and organizations of liberation struggle globally which in the subsequent years have come to include Antifascists, Living Autonomous Zone and collectives, International Brigade volunteer forces, Resistance to tyranny and state terror including the Trump regime and the capture of the American state by the Fourth Reich, and democracy movements, and I write now in celebration and reflection of our journey together in the glorious quest of reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value, of how we choose to be human together, of our solidarity and role as guarantors of each other’s humanity and universal human rights, and of the limitless possibilities of becoming human which we share.
Two thousand five hundred fifty five and more unique articles and counting, something between personal daily journals in which I process our shared public trauma of current events and interpretive and predictive essays in which I parse their meanings and work through the consequences of our histories and possible actions for our lives in this moment and for our future. Herein I sort among futures, using critical tools of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy, the instruments of my field of study since my teenage years which is the origins of evil as violence, inequality, and systems of oppression and dehumanization, and sort between tyranny and liberty, degradation and exaltation, to refine the human from the monstrous, the legacies of our history, and systems of unequal power, from falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
This mad Quixotic quest has taken me to places liminal and strange, wherein our possibilities of becoming human are destroyed and recreated beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden in the uncharted places of our maps of human being, meaning, and value; the blank spaces and unknowns marked Here Be Dragons.
Here among the Dragons we may lose ourselves, find ourselves, dream the impossible and make it real; for beyond the limits of authorized identities we are Unconquered and free.
These past seven years encompass the whole struggle to save democracy against subversion by the Fourth Reich which has captured the state in the First and Second Trump regimes, the fight versus Trump’s ICE white supremacist terror force, the historic Black Lives Matter protests for equality and racial justice which seized fifty American cities and in which we Antifa direct action teams fought both police and Homeland Security forces and their deniable assets, brownshirts, and militias like the Oathkeepers and Proud Boys who were engaged in a destabilization campaign of arson, looting, violence, and the kidnapping, torture, and assassination of protestors as state terror and repression of dissent at the orders of the Triumvirate of Trump, Barr, and Wolf, which ended with the surrender of the United States to its citizens as the Triumvirs declared New York, Portland, and Seattle as Autonomous Zones, and Antifa emerged as the only force to have defeated the federal government of the US on its own ground or within her borders since Little Bighorn.
It’s a strategy of centralization of power, manufacture of legitimacy, and capture of the narrative Trump has tried several times before and is now re-enacting as in the performative morality play of his Antifa Roundtable to shift the blame for the violence his forces inflict on the citizens who protest against it, as he sends armies to Occupy cities which are bastions of liberty like Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles. Among the most vile and criminal acts of terror committed by his terror forces is the pepper ball shooting of Pastor David Black by ICE in Chicago. And this we must Resist, and as before we will be victorious for all refusal to submit to tyranny and state terror confers freedom, and we become Unconquered and Living Autonomous Zones bearing seeds of change which can liberate others. “Fire catches”; thus saith the Mockingjay.
Grandeur to match the glory of our victories over the tyranny and terror of Trump’s regime and the Fourth Reich was found in our seizure of power in Seattle’s Capital Hill Autonomous Zone, the first of many which I helped to found throughout the world as the originator of the Living Autonomous Zones idea and networks of collective action and revolutionary struggle.
Though I have often failed, as I did in the Last Stands at Mariupol in Ukraine though we survivors of the breakout founded networks of Resistance to take the fight to the enemy within Russia, Panjshir in Afghanistan after the Fall of Kabul, and now in Palestine and Lebanon against the brutal terror and genocide of Israel and her war of imperial conquest and dominion, though in the Red Sea Campaign to counter-blockade the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid to Palestine we were victorious even despite Biden’s drone attacks and attempts to kill me personally in Yemen, still we were victorious in refusal to submit to force and control and we remain Unconquered and free.
As the Oath of the Resistance given to me in Beirut 1982 by the great Jean Genet goes; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to Resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
This, friends, this solidarity, this refusal to submit, this will to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand beyond hope of victory or even survival, this, this, this.
May we make a better future than we have the past.
As I wrote in my post of February 9 2024, Why Do I Write, and Why Am I Writing To All of You Here, in the Nakedness of my Life, my Voice, and my Truth, as America Begins Her Last Stand Against Fascism in the 2024 Elections; Now and then I poke sleeping dragons with a stick, among them my own normalities; its why I travel when I write about a place and its current events, to disrupt my own expectations and ideas as I act to bring change to systems of oppression.
A maker of mischief, I.
