Behold the perfidious crimes of an Absurd Clown, Russian agent, Nazi Revivalist, lunatic, idiot, and saboteur of democracy, our universal human rights and rights as citizens and co owners of the state, of America’s historic role as a guarantor of democracy globally and of American power, legitimacy, and hegemony; the mask has slipped, before the stage of history and the world, and proven the truth of my mother’s description to me of what Republicans are, as a child hiding from the brutal thugs who had donned Halloween masks and stripped off their police badges as they hunted student protestors in the wake of the attack by police ordered by then-Governor Ronald Reagan against the divestiture from Israel protest at People’s Park, Berkeley May 15 1969; “If you scratch one, there’s a Nazi underneath.”.
Thanks for showing us what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator. And remember, folks, you can always tell a Republican’s secret name; it’s their act of treason plus their sex crime.
The clown show at the White Man’s House, which I so name because it is a bastion of white supremacist terror and Nazi revivalism and no long a shrine of democracy as the embodiment of the Enlightenment and its values of liberty, equality, Truth, and Justice, but merely a symbol of the state as embodied violence and systems of oppression which include racism, theocratic patriarchal sexual terror of which our Rapist In Chief is a figure and authorized role model for young men, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and fascism of blood, faith, and soil, has in the Trump-Zelenskyy Incident been performed as a terrorist act by the aberrant, treasonous, and dishonorable Trump regime in accord with Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty in a failed attempt to seize power over Ukraine through fear, just as Traitor Trump has failed to seize power over us all through abjection, despair, and learned helplessness.
For just as we here in America refuse to submit in mass national protests, so Ukraine and all of Europe unite in Solidarity and refusal to submit to our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
Let us become a United Humankind as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights, among these being the right to self-determination as a free society of equals, a future set against that of Russian imperial conquest and dominion and an Age of Tyrants wherein our uniqueness and individuality ceases to exist, and there is only the will of the tyrant, the hegemonic elites he serves, the enforcers who serve them, and a mass precariat of slaves.
Those who would enslave us and steal our souls through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization must first trick us into giving them our power, and without our belief in their lies and claims to act in our name and our obedience they cannot subjugate us.
Disbelieve, disobey, and unite in solidarity of action to Resist.
For the great secret of power and authority is that without legitimacy and the freely given power of the people, power is hollow and brittle and fails at the point of disobedience, and force becomes meaningless.
Those who would enslave us can kill us, imprison and torture us, but they cannot rule us if we are unwilling to belong to them.
And this is a power which cannot be taken from us, a power which defines our humanity and is an inherent condition of it, and like the Magic Ruby Slippers bears the power to send us home and return to us our own best selves as we imagine and wish to become.
So I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was devised in Paris 1940 by the great Jean Genet from his oath as a Legionnaire, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a Last Stand as we were about to be burned alive by the Israeli Army in Beirut 1982; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows”.
As written by Moira Donegan in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s style of petty domination was in full display with Zelenskyy; “The last time Donald Trump did this, it was in secret, and he got impeached over it. In 2019, Trump, on a phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, demanded that the Ukrainian president produce – or fabricate – evidence of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden, the son of Trump’s eventual opponent in the 2020 election, in exchange for continued US military aid.
At the time, Russia had already seized control of the Ukrainian region of Crimea, and was funding violent insurgent groups in the country’s east; it was increasingly clear that a full-scale Russian invasion was coming, as it finally did in 2022. Since the end of second world war, it has been the US that checks Russian expansionist ambitions in Europe – the US that provided the backstop to the Nato alliance, the US that secured the independence of eastern Europe. The US president wanted to condition that longstanding role on the Ukrainian president doing him a personal political favor. The international order could be ended, he suggested, if those who depended on him didn’t do enough to indulge his vanity, self-interest and impulsive whims.
Something similar was already afoot earlier this week, when Trump summoned Zelenskyy to Washington at the last minute to pressure him to sign a mineral rights deal. Trump wanted to make continued US support for Ukraine’s military effort contingent on US involvement in the country’s mineral industry. But the deal that was offered to Zelenskyy in fact contained no security guarantees: it offered something less like a bilateral agreement and more like a shakedown. Nevertheless Zelenskyy, who is leading a besieged people in danger of losing their country, seemed willing to take it – even after Trump called him a “dictator” last week.
But things went downhill from there. Trump seemed determined to antagonize Zelenskyy, making a passive aggressive remark about what Zelenksyy was wearing when he arrived at the White House. (Sources close to Trump leaked to Semafor that the administration was also displeased with Zelenskyy’s “body language”.) In a meeting in the Oval Office, with film crews and reporters present, the US vice-president, JD Vance, began berating Zelenskyy for what he alleged was the Ukrainian president’s disinterest in diplomacy, by which he seems to have meant a Ukrainian surrender on Russia’s terms.
When Zelenskyy countered that Russia has not been a reliable partner, breaking promises to Ukraine repeatedly in past ceasefires, Vance began berating him that he was not grateful enough for US support. “I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media,” said Vance, who had initiated the confrontation with cameras in the room, in a practiced cadence. “Have you said thank you once?” Zelenskyy has in fact said “thank you” to the United States many times, including at the outset of the meeting. Both Trump and Vance began raising their voices, ignoring Zelenskyy’s attempts to speak and impugning both his leadership and his personal character. Zelenskyy was soon kicked out, and left the White House without signing the minerals agreement that Trump had nominally summoned him from Ukraine to conclude.
It is clear that the post-second world war international order is over. It is clear that Europe will have to look elsewhere, and not to the United States, for its security, and that the US will increasingly be isolated among nations, without allies to advance its interests abroad and without friends to share the benefits of science, culture and commerce. Few world leaders, after all, are willing to make deals with such a mercurial partner; fewer still are willing to try, if the attempt will be met with public humiliation in such brutish and bullying style.
It is clear that other great powers, including those who do not share what were once the US’s stated principles of justice, democracy and human dignity, will fill this vacuum, to America’s detriment. It is clear that Trump does not intend to check Vladimir Putin’s expansionist ambitions – that he will force a deal in the Ukraine war on Russia’s terms, that Zelenskyy himself will likely be exiled or killed in the aftermath, and that other countries in Europe are in danger.
In the hours after the meeting, many world leaders publicly voiced their support for Zelenskyy, including the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk. Like him, they stand on the edge of an uncertain future. Russia is on the march, indifferent to borders, laws and freedoms, and the United States will no longer stop them. As an American, I was embarrassed by the display. I am also, now, very scared.
Because what Trump did to Zelenskyy on Friday is not a departure from his style: it is entirely typical of his domineering approach to politics – one in which violence or harm is threatened to extort his preferred outcomes, and in which good faith negotiation or even basic dignity is shrugged off in favor of petty displays of domination and cruelty.
Trump and Vance, I now think, never really intended to have a conversation with Zelenskyy: they intended, instead, to try to make themselves look tough on TV by humiliating him. Jake Paul, a boxer, influencer and alleged crypto scammer who has been a booster of Donald Trump, said of the televised shouting match against a head of state, “This isn’t attacking. This is called being a MAN.”
Manliness seems to be all that Trump aspires to: and he defines it, almost exclusively as cruelty. Both on the international stage and on the domestic one, Trump and the crowd of racist, misogynist and endlessly immature idiots who surround him will stop at nothing to prove what men they are – no matter how much America suffers, or how many people die, in the process. At the meeting, when Zelenskyy tried to persuade Trump to feel differently about the prospect of Russian expansion, Trump cut him off. “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel,” he said. “We’re going to feel very good. We’re going to feel very good and very strong.” Maybe he does.”
As written in the Observer Editorial, entitled Zelenskyy clash: a moment of dark reckoning; “The treatment of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, by the US president, Donald Trump, during what appears to have been a staged confrontation in the White House in front of the world’s press, marks one of the most profoundly shocking moments in US diplomacy in decades.
In this crass and deeply disturbing performance, the wartime leader of a democratic European country that is fighting against an illegal invasion by Russia, which has seen its citizens killed and cities bombed indiscriminately, was subjected to a vicious, ignorant and mendacious attack that was designed to humiliate.
Many watching the antics of Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance – and the subsequent cheerleading from their far-right political allies – will have been sickened by what they saw: an American president channelling the words of Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin. In the cold light of the day that has followed, the world – and Europe in particular – has woken to the most uncomfortable of realities.
The US, the country that has styled itself the indispensable nation, has aligned itself with the enemies of peace and democracy. If “America first” marks simply a shattering moment of US isolationism not seen since the run-up to America’s entry into the Second World War, this would be devastating enough. But, as they gather in London tomorrow, European leaders, Keir Starmer among them, must recognise that the contours of European and global security have been transformed.
The first lesson should be acknowledgment of what has been obvious since Trump’s inauguration: the US cannot be relied on as a security, intelligence or trading partner. Washington’s underpinning of Nato, and international security, is no longer a given. By giving succour to a Russia already conducting hostile acts against European countries beyond Ukraine, including Britain, Trump has made common cause with the greatest threat facing Europe today.
That was reflected in the comment by Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, after Friday’s degrading White House spectacle, that the “free world needs a new leader”. In practical terms, that must mean an end to the pretence that Trump can be flattered and played.
The almost unanimous outpouring of support from European leaders for Zelenskyy and Ukraine after the White House meeting needs to be swiftly followed by a show of unity at the London summit – and by concrete measures to support Ukraine and to preserve the wider peace on the European continent.
All of which means hard decisions will need to be made, and quickly, in European capitals, not only on defence spending but in recognising and in communicating to the public that a wider conflict with Russia – and without US support – is not unthinkable but must be actively prepared for.
For, while it is easy to see Trump’s actions as the petulant, theatrical and narcissistic reaction of a deeply insecure individual, the consequences go far beyond that. If there is a glimmer of hope, no matter how dim, it is that Trump’s poisonous bluster is underpinned by incoherence and weakness that is open to being challenged.
It is important to take stock of the reality with which the world is confronted, not the fantasy some would wish to see. Washington’s abdication of leadership and support for Ukraine requires a rapid and united European response without caveats.
As Kallas suggests, that requires European leaders to articulate the values to which they are committed and how they will practically back them, including material aid to Kyiv. Because the Trump administration’s often bizarre and self-harming view of foreign and trade policy, merging unilateralism, territorial expansion and isolationism, can only work in our deeply connected world if other countries allow it to.
America, as Zelenskyy rightly observed, is as vulnerable to Putin’s acts as Ukraine and Europe. Starmer’s visit to Washington last week – following that of the French president, Emmanuel Macron – was a necessary attempt to influence Trump. That effort has failed and it should be clear that there are now red lines, the most obvious of which is the threat to end US aid to Kyiv. After Friday’s events, it is already highly questionable in many minds whether Trump should be granted a state visit to the UK.
What should be clear to No 10 is that ending aid to Ukraine would be a step too far for the UK, even for this highly abnormal regime in Washington. Above all, Starmer and other European leaders must insist on the primacy of one of the key founding principles of the post Second World War order, enshrined in international law: territory may not be acquired through military aggression.
The starting point for any peace in Ukraine must be to recognise the illegality of Putin’s aggressions, which began with the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Ukraine should have a seat at the table in all discussions, free from threats and extortion from Trump and his allies. The aim of those discussions should be to see both the full withdrawal of Russian forces and powerful guarantees for Kyiv’s security. At this moment of dark reckoning, we owe it not only to the people of Ukraine; we owe it to ourselves.”
As written by Simon Tisdall in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump has utterly changed the rules of engagement. World leaders must learn this – and quickly: The world’s most admired democracy is being held hostage by a clique of far-right thugs. It would be a mistake to placate them; “It’s not only about Donald Trump. It’s not just about saving Ukraine, or defeating Russia, or how to boost Europe’s security, or what to do about an America gone rogue. It’s about a world turned upside down – a dark, fretful, more dangerous place where treaties and laws are no longer respected, alliances are broken, trust is fungible, principles are negotiable and morality is a dirty word. It’s an ugly, disordered world of raw power, brute force, selfish arrogance, dodgy deals and brazen lies. It’s been coming for a while; the US president is its noisy harbinger.
Take the issues one at a time. Trump is a toxic symptom of the wider malaise. For sure, he is an extraordinarily malign, unfeeling and irresponsible man. He cares nothing for the people he leads, seeing them merely as an audience for his vulgar showmanship. His undeserved humiliation of Ukraine’s valiant leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was, he crowed, “great television”. As president, Trump wields enormous power and influence. But Potus is not omnipotent. America’s vanquished Democrats are slowly finding their voice. Connecticut senator Chris Murphy shows how it should be done. Don’t bite your lip. Don’t play by rules Trump ignores. When Trump tried to blame diversity hiring policies for January’s deadly Potomac midair collision, Murphy hit back fiercely.
“Everybody in this country should be outraged that Donald Trump is standing up on that podium and lying to you – deliberately lying to you,” Murphy fumed. Trump was at it again when he mugged Zelenskyy last week. But it is not passing unchallenged. Street protests in Britain and the US followed. A campaign gathers pace to block Trump’s planned UK state visit. Opinion polls show growing opposition.
It seems strange to talk about “resistance”, as if a Nazi-style wartime occupation is under way. Yet resisting Trump is what our leaders must do. The world’s most admired democracy is held hostage by a far-right clique of thugs and chancers. Its leader calls himself “king” and talks of a presidency for life. Elon Musk and Steve Bannon raise stiff-armed salutes. European neofascists drool adulation from afar.
Trump’s minions attack or subvert the agencies of government, the judiciary and free press, terrorising and intimidating those whose loyalty they impugn. Their propagandists, so-called tech barons, have a reach Joseph Goebbels would envy. And just like Vladimir Putin, Russia’s dictator, JD Vance, Trump’s loudmouth hitman, fights a regressive, anti-democratic culture war for “Christian values” and a narrow, bigoted orthodoxy.
Ukraine, despite Trump’s betrayal, remains the epitome of resistance. The Ukrainian people are fighting for freedom, sovereignty and democratic self-determination. The issue is simple. Since the US cannot any longer be relied upon, Europe’s leaders know what they must do: supply more and better weapons for Kyiv, such as Taurus missiles; provide more humanitarian aid and finance, obtained by seizing $300bn in frozen Russian funds; and collectively raise their defence spending. From leaders such as Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, we need less polite subservience and more honest defiance.
To be effective, European leaders need to put concerted pressure on the US government to provide credible, long-term security guarantees for Ukraine and a backstop for any force that the UK and Europe deploy to monitor the ceasefire. It’s reasonable to expect the US to support a European peace initiative. If it does not, an open rupture with Washington should not be dodged. Equally, they need to put more pressure on Russia, too, to halt its daily slaughter and bombing in Ukraine’s cities. Putin could stop this war today – after all, he alone started it. The fact he refuses to do so is proof, if it were needed, of Zelenskyy’s contention that he cannot be trusted in anything he says. He must be squeezed further.
Right now, the opposite is happening. Military analysts warn that a gleeful Kremlin, encouraged by western discord, may step up its offensive in the east and try to capitalise on Ukraine’s demoralisation, perhaps even reinstating Putin’s original plan to seize the whole country. To deter such scenarios, EU leaders, meeting again in Brussels on Thursday after their London weekend talks, must finally bury their differences and draw a line.
Starmer says that he and Macron are now developing a plan. Good. The leading European Nato powers should demand an immediate halt to all fighting in Ukraine and Kursk. They should launch a peace process inclusive of all interested parties, without preconditions or prior concessions. If Putin balks, they must withdraw their diplomats, close borders with Russia, move to interdict its exports, mobilise their armed forces – and set a deadline for providing defensive air cover for all unoccupied Ukrainian territory. Russia must be reminded that the west has teeth, too – and will, if forced, resist Putin’s unlawful aggression with everything it has got. Enough of Trump’s scaremongering nonsense about a third world war. Putin is a mass murderer, not a mad murderer. He’s also a coward.