Today’s post in my daily journal Torch of Liberty marks my debut on the writer’s and reader’s community and newsletter platform Substack, an event which calls for the questioning of my ends and means; why do I write, and why am I writing to all you here, in the nakedness of my life, my voice, and my truth, in this moment of tidal change as America begins her Last Stand against fascism in the 2024 elections?
As I re-evaluate my mission of the Restoration of democracy and actions as a guarantor of our universal human rights both in America and globally, and its praxis as Resistance to fascism and revolutionary struggle against tyranny and systems of unequal power, I reflect on the path which brought me here and the Defining Moments of my history.
First among these traumatic events of destruction and recreation which revealed to me my true self and mission, Bloody Thursday 1969 in People’s Park, Berkeley when the police at the order of then-governor Reagan opened fire on student protestors, and I at nine years of age holding my mother’s hand in the front line as I was driven out of my body by the force wave of a police grenade, and in that brief awareness beyond time as I lay dead in her arms beheld our myriad possible futures; overwhelmingly those of centuries of tyranny and wars of imperial dominion ending with the extinction of human beings. I’ve been trying to warn others in hope of changing our future ever since, and I am failing.
Second my near execution by police who were bounty hunting abandoned street children in Sao Paulo Brazil where I was training as a fencer the summer before I began high school in 1974, when I refused to step aside between them and a boy with a twisted leg who could not run. I was rescued by the Matadors, something between vigilantes, revolutionaries, and criminals who brought a Reckoning to the wealthy and powerful beyond the law or who were the law, founded by the great and terrible Pedro Rodrigues Filho the year before, who welcomed me into their ferocious brotherhood with the words; “You are one of us; come with us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
Third was the Siege of Beirut in the summer of 1982, when my culinary tour of the Mediterranean before my senior year at university in San Francisco was interrupted by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Israeli soldiers had set fire to two children and were laughing and making bets on how far they could run before collapsing into ruin, and I found myself fighting them as the children screamed in agony and horror burning to death. Others joined me, more joined us, and from that day I was part of the defense of the city.
There was a café on the far side of a sniper alley that served the best strawberry crepes in the world, and my friends and I made an extreme sport of dashing across it for breakfast. One morning an elegant gentleman sat at my table, and said in French; ”I am told you do this every day, steal breakfast from death.”
To this I replied; “Yes; moments stolen from death are all we truly own, and set us free. It’s a poor man who has no joys worth dying for.”
He smiled and said “I agree”; so began our conversations at breakfast, until the day came when Israel overran the barricades. The IDF were asking for surrender, blindfolding the children of those who came out and using them as human shields, and setting fire to the homes of those who refused. When they set fire to our house, and our discovery that our only weapon was the bottle of champagne we had just finished, he asked; Will you surrender?” and I said no.
“Neither will I” he replied, and stood. “As I offer you now, offer others at need; this is the Oath of the Resistance which I invented in Paris 1940 after spending much of the previous year spying on the Nazis in Berlin, reworded from my oath as a Legionnaire in 1918. It’s the finest thing I ever stole. Say with me; We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” Thus was I set on my life path by Jean Genet, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of fear and horrors, with the Oath of the Resistance which I now offer all of you.
And he gave me a principle of action that day, by which I have lived now for over forty years, among the unknown spaces on our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, where there are no rules, and now recommend to you; “When there is no hope, one can do impossible things, glorious things.”
Among his last words to me, having asked him “What do I do now with my life, now that I’ve seen through the lies and illusions by which authority seeks to enslave us? How do I live, when the world itself is a mirage and untrue, when the world is a lie?”
To which he replied; “Live with grandeur.”
What is Torch of Liberty? A voice of democracy and the Resistance, as the banner of my periodical declares, whose intent is to incite, provoke, and disturb.
A journal of my witness of history and current events, and their meaning for strategy, intelligence, and policy for antifascists, revolutionaries, democracy activists, and allies of liberation struggle, wherein I interpret events as they occur using lenses of history, literature, psychology, and philosophy. It’s a method I developed from Robert G.L. Waite’s multidisciplinary study The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler, which I read as a high school senior and also motivated me, along with Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, to choose the origins of evil and its actions as war, genocide, violence, and the social use of force as my field of study.
Seven years ago this month I founded Torch of Liberty and Lilac City Antifa together, a network of action and its community publication, to work through ideology and its praxis in the context of real world events and actions, to offer actionable intelligence, strategy, and ideological and policy guidance to all who make mischief for tyrants, and to reveal the meaning and consequences of current events. Herein I struggle to find answers to two primary existential questions.
Who do we want to become, we humans; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
What is to be done, as Lenin and Tolstoy asked with such different answers and results?