Given Trump’s treachery and threats to cut military aid, only a strong, united Europe stands a chance of preventing Ukraine’s defeat on the battlefield. Were Ukraine forced to capitulate to a Kremlin deal and lose its sovereignty, it would set a disastrous precedent for free people everywhere, from Taiwan and Tibet to Moldova, Estonia, Panama and Greenland.
Marco Rubio, Trump’s obsequious secretary of state, spoke revealingly last month about his vision of a 21st-century world dominated by the US, Russia and China, and divided into 19th-century geopolitical spheres of influence. It was necessary to rebuild US relations with Moscow, Rubio argued, to maintain this imperious tripartite balance of power. This is the partitioned future that awaits if Trump’s surrender strategy prevails and he and Putin carve up Ukraine.
Such a global catastrophe was foretold. In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell describes a nightmare world divvied up between three great empires or superstates, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, which deliberately stoke unceasing hostilities. Their shared characteristics: totalitarianism, mass surveillance, repression, immorality, gross inhumanity. Sound familiar? Annalena Baerbock, foreign minister of Germany, a country that knows much about fascism, past and present, recently said that a “new era of wickedness has begun”. Ukrainians, under occupation, are only too familiar with the evil that has descended upon their heads. This is the violent, lawless dystopia towards which the Americans in the Oval Office are leading us. Unless they are stopped. Unless we fight. Unless Europe resists.”
And this is the Letter of Lech Wałęsa to Trump; “This is the text we signed:
Your Excellency Mr President,
We watched the report of your conversation with the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenski with fear and distaste. We consider your expectations to show respect and gratitude for the material help provided by the United States fighting Russia to Ukraine insulting. Gratitude is due to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who shed their blood in defense of the values of the free world. They have been dying on the frontline for more than 11 years in the name of these values and independence of their Homeland, which was attacked by Putin’s Russia.
We do not understand how the leader of a country that is the symbol of the free world cannot see it.
Our panic was also caused by the fact that the atmosphere in the Oval Office during this conversation reminded us of one we remember well from Security Service interrogations and from the debate rooms in Communist courts. Prosecutors and judges at the behest of the all-powerful communist political police also explained to us that they hold all the cards and we hold none. They demanded us to stop our business, arguing that thousands of innocent people suffer because of us. They deprived us of our freedoms and civil rights because we refused to cooperate with the government and our gratitude. We are shocked that Mr. President Volodymyr Zelenski treated in the same way.
The history of the 20th century shows that every time the United States wanted to keep its distance from democratic values and its European allies, it ended up being a threat to themselves. This was understood by President Woodrow Wilson, who decided to join the United States in World War I in 1917. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood this, deciding after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 that the war for the defense of America would be fought not only in the Pacific, but also in Europe, in alliance with the countries attacked by the Third Reich.
We remember that without President Ronald Reagan and American financial commitment it would not have been possible to bring the collapse of the Soviet Union empire. President Reagan was aware that millions of enslaved people were suffering in Soviet Russia and the countries it conquered, including thousands of political prisoners who paid for their sacrifice in defense of democratic values with freedom. His greatness was m. in. on the fact that he without hesitation called the USSR the “Empire of Evil” and gave it a decisive fight. We won, and the statue of President Ronald Reagan stands today in Warsaw vis a vis of the US embassy.
Mr. President, material aid – military and financial – cannot be equivalent to the blood shed in the name of independence and freedom of Ukraine, Europe, as well as the whole free world. Human life is priceless, its value cannot be measured with money. Gratitude is due to those who make the sacrifice of blood and freedom. It is obvious for us, the people of “Solidarity”, former political prisoners of the communist regime serving Soviet Russia.
We are calling for the United States to withdraw from the guarantees it made with the Great Britain in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which recorded a direct obligation to defend the intact borders of Ukraine in exchange for giving up its nuclear weapons resources. These guarantees are unconditional: there is no word about treating such aid as an economic exchange.
Lech Wales, b. political prisoner, Solidarity leader, president of the Republic of Poland III
Mark Bailin, b. political prisoner, editor of independent publishing houses
Severn Blumstein, b. political prisoner, member of the Workers’ Defense Committee
Teresa Bogucka, b. a political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition and Solidarity
Gregory Bogut, b. political prisoner, activist of democratic opposition, independent publisher
Mark Borowik, b. political prisoner, independent publisher
Bogdan Borusewicz, b. political prisoner, leader of the underground Solidarity in Gdansk
Zbigniew Bujak, b. political prisoner, leader of the underground Solidarity in Warsaw
Władysław Frasyniuk, b. political prisoner, leader of the underground Solidarity in Wrocław
Andrew Gintzburg, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity
Richard Grabarczyk, b. a political prisoner, Solidarity activist
Alexander Janiszewski, b. a political prisoner, Solidarity activist
Peter Kapczy .ski, b. a political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition
Mark Kossakowski, b. political prisoner, independent publicist
Christopher the King, b. a political prisoner , independence activist
Jaroslav Kurski, b. a political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition
Barbara Swan, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity
Bogdan Lis, b. political prisoner, leader of the underground Solidarity in Gdansk
Henryk Majewski, b. a political prisoner, Solidarity activist
Adam Michnik, b. political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition, editor of independent publishing houses
Slavomir Najniger, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity
Peter the German , b. political prisoner, journalist, and printer of underground publishing houses,
Stefan Konstanty Niesiołowski, b. a political prisoner , independence activist
Edward Nowak, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity
Wojciech Onyszkiewicz, b. political prisoner, member of the Workers’ Defence Committee, Solidarity activist
Anthony Pawlak, b. a political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition and underground Solidarity
Sylwia Poleska-Peryt, b. a political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition
Christopher Push, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity
Richard Push, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity,
Jacek Rakowiecki, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity
Andrew Severn, b. political prisoner, actor, director of the Polish Theater in Warsaw
Witold Sielewicz, b. political prisoner, printer of independent publishing houses
Henryk Sikora, b. a political prisoner, Solidarity activist
Christopher Siemien Krski, b. political prisoner, journalist, and printer of underground publishing houses
Gra ,yna Staniszewska, b. a political prisoner, leaders of Solidarity of the Beskids region
George Degrees, b. a political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition
Joanna Happy, b. political prisoner, editor of Solidarity underground press
Ludwik Turko, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity
Matthew Wierzbicki, b. political prisoner, printer and publicist of independent publishing houses”
Here I wish to signpost for the historical record that the Resistance to Putin’s regime and the invasion of Ukraine is based in Warsaw because Poland is among the most committed Antifascist nations of Europe, and remembers well her history when menaced with invasion by Russia and Nazi Revivalist forces which have a launchpad for the reconquest of Europe in Orban’s Hungary and Meloni’s Italy. Poland not only hosts a community of Ukrainian war refugees and fighters, but also Russian citizens working with their Ukrainian and European counterparts to bring regime change to Russia and end the invasion of Ukraine and the threat of invasion of Europe.
This is not a speculative threat, but one with several active plans now in motion; Russia intends to seize the Ukrainian port of Odesa as they did Mariupol, then the Romanian port of Constantia from which the whole of the Danube Basin can be invaded. This in concert with the invasion of Europe from Moldava and Poland with the recapture of Berlin the prize and also from the Baltic Sea and North Atlantic with the conquest of Britain the final goal.
Vichy America under Putin’s star agent Trump of course is already a Russian client state. Putin may or may not in time send an Russian Army of Occupation to rule us directly, but for the moment all he needs to do is monkeywrench democracy and its institutions and destroy our economy so that we cannot resist either the conquest of Europe or our own; and Trump is doing this for him now. A “useful fool”, Trump, as the KGB term describes such agents.
Putin has intended to launch the Baltic War this spring, just a few weeks from today. If get wins international recognition of his captured territories in Ukraine, he will be free to do so, for NATO and the international order born of the Second World War will have abandoned its mission to resist the acquisition of “Living Room” as Hitler termed it by war.
As written by Bret Stephens in The New York Times in an article entitled A Day of American Infamy; “In August 1941, about four months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill aboard warships in Newfoundland’s Placentia Bay and agreed to the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration by the world’s leading democratic powers on “common principles” for a postwar world.
Among its key points: “no aggrandizement, territorial or other”; “sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them”; “freedom from fear and want”; freedom of the seas; “access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity.”
The charter, and the alliance that came of it, is a high point of American statesmanship. On Friday in the Oval Office, the world witnessed the opposite. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s embattled democratic leader, came to Washington prepared to sign away anything he could offer President Trump except his nation’s freedom, security and common sense. For that, he was rewarded with a lecture on manners from the most mendacious vulgarian and ungracious host ever to inhabit the White House.
If Roosevelt had told Churchill to sue for peace on any terms with Adolf Hitler and to fork over Britain’s coal reserves to the United States in exchange for no American security guarantees, it might have approximated what Trump did to Zelensky. Whatever one might say about how Zelensky played his cards poorly — either by failing to behave with the degree of all-fours sycophancy that Trump demands or to maintain his composure in the face of JD Vance’s disingenuous provocations — this was a day of American infamy.
Where do we go from here?
If there’s one silver lining to this fiasco, it’s that Zelensky did not sign the agreement on Ukrainian minerals that was forced on him this month by Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary who’s the Tom Hagen character in this protection-racket administration. The United States is entitled to some kind of reward for helping Ukraine defend itself — and Ukraine’s destruction of much of Russia’s military might should top the list, followed by the innovation Ukraine demonstrated in pioneering revolutionary forms of low-cost drone warfare, which the Pentagon will be keen to emulate.
But if it’s a financial payback that the Trump administration seeks, the best place to get it is to seize, in collaboration with our European partners, Russia’s frozen assets and put them into an account by which Ukraine could pay for American-made arms. If the United States won’t do this, the Europeans should: Let the Ukrainians rely for their arms on Dassault, Saab, Rheinmetall, BAE Systems and other European defense contractors and see how that goes over with the “America First”-ers. Hopefully that could serve as another spur to Europeans to invest, as quickly and heavily as they can, in their depleted militaries, not simply to strengthen NATO but also to hedge against its end.
There is a second opportunity: While Trump’s abuse of Zelensky might delight the MAGA crowd, it isn’t likely to play well with most voters, including the almost 30 percent of Republicans who, even now, believe it’s in our interest to stand with Ukraine. And while most Americans may want to see the war in Ukraine end, they almost surely don’t want to see it end on Vladimir Putin’s terms.
Nor should the Trump administration. A Russian victory in Ukraine, including a cease-fire that allows Moscow to consolidate its gains and recoup its strength before the next assault, will have precisely the same effect as the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan: emboldening American enemies to behave more aggressively. Notice that, as Trump has ratcheted up pressure on Ukraine in recent weeks, Taiwan reported a surge in Chinese military drills around the island, while Chinese warships held live-fire exercises off the coast of Vietnam and came within 150 nautical miles of Sydney.
Those are points honorable conservatives should press: Can Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska — two Republicans who haven’t sold their souls on Ukraine — lead a delegation of like-minded conservatives to Kyiv?
More so, this should be an opportunity for Democrats. Joe Biden was right when he called this a “decisive decade” for the future of the free world; he just happened to be too feeble and cautious a messenger.
But there are tough-minded Democrats with military and security backgrounds — Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan come to mind — who can restore the spirit of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy to the Democratic Party. It’s a message of toughness and freedom they might also be able to sell to at least some Trump voters, who cast their ballots in November for the sake of a better America, not a greater Russia.
Still, there’s no getting around the fact that Friday was a dreadful day — dreadful for Ukraine, for the free world, for the legacy of an America that once stood for the principles of the Atlantic Charter.
Roosevelt and Reagan must be spinning in their graves, as are Churchill and Thatcher. It’s up to the rest of us to reclaim America’s honor from the gangsters who besmirched it in the White House.”
The perfidious crimes of an Absurd Clown, Russian agent, Nazi Revivalist, lunatic, idiot, and saboteur of democracy, our universal human rights and rights as citizens and co owners of the state, of our historic role as a guarantor of democracy globally and of American power, legitimacy, and hegemony.
In the Wilderness of Mirrors, is anything real and true? How would we know?
The figure of Our Clown of Terror and Rapist In Chief Traitor Trump confronts us with existential and ontological questions, ones with enormous real world consequences regarding who lives and who dies, who is human and who may be used as a thing for the profit of others, as conflicting visions of our future and of the nature of human being, meaning, and value collide in titanic struggle for power, wealth, and ideas of the Good and of public virtue; shall we be a free society of equals who are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s humanity and our parallel and interdependent universal human rights and rights as citizens, or masters and slaves, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege divided from slave castes by hierarchies and taxonomies of belonging and exclusionary otherness based on fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and enforced by systems of oppression as theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror, and by a police state of brutal repression of dissent, pervasive surveillance, and endemic propaganda and thought control, wherein all power is centralized to totalitarian authority wherein our uniqueness is obliterated and we become things and not human beings, subjects and not citizens, raw material for the power of others and consumed like Charlie Chaplin in The Factory by the great and terrible machine we serve.
Nothing but lies is trump, lies are the stuff of which he is made, and no true and real thing lives beyond the illusion. Hollow and without a soul or any human qualities is our Clown, but full of bottomless perversions, avarice, horrors, like the Party of Treason and Terror which he commands. A Lord of Misrule and a Mad King, whose mission is the subversion of democracy and abandonment of the ideas of equality, freedom, testable truths and impartial justice for all.
He is but the first of far more terrible tyrants to come, but he it was who broke democracy and began the Age of Tyrants.
As I wrote in my post of April 5 2023, With all the Lies Exposed and Let Out Of Him, Trump Becomes Nothing; A man made of lies means nothing; his words mean nothing, he means nothing, is nothing, can bear no witness or testimony, swear no binding oaths, pledge no loyalty, and we do not hear his words.
Today we witness in the defeated scowl of a pathetic loser and dishonorable traitor the realization of the truly damned that he is T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Man, without any redeeming human qualities, utterly worthless and alone for no one can trust or believe his words, and we should be horrified.
That a human being can become this empty thing, consumed by the demons he serves, is pitiable; but it must not compel our mercy.
To those who would enslave us and to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil we must give the only reply it merits; Never Again!
Nor does the Republican Party, captured by organized theocratic Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchal sexual terror and tyranny in the guise of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in 1980 and infiltrated by Nazi revivalists and Confederate KKK white supremacist terrorists resulting in the Fourth Reich of our Vichy America under the Trump regime elected through massive Russian propaganda and the dark money of oligarchs and Russian crime syndicates, have any ideology to offer other than submission to those who would enslave us.
As I wrote in my post of February 8 2023, The Limits of Fear and Lies: the Republican Party Has No Story to Tell Beyond These Instruments of Subjugation, Division, Tyranny and Terror, and the Wealth, Power, and Privilege of Hegemonic Elites It Represents and Enacts; The Republican Party is a political machine of amoral nihilism beneath the gilded mask of patriarchal Gideonite fundamentalist sexual terror and faith weaponized in service to power.
Though our money has been branded In God We Trust implying divine authorization of wealth, power, and privilege and legitimation of the hegemonic elites who monopolize them as apex predators and the asymmetrical and unequal hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness which our systems and institutions are designed to enforce and perpetuate, this does not make it true.
Coequal with patriarchy as systemic oppression is white supremacist terror; both are forces of authorized identity and subjugation to authority. Insidious, pervasive, and endemic in our civilization, these parallel and interdependent evils are among the legacies of our history from which we must emerge if we are to realize the dream of America as a free society of equals.
In the Republican rebuttal to Biden’s visionary and unifying State of the Union address, the vacuity and cruelty of the Republican Party and their organization of infiltration of the state and subversion of our values is exposed to all the world.
This way lies madness, ruin, tyranny and terror, the loss of meaningful citizenship and universal human rights especially of Black and other nonwhite peoples and of women’s rights of bodily autonomy as property of the state in subjugation to men; falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
No matter what marginalized others or precariat are the initial targets of unequal power, regardless of who you begin with in division and exclusion which is the Republican Party brand and with all fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Let us give to fascist tyranny and terror the only reply it merits; Never Again!
This is the future the Republicans would damn us to, and it remains the primary mission of any democratic society to prevent as institutional liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
Here in the Democratic Party’s State of the Union address and the Republican Party’s reply we have a chiaroscuro not of policies to achieve common goals as it should be, but of competing visions of who we are and wish to become.
Who do we want to become, we Americans, we humankind? Masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
Let us answer hate with love, division and exclusion with diversity and inclusion, fear with hope, and tyranny and terror with liberty and Resistance.
God Bless America; we’re really going to need it.
As I wrote 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 in 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 beinbgs.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As I wrote in my post of October 10 2024 Lies, Misdirections, and the Fog of War: the Information Front of the Climate Crisis and the Party of Treason’s War on Truth and Democracy; So wishful I was when I wrote these words on April 29 2019, Trumps Ten Thousand Lies; On this day we count ten thousand lies since Trump has taken office as President of the United States; obviously he is a pathological liar who is unable to tell the difference between truth and lies.
The sounds he makes are as meaningless as the squeals of a mindless gluttonous brute animal that he so resembles.
His words mean nothing; he also means nothing, and we do not hear him.
If only we like Ulysses beset by the sirens could stop our ears, and free ourselves from capture by the tide of lies unleashed upon us by Traitor Trump and his Fourth Reich minions which include the Republican Party.
But it is never simple, liberation struggle against systems of oppression and thought control, alternate realities, myriads of lies and illusions, phantasms of subjugation to authority and the weaponization of fear in service to power, and the legacies of history from which we must emerge if we are to become human, self created and self owned beings, glorious and Unconquered.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
We ourselves are the primary ground of struggle between tyranny and liberty, for what we choose to believe and how we judge the choices and stories offered to us determines our subjugation to authority or our liberation from it. And truths are ambiguous, ephemeral, relative, and constantly shifting and in processes of change, and can be Rashomon Gate Events which shatter time into myriads of possible futures.
We wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors, echoes and reflections which capture and distort like the images of ourselves in a funhouse mirror labyrinth, and the only guidance I can offer you is to ask; Whose story is this?
So it is with the disinformation campaign surrounding the twin hurricanes which have devastated Florida and the work of FEMA and other humanitarian aid workers in savings the lives of our citizens from a disaster unleashed by the greed for wealth and power of those who would enslave us.
Trump rambles witlessly before the world once again, displaying his freakish monstrosity as an idiot madman of delusions and perversions. For beneath the mask lies the demon whom he worships and to whom he would sacrifice America and us all; Moloch the Deceiver, Demon of Lies.
For an excellent interrogation of how tyranny operates through falsification, lies, illusions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, and conspiracy theories in our subjugation, enslavement, and the theft of the soul, see Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season one, episode 8; I, Robot…You, Jane. Crucial to the understanding of conspiracy theories is that Moloch, whose name means King, is claimed as the Big Bad of QAnon; the first principle of propaganda is deflection or to claim your enemies are doing whatever you actually are. The second is to assault the idea of truth itself by exaggerating claims to the point where belief becomes an act of perverted faith and a loyalty test.
For a brilliant fictionalization of how conspiracy theories work as falsification in the context of QAnon’s previous iteration, the Nazi blood libel against the Jews, read Umberto Eco’s magisterial novel The Prague Cemetery.
In disambiguating truth from lies, consider the source and who benefits. And remember always the First Rule of Resistance; everything the enemy says is a lie.
Of our history, memory, and identity there are those which must be kept, and those we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
As I wrote in my post of November 17 2020, Lies, Delusions, and the Subversion of Democracy: the Legacy of Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty; As our Clown of Terror’s Theatre of Cruelty prepares to surrender the keys to a kingdom which no longer open any doors and the lights begin to wink out one by one, I reflect on the legacy of the Stolen Election of 2016 and the illegitimate Trump Presidency which has so crippled America and devoured the hearts of her people as a disease of the spirit; lies, delusions, and the subversion of democracy.
Fascism, patriarchy, and the corrupt kleptocracy of a plutocratic and oligarchic regime of elites has been turned back with the dark tide of atavistic barbarism of hate and greed on which it is borne, and for now we the people have triumphed; but we must be vigilant lest it return.
Trump has been the most successful agent any foreign power has ever fielded against America, and he has damaged our ability to respond to threats more than any event in our history, exceeding even Pearl Harbor and 9-11. Yet like those who planned the attack on Pearl as a pre-emptive strike to render us powerless to oppose conquest and dominion, our enemies have underestimated the resilience of democratic institutions and the unconquerable will of a free and united people.
Let us celebrate our victory over fascism and the glorious defiance of authority by which we won; let us also give no opportunity nor moment of rest to the enemy, for he is always at the gate, testing our weaknesses and biding his time, and we must give him nothing to exploit.
As I wrote in my post of November 13 2020, The Trump Era: A Legacy of Shame, Amorality, Fear, Tyranny, Lies and Delusions, and Now We Are Become Ridiculous; Traitor Trump has already sabotaged America’s role as a guarantor of democracy and the universal rights of man, and with it any fig leaf of moral supremacy and our global hegemony of power and privilege which derives from it.
The Trump regime has been a parallel of the Salt Tax in India which brought down the British Empire; a delegitimizing event which exposes the amoral hollowness of our rapacious imperialism and any apologetics of power.
While I welcome the death of the American Empire of capitalist plunder and military colonialism, this unintended consequence of the Fourth Reich’s subversion of democracy does not offset the loss of our freedom, equality, and human rights.
Our Clown of Terror has long since made America a figure not of hope but of fear, not of liberty but of tyranny; now he has made us ridiculous as well.
As I wrote in my post of September 16 2020, A Wilderness of Mirrors: Lies, Illusions, and the Theft of the Soul; As truth becomes uncertain and malleable through the instruments of media and reduces everything to identitarian partisanship, as reality becomes a social consensus model authorized for us by others, as we wander in a wilderness of mirrors, distorted images as if in a funhouse which falsify and abstract us from ourselves in infinite reflections, of misdirects, lies, and illusions, we become colonized by these falsehoods and shaped to the uses of their puppetmasters and those who would enslave us. Thus do we become puppets of the thieves of souls.
And somewhere in the funhouse, a Clown of Terror laughs.
Among the most successful propaganda campaigns of this election season is the QAnon conspiracy narrative, a modern reformulation of the charges against the Jews during the Inquisition which were later repurposed by the Nazis. Of the many great works on this subject, I recommend beginning with a novel by Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery.
“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”; so argues Oscar Wilde in his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying, a Socratic dialogue in which he deconstructs Aristotle’s theory of mimesis, memory as the basis of identity, and also a critique of Marx’s historical determinism. In this he expanded Keat’s Idealism, “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not”, into an anarchist humanism embracing both political and personal spheres, in which self-creating autonomous individuals are the origin of all meaning and value.
As such Wilde prefigures Sartre and forms a link between Romantic Idealism and Existentialism; I digress to point this out because Wilde’s breaking of the Great Chain of Being and causality, from the Infinite to kings and priests and then to their subjects, levels hierarchy and social station, interrogates authorized truth, democratizes the ownership of ourselves, and seizes and reclaims our power of choice regarding bodily autonomy and identities of sex and gender.
In Oscar Wilde’s solution to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, reality and its imitation shape each other as a recursive process, circular and infinite; and between these mutual negative spaces which create one another like Escher’s Drawing Hands is a liminal interface, full of possibilities and transformative power. The nature and relativity of time, order as an emergent function of chaos, the polymorphism of identity, and the necessity of rebellion against authority which interposes itself between the free conscience and ideas of autonomous individuals and our direct relationship with the Infinite in order to enslave us; all these are major themes of Oscar Wilde; but what is important to us in the context of designed lies and illusions by authority in a political context is that he signals a way out of the maze of propaganda and control which enforces falsification and dehumanization, or simply put the theft of the soul by those who would enslave us.
If fictions can enslave us to the ideas of other people, our own fictions can also liberate us from them.
At its best, true art allows us to transcend the limits which ensnare and diminish us; to rise above the troughs of our social position and of exclusionary categories of otherness and divisions from each other and to see the true shape of our possibilities and the seas in which we must swim from the crests of its waves.
Art is revolutionary struggle which reconnects us and transforms human relationships, reveals new possibilities of becoming human together as yet undreamed, and with these functions of vision, self-ownership, transformation, and seizure of power becomes an instrument and process of Liberty.
Let us forge an art of being human which returns to us our true selves.
As I wrote in my post of August 3 2019, The Age of Lies and Illusions; We live in the funhouse of mirrors, images which reflect lies and illusions and which steal our souls through falsification. The truth is the frontline in the battle for freedom against tyranny and fascism, requiring new definitions of freedom in the age of digital propaganda and subversive disinformation targeting social media microcommunities.
Part of our vulnerability to influence messaging is its ability to disguise its source and masquerade as communication from friends; another dimension is the ease with which big data can be gathered and deployed against an electorate with precisely targeted messages, as for example Netflix benignly and brilliantly uses viewing habits to sort people into thousands of preference categories and suggest other shows they might enjoy. These first two vulnerabilities can be rendered harmless if we have the political will to do so; but what truly terrifies me is the context in which modern propaganda occurs, in an overwhelming and pervasive environment of lies.
Ours is a world in which Big Brother is not only watching, he wears the masks of our most trusted friends and lives in our pocket, following us everywhere, listening, reporting our location constantly, and sending our information home to whoever buys it. We have become commodities and resources as well as markets; we are the greatest frontier of our age, gold mines for oligarchs and tyrants.
Information is not only the best defense of democracy; it is also its greatest existential threat. How we balance these dual aspects of our freedom will determine the survival of freedom, and the possibilities of our future humanity.
As I wrote in my post of August 25 2020, Welcome to Bizarro World, Where Truth and Lies Change Places and All Our Values Are Reversed; The Republican Party held up a mirror to America in the figure of Trump at last night’s National Convention, and I’m hoping most of us didn’t like what we saw.
A funhouse mirror, filled with distorted images, a thing of surfaces without substance which offering a mirage of illusions, lies, and reflections into infinite regress of our atavisms of fear and hate, shadows which we drag behind us in our wake like an invisible reptilian tail, and which like the picture of Dorian Grey reveal our disfigured souls and our failures as Americans and as human beings.
It is an image designed to terrorize us into submission, and to steal our souls.
Among the freaks and monsters, the litanies of victimhood and retribution, of dominion, white supremacy, patriarchy, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil sung by the barkers and screaming johnnies who warmed up the main show, among all these and reigning over them like a ringmaster was the tyrant himself, Traitor Trump, spewing abominations and depravities as the puppet of the demons he worships, the lies of those who would enslave us.
Thanks for showing us what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
So for Traitor Trump, Rapist In Chief and Russian agent and puppet tyrant ruling a Vichy America by terror, and the treasonous and dishonorable criminals of white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror who voted for him in the hope that they too may commit crimes against humanity, violations of truth, justice, and the American Way, and the fracture and disruption of our institutions of democracy.
To all these enemies of the People I wish the ruin of their fortunes and their lives; may they come to nothing and be forgotten, may their bodies be all they possess as prisons of suffering for their soulless ghosts of memories and the humanity they have abandoned, for Republicans are zombies consumed by the demons they worship just as Trump is an empty husk and a puppet animated and inhabited by Moloch, Prince of Lies.
Trump is an illusion made of lies, but how is he constructed and how may we unmake him?
Herein I look to the historical process of his creation, like a Frankenstein’s Monster of deceptions, illusions, misdirects and conspiracy theories, and ultimately alternate realities wherein good and evil become meaningless or change sides and the subversion of democracy and its replacement by the Fourth Reich of tyranny and terror becomes possible.
This has unfolded in stages of mass derangement, the Rush Limbaugh era, the Fox news era of Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and Tucker Carlsen, and the Twitter-Musk era of social media which includes the transitional figure of Alex Jones with whom he is linked.
Exhibit One in the Museum of Future Holocausts; as I wrote in my post of February 18 2021, Death of a Monster: In Memory of Rush Limbaugh, Master Propagandist of Fascist Terror; Today we celebrate the death of a monster, master propagandist of fascist terror Rush Limbaugh, who with his partner Roger Ailes brought the methods of Goebbels and the ideology of Hitler into the modern American cultural context and political arena, creating a mass of radicalized voters which transformed and seized the Republican Party and America.
An independent and self-taught but brilliant, meticulous, and obsessive scholar of classical rhetoric and Nazi propaganda, whose radio broadcasts bear the marks of his studies and who may not have shared Trump’s habit as related by a former wife of keeping Hitler’s Mein Kampf on his bedstand where one might usually find a Bible, to read last before sleep and first upon awakening in hopes the master’s words might overwrite his soul, did share it as his primary source and reference. Rush Limbaugh created the model for the transformation of mass media from news to propaganda under the guise of entertainment.
Among the meandering labyrinth of its poisonous ramblings, Mein Kampf contains a clear and precise manual of propaganda, which together with his decades of study and explication of Nazi propaganda, the principles of Goebbels, and especially the example of Julius Streicher’s newspaper Der Stuermer, served as Rush Limbaugh’s university of hate and its ideology and methods.
He led the assault on truth, and as the principal architect of the Fourth Reich as an ideological union of Confederate and Nazi racists and white supremacist terrorists and Christian Identity Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs of sexual terror has authored a climate of fear and hate in submission to authority, advanced the cause of tyranny and the subversion of democracy, and caused incalculable harm; death, violence, and destruction.
He began not as a criminal mastermind of racism and misogyny, but as a young man who grew up in a typical conservative Southern Republican family and as a teenager with a radio license began crafting his humor of insults, nicknames, and storytelling through invented personalities, which became a profession when he was 22. From this beginning as a “shock jock” radio host throughout the seventies and several failed shows, then five years as a public
relations assistant, he returned to radio in 1983 and in 1984 was hired by a Sacramento station as a right wing commentator and talk show host, with instant success.
His satire, inventive skits, and wild monologues won national syndication, yet they were the result of a decade of self-reinvention modeled on the rhetoric and public personas of his heroes, George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, and Spiro Agnew.
Chosen by William F. Buckley as his successor and mentored by key ally Henry Kissinger, Limbaugh’s emergence as the voice of American conservatism and the Republican Party came in 1987, when Ronald Reagan abolished the FCC Fairness Doctrine to clear the way for his strategist of propaganda Roger Ailes’ market test of a new television station in The Rush Limbaugh Show. This soon became Fox Network, which formed the Echo Chamber with its news shows, its star Limbaugh, and the editorial column of the Wall Street Journal.
A sympathetic reading of Rush Limbaugh might interpret him as the protagonist in Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night; a man who became what he pretended to be. For myself, I am concerned in this case more with the consequences of evil than with its origins; more with actions than with motives.
There are two stellar works which contain critical analyses of Limbaugh, Rodger Streitmatter’s book Mightier than the Sword: How the News Media
Shaped American History, and Media, Culture, and the Religious Right, edited by Linda Kintz and Julia Lesage. His rhetorical techniques are investigated fully in Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment, by political communication scholars Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella.