If we are to inhabit the perspectives of others and transform boundaries into interfaces, we must be willing to embrace otherness as diversity and inclusion but also as truths written in our flesh, the witness of history, and what Foucault called truth telling; writing is a sacred calling in pursuit of truth, which like love frees us from the flags of our skin and from authorized identities as an imposed condition of struggle.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
As Virginia Woolf teaches us, “If we cannot tell the truth about ourselves, we cannot tell the truth about others.”
So for my ars poetica as a praxis of revolutionary struggle. But I do not write to you today as an apologetics for poetic vision as the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value, nor for chaos as the adaptive range and change potential of systems, nor to give warning as we pass through Rashomon Gate Events of history under multiple threats of civilizational collapse and the extinction of our species and on its reverse face the limitless possibilities of becoming human, nor of the joy of total freedom which balances the terror of our nothingness.
No, friends and those I hope may become friends, herein I write to you to ask for your help in questioning our truths, that together we may perform the Four Primary Duties of Citizens; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, as seizures of power, allyship, and solidarity in liberation struggle and bringing change to systems of oppression and unequal power, as guarantors of each other’s humanity and universal human rights in refusal to submit to authority and those who would enslave us through commodification, falsification, and dehumanization, in these years of the Last Stand Against Fascism as it unfolds in America and throughout the world.
Hope, solidarity, the witness of history, and truth telling; such are my motives and purposes in writing to you as an open letter to humankind in this pivotal moment and to future generations.
And last but most important of all among my motives and purposes in writing, like Hope hidden in Pandora’s Box once the evils have escaped, herein I write to find healing for the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world in sharing our journeys toward becoming human and in the reimagination and transformation of how we choose to be human together.
I hope to have lived, and written, not at the end of the story of humankind, but at its beginning.
And all of this tumultuous and traumatic chaotization and unraveling as human civilization falls from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions and is reborn, either to an Age of Tyranny or a United Humankind as our choices about how to be human together unfold across the next several centuries.
We now face existential threats first of the subversion of democracy by theocratic tyranny and fascism in America and throughout the world, second of the abandonment of the idea of universal human rights, the collapse of civilization founded on the values of the Enlightenment, and the delegitimation of its bastion and incubator of a United Humankind the United Nations by Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians and other war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza War and the lack of decisive action to stop it by the international community, third Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and other fronts of World War Three as she tries to refound her empire in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, fourth China’s looming plan of imperial conquest and dominion of the Pacific Rim, and the end of the earth’s capacity to sustain life and our own species extinction as a consequence of our reliance on fossil fuels as a strategic resource which confers global dominion of the capitalist class and of our addiction to power and control of nature.
First among our primary existential threats is Nazi revivalism in America and Europe and the emerging new global order of fascism and totalitarian states of blood, faith, and soil. This includes Trump’s captured state of Vichy America and his role as global figurehead of the Fourth Reich white horrifically combines white supremacist terror, Christian Identity nationalism and theocratic-patriarchal sexual terror, and unchecked kleptocratic grift and the rule of plutocratic elites through privatization and deregulation, Orban’s Hungary which is the launchpad for Nazi revivalism in Europe, the capture of Italy by the original Fascist Party, and the political fronts which have become the opposition parties in France, Spain, and elsewhere, but also fascist states beyond the limits of Nazi ideology arising from similar forces of identity politics and the centralization of power to carceral states of force and control which include Modi’s India, Myanmar, and the Netanyahu regime of Israel.
Second among our direct and immediate threats is the Genocide of the Palestinians as the Netanyahu regime of Israel completes its transformation from a democracy to a fascist and totalitarian state of total militarization in the imperial conquest and dominion of her neighbors to found Greater Israel as a “Middle Eastern Sparta”, as American taxes buy the deaths of a people on whose bones Trump and Netanyahu plan to build a Riviera of casinos for elites.
And since Black Saturday October 7 2023 as the Gaza War erupted and became a regional theatre of World War Three as a theatrical performance in three dimensions; first the seventy years of anticolonial struggle of Palestine versus America and her colony of Israel which has gradually degenerated into a mirror image of the Nazi society it was designed to protect us all from, second the broader conflict between the Arab-American Alliance and the Dominion of Iran including Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and until we liberated it last December Syria, which is driven by the historical sectarian Sunni-Shia division, and third its dimensions as World War Three as Iran’s ally Russia attempts to re-found her Empire versus that of Turkey for control of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, in Africa directly opposing France, and in proxy wars with America, and all of this as civilizational collapse and rebirth in the titanic struggle between forces of liberation and imperial state terror and tyranny as a theatre of cruelty. All of this is fracture and disruption of our world order grounded in Humanism, and its our second most terrible threat to humankind after fascism and the Age of Tyrants to come because of the failure of the international community to stop it and the failure of America to bring our dog to heel with the Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of Israel, regime change in Israel, the total disarmament of Israel, and sending peacekeeping forces to help restore our universal human rights and to create a secular state of Israel where no faith of ancestral bloodline has status under the law. Israel is the shoal on which our civilization founders, and it must be reimagined and transformed if our human rights are to have value in the future.