Helene Megaard’s 2012 thesis for her Masters in Literature at the University of Oslo, The Rush Effect, is excellent; she argues that he is not a true propagandist as he does not conceal his goals, sources, identity, or the opposing side of issues; Goebbels would not approve. He does often use traditional techniques of name calling, stereotyping, and card-stacking, and modern ones including repetition, simplification of choices, reinforcement of existing bias, and the manufacture or release of tension.
Last night I celebrated the death of Rush Limbaugh with fireworks at eleven; for this breach of decorum I received the following criticism; “Never take pleasure in someone’s death. Hatred is killing this country.”
To this my answer was and must ever be; Provocateurs and apologists of racist and patriarchal hate crimes are enemies of humankind. Who denies the humanity of others merits none.
I hate no one. I find moral lepers such as Rush Limbaugh monstrous, defining the limits of the human, precisely because his incapacity for empathy with others places him beyond the boundaries, where any evil becomes possible. Such freaks of nature are pitiable figures, like Alberich in Wagner’s Ring, forever disconnected from humankind and from the ability to feel love.
Yes, hate is destructive to humankind; this is why it must be opposed with love, and the violence from which it is born with healing, though this does not mean failing to confront evil and pursue it to destruction. Any argument which seeks to discredit and steal our ability to resist evil and refuse to submit to authoritarian force and control, as the critic of my fireworks attempted in the use of a classic fascist apologetics of accusing the objection, must be recognized as specious and as an attack. This, too, merits nothing, and one must not engage them on this ground of their choosing.
Therefore celebrate with me the death of a monster, and the end of an existential threat.
As to the judgement of history, we may say of Rush Limbaugh what was said of his model Julius Streicher by the prosecution at his trial in Nuremberg, “that while Streicher was not directly involved in the physical commission of these deadly crimes against humanity, his crime is no less worse for that reason…. It was to the task of educating and poisoning the people with hate, and of producing murderers, that Streicher set himself. For 25 years, he continued unrelentingly the perversion of the people and youth of Germany. He went on and on as he saw the results of his work bearing fruit. In the early days, he was preaching persecution. As persecution took place, he preached extermination and annihilation and, as millions of Jews were exterminated and annihilated in the Ghettos of the East, he cried out for more and more.
“The crime of Streicher is that he made these crimes possible, which they would never have been had it not been for him and for those like him. In its extent Streicher’s crime is probably greater and more far-reaching than that of any of the other defendants. The misery which they caused ceased with their capture. The effects of this man’s crime, of the poison that he has put into the minds of millions of young boys and girls goes on, for he concentrated upon the youth and childhood of Germany. He leaves behind him a legacy of almost a whole people poisoned with hate, sadism, and murder, and perverted by him. That people will remain a problem and perhaps a menace to the rest of civilization for generations to come.”
Exhibit the Second as I wrote in my post of April 28 2023, Tucker Carlson, Voice of the Fourth Reich and Nazi Ideology in the Era of Traitor Trump, Is Disavowed by Fox and Now Free to Run For the Presidency; Rupert Murdoch, our current version of William Randolph Hearst in wagging the dog, has fired and disavowed his star apologist of fascism, white supremacist terror and Gideonite patriarchal sexual terror, after his many years of loyal service to our enslavement. Tucker Carlson is now free to replace Traitor Trump, the clown he cheer led and served as barker for his show, or to act without restraint in helping him recapture the state for a second term.
Go us? The deplatforming of Tucker Carlson is a partial victory, which leaves our enemies free to pursue our destruction.
Fox News is a hostile intelligence service of the Fourth Reich, designed for the mission of subversion of democracy.
What is to be done? as Lenin asked in the essay which started the Russian Revolution.
As I wrote in my post of March 15 2019, Evildoer of the Week Tucker Carlson; Watch Samantha’s Bee’s takedown of racist, misogynist Tucker Carlson. Revile him not because he is a loathsome slave of the devil, but because his hate speech motivates unspeakable crimes.
Tucker Carlson is a remora servicing a shark as its garbage scavenger, a funhouse mirror reflection of his secret twin Alex Jones and a distant echo of his direct model Rush Limbaugh.
What is the nature of this interdependence and symbiosis of Nazi ideology and the Republican Party, of hate and power, lies and subjugation?
And what of Roger Ailes, creator of Fox News as a propaganda venue for the Fourth Reich, whose torch Rupert Murdoch bears forward?
As I wrote in my post of December 14 2019, Fox News, Roger Ailes, & a model for patriarchy as tyranny and terror; What is interesting to me is not the personal venality of Roger Ailes as a de facto cult leader, but in Fox News as a model of patriarchy as tyranny and terror. Fox News is important as a private propaganda arm of Traitor Trump and the cabal of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, white supremacist terrorists, and their Russian paymasters and amoral plutocrats willing to capture ephemeral and very temporary wealth and power as the world is destroyed by their greed.
Of course the ultimate goal of Fox News and the Party of Treason remains the fall of democracy and western civilization globally, and the subversion of America’s values; liberty, equality, truth, and justice. And in the example case of Roger Ailes and Fox News, we may find an instructive model of what the world would look like if the Patriarchy achieves these objectives and seizes control.
Here is the nightmare alternate reality of The Handmaid’s Tale in operation now within our democracy, metastasizing until it consumes its host civilization. That Fox News operates in near identical fashion to Stalin’s regime of lies should surprise no one; that we allow an open enemy of freedom to conduct operations against America without restrictions or the shadow of the hangman’s noose surprises me continually.
In the words of Alisyn Camerota, writing in Vanity Fair; “As the credits rolled at a recent screening of Bombshell, out today, several of us former Fox News Channel staffers were left reeling. Watching John Lithgow’s spot-on performance as Roger Ailes, the Fox chairman and CEO who was ousted amid a sexual harassment investigation, had a PTSD-inducing effect, transporting us back to the years we spent under the control of the all-powerful leader. Even the audience members who had never set foot inside Fox seemed shaken by the scenes of what some women endured in Roger’s office. I know that office. I was summoned there many times. And I can attest to the bizarre, parallel-universe experience of being alone with Roger Ailes.”
“But what the movie mostly brought back for me was that Roger’s sexual harassment was only the beginning of his manipulation and mind games. Roger Ailes always reminded me of a different omnipotent, fear-inducing wizard, one who maintained control over a kingdom of nervous minions through smoke, mirrors, endless corridors, and devastating demands.”
“It’s interesting; from the outside, the people we believe to be omnipotent seem invincible. But having met a few of them up close, I’ve learned that maintaining their masquerade requires a huge suspension of disbelief from those around them. There’s nothing quite like a finale with a big reveal. Roger always appreciated that TV trope—and he got one. It was Gretchen Carlson, then Megyn Kelly, and many other women harnessing their own power who ultimately pulled back the curtain and brought him down. Once the spell is broken and the truth revealed, wizards can fall surprisingly fast. “
As written by Adam Gabbatt in The Guardian, in an article entitled Tucker Carlson leaves a toxic legacy at Fox News. What’s next?; “Tucker Carlson, the far-right TV host whose embrace of racist conspiracy theories came to signify a shift further towards the right at Fox News, leaves behind a legacy of mainstreaming extremism after exiting the channel, and speculation is turning to any next step in an incendiary career.
The departure of Carlson, Fox News’ most-watched and highest-profile host, came as a shock. It is the second seismic moment at the news channel in a matter of days, after Fox News agreed to pay a $787.5m settlement to Dominion Voting Systems last week after airing election conspiracy theories.
Fox News announced the split in a terse statement on Monday, stating that the channel and Carlson had “agreed to part ways”. But the pithiness of the statement barely hinted at the dubious repercussions of Carlson’s seven-year tenure as a regular host: a spell in which he seemed to grow into a force that Fox News wouldn’t, or couldn’t, control.
“Tucker Carlson basically leaves a superhighway to the rightwing fever swamps,” said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, an organization that monitors rightwing media.
“Tucker took things from what otherwise would have been considered the fringes: Infowars [a far-right conspiracy theory website], these white nationalist communities online, he took that content and laundered it into the Fox News ecosystem, and basically built up an appetite for this amongst the Fox News audience.
“And once they sort of got a taste for blood, that’s all they wanted. That’s going to be a challenge for Fox moving forward, but what’s his legacy? His legacy is bloodthirstiness and bigotry.”
Carlson’s eponymous show, which aired at 8pm ET, averaged more than 3 million viewers a night, and was generally the most watched cable news program.
The 53-year-old might have been an unlikely hero to Fox News’ coastal-elite loathing audience. A multimillionaire who was privately educated in California, Switzerland and the Waspy environs of New England, Carlson hosted most of his shows from a specially built studio in Maine, where he spends much of the year (he also has a home in Florida).
Yet night after night, millions tuned in to watch Carlson’s furious, reddening face, under a neatly parted, country club hairstyle, as he fed viewers a daily dose of fury and victimhood and painted a dystopian picture of America.
Among Carlson’s most passionately pursued topics was the idea – contrary to all able evidence – that white people were being persecuted in the US.
Across his tenure at Fox News, Carlson pushed the concept of the great replacement theory – which states that a range of liberals, Democrats and Jewish people are working to replace white voters in western countries with people of color, in an effort to achieve political aims – in more than 400 of his shows, a New York Times analysis found.
“No singular voice in rightwing media has done more to elevate this racist conspiracy theory than Tucker,” Joy Reid, a MSNBC host, said in 2022, and his peddling of the claim brought multiple calls for him to be fired across the years, all of which Fox News ignored.
“Carlson positioned himself as the voice of the Maga base of the party and really leaned into the kinds of conspiracy theories, the white nationalist ideas that he thought would appeal to that base,” said Nicole Hemmer, a political historian at Vanderbilt University and author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.
“He really was able to give a voice to this kind of grievance that Donald Trump was so good at tapping into. It was Tucker Carlson who was out there saying: ‘They’re coming for you, white people.’”
Fox News gave no indication as to the reason for splitting with Carlson, but on Monday the Los Angeles Times reported that Rupert Murdoch, the omnipotent chairman of Fox Corporation – the parent company of Fox News – had forced Carlson out of the news channel in relation to a looming discrimination lawsuit.
Another thing that may not have helped were the embarrassing disclosures of Carlson’s text messages and emails, published as part of the Dominion lawsuit. Those messages revealed that privately Carlson held very different views from those he espoused on air, including about Donald Trump.
“I hate him passionately,” Carlson said of the former president, describing Trump’s behavior in the weeks following the 2020 election as “disgusting”.
In another text, Carlson said of “the last four years” under Trump: “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”
It is difficult to say what comes next for Carlson. Newsmax and One America News Network, two other rightwing cable news channels, could be possible homes, but they have a much smaller audience, and would probably be unable to match Fox News’ salary.
“I don’t think he goes to a competing cable network,” Carusone said.
“He’s too sensitive to ratings and that would be an embarrassment – they could never match the ratings, they could never give him the reach.”
One thing that is likely, however, is that Carlson “attacks Fox”, Carusone said.
“He wasn’t shy about attacking his colleagues and management when he was at a company – he’s certainly not going to be shy about attacking them now,” Carusone said.
The idea of an aggressive response is “tightly tied into his brand”, Carusone said “And he’s also just a venomous, spiteful guy, so the reflex will be to take a shot.”
Carlson’s unexpected departure meant he had no opportunity to say goodbye to his viewers. On Friday, in what turned out to be his last show, he had once more voiced that issue which is so close to his heart: the great replacement theory.
“The defining strategic insight of the modern Democratic party is they don’t really need to convince anyone of anything,” Carlson said in his monologue on Friday’s show.
“What matters is demographics. To import enough people from elsewhere, people who are financially dependent on you in order to live.”
Perhaps Carlson can take some comfort in knowing that his persona on Fox died as he lived: sitting in a TV studio, looking upset, and pushing a racist conspiracy theory to an increasingly rabid rightwing audience.”
As written by Matt Shuham and Christopher Mathias in Huffpost, in an article entitled Tucker Carlson Brought TV Racism Into The 21st Century; “
The sudden departure of cable’s top news host shocked the country. But his legacy won’t disappear so quickly; “Monday brought the news that Tucker Carlson and Fox News “have agreed to part ways,” according to a statement from the network. The surprise announcement that cable news’ top-rated host was unceremoniously and suddenly dumped sent shock waves through media and political circles. The decision was so sudden that Fox News doesn’t have a replacement lined up, and will instead use a cycle of rotating hosts until they determine what’s next for the critical 8 p.m. hour.
Regardless of who takes over, Carlson has already changed the network — and the country. For years, he used his cable news platform not only to broadcast racist conspiracy theories, but to bring televised racism into the 21st century.
Carlson beat a pathway from far-right corners of the internet into millions of Americans’ living rooms, laying the groundwork for Donald Trump and dozens of other high-profile Republicans to seize on racial grievance as an animating issue for voters.
He’d occasionally aired his repellent views before reaching Fox News. During the George W. Bush administration, when he was employed at MSNBC, Carlson vilified Iraqi citizens, claiming during a radio appearance that they “don’t use toilet paper or forks.” Iraq is “filled with a bunch of semiliterate primitive monkeys,” he said in 2008.
But once he took the main chair for Fox’s 8 p.m. hour, Carlson fired with both barrels. He used his prime-time slot to deliver talking points that were manufactured on the internet’s most noxious message boards and websites, normalizing them for a nightly audience of millions. Carlson’s message sounds familiar at this point because of its dominance in politics: America’s liberal elite, he spent years alleging, is destroying the country by subverting white people’s place atop the U.S. political hierarchy.
“Let me just state, unequivocally, the country’s being stolen from American citizens as we watch,” he said in 2021, during a discussion of undocumented immigrants in the United States. The liberal watchdog group Media Matters has kept an ongoing tally of such racist one-liners. It runs to dozens of pages.
To justify his apocalyptic language, Carlson frequently framed political debates as civilizational struggles. The Black Lives Matter movement, which led racial justice protests around the country in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, was actually “a totalitarian political movement, and someone needs to save the country from it.” Where could Americans turn to preserve their free speech rights, which were supposedly in mortal peril? “Only Republicans can save us,” Carlson said.
On the other side of the debate, according to Carlson, was nothing less than widespread violence ― the emasculation of his viewership. People taking a critical view of Christopher Columbus, Carlson argued, were actually telling Americans: “You don’t have the right to defend yourself against our assaults. You don’t have the moral legitimacy to defend your own country.” The jury that found police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of murdering Floyd, Carlson said, was actually pleading with Black Lives Matter protesters: “Please don’t hurt us!” Black Lives Matter itself, he said, is “poison.”
Perhaps Carlson’s most notable contribution to 21st-century racism came from his pioneering work amplifying the so-called “Great Replacement” theory ― the idea that Democrats support greater immigration levels and lax border enforcement because they are trying to replace white American voters with voters of other races, who would supposedly be more likely to vote for Democrats.
The racist conspiracy theory takes as a given that certain immigrants inherently hold certain political beliefs, and that America’s political fate should rightfully be determined by white people.
“I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World,” Carlson said in April 2021. “But … let’s just say it: That’s true.”
America’s most prominent white supremacists were overjoyed at Carlson’s support for their favorite theory. “This week Tucker redpilled 4 million people and there’s nothing liberals can do about it,” Nick Fuentes, the Adolf Hitler-loving leader of the “America First” movement, tweeted at the time. (In modern fascist parlance, being “redpilled” means adopting a white supremacist worldview.)
VDARE, a far-right website that frequently trafficks in similar theories, was also thrilled. “This segment is one of the best things Fox News has ever aired and was filled with ideas and talking points VDARE.com pioneered many years ago,” the website’s account tweeted. “You should watch the whole thing.”