Third among the lines of fracture of this large scale transformative process is the Third World War now ongoing in multiple theatres of conflict as Russia attempts to re-found her empire; first in the democracy and peace movements within Russia itself to bring regime change to its totalitarian plutocracy of crime syndicates, second the Russian capture of the state in America under the puppet regime of Trump who is also the primary figurehead of the Fourth Reich of patriarchal sexual terror, white supremacist terror, and theocratic Christian Identity tyranny, third in the Russian conquest of Ukraine and Russian atrocities and crimes against humanity, and in related conflicts, wars, and revolutions in Russian client states Belarus and Kazakhstan, and conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, Libya, and throughout Africa, as Putin tests the resolve of the western democracy and the solidarity of Europe.
Fourth, and only this far down the list because Xi Jinping hasn’t launched it yet and we are not yet fighting in the streets of San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle, Honolulu, Sydney, and elsewhere, we also face the coming Chinese Conquest of the Pacific Rim and the Occupation of all cities with a Chinatown under the Overseas Chinese policy of the CCP, which declares all persons of Chinese blood to be their citizens and subject to their laws, though the invasion of Taiwan and the seizure of control of shipping in the South China Sea through the artificial archipelago of island fortresses built on the carcasses of coral reefs are the next steps in Xi Jinping’s grand strategy of dominion. We need only look to the vast laboratory of thought control and ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang, the ghost of a nation in Tibet, or to the repression of dissent and freedom in Hong Kong to see what that future would look like.
Fifth among the things that might dehumanize or kill us all is climate change, and like the Pacific Rim War it hasn’t truly become a visible threat for most of us yet, but it is inevitable. All that remains in question is how bad it has to get before we do something to stop it, and how quickly; because action now by a United Humankind reorganized for survival may keep its consequences within survivable boundaries. I believe we may have already passed the point of no return for our species, but as we become extinct posthuman species may emerge. The question now is whether something like ourselves will one day discover the ruins of our civilization, and begin to wonder who we were and why we destroyed ourselves.
As you know if you have followed my work here at Torch of Liberty, I believe we face an Age of Tyrants and around eight centuries of wars fought with weapons of unimaginable horror ending with our extinction. But I could be wrong, because of my own limits or the Butterfly Effect of myriads of possible futures, recursive causes, and Rashomon Gate Events. It’s up to each of us, in the end, to choose our own future and who we will become.
In this only our imagination limits us. Let us escape the legacies of our past, and with poetic vision reimagine and transform our possibilities of becoming human.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
Let us give to tyranny and terror, to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, the only reply it merits; Never Again!
Who am I? By way of introduction, here follows my usual social media profile:
I am on the side of Prometheus; rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses.
Chaos autonomizes; Order appropriates, Law serves power, and there is no just Authority.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
I am a writer and former counselor, high school debate coach and forensics teacher, and English teacher with a lifelong interest as a scholar in the nexus of literature, psychology, history, and philosophy, my chosen field of study being the origins of evil and violence in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force and its consequences as unequal power and systems of oppression and the social use of force as tyranny and terror.
What is the praxis of my values? My purpose as a democracy activist is to realize a free society of equals in which we are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s rights, as a revolutionary to bring change to tyrannies of force and control and to systems of oppression, as an antifascist to bring a Reckoning to elite hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness and to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, as a member of the Resistance founded in Paris 1940 and sworn to its oath by the great Jean Genet in Beirut 1982 to do all of this without surrender and with absolute loyalty to my comrades in liberation struggle, and as the Oath goes “We swear our oath to each other, to Resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows”, and as a human being to place my life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
Why is simple to answer, though never easy to perform; that we may fight our way out of the ruins, every time, no matter the cost, and make yet another Last Stand beyond hope of victory or survival, and claw back something of our humanity from the darkness.
In this cluster of causes, democracy, revolution, antifascism, resistance, and solidarity with all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, I travel and write, speak, teach, and organize liberation struggle.
I practice the Way of believing six impossible things before breakfast, as Lewis Carroll teaches us, but only those I myself have chosen or created.
When you begin to question the boundaries and interfaces between normality as authorized identity and transgression as seizure of power, between subjugation and liberty, the grotesque and the beautiful, idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of madness and vision, truths and lies, and to challenge the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, you enter my world, the place of no rules, of unknowns and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.
Welcome to freedom and its wonders and terrors; to reimagination, transformation, and discovery.
Thank you for sharing this journey with me, and may the new truths we create together bring all of us joy.
Live with grandeur, friends.
“Fire Is Catching”; where we live now
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1; Fire Catches
“If we burn, you burn with us”
Michael Sheen performs ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ by Dylan Thomas
(who I am)
September 23 2025 On Becoming a Fulcrum of Change, In the Shadow of Trump’s Declaration of Antifa As a Terrorist Organization
February 11 2025 How To Be An Antifascist: Historical Sources and Contexts For The Resistance
July 31 2020 A Useful Past: What is Antifa?
Who I am: Defining Moments
November 14 2025 Defining Moments: A Confession, and Some Thoughts on My Birthday Regarding Poetic Vision as the Reimagination and Transformation of Ourselves; How Do We Create Human Being, Meaning, and Value?
November 15 2025 Defining Moments, Part Two: Last Stands
November 16 2025 Defining Moments Part Three: A Library of Possible Selves Through My Languages and An Atlas of Myself
November 17 2025 Defining Moments, Part Four: Songs Of Myself As the Books Which Have Written Me
The Imposed Conditions of Struggle: America Under Occupation, as of October 9 2025
ICE shoots Pastor David Black in Chicago
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1465018918159818
Trump calls for jailing of Chicago mayor and Illinois governor as national guard arrives in city
What to know about Trump’s national guard deployment, from rulings to protests
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/06/california-oregon-national-guard-trump-lawsuit
Brent Molnar, Voice of Reason
https://www.facebook.com/BrentMolnarVoiceOfReason
“Operation Midway Blitz: When Border Patrol Turned Its Guns Inward…
It began as another enforcement sweep, another name on a growing list of operations meant to project power inside the country’s borders. “Operation Midway Blitz” was pitched as a coordinated crackdown on undocumented migration and “anti-ICE activity.” In reality, it was something darker. What unfolded on the streets of Chicago this week was not just a tactical blunder. It was a turning point. A Border Patrol task force, acting under a federal directive, shot an unarmed protester in broad daylight, and the story they told afterward began to crumble almost immediately.
The protester’s name is Marimar Martinez, a 30-year-old activist who joined an anti-ICE demonstration on Chicago’s Southwest Side. According to early statements from the Department of Homeland Security, Martinez had “brandished a firearm” and “rammed her vehicle” into federal agents’ cars. The shooting, they said, was self-defense. That was the official version of events for about 48 hours. Then, the retractions began.
Federal prosecutors quietly admitted that Martinez never pointed or raised a weapon. They acknowledged that her car contained a registered firearm but that it remained holstered and unused. They also stopped repeating the claim that she deliberately rammed law enforcement vehicles. Her lawyer, citing body-camera footage, said the truth was far more disturbing: Border Patrol agents instigated the confrontation, yelled “Do something, b****,” and then opened fire.
If that version is true, the implications are staggering. It would mean that a federal agency, deployed for a domestic operation, provoked a civilian and then used lethal force under false pretenses. That would make the shooting not a matter of split-second fear but of deliberate escalation, a pattern increasingly familiar in Trump’s second term as ICE, DHS, and Border Patrol expand their roles from immigration enforcement to political suppression.
The government calls these incidents “enforcement encounters.” But what we are witnessing looks more like occupation logic transplanted onto American soil. The armored vehicles, the camo-clad officers, the optics of control, they’re not policing borders. They’re policing dissent. And when they shot Marimar Martinez, they weren’t neutral arbiters of law. They were armed propagandists, ensuring the next activist thinks twice before showing up.
The footage itself has not been fully released. Prosecutors admit it exists. They acknowledge that the shooting itself is not captured on camera, but surrounding video shows agents crowding Martinez’s car and shouting before she even exits. Her defense team says the physical evidence contradicts DHS’s version of the timeline. For now, the public must piece together fragments from statements, partial transcripts, and heavily redacted documents. It’s a familiar story of official secrecy buying time for narrative control.
Federal agents are supposed to be trained to de-escalate, not provoke. Yet “Operation Midway Blitz” appears to have been structured around confrontation from the start. The operation’s scope, focusing on “urban anti-ICE agitators,” blurred the line between lawful protest and criminal conspiracy. That framing allowed agents to treat dissent as threat. When the first bullet was fired, the mission’s real purpose was exposed, deterrence through fear.