Steve Sailer, a VDARE writer, saw Carlson’s monologue as a significant step in widening the “Overton Window” — a term for the range of acceptable mainstream political discussion — to include white supremacist beliefs. “Tucker’s Overton Window-Smashing Broadside: ‘The Truth About Demographic Change’” was the headline of an article Sailer published on VDARE.
Carlson ultimately promoted the Great Replacement concept in more than 400 episodes of his show, a wide-ranging New York Times analysis found. He has accused Mexico and other Latin American countries of “forcing demographic change” and “packing the electorate” in order to interfere in U.S. elections. The United States, Carlson has maintained for years, is not simply welcoming immigrants into its borders, but rather experiencing an “invasion” of enemies of the state that will lead to the country’s destruction.
Just as the Great Replacement theory got a thorough airing on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” it has also featured prominently in the genocidal screeds of various white mass shooters ― including those written by the Christchurch shooter, who killed 51 Muslims in two mosques in New Zealand, and the El Paso shooter, who killed 22 Hispanic people in a Texas Walmart.
Last year, another white supremacist, who’d written his own screed about the Great Replacement theory, opened fire at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, killing 10 Black people. Afterward, Carlson briefly attempted to distance himself from the concept he’d spent so much time promoting, saying that “we’re still not sure exactly what it is.”
But within a couple of months, an indignant Carlson was back to explicitly promoting the racist theory on air, declaring: “The great replacement? Yeah, it’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s [Democrats’] electoral strategy.”
On Monday, the same day news broke of Carlson’s ouster at Fox News, jury selection began in the trial of another Great Replacement enthusiast ― Robert Bowers, the white supremacist facing dozens of federal charges over the October 2018 killings of 11 Jewish people in a Pittsburgh synagogue.
Bowers allegedly carried out the massacre due to his belief in the conspiracy theory that Jews were helping fund a caravan of Latino migrants coming into the country. Fox News, and Carlson in particular, had spent weeks whipping up fear over the migrant caravan, repeatedly calling it an “invasion.”
“I have noticed a change in people saying ‘illegals’ that now say ’invaders,” Bowers wrote in a social media post shortly before the shooting. “I like this.”
Days earlier, Carlson had referred to the migrants as “invaders” on his program.
Tucker’s White Nationalist Writing Rooms
Carlson was never content just to receive praise from racists. He frequently hired them to write and produce his programs.
In 2020, Blake Neff, Carlson’s most senior writer — who once boasted that “anything [Carlson is] reading off the teleprompter, the first draft was written by me” — was fired after CNN received an anonymous tip that Neff had been posting virulently racist comments online under a pseudonym. “Black doods staying inside playing Call of Duty is probably one of the biggest factors keeping crime down,” Neff once wrote.
In 2021, Carlson tapped Scooter Downey as a writer for his Fox Nation “documentary” about the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Downey’s résumé included directing two films for well-known white nationalists. He directed “Crossfire,” starring Lauren Southern, the white nationalist best known for taking part in a mission to stop boats from saving desperate refugees stranded in the Mediterranean Sea.
Downey also directed a film based on a book written by Theodore Robert Beale, aka Vox Day, a white nationalist who once wrote that “Western civilization” is dependent upon “white tribalism, white separatism, and especially white Christian masculine rule.”
When Downey directed Carlson’s documentary about Jan. 6, “Patriot Purge,” he made two white nationalists into the film’s protagonists. Richard Barnett, a self-described white nationalist who was photographed sitting in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office during the attack on the Capitol, his feet propped up on a desk, was given a sympathetic platform. “I’m absolutely a political prisoner,” he told Carlson.
And conspiracy theorist Darren Beattie — a former speechwriter for Trump who was pushed out of the White House after speaking at a white supremacist event — was given plenty of air time to push baseless allegations that the insurrection was orchestrated by the FBI as a pretext for mass arrests of Trump supporters.
As The New York Times’ analysis of years of his show found, Carlson’s discussions of the “Deep State,” whose bidding was notionally carried out by the FBI and other armed agents and nongovernmental groups, usually came down to two words: “they” and “you.” Carlson shaped his racism as an indictment of America’s power-hungry liberal elite, who, he tried to convince his audience, were hellbent on policing speech and destroying the country.
“Shut up and obey!” Carlson often said, in a send-up of his audience’s supposedly tyrannical cultural and political leaders.
What could his viewers do in response? Aside from supporting Republicans, Carlson offered few answers. He focused instead on constantly reminding his audience of the impending civilizational struggle.
For that seemingly inevitable outcome, though, he did have an answer ― one he invoked after news broke last month of Trump’s indictment on criminal charges.
“Probably not the best time to give up your AR-15,” Carlson said then. “And I think most people know that.”
In the final exhibit we have my post of December 12 2023, Elon Musk, Alex Jones, and the Apologetics of Fascist Power; In the notorious fascist soapbox once known as Twitter, a primary instrument of Traitor Trump’s subversion of democracy in the Stolen Election of 2016, we have hate speech masquerading as free speech, as well as a Fourth Reich propaganda factory spinning endless lies, misdirects, and falsification designed to capture the idea of the truth as a pillar of democracy.
In this it is sadly far from alone, though we must recognize it as an enemy instrument of war and act accordingly in purging it from our nation and from all those who love liberty.
When its owner Elon Musk, in his mad quest to transform America into an image of the Apartheid State of South Africa, admitted the Russian agent, crime lord of a sex trafficking syndicate operating under the guise of a modeling and beauty pageant network and known Epstein associate, and figurehead of the Fourth Reich Donald Trump, I and many other loyal Americans and antifascists quit Twitter.
Recent actions by Musk, in collaboration with Tucker Carlsen, to reinstate the grotesque purveyor of cruelties Alex Jones, who tormented the families of victims of gun violence with unspeakable savagery, calls for more than this in reply.
But first, what has happened?
As written by Miles Klee in Rolling Stone, in an article entitled The Curious Alliance of Alex Jones and Elon Musk: The latest right-wing ideologue to have a ban lifted by X (formerly Twitter) spent months alternately flattering and needling its mercurial owner; “WHEN INFAMOUS CONSPIRACY theorist Alex Jones recorded a video last week saying he hoped Elon Musk would watch an interview he gave to Tucker Carlson, it was clear what he wanted most of all: a comeback.
“Elon Musk says he’s a free-speech absolutist, but still hasn’t let me back on Twitter with my own channel,” Jones said, putting the owner of the site now branded as X in something a bind. Either reinstate the account of a man whose name is practically synonymous with extremist misinformation, or accept the wrath of Jones’ many far-right allies, who bombarded Musk with demands that Jones be allowed on the platform again. It certainly didn’t help that Musk had, a year previously, vowed to maintain Jones’ 2018 permanent ban, saying the InfoWars host’s false claims about the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting being a hoax (which resulted in $1.5 billion in legal judgments against him for the victims’ families) were beyond the pale. (Jones was actually suspended for harassing CNN journalist Oliver Darcy on Capitol Hill in a live Periscope video.)
Musk took the path of least resistance and responsibility, outsourcing the matter to his followers — or, more accurately, to an increasingly far-right X user base almost certain to approve of Jones’ return. Nearly 2 million accounts voted, with more than 70 percent in favor of reinstatement. Musk dutifully complied, just as he had following a similar poll about reinstating Donald Trump last year. (Trump has only tweeted once since, in August, to share the mug shot from his booking at an Atlanta jail on felony charges related to attempts to overturn the 2020 election, instead opting to post on his own platform, Truth Social.)
But the lifting of Trump’s ban more than a year ago amid an early wave of “amnesty” for right-wing misinformation peddlers and extremists — including outright Nazis — came under very different circumstances than the move to unmuzzle Jones. In November 2022, Musk had only just begun his supposed free-speech crusade and wanted to persuade conservatives, who had long blasted Twitter as biased against them, that the site would become politically neutral. Giving Trump a pass, despite the former president’s violations of platform guidelines and attacks on Musk himself, seemed like an effort to simultaneously pander to MAGA world and reap the massive engagement that a singular figure like Trump had historically brought to his once-favorite app.
Meanwhile, the promise to keep Jones in exile made it look as if Musk were carefully considering each executive pardon. But the hard-right element he had started courting was never going to stop with Trump — who never resumed his unhinged tweeting anyway. In articles at the time, Jones’ InfoWars even seized on the reversal of Trump’s suspension to argue that it was hypocritical to deny the radio host’s reinstatement given the Trump decision; Jones himself grumbled a good deal about how Musk could “bring freedom back to the web” and kick off a “human renaissance” — though, of course, not if he continued to stubbornly refuse entreaties to reactivate Jones’ account.
This became the blueprint for a distant relationship between the two, all the way up through the message Jones delivered to Musk ahead of the Carlson interview: Jones continued to flatter Musk as a potential savior of free expression while insinuating that the billionaire was nothing more than a puppet of the globalist cabal if he didn’t hand Jones a powerful megaphone.
That Musk, in Jones’ view, might prove a kind of establishment coward did not appear to be a novel attitude. In a 2018 interview for the YouTube series Valuetainment, as Jones faced the removal of his content from several major tech platforms, he did a round of word association in which the host listed public figures, asking him to relay the first impression that popped into his head. Jones responded “patriot” to a mention of Sen. Ted Cruz, and used an ableist slur to describe LeBron James and Colin Kaepernick. When he heard the name “Elon Musk,” paused a second before answering, “scared man.”
Some of Jones’ ideas clearly clash with Musk’s — he has ranted, for example, that electric vehicles are “the biggest energy guzzlers.” Prior to Musk’s Twitter takeover, an InfoWars contributor went so far as to publish a 2021 video called “Elon Musk Exposed,” calling him a “fraud” and a “fake genius.” While subsequent coverage showed an appreciation for Musk’s increasing hostility toward liberals and leftists in his conservative conspiracism, the outlet nonetheless made room for columns that struck a more skeptical tone (like the May 2022 column “Elon Musk Is Not the Free Speech Superhero We’d Like Him To Be“) and tied him to moral panics. In November 2022, InfoWars questioned the possibly Satanic significance of Musk’s Halloween costume (he seemed to be dressed as a samurai, of sorts), also noting his role at the forefront of “transhumanist technology,” something Jones has condemned as a precursor to “humanity’s destruction.”
That same month, Jones himself took aim at Musk as mass layoffs led to speculation about Twitter’s demise. “He hit the panic button and basically came out and attacked me so that he can get the left off of his back,” Jones complained. “It’s fine to me that he did that, except he went too far and compared himself to Jesus” by using a Bible quote, he said. “If Elon loves to quote Christ so much, in between dressing up like Satan, he should quote Christ’s most famous quote: ‘Let he without sin cast the first stone.’”
The stage was set for the long game: Musk drew praise from Jones and InfoWars whenever he triggered the libs, but also the occasional reminder that he had not proven himself a committed ally to their movement. Over the course of 2023, as Musk’s erratic behavior, dabbling in harmful misinformation, and squabbles with anti-extremism watchdogs led to an advertiser exodus from Twitter, he began to sound more radicalized and in closer alignment with Jones’ brand of blustery defiance, telling departed brands at a conference event in November, “Go fuck yourself.”
In that context, Musk had less to lose by submitting to this latest pressure campaign to bring Jones back. Ad revenue had already cratered, so what’s the downside of platforming a dangerous radical known to call for violence? Following Jones’ return, in an X Spaces chat on Sunday (featuring reactionaries Andrew Tate, Vivek Ramaswamy, Jack Posobiec, Laura Loomer, Rep. Matt Gaetz, and Michael Flynn), Jones and Musk acted as if any past friction between them had all been a misunderstanding. Musk at one point asked Jones to clarify what had happened during “the Sandy Hook thing” (Musk said that “denying the murders of children” is “not cool”), with Jones referring to him in groveling tones as “sir” and falsely claiming that he had just covered the conspiracy theories about the shooting that other people had put forward. Musk evidently took the explanation at face value.
After digging himself into a hole with his constant proclamations of X as a no-holds-barred public square, he may not have had much of a choice. Musk actually admitted that Jones would be “bad for X financially” but stuck to the same rhetoric, piously tweeting that “principles matter more than money.” He can therefore bask in (momentary) adulation from the far right for abandoning his earlier-stated principles. Jones, a man given to railing against “elites,” is subverting his own to heap gratitude upon the richest man alive — this despite the fact that his online footprint remains much smaller than it was before the flurry of bans he received across all his channels in 2018.
Caught in this weird embrace, the duo may have yet stranger days ahead as both strain for influence over online discourse ahead of an election year. And while Musk could theoretically rein Jones in for bad behavior, any discipline would spark enormous backlash from his political cohort — and besides, he has proven susceptible to exactly the kind of outlandish propaganda Jones dishes out. Musk may believe he runs this circus, but when it comes to the command of spectacle, Jones often has the upper hand.”
Who is Elon Musk? Why is he trying to reproduce in America the Apartheid regime of South Africa where his fortune originates?
As I wrote in my post of December 16 2022, Hate Speech is Not Free Speech: the Case of Elon Musk’s Twitter; Mesmerized as by the blinkless predator stare of a cobra or its echo in the Kubrick gaze of Jenna Ortega’s character of Wednesday, we have witnessed the spectacle of violation and degradation of a beloved social media platform by an amoral plutocrat who purchased it to leverage Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, into the White House once more, for the purpose of the subversion of democracy and the Fall of America to a regime of tyranny, and has relentlessly and with feral viciousness promoted white supremacist and antisemitic terrorists and fascist propagandists and marginalized and silenced dissent, impartial investigative journalism, and voices from the center of traditional democracy and its values of liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
Hate speech is not free speech, and merits no quarter. To fascism we must give the only reply it merits; Never Again!
In all of the absurd madness of conspiracy theories, alternate realities, rewritten histories, lies and illusions, propaganda and thought control, and the commodification of humankind by big data and pervasive surveillance, and with the examples of monsters of depravity and paranoid fantasy such as Traitor Trump, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Rupert Murdoch, and Elon Musk, of fascist propaganda mills like Fox News and now sadly Twitter weaponized in service to power and the repression of dissent, let us study closely a great truth which now stands revealed on the stage of history; the Fifth Estate has now replaced the institutions of politics as the shaping force whereby we choose how to be human together.
Its been a long process, the fall of democracy; I’m tempted to say it began with Hearst and his 1898 false story of the bombing of an American ship in Cuba as the pretext for the Spanish-American War and our conquest of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines as we built our empire on the carcass of Imperial Spain’s; but the historical forces involved are ambiguous and complex. And the mighty have always sought to keep the slaves at their work creating the wealth they enjoy through lies as well as force; lies are cheaper than armies.
As the marvelous and prophetic film Wag the Dog tells us, he who tells the story shapes the response. And we must be very careful who we allow to write our history, and who makes the rules by which it is written, for journalism is a sacred calling to pursue the truth, and electoral democracy requires truths free from the influence of power.
As Lenin asked in the essay that began the Russian Revolution; “What is to be done?”
If we do not seize and nationalize Twitter and any media platform of hate crime or fascist propaganda as a public good owned by us all, and purge our media and our society utterly of the speech, we must enact and enforce fair rules of play which ensure no one’s speech harms another, either as individuals or as a class of persons.
To create an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
As I wrote in my post of January 12 2025, Behold Der Erlkonig, The Troll King Elon Musk; Behold Der Erlkonig, the Troll King Elon Musk, apologist of fascist tyranny and terror and plutocrat who recently purchased the American state with the election of Traitor Trump to a second term, possibly the last free election in our history, who now intervenes in Europe to secure Nazi revivalism and the imperial Fourth Reich.
We have seen his kind before, in kingpins of propaganda like Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, William Randolph Hearst, and Goebbels, and in apologists of fascism like Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh, and Julius Streicher.
Such monsters wait their chance to steal our souls, spinning webs of deceits, lies and illusions, alternate realities of delusion and falsification, with siren songs of power and security, belonging and purpose, to subjugate and ensnare us in service to their own power. We wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors, grotesque and distorted images of ourselves as in a labyrinth of funhouse mirrors. And once we surrender ourselves to those who claim to speak and act in our name, it is very hard to reclaim our true image.
There is a simple prescription to free us from falsification and the effects of pervasive propaganda and thought control; Question Authority. Practice the arts of Disbelief and Disobedience, for the great secret of power is that it is hollow and brittle without legitimacy, and crumbles like a palace of illusions when met with Disbelief and Disobedience. Question and test all claims of fact, and demand proof from authorities who wish us to take them at their word, for there is no just authority.
Practice the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Lost in Trump’s Funhouse of Lies: Jacob’s Ladder (1990) – Official Trailer
Trump’s regime: Pan’s Labyrinth trailer
Trump Delivers Gloating, Grievance-Filled Speech Hours After Sending Economy Reeling
Our Supreme Court a year ago today ignored the question of Trump’s treason and insurrection, and instead ruled that states cannot bar him from the ballot in a federal election on the basis of being an insurrectionist. As they well know, this moved him a step closer to the Presidency.
Among the many flaws in our system which must be changed as Trump has demonstrated to us all include our method of choosing a President, in which we must abolish the electoral college and adopt one citizen one vote national elections without regard to state of residency, wherein all citizens are equal in the power of their vote, and term limits for the Supreme Court to the term of the appointing President, which would recognize its political nature. Aberrant and disgusting as Trump is, he has been useful in exposing weaknesses in our democracy.
The time is now past for disqualifying Traitor Trump from office on the basis of his treason and foreign espionage, for his deplorables have elected him once again as our President and the Age of Tyrants may have already begun. His regime of destruction of the American state and the subversion of democracy must be met on its own terms and ground of struggle, in the unknown places beyond all laws and all limits marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value. I have lived in such places, among the dragons of the unknown and the monsters which define the limits of the human, for forty three years now, and it can be done, if when confronted by those who play by no rules but their own we do the same. As my father taught me, never play someone else’s game or by someone else’s rules.
In Syria we proved that the enemy can be defeated, for the bogeyman of Russian invincibility is an illusion, and so is the inevitability of the Fall of America and our global civilization before the onslaught of the Fourth Reich and Russia’s star agent Traitor Trump. The darkness is not an unstoppable wave; we have defeated the Fourth Reich twice before, in the 2020 Biden election and Restoration of America and in the surrender of the Triumvirs Trump, Barr, and Wolf in declaring New York, Seattle, and Portland to be Autonomous Zones under control by the people and not the state; we Antifascists being the only force to have defeated the federal government of the United States in open battle on its own ground since Little Bighorn.
We can take America back exactly the same way, by coordinating electoral and legislative action for the Restoration of America with mass action as in the Black Lives Matter protests which seized over fifty American cities for several months and birthed the Autonomous Zones.
Now we must reimagine, transform, and bring meaningful change to our institutions, systems, and structures, and to the praxis of our values and ideals in a rapidly changing threat environment, to envision ourselves anew as a free society of equals and work together in solidarity to make it real.
As I wrote in my post of January 9 2022, How Shall We Answer Treason?; Disloyalty and the betrayal of trust are among the worst and most terrible of true crimes, for they signify and represent the failure and collapse of all other values and meaning. This is why Solidarity as Fraternity is among the three principles on which the Revolution is built, along with Liberty and Equality, for without them there can be no free society of equals.
A brilliant Meidas Touch video which indicts Trump as a domestic terrorist for the January 6 Insurrection provoked me to question, How shall we answer treason? So wrote the following in reply:
Actually, I would like to see Trump achieve his true nature by being fed to dogs and transformed into dog shit. Wouldn’t it be a lovely display in a glass case exhibited in a museum of holocausts, atrocities, and crimes against humanity? Let his monument read thus:
Here lies Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, in his true form, most terrible enemy democracy has faced since Alcibiades betrayed Athens, most dangerous foreign agent to ever attack America even including Pearl Harbor and the Twin Towers, who subverted our ideals and sabotaged our institutions, and nearly enacted the fall of civilization as the figurehead of the Fourth Reich and herald of an age of fascist tyranny and state terror.
Yet here he lies, nothing but a pile of dog shit. Look upon the rewards of tyranny, you who are mighty, and despair.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
We can but wish. Beyond such fantasies, exclusion is a just balance for crimes of treason, disloyalty, and betrayal, in the forms of loss of citizenship, the most terrible punishment any nation can inflict, seizure of assets, and exile and erasure.
To be clear, all participants in the January 6 Insurrection, and all who conspired in this crime, had knowledge aforehand but did not sound an alarm, or acted subsequently to conceal, abet, or deny and excuse its perpetrators and its nature including all legislators who voted not to investigate it, bear responsibility in its crimes and should be repaid with loss of citizenship, seizures of assets, exile, and erasure.
Exile as the natural consequence of treason was explored in the short story “The Man Without a Country” by Edward Everett Hale, first published in The Atlantic in December 1863. It is a story of a traitor who comes to understand the true meaning of his crime; the renunciation of his social contract, connection and interdependence with other human beings, and membership in a national identity.
As described in Wikipedia; “It is the story of American Army lieutenant Philip Nolan, who renounces his country during a trial for treason, and is consequently sentenced to spend the rest of his days at sea without so much as a word of news about the United States.
The protagonist is a young US Army lieutenant, Philip Nolan, who develops a friendship with the visiting Aaron Burr. When Burr is tried for treason (that historically occurred in 1807), Nolan is tried as an accomplice. During his testimony, he bitterly renounces his nation and, with a foul oath, angrily shouts, “I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” The judge is completely shocked at that announcement and, on convicting him, icily grants him his wish. Nolan is to spend the rest of his life aboard US Navy warships in exile with no right ever to set foot on US soil again and with explicit orders that no one shall ever again mention his country to him.
The sentence is carried out to the letter. For the rest of his life, Nolan is transported from ship to ship, lives out his life as a prisoner on the high seas, and is never allowed back in a home port.”
So for Exile; now also for Erasure. As I wrote in my post of January 7 2021, Treason and Terror: Trump’s Brownshirts Attack Congress; This leaves the ringleader and chief conspirator of treason, sedition, insurrection, and terror to be removed from power and denied a platform from which to spread madness and violence like a plague; our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump. I believe we must remove, impeach, deplatform, and prosecute him for his many crimes against America; Trump must be exiled from public life and isolated from his power to destroy us.
Roman law called this damnatio memoriae, the erasure of public forgetting, and coupled with the Amish practice of shunning provides a useful model of minimum use of social force in safeguarding ourselves from threats, without the brutality of torture and prison to which we have become addicted. A fascinating article by the classical scholar Alexander Meddings examines its use in the cases of Trump’s nearest Imperial parallels, Caligula and Nero.
Exile and Erasure; neither prison nor violence or the use of force and fear. Let us simply cast out those who would destroy us from among us, and forget them.
As I wrote in my post of December 28 2023, Can States Ban Trump From Our Next Election For the Crime of Insurrection Under the 14th Amendment?; As the wall of his immunity begins to crumble and states ban Trump from the ballot in the next elections, and the issue of whether or not states can do so is escalated to the Supreme Court that he rigged for just such a moment, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, struts in the lights of the circus he has made of our nation, howling with rage and cheerleading his adoring sycophants in barbarisms and fascist litanies of atrocities to come.
Our election year in 2024 will be like nothing in our history, a ground of struggle not only of fascist tyranny and democracy, but of hate and love, hope and despair, solidarity and division, madness and vision, the psychopathy of power and the mutualism of a free society of equals.
I hope what Shakespeare wrote in Henry the Fifth is still true; “When cruelty and lenity play for a kingdom, the gentler hand is the surest winner.”
As written by Cameron Joseph and agencies in The Guardian, in an article entitled Why did Maine and Colorado disqualify Trump from their ballots?
Decisions stem from the US constitution’s insurrection clause and could have major ramifications for 2024 election; “Officials in Colorado and Maine have ruled that Donald Trump is ineligible to run for the White House again, citing his role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
In Colorado, the state supreme court ruled 4-3 earlier this month to take the former president off the state’s Republican presidential primary ballot; on Thursday, Maine’s secretary of state kicked him off the ballot there too.
The decisions will probably have major legal and political ramifications for the 2024 election, and stem from a rarely used provision of the US constitution known as the insurrection clause.
Trump’s campaign promised to immediately appeal the decisions to the US supreme court, which could well strike them down. Similar lawsuits are working their way through the courts in other states.
Here’s what we know so far, and what it might mean for the former president and current Republican frontrunner.
What is the insurrection clause and why was it used?
The decision by the Colorado supreme court is the first time a candidate has been deemed ineligible for the White House under the US constitutional provision.
Section 3 of the 14th amendment, also referred to as the insurrection clause, bars anyone from Congress, the military, and federal and state offices who once took an oath to uphold the constitution but then “engaged” in “insurrection or rebellion” against it.
Could Trump be barred under the constitution’s ‘engaged in insurrection’ clause?
Ratified in 1868, the 14th amendment helped ensure civil rights for formerly enslaved people, but also was intended to prevent former Confederate officials from regaining power as members of Congress and taking over the government they had just rebelled against.
Some legal scholars say the post-civil war clause applies to Trump because of his role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election and obstruct the transfer of power to Joe Biden by encouraging his supporters to storm the US Capitol.
“The dangers of Trump ever being allowed back into public office are exactly those foreseen by the framers of section 3,” Ron Fein, the legal director for Free Speech for People, said in a recent interview. “Which is that they knew that if an oath-taking insurrectionist were allowed back into power, they would do the same if not worse.”
How did this happen?
In Colorado, the case was brought by a group of voters, aided by the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), who argued Trump should be disqualified from the ballot for his role in the 6 January 2021 riot at the US Capitol.
Noah Bookbinder, the group’s president, celebrated the decision as “not only historic and justified, but … necessary to protect the future of democracy in our country”.
Colorado’s highest court overturned an earlier ruling from a district court judge, who found that Trump’s actions on January 6 did amount to inciting an insurrection, but that he could not be barred from the ballot, because it was unclear that the clause was intended to cover the role of the presidency.
A majority of the state supreme court’s seven justices, all of whom were appointed by Democratic governors, disagreed.
In Maine, the secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, examined the case after a group of citizens challenged Trump’s eligibility and concluded that he should be disqualified for inciting an insurrection on 6 January 2021.
Has this happened before?
The provision has rarely been used, and never in such a high-profile case. In 1919, Congress refused to seat a socialist, contending he gave aid and comfort to the country’s enemies during the first world war.
Last year, in the clause’s first use since then, a New Mexico judge barred a rural county commissioner who had entered the Capitol on January 6 from office.
What does this mean for the election?
The Colorado ruling applies only to the state’s Republican primary, which will take place on 5 March, meaning Trump might not appear on the ballot for that vote. The same is true in Maine – if the decision takes effect, it would only apply to the state’s ballot.
The Colorado supreme court temporarily stayed its ruling until 4 January, however, which would allow the US supreme court until then to decide whether to take the case. That’s the day before the qualifying deadline for candidates.
Colorado is no longer a swing state – Biden won it by a double-digit margin in 2020, and the last time a Republican won it was 2004 – but the ruling could influence other cases across the US, where dozens of similar cases are percolating. Other state courts have ruled against the plaintiffs; in Michigan, a judge ruled that Congress, not the courts, should make the call.
Advocates hoped the case would boost a wider disqualification effort and potentially put the issue before the US supreme court. It’s unclear whether the court might rule on narrow procedural and technical grounds, or answer the underlying constitutional question of whether Trump can be banished from the ballot under the 14th amendment.
The case could have significant political fallout as well. Trump allies will paint it as an anti-democratic effort to thwart the will of the American people, lumping it in with the numerous legal cases he faces in state and federal court.
“Democrats are so afraid that President Trump will win on Nov 5th 2024 that they are illegally attempting to take him off the ballot,” the Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a close Trump ally, posted on social media.
Trump didn’t mention the decision during an evening rally on 19 December in Iowa but his campaign sent out a fundraising email calling it a “tyrannical ruling”, with the statement going on to say:
“Democrat Party leaders are in a state of paranoia over the growing, dominant lead President Trump has amassed in the polls. They have lost faith in the failed Biden presidency and are now doing everything they can to stop the American voters from throwing them out of office next November.”
Trump’s attorneys, meanwhile, have argued that the 14th amendment’s language does not apply to the presidency. A lawyer for Trump has also argued that the January 6 riot at the Capitol was not serious enough to qualify for insurrection, and that any remarks that Trump made to his supporters that day in Washington were protected under free speech.”
How if we fail to consequent treason and insurrection, and thereby make a rule that all things are permitted in service to theocratic patriarchy and white supremacist terror?
As written in The Guardian editorial, in an article entitled The Guardian view on a second Trump presidency: things could only get worse; Over the holidays, this column will explore next year’s urgent issues. Today we look at the danger posed by the former president’s bid for reelection; “The great spectre haunting 2024 is the threat of Donald Trump triumphing in November’s election. A second stint in the Oval Office would have grim repercussions for the US and the world. He dominates the Republican race for the presidential candidacy, while recent polls showed him beating Joe Biden in five of the six key battleground states, and besting the president on issues including the economy and national security. The Biden administration has overseen a striking economic recovery in tough global conditions, but voters don’t feel the improvement. The president’s handling of the war in Gaza is alienating core supporters. He inspires little enthusiasm.
Democrats point out that there’s a long way to go and that November’s off-year election results point to a brighter picture. Mr Trump faces a dizzying array of legal cases, though the most significant may not move to a trial before the election. While they boost the belief of diehard admirers that he is being persecuted, some supporters say he should not stand if convicted. It’s not impossible that he might run from a prison cell.
Mr Trump is already teeing voters up to declare a Biden victory fraudulent again. Election officials have been bombarded with death threats. Convictions for the January 6 storming of the Capitol were welcome and necessary, but his supporters remain armed and dangerous.
What would Mr Trump’s return to the White House mean for America and the world? Nothing good. For all the volatility of his presidency, he delivered on key pledges for his followers: his supreme court appointments led to the overturning of Roe v Wade. Authoritarians don’t improve with power: quite the opposite. Mr Trump’s first term began with “alternative facts” about his inauguration and ended with the big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. His recent statements make 2016’s inflammatory rhetoric look almost mealy-mouthed. He declared that he would be a dictator, though only on “day one”, because “I want a wall and I want to drill, drill, drill”. His language is not merely racist but echoes the invective of Nazi Germany: immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”, while “communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs” are “vermin”.
Sycophantic state
What is truly alarming this time is not merely that he has declared his intentions loud and clear, it is that his backers have drawn up action plans to implement his talking points, and that he faces fewer political, institutional or legal constraints. “You cannot count on those institutions to restrain him,” said former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who fears that her country is “sleepwalking into dictatorship”. Ms Cheney is a rare exception to the rule that Republican politicians have ultimately fallen into line even when they briefly balked at his extremes. A re-elected President Trump would benefit from a more compliant Congress (though there’s speculation that Democrats might win back the House while the GOP takes the Senate). And having set out his stall, he could claim a mandate from the people.
He would not appoint those who might thwart his will this time. “The lesson he learned was to hire sycophants,” his former chief of staff John Kelly observed. He boasts that he would “dismantle the deep state”, clearing out career employees and replacing them with appointees he could fire at will. Intimidation – siccing his base on those who impede him – would always be an option. He has suggested that Gen Mark Milley, the outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, deserved to be put to death.