Even the language officials used afterward reveals the mindset at work. DHS spokespeople called protesters “domestic extremists” and “anti-American infiltrators.” It’s the same vocabulary that justified federal crackdowns during the civil rights era and the anti-war movements of the 1960s. But this time, the machinery is bigger, faster, and algorithmically informed. These aren’t rogue cops on the beat. They’re militarized agents backed by data tools capable of tracking faces, locations, and affiliations in real time.
The human cost is no longer abstract. Marimar Martinez is alive, but she’s in the hospital under guard, recovering from gunshot wounds to her shoulder and abdomen. Her lawyer says she is conscious, in pain, and facing felony charges of assaulting a federal officer, charges that prosecutors admit stem from an incident she may not have initiated. It’s the kind of legal trap authoritarian systems perfect: create a confrontation, cause the harm, then criminalize the victim.
Meanwhile, DHS has not released the names of the agents involved. They have not confirmed whether they remain on duty. They have not said if an independent review will occur. Instead, their statement reads like an internal press release about “maintaining operational readiness.” No mention of accountability. No acknowledgment that a federal operation ended with a civilian shot in the street. Just bureaucratic silence masking moral collapse.
This is how systems rot. Not all at once, but by degrees. A government that uses its border patrol as a domestic army is no longer protecting borders. It’s policing the population. When officials hide behind “ongoing investigation” while their agents shoot unarmed protesters, it’s not investigation. It’s delay. And delay is the oxygen of impunity.
The case of Marimar Martinez is not just about one shooting. It’s about whether America still recognizes the difference between law and power. Because if agents can shoot someone for protesting a government agency, then every citizen who raises their voice is already in their crosshairs. The bullet might not hit you, but it was meant for your silence.”
Trump just hosted an ‘Antifa roundtable’ at the White House. It was so much worse than you’re imagining: Holly Baxter reports on a meeting that, at one point, appeared to position people protesting against Nazis in the Weimar Republic as the bad guys, and at another saw the president declare, ‘We got rid of freedom of speech’
“Wake up, babe, new civil liberties infringement propaganda just dropped! Today’s instalment of America’s ongoing descent into farce brings us a White House press release about “Antifa terror” and a presidential roundtable devoted entirely to the group that famously isn’t a real entity.
Around noon, a press release appeared on the official White House website, quoting numerous anonymous Portland residents, including a “man,” a “woman,” and a “business owner,” all of whom absolutely want the National Guard to storm their city. “I kind of support it 110%” is an actual quote.
But that was just the appetizer. At 3 p.m., the televised meeting began. And boy, was there a lot of meat.
Held at the table of “independent journalists” (far-right activists) and moderated by Donald Trump, it opened with a statement by the president that “paid anarchists” want to “destroy our country,” followed by bizarre, conspiracy-laden claims that anti-Trump protesters have signs made of expensive paper “with beautiful wooden handles” that therefore must have been printed in the basements of secretive organizations, and that “we have a lot of records already, a lot of surprises, a lot of bad surprises” in store for the people who align themselves with anti-fascism.
And by the way, he noted, “we got rid of free speech” because flag-burning is bad.
Attorney General Pam Bondi jumped in to underline the message: “We’re not going to stop at just arresting people in the street.” No, they’re going to “take down the organization brick by brick” and “destroy the organization from top to bottom.”
In chimed Kristi Noem, everyone’s favorite puppy killer: Antifa wants to “destroy the American people and their way of life” and is a group that has “infiltrated our entire country,” from “city to city,” cried the Homeland chief. Never mind that the anti-fascist protesters in Portland, Chicago and other Democratic cities are pretty much all homegrown Americans.
No, insisted ICE Barbie — they are invaders. They are traitors. They are “just as dangerous” as MS-13, Isis and Hamas. Her priority is “making sure they never see the light again.” This, by the way, is the woman who grandstanded about “staring down” Antifa when footage showed it was actually a couple of photographers and a guy in a chicken suit.
The quotes came thick and fast from the others around the table. At one point, someone casually addressed an imaginary Antifa member, saying: “You will be crushed by the Constitution.” Just as the Founding Fathers intended, no doubt.
The frenzied energy in the room was palpable even through a screen. Influencer Brandi Kruse did a monologue about how she used to “suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome” and how, since she changed sides, “I’m happier, I’m more healthy, I think I’m even a bit more attractive.”
Not to be outdone, in came Jack Posobiec, one of the right’s weirdest hangers-on, who is perhaps most famous for the time he spread the “Pizzagate” theory and then got removed from the pizzeria in question by police for filming a child’s birthday party. Running with the major theme of the hour — that Antifa is definitely, certainly, really real despite all evidence to the contrary, and that everybody needs to stop saying it’s not real — Posobiec made a startling claim: Antifa is so clearly real that it “has been going on for almost 100 years … going back to the Weimar Republic in Germany.”
And look, yes, it is absolutely true that there were anti-fascist protesters in the Weimar Republic. If you’ll remember, those were the people taking issue with the early versions of the Nazis. But it’s sort of difficult to position yourself as the good guys if you’re aligning yourself with the Nazis in your historical analogy. I’m just saying that, if I was Posobiec’s publicity guy, I might ask him to drop that soundbite from future public appearances.
I think we all know what’s going on here. But let’s begin with the fundamentals: Antifa isn’t real — at least, not in the way one convenes a roundtable. It has no central command structure, no coherent leadership, no membership rolls, no headquarters. It is a loose ideological umbrella — a term that is sometimes used by disparate activists and local groups, but much more frequently by the far right than by the supposed lefties who are part of it.
Obviously, the fact that there’s no proof anyone even really identifies as Antifa didn’t stop the White House from designating the “group” a terrorist organization a couple of weeks ago.
Research shows that genuine political violence remains overwhelmingly driven by far-right actors, not nebulous “Antifa” networks. But this, truly, is where MAGA has arrived at: a place so far removed from observable reality that it now holds official government functions with imaginary enemies. Once, conservatism prided itself on being “the party of realism.” Today’s version treats politics as fan fiction, complete with invented villains and lore.
Such productive unreality takes the energy that could be spent on governing or solving problems and redirects it into myth-making. Instead of talking about wages, housing or climate disasters, we’ll talk about black-clad anarchists who can’t be fact-checked because they’re mostly not real. And then we’ll use their alleged existence to justify sending masked men with rifles into cities that, it just so happens, didn’t vote for us. You could almost admire the absurdity if it wasn’t attached to actual state power.
The constant threats at this roundtable aimed at “people with money” who are supposedly “funding” Antifa are the real point. And, like a lot of the White House’s output at the moment, it is intended to intimidate as many people as possible into silence.
In their little room with their teeny little microphones, a bunch of very important people in heavy makeup entered into a collective delusion today. They’re desperate for everybody else to join them. But there are some facts that just won’t un-fact. And for those of us who fancy ourselves OK with words, let’s remember that, no matter how much you twist it, being anti-anti-fascism means being fascist, even — especially — in the Weimar Republic. That’s just elementary logic.”
Heather Cox Richardson
https://www.facebook.com/heathercoxrichardson
October 8, 2025 (Wednesday)
Yesterday, journalists observed members of the Texas National Guard at a U.S. Army Reserve Center in Elwood, Illinois, about 55 miles (89 kilometers) southwest of Chicago. This morning, the Defense Department announced the federal activation of about 200 soldiers from the Texas National Guard and about 300 from the Illinois National Guard, saying they would be protecting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and other federal agents “who are performing federal functions, including the enforcement of federal law, and to protect federal property.”
The statement said the National Guard soldiers “are under federal command and control in a Title 10 status.” The section of the legal code to which the announcement pointed was the one permitting the president to call into federal service members of the National Guard whenever the U.S. is invaded or in danger of invasion by a foreign nation, there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the U.S. government, or the president cannot execute the laws of the United States with the power of regular law enforcement.
It is this power under Title 10 that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller yesterday claimed was “plenary,” or absolute. The idea that exceptions to the rule of law reveal who is really in charge of the government was central to the political philosophy of German political theorist Carl Schmitt, who joined the Nazis and whose work is increasingly popular among the radical right in the U.S. these days. Since taking office in January, Trump has declared at least eight national emergencies that the administration has used to justify the use of emergency powers.
As J.V. Last of The Bulwark laid out clearly last night, there is no crisis in Chicago that makes it necessary for the administration to send in National Guard troops. Last points out that any instability in Chicago has been caused by the administration’s surge of federal agents into the city, where they shot and killed Chicago resident Silverio Villegas González; raided and ransacked an apartment building, leaving residents—including U.S. citizens and children—bound outside for hours; shot an unarmed woman, Marimar Martinez; and aimed a weapon at a resident who was simply recording what the agent was doing, In each case, the government initially insisted the federal agents either were under attack or were rounding up “the worst of the worst,” but subsequent information has showed the federal agents were the aggressors in each situation.