Legal challenges to his policies would face a harder path – the supreme court now has a conservative supermajority, with three Trump appointees, and he similarly stacked lower levels of the judiciary. He is preparing plans to turn the power of the state against opponents and critics, and boasting of “retribution” for those who hindered his attempt to steal the last election. He has warned that he would urge his attorney general to indict any political rival even without known grounds, saying: “I don’t know. Indict him on income tax evasion.” His associates have reportedly begun drafting plans to deploy the military against civil demonstrations – as he wanted to do against Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. One would hope that military leaders would oppose this. But it would be complacent to assume that.
Politics of hate
On the international front, the battle against global heating would be struck a catastrophic blow. A second Trump presidency would clearly be good for Vladimir Putin and bad for Ukraine and Nato, which the US could well leave. Mr Trump’s transactional approach to foreign policy puts himself first, and has only the most narrow and short-term conception of US interests. Allies such as South Korea are already contemplating their own nuclear deterrents. He would seek to hammer China on trade again, and Republicans would encourage him to go further on other fronts, but his admiration for autocrats might allow him to come to terms with Xi Jinping on some issues – notably, Taiwan’s future. Overall, his ignorance, arrogance and erratic nature could be as damaging as his pursuit of specific goals.
The far right around the world would be emboldened by his victory. Mr Trump is in large part a symptom of our times, but he has encouraged and enabled others in his mould at home and abroad. The social fabric has been damaged by a style of politics in which hatred is the organising principle. Anti-Asian hate crime surged following his racist rhetoric about the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu”. A defeat for Mr Trump would not in itself be sufficient to defeat Trumpism. But it is necessary.
The Democrats cannot campaign only on the threat that Mr Trump poses. They must speak to broader concerns too. But focusing on the likely consequences of his re-election is critical to ensuring that voters understand the choice they are making – including by not voting, or by backing a candidate other than Mr Biden. Think of the way that the voter backlash against the destruction of abortion rights was essential for Democrats in the 2022 midterms and has been evident in ballot measures more recently, with voters opting to preserve or expand access.
Of course, Mr Trump might not be able to fully implement his nightmarish boasts in office. But he would do more than enough. Drive off a cliff and you might live to tell the tale. But you can’t count on survival – and you can be certain of damage. The US, and the world, cannot afford a second term for Mr Trump.”
As written by David Smith in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘Sitting on a powder keg’: US braces for a year, and an election, like no other; “The 60th US presidential election, which will unfold in 2024, will be quite unlike any that has gone before as the US, and the rest of the world, braces for a contest amid fears of eroding democracy and the looming threat of authoritarianism.
It will be a fight marked by numerous unwanted firsts as the oldest president in the country’s history is likely to face the first former US president to stand trial on criminal charges. A once aspirational nation will continue its plunge into anxiety and divisions about crime, immigration, race, foreign wars and the cost of living.
Democrat Joe Biden, 81, is preparing for the kind of gruelling campaign he was able to avoid during coronavirus lockdowns in 2020. Republican Donald Trump will spend some of his campaign in a courtroom and has vowed authoritarian-style retribution if he wins. For voters it is a time of stark choices, unique spectacles and simmering danger.
“It feels to me as if America is sitting on a powder keg and the fuse has been lit,” said Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “The protective shield that all democracies and social orders rely on – legitimacy of the governing body, some level of elite responsibility, the willingness of citizens to view their neighbors in a civic way – is in an advanced stage of decline or collapse.
“It’s quite possible that the powder keg that America’s sitting on will explode over the course of 2024.”
US politics entered a new, turbulent era with Trump’s shocking victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. The businessman and reality TV star, tapping into populist rage against the establishment, was the first president with no prior political or military experience. His chaotic four-year presidency was scarred by the Covid-19 pandemic and ended with a bitter defeat by Biden in a 2020 election that was itself billed as an unprecedented stress test of democracy.
Trump never accepted the result and his attempts to overturn it culminated in a deadly riot at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, and his second impeachment. He has spent three years plotting revenge and describes the 5 November election as “the final battle”. But he is running for president under the shadow of 91 criminal charges in four jurisdictions, knowing that regaining the White House might be his best hope of avoiding prison – a calculus that could make him and his supporters more desperate and volatile than ever.
Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, said: “This is the most astounding election I have ever seen.
“We have never had an election where a likely major party nominee is indicted for major felony charges of the most serious nature; this is not shoplifting. He’s being charged with an attempt to destroy our democracy and subverting our national security. Both in terms of Trump’s personal morality and his incredibly serious crimes, we have never seen anything remotely like this.”
First Trump must win the Republican primary against Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, putting the electoral and legal calendars on a collision course. On 16 January, a day after the Iowa caucuses kick off the Republican nomination process, Trump faces a defamation trial brought by the writer E Jean Carroll, who has already won a $5m judgment against him after a jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation.
On 4 March, Trump is due in court in Washington in a federal case accusing him of plotting to overturn the 2020 election result. The following day is Super Tuesday, when more than 15 states are scheduled to hold Republican primaries, the biggest delegate haul of the campaign.
On 25 March, Trump also faces state charges in New York over hush-money payments to an adult film star, although the judge has acknowledged he may postpone that because of the federal trial. On 5 August, prosecutors have asked to start an election fraud trial in Georgia, less than three weeks after Trump is likely to have been nominated by the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Trump is hard at work to flip his legal troubles to his political advantage, contending that he is a victim of a Democratic deep state conspiracy. He frequently tells his supporters: “In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you – and I’m just standing in their way.” His Georgia mugshot has been slapped on T-shirts and other merchandise like a lucrative badge of honor.
It seems to be working, at least according to a series of opinion polls that show Trump leading Biden in a hypothetical matchup. A survey in early December for the Wall Street Journal newspaper showed Trump ahead by four points, 47% to 43%. When five potential third-party and independent candidates were included, Trump’s lead over Biden expanded to six points, 37% to 31%.
To Democrats, such figures are bewildering. Biden’s defenders point to his record, including the creation of 14m jobs, strong GDP growth and four major legislative victories on coronavirus relief, infrastructure, domestic production of computer chips and the biggest climate action in history. He has also led the western alliance against Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Lichtman added: “He gets credit for nothing. It’s just amazing: I’ve never seen a president do so much and get so little mileage on it. He has more domestic accomplishments than any American president since the 1960s. He’s presided over an amazing economic recovery, a far better economy than was under Donald Trump even before the pandemic in terms of jobs, wages, GDP. Inflation has gone down by two-thirds.
“It was Biden who single-handedly put together the coalition of the west that stopped [Vladimir] Putin from quickly overtaking Ukraine. He seems to get no credit for any of this whatsoever and that’s partly his own fault and the fault of the Democratic party. The Democratic party has been horrible for some time now – at least 15 years. Republicans are so much better at messaging.”
The president’s approval rating has been stubbornly low since around the time of the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. He is grappling with record numbers of migrants entering the country – an issue that increasingly aggravates states beyond the US-Mexico border. His refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza is costing him some support among progressives and young people.
The latest Democratic messaging salvo – “Bidenomics” – appears to have been a flop at a moment when many voters blame him for rising prices and a cost-of-living crisis. For all the barrage of positive economic data, Americans are lacking the feelgood factor.
Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, said: “People feel that Biden overpromised and underdelivered and ultimately what it came down to was he didn’t make me feel good while he did it and he didn’t make it look easy.”
Biden still holds a potential ace in the hole. Democrats plan to make abortion central to the 2024 campaign, with opinion polls showing most Americans do not favor strict limits on reproductive rights. The party is hoping threats to those rights will encourage millions of women and independents to vote their way next year. It is also seeking to put measures enshrining access to abortion in state constitutions on as many ballots as possible.
The issue has flummoxed Republicans, with some concerned the party has gone too far with state-level restrictions since the supreme court overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling last year, ending constitutional protection for abortion. Trump has taken notice and is conspicuously trying to be vague on the issue.
The Wall Street Journal poll found Biden leading Trump on abortion and democracy by double digits. But it gave Trump a double-digit lead on the economy, inflation, crime, border security, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and physical and mental fitness for office. Biden still has time to reshape perceptions but even close allies concede that he is not an inspirational speechmaker like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. How can he turn it around?
Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “My advice would be to be aggressive, go on offence and set the narrative. They must make the contrast between a Biden America and a Trump America and ask people which America do they want to live in.
“A year out, most people are not paying attention so the polls are meaningless in that they are not predictive of what will happen in a year. Where they do have value is what the trend line shows, which is that the American people are not getting the messaging clearly enough now, so it’s time to get up off their asses and activate the campaign at level 10 right now.”
Setmayer, a senior adviser to the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, added: “What Donald Trump is telegraphing, what he plans to do to this country, I don’t fully think most Americans understand.
“Use the power of incumbency, of the bully pulpit, of their record. Biden is surrounded by people who are experienced campaign veterans and so is he. Use it.”
Should Trump prevail, numerous critics have warned that his return would hollow out American democracy and presage a drift towards Hungarian-style authoritarianism. In a recent interview on Fox News, Trump was asked: “You are promising America tonight, you would never abuse this power as retribution against anybody?” He did not give an outright denial but replied airily: “Except for day one.”
Should Biden serve a second term, he will be 86 when he leaves office. Dean Phillips, 54, a congressman from Minnesota, mounting a Democratic primary challenge, is calling for a new generation of leadership. Some Democrats privately wish that Biden had declared mission accomplished after the 2022 midterm elections and stepped down to make way for younger contenders such as Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer. It now appears too late.
Frank Luntz, a prominent consultant and pollster, said: “Democrats should be apoplectic. Donald Trump has been indicted in felony after felony. The economy is relatively OK and yet Biden is sinking every week and it’s because of something that no soundbite and no messaging can fix: his age. If I were a Democratic strategist, I would have been arrested in front of the White House for begging him to accept four years and move on. You can’t fix age.”
Biden’s potential for gaffes was limited during the pandemic election; this time he will be expected to travel far and wide, his every misstep amplified by rightwing media. The social media platform X, formerly Twitter, is now owned by Elon Musk and populated by extremists such as Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones. This has also been dubbed the first “AI election”, with deepfakes threatening to accelerate the spread of disinformation – a tempting target for foreign interference.
It is unfolding in a febrile atmosphere of conspiracy theories, polarisation, gun violence and surging antisemitism and Islamophobia. Political opponents are increasingly framed as mortal enemies. Violence erupted on January 6 and again last year when a man broke into the home of the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and attacked her husband with a hammer.
Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “If you have something like the last couple of elections where it’s razor thin, and people who don’t understand the American electoral process see malfeasance and misfeasance where there is none, we have a very non-trivial chance of violence.
“I wouldn’t even presume that we wouldn’t have an outbreak of sporadic violence before that. The fact is when people see each other as the enemy, and talk about each other as the enemy, people who are mentally unbalanced and have access to firearms will do mentally unbalanced things.”
Luntz does not foresee violence.
But nor is he optimistic about the future of a nation torn between hope and fear. “What I do expect is a fraying no longer at the edges but at the heart of American democracy,” he said. “I’m afraid that we are reaching the point of no return. In my conversations with senators and congressmen every day I’m on the Hill – it doesn’t matter which party – we all agree that it’s not coming, it’s here, and no one knows what to do about it.”
As written by Rachel Leingang in The Guardian, in an article entitled US supreme court ruling on Trump ballot ban: five key takeaways: Donald Trump can remain on the presidential ballot but the question of whether he was guilty of insurrection unresolved; “The US supreme court ruled on Monday that former president Donald Trump cannot be kept off the ballot in Colorado, foreclosing a series of legal challenges the Republican frontrunner faced in multiple states as he seeks a return to the White House.
The 14th amendment’s third clause, enacted after the US civil war, seeks to prevent people who were elected officials who engaged in insurrection from then holding office again. It has been rarely used since, but was resurrected by advocacy groups and voters who claim it applies to Trump because of his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.
The court’s nine justices agreed that a state can’t remove a federal candidate from its ballot. Though the decision was unanimous, briefs filed separately indicate tension among the justices about how far the majority opinion went.
Because the case involved an obscure part of the constitution, the court had to parse questions of how the clause works and to whom it applies. And, perhaps most critically, the court’s decision held tremendous capacity for disruption during an election year with a leading candidate known to rile up his followers.
Here are some key takeaways from the decision and the broader context at play.
State v federal rights at heart of issue
The core of the decision rests simply on the interplay between state and federal rights.
Though states administer federal elections, the court decided states have no authority to remove a candidate from the running under Section 3. Instead, the majority opinion noted, the 14th amendment “expanded federal power at the expense of state autonomy”. Allowing states to do as Colorado did would “invert the Fourteenth Amendment’s rebalancing of federal and state power”.
The language of the clause doesn’t include any direction on how a state could enforce it, the majority said. Only Congress is mentioned as an enforcer, they argue.
States could, and did, use the section to disqualify state candidates from holding office if they violate the insurrectionist clause, the majority wrote.
This federalism argument was clearly agreed to by all nine justices – though the majority opinion goes on further to suggest how Congress might act to enforce the clause in the future.
Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson all wrote, in two separate opinions, that the majority opinion went too far.
The decision that states lack the authority here “provides a secure and sufficient basis to resolve this case”, the liberal justices (Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson) wrote. “The Court should have started and ended its opinion with this conclusion.”
Tension among the justices on how far the ruling goes
The justices’ unanimity in the belief that the Colorado court couldn’t remove Trump was fractured by two addendums that strike at the extension of the case beyond its scope.
The court’s majority – conservative justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch – specified how the insurrectionist clause would need to be enforced. It would require an act of Congress to determine who would be ineligible to hold office because of insurrection, they wrote, relying on another section of the 14th amendment to make the case.
The liberal justices, in one separate opinion, and the conservative Barrett, in her own, said the majority went too far by prescribing what kind of process would be needed.
The case did not require the justices to “address the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which Section 3 can be enforced”, Barrett wrote. Because of the sensitivity of the issue and its context, the justices should have left it with the federalism justification alone. “In my judgment, this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency,” she wrote.
The liberal justices took this disagreement further, saying the majority opinion moved into constitutional questions it didn’t need to as a way to “insulate this court and petitioner from future controversy”.
The case did not involve federal action; it was a state court in Colorado that decided Trump could not be on the ballot there. The majority did not need to move into contested federal issues, the liberals said. “These musings are as inadequately supported as they are gratuitous.”
No decision on whether Trump engaged in insurrection
What’s left entirely unsaid in the court’s opinions issued on Monday: whether Trump engaged in insurrection.
A finding that Trump had himself engaged in insurrection would have been required for keeping the former president off the ballot. The clause says that a person could be disqualified from holding office again if they had “engaged in insurrection or rebellion”.
Trump and his team fought against this claim, saying his actions after the 2020 election did not constitute an insurrection. Instead, he argued, 6 January was more akin to a “riot” and his comments to his followers, which some have contended amounted to incitement, were protected by the first amendment. In Colorado, the state supreme court had concluded that he incited his followers to engage in insurrection, which met the definition for engaging in insurrection.
The legal cases against Trump over his election subversion will continue unabated by any opining by the high court about whether he is an insurrectionist.
The potential for mayhem/violence was high because of this case
The 2024 election was already marked by tension because of the presence of Trump; his ability to direct his followers is unparalleled in American politics.
The cases against Trump in several states – for election subversion, hush-money claims, keeping classified documents and business fraud – have not injured his standing with his followers, but instead seemingly solidified or even amplified their support.