Federal agents have held journalists, who are now suing ICE and the Department of Homeland Security for the use of “extreme force” against them, and pummeled them with tear gas and pepper spray. As Last notes, local police chief Thomas Mills has testified that the “use of chemical agents by federal agents at the ICE facility in Broadview has often been arbitrary and indiscriminate. At times it is used when the crowd is as small as ten people.”
Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker warned that the administration is deliberately trying to “cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at them. Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send military troops to our city.”
As Joseph Nunn of the Brennan Center explained earlier this year, the Insurrection Act brings together a number of laws Congress passed between 1792 and 1871. They make up sections 251 through 255 in Title 10 of the United States Code. Together, they suspend the Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits the U.S. military from taking part in civilian law enforcement.
The Insurrection Act permits the president to deploy troops to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” in a state that “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.”
Courtney Kube, Katherine Doyle, Carol E. Lee, and Garrett Haake of NBC News report today that White House officials, led by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, have been having increasingly serious discussions about having Trump invoke the act.
This morning, President Donald J. Trump’s social media account posted: “Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice [sic] Officers! Governor Pritzker also!”
But Pritzker is standing up to the administration.
“I will not back down,” he posted. “Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power. What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?”
“His masked agents already are grabbing people off the street. Separating children from their parents. Creating fear. Taking people for ‘how they look.’ Making people feel they need to carry citizenship papers. Invading our state with military troops. Sending in war helicopters in the middle of the night. Arresting elected officials asking questions. We must all stand up and speak out.”
In an interview with MSNBC senior political correspondent Jacob Soboroff, Pritzker noted that Trump, who is a convicted felon, has a lot of nerve calling for Pritzker’s arrest. “[T]his guy’s unhinged. He’s insecure, he’s a wannabe dictator.” Pritzker said directly to Trump: “If you come for my people, you come through me. So come and get me…. We’ve done nothing wrong here and…it’s Donald Trump that is breaching the Constitution, breaking the law.”
Illinois has sued to stop the administration from sending federalized National Guard troops from any state to Illinois, “because it is unconstitutional,” Pritzker said. “[I]t’s important to recognize that the Trump administration doesn’t seem to respect any laws in the United States. They just do what they want to do, and they’ll keep doing it unless someone stops them. Here in Illinois, we’re stopping it. We’re doing everything that we can to push back.”
The administration is engaging in “a show of force,” Pritzker said, because it “wants to militarize major cities across the United States, especially blue cities in blue states, because he wants us to get used to the idea of military on the streets” before the 2026 elections. “I believe that he’s going to post people outside of ballot boxes and polling places. And if he needs to in order to control those elections, he’ll assume control of the ballot boxes” and let the administration count the results. Pritzker said we will have free and fair elections in 2026, “if we all stand up and speak out.”
Today the White House tried harder than ever to push the idea that the country is consumed by violence from the “Radical Left.” This afternoon a press release from the White House claimed that “[f]or years, an Antifa-led hellfire has turned Portland into a wasteland of firebombs, beatings, and brazen attacks on federal officers and property—yet the Fake News remains in shameful denial about the Radical Left’s reign of terror.” In fact, before Trump ordered troops into the city, federal agents described the small protests at the ICE facility as “low energy,” consisting of people standing in front of vehicles, raising a middle finger, and playing loud music.
To push the administration’s narrative, Trump held an “Antifa Roundtable” at the White House this afternoon. There, far-right influencers tried to make the case that “antifa” is real and has harassed them, although as The Guardian noted, many of those influencers feed their media channels by confronting protesters and filming the responses they’ve provoked. The press release claimed that “terrorists” have “laid siege” to the ICE office in Portland, Oregon, and at the meeting, Trump claimed that “paid anarchists” want to “destroy our country.” Bizarrely, he claimed that “I don’t know what could be worse than Portland. You don’t even have stores anymore. They don’t even put glass up. They put plywood on their windows.”
Antifa is a term used by the far right to define anyone who does not support MAGA: it means “antifascist.” During the meeting, influencer Jack Posobiec—a proponent of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory—warned that “Antifa” went back all the way to Germany’s Weimar Republic. As Holly Baxter of The Independent pointed out, “it is absolutely true that there were anti-fascist protesters in the Weimar Republic. If you’ll remember, those were the people taking issue with the early versions of the Nazis.”
References
Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia, by Michel Foucault
(why we must question, bear witness, and remember)
The Psychopathic God, Robert G.L. Waite (How I parse the meanings of current events and the futures that unfold from them)
The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosiński (How I imagined myself as a teenager coping with trauma as an origin story)
My Kit For Hope:
The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus
The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
The Trial of Socrates, by I.F. Stone
Invictus, by William Ernest Henley
Torch of Liberty 