The 14th amendment cases entered into this fraught dynamic, throwing yet another legal bomb, albeit an obscure one, that gave Trump’s followers further belief that there is a conspiracy against Trump’s ability to run for re-election.
On the campaign trail, Trump has used these legal liabilities to his benefit, claiming they are evidence of election interference and a sign that President Joe Biden, not he, is a threat to democracy.
A survey focused on political violence conducted by the University of Chicago’s Chicago Project on Security & Threats in January showed that the court’s decision on the 14th amendment held the potential for further support of political violence, regardless of how the court decided, because of the extreme partisan divide on the issue.
Trump called the decision “very well-crafted” and said he thought it would bring the country together. Most states were “thrilled” to have Trump on the ballot, he said, but others didn’t want him on there for “political reasons” and because of “poll numbers”.
The court clearly considered the political implications
While courts often claim to avoid wading in on political questions, politics clearly played into how the court decided on this case. The implications of how removing Trump could play out electorally are contemplated throughout the opinions.
The potential that a candidate could be ineligible in some states, leading to a “patchwork” effect, would disrupt voters, the majority wrote in their opinion.
“An evolving electoral map could dramatically change the behavior of voters, parties, and States across the country, in different ways and at different times,” the majority wrote. “The disruption would be all the more acute – and could nullify the votes of millions and change the election result – if Section 3 enforcement were attempted after the Nation has voted. Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos – arriving at any time or different times, up to and perhaps beyond the Inauguration.”
It wasn’t just politics with the election itself or the public at large that came into view; the political dynamics between the justices showed through as well.
The liberal justices jabbed at the majority opinion for its extension of the case into how Congress would need to act, claiming that was an attempt to “insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office”.
Barrett, in her separate opinion, tried to strike a conciliatory note. She called attention to the fact that the court unanimously decided on a “politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election”. The court’s goal, she said, should be to turn down the national temperature instead of inflame it.
“For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case,” she wrote. “That is the message Americans should take home.”
As written by Rachel Leingang in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s supreme court case hinged on the 14th amendment – what it actually means: The supreme court determined if section 3 of the 14th amendment – which bars insurrectionists from holding office – applied to Trump; “ A former US president could have been kicked off the ballot in his quest to return to the White House because of a rarely used provision in an amendment created in the aftermath of the civil war.
A lawsuit out of Colorado that sought to oust Donald Trump in his re-election bid went before the US supreme court, which decided Trump could not be removed from seeking office there over the 14th amendment’s third clause.
The clause was intended to ensure that people who participated in the civil war and other acts against the US weren’t allowed to keep or resume holding positions of power in government. In essence, it says that people could not again hold office if they had participated in insurrection or rebellion against the country while they were in office.
Trump’s team argued the clause doesn’t apply to him for a handful of reasons, based on both esoteric readings of the clause itself and on larger questions like what constitutes an insurrection.
The justices sided with Trump, saying states could not try to keep a federal candidate off the ballot because it was beyond their power. The case involved several issues of legal reasoning the justices had to weigh.
Here are the clause’s big questions.
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State …”
The first part of the clause essentially says that a person can’t hold office again if they were an officer of the US when they participated in an insurrection. It specifies that it applies broadly – to the presidency, Congress and “any office … under the United States”.
Trump’s team argued, though, that this means he couldn’t hold office again, not that he can’t run for office again, so he can’t be disqualified from appearing on the ballot. The legal question would then be raised anew if he won and therefore “held office” again. The case is therefore premature, they said.
In Colorado, the court concluded that because Trump is disqualified from holding the office of president, it would be a “wrongful act” for the secretary of state there to list him as a candidate in the presidential primary.
“… who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States …”
Trump’s arguments related to this part of the clause involve twists of plain language to conclude the president is not an “officer of the United States” and therefore the clause doesn’t apply because anything Trump did happened when he was president.
His attorneys argued that because the presidency isn’t explicitly listed in the clause, it wasn’t intended to include the presidency. They’ve also said that the presidency is not “under” the United States because it is the government, and because the president is an officer of the constitution, not of the United States.
These arguments go hand in hand with the earlier provision in the clause, about whether someone could hold office. Trump’s team argued that because the presidency isn’t specifically mentioned, like “member of Congress” is, it doesn’t apply to him.
The Colorado supreme court essentially said the plain language of the amendment and how the presidency is viewed overall show that the presidency is an office of the US, and the president would be considered an “officer” of the US.
“President Trump asks us to hold that Section Three disqualifies every oath-breaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath-breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land,” Colorado’s ruling says.
“… shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
The insurrection part of the clause involves perhaps the more political questions of the case: whether the associated events of 6 January 2021 to overturn Trump’s loss would constitute an “insurrection” and, if so, if Trump himself “engaged” in it.
In Colorado, the case went before a jury for a trial, with evidence submitted that backed up the claims both that the events of 6 January 2021 were an insurrection and that Trump engaged in it. Among the evidence were many months of claims made by Trump that the election was stolen and specific callouts to his supporters to protest the results.
Using definitions of what was considered an insurrection when the clause was written, the Colorado court said basically that it would entail a public use or threat of force by a group of people to hinder some execution of the constitution – in this case, the awarding of electors and the peaceful transfer of power. By that definition, the events of 6 January constituted an insurrection.
Trump’s team argued both that the events of 6 January were not an insurrection and that the former president didn’t engage in it anyway. His attorneys instead described the events as a “riot” and said the president’s speech was protected by the first amendment. They also pointed to comments he made telling the mob to go home eventually on 6 January, in which he said they should “go peacefully and patriotically”.
Colorado’s justices concluded that free speech rights don’t allow for incitement and that his intent was to call for his supporters to fight his loss, which they responded to.
“President Trump’s direct and express efforts, over several months, exhorting his supporters to march to the Capitol to prevent what he falsely characterized as an alleged fraud on the people of this country were indisputably overt and voluntary,” the ruling said. “Moreover, the evidence amply showed that President Trump undertook all these actions to aid and further a common unlawful purpose that he himself conceived and set in motion: prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election and stop the peaceful transfer of power.”
But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Finally, there’s the matter of what role states play in assessing eligibility for federal offices and whether a state can decide not to put a candidate on the ballot because they haven’t met federal constitutional requirements for running, which include factors like age and citizenship as well as the broader insurrection question.
Even for federal elections, states manage the electoral process of who can vote, how they vote and how results are counted.
Trump argued that eligibility in this case is a political question that Congress should decide, not one for state courts – and not one for courts in general, which tend to stay away from purely political questions.
His team tried to make the case that Congress would need to put the process in motion to keep him off the ballot, saying that the clause is not “self-executing”, or something that goes into effect upon its creation.
The clause itself doesn’t say anything about whether Congress would initiate such a proceeding. Instead, it says Congress could remove a finding that kept an insurrectionist off the ballot with a two-thirds vote, thus allowing that person to hold office again.
The Colorado court rejected the idea that the clause needs congressional action to be implemented, relying on other Reconstruction-era amendments that went into effect without congressional action. If those other amendments needed Congress to go into effect, it “would lead to absurd results”.
“The result of such inaction would mean that slavery remains legal; Black citizens would be counted as less than full citizens for reapportionment; nonwhite male voters could be disenfranchised; and any individual who engaged in insurrection against the government would nonetheless be able to serve in the government, regardless of whether two-thirds of Congress had lifted the disqualification,” the court wrote. “Surely that was not the drafters’ intent.”
As written by Robert Reich in his newsletter, entitled The most troubling aspect of today’s Supreme Court decision: It doesn’t just allow Trump back on the ballot, but potentially disables enforcement of other provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment; “Friends, Even though Trump clearly engaged in an insurrection and even though the Constitution clearly bars insurrections from holding elected office, the Supreme Court today ruled that Trump will remain on the ballot anyway.
With the Super Tuesday primaries looming tomorrow, all nine justices agreed that states (in this case, Colorado) cannot decide to keep Trump off the ballot under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment – which bars anyone who has sworn an oath to the Constitution and yet participated in an insurrection against the United States from holding office. They agreed that allowing states to make such decisions would lead to a patchwork of ballots, undercutting federal authority.
But this may not be the most troubling aspect of their decision over the long term. The five justices in the majority went further, ruling that Section 3 could only be enforced by Congress. They rested their argument on Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides that Congress shall pass “appropriate legislation” to enforce the Amendment — such as, for example, procedures to identify which individuals should be disqualified under Section 3. And Congress has not done so.
But requiring that Congress first pass such legislation would prevent the Justice Department from bringing a suit alleging that someone should not be allowed on a ballot because they participated in an insurrection.
It would in effect shield any future insurrectionist candidate, whose party controls at least one chamber of commerce and therefore would not enact such legislation.
Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson were also rightfully concerned that the majority’s decision could be used to prevent the Justice Department from enforcing other provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment – such as Section 1, which prohibits states from making or enforcing laws that “abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” or deprive “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” or deny them “equal protection of the laws.”
Under the majority’s view of how the Fourteenth Amendment should be enforced, Section 5 might first require Congress to pass “appropriate legislation” to identify which defendants should be prosecuted under Section 1, before the Justice Department could act.
States charged with violating the privileges and immunities clause, or denying people due process of law, or denying their citizens the equal protection of the law will almost certainly use today’s ruling in attempts to shield themselves from federal prosecution.
By the way, Clarence Thomas should never have participated in this case, given his obvious conflicts of interest. His participation makes the Supreme Court’s recently adopted “ethics” guidelines look like the sham they are.”
Arrest Trump Now/ MeidasTouch
US supreme court ruling on Trump ballot ban: five key takeaways
Celebrate with me the historic 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade, which on this day 112 years ago brought thousands to women to Washington D.C. to call for the right to vote, the first such event on a massive national scale after 60 years of the fight for women’s suffrage.
It was a public declaration of freedom from fear, and of solidarity in the face of horrific repression. One hundred women were hospitalized this day, attacked by mobs unrestrained by the police, merely one incident in a decades long struggle against violence and control, and against the deniable forces of a government wholly vested in the Patriarchy. And before that, millennia of enslavement, dehumanization, marginalization, and the silencing of women’s voices.
But after that day, the world has never been the same. Women had stood up to the brutal tyranny of force and control in defiance and refusal to submit, and that is a genie which can never be put back in its bottle. This is the secret of power; it is hollow and brittle, for it fails at the point of disobedience. In the words of the great Sylvia Plath; “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”
Women will be silent no more, and as we rejoice together in the refusal to submit to authority, remember the victories of our history which brought us to what liberation we now enjoy.
In this time of darkness when atavistic forces of Patriarchy and Gideonite fundamentalism scuttle from beneath their stones to attempt once again the re-enslavement of women through control of reproductive rights and denial of bodily autonomy without which there is no freedom, and which also infringes on our universal right to health care as a precondition of the right to life, which together threaten dehumanization, theft of citizenship, and render democracy meaningless, let us claim and raise again the suffragette banner bearing the catchphrase of liberation which Alice Paul appropriated from Woodrow Wilson, “The time has come to conquer or submit.”
On this anniversary of the historic 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade led by Alice Paul, let us frighten the horses, and through our public performance of identities of sex and gender seize ownership of ourselves, reclaim the narratives of liberation from the marginalization and silences of historical authorization of identity, and shift the boundaries of the Forbidden through transgression of normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas.
Freaking the normies, we called it in the San Francisco of my youth; enactments of difference and uniqueness as revolutionary struggle and guerilla theatre, in which we seized public spaces as our stage. As in the spectacle of human possibilities of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade, strategies of confrontation which valorize totemic figures of transgression act as rituals of liberation, seizures of power, and the transformation and reimagination of authorized identities and of humankind.
Go ahead, frighten the horses; for none of us need stand alone, and if they come for one of us, they must be met with all of us.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
the Women’s Suffrage Movement in America, a reading list
Votes for Women!: American Suffragists and the Battle for the Ballot, by Winifred Conkling
A conversation of last year raised questions of moral equivalency in liberation struggle under dissimilar conditions of unequal power as historical and systemic imposed conditions of struggle, and of the conflicted and ambiguous nature of humans including iconic leaders
Rhonda:
A well written and intelligent piece which applies queer theory to the struggle for womens suffrage. The two questions I would pose; is the nonconformist cultural norms busting behavior in San Francisco that equivalent to the suffrage movement? To me there is a big difference.
Second, while it is completely proper to praise the suffragette movement, especially now, there were also serious issues of racism and strategic differences between the street activists and the establishment ones who pressured the government.
Me:
We all bear the flaws of our humanity and the legacies of our history; and we must all become human by emergence from the imposed conditions of struggle. I am aware of the ambivalent nature of liberation struggle and its heroes and iconic champions; for such processes are successive, much like Gould’s punctuated equilibrium theory of evolution, and the system of unequal power itself must change, not merely its manifestations.
We rebel against unjust control of reproduction by a sectarian captured state; in the future, who will rebel against us? The history of womens liberation as successive revolutions of expanding equality, from Abolition to Suffrage to three and counting reinterpretations of Feminism, remains to be written.
These share the problem so horribly evident with anticolonial revolutions which become tyrannies; the imposed conditions of struggle shape successor states in their image due to the requirements of victory in charismatic leaders who become authoritarian, nationalism and identitarian politics, and the valorization of violence and militarism.
Yes, the suffragettes were themselves not free of divisions of class, race, gender, faith; but once they moved the horizon of the known and of belonging, as with the Spear of Archytus, the ground of struggle for the next revolution was redefined. Humanity is a tidal force, which moves beneath our surfaces as circles propagating outwards toward infinity and the unknown.
Thank you, Rhonda, for asking such interesting questions.
As to your first observation, you are of course right that the stakes were much higher for the Suffragettes in a world where women had equality nowhere. I intended to compare them only as guerilla theatre, but as with all things human they also share our moral ambiguity.
On the first of March 1692 the Salem Witch Trials began; and in some ways have never stopped, but expanded to become a pervasive and endemic harm which characterizes our society and the carceral state America has become. Patriarchy is unequal power as sexual terror, and it is a systemic mechanism of control spun of lies, illusions, false histories, and alternate realities, a wilderness of mirrors which distort and capture our images, and a nightmare from which humankind must awaken.
Mass hysteria has assaulted truth with the sophisticated propaganda of social media and become a horrific new religion with QAnon, racism and patriarchal religious authoritarianism and intolerance has become Christian Identity fascism, conformism and the use of social force as show trials, torture, and terror have become state tyranny and terror on a vast institutional scale.
Othering those whom we vilify through divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite membership and belonging remains a primary instrument of repression of dissent and the subjugation, dehumanization, and enslavement of labor to centralize wealth, power, and privilege. Just as with the historical witch trials, during which my family was driven out of Bavaria in 1586 for the crime of being werewolves, berserkergangr or shapechanging warriors who were figures of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, and witches, Drachenbräute or ‘the brides of the dragon’ as the witch hunting mass murderer Martin Luther described them, independent women free from the authority of any man, at the beginning of a forty-four year period of witchcraft persecutions and the start of the savage Cologne War between Catholics and Protestants, a prelude to the Thirty Years War which killed a third of German peoples.
There is no terror like religious terror, and no tyranny like authority which speaks for the unquestionable divine and whose armies and police are authorized as enforcers of divine law.
This is not an issue confined to the remote past as a vestigial legacy of patriarchal sexual terror, but the warning sign of an iceberg of hidden structural and systemic injustices and inequalities which surround us as a pervasive and endemic harm in our daily lives.
I witnessed what was possibly the last witch burning in America as a child in the 1960’s, growing up in a Reformed Church community an hour’s drive from San Francisco. There is no forgetting the smell of a burning human being; sweet and charcoal like barbecue pork ribs, which is why I do not eat meat, and am uneasy around others who are doing so; there is no difference between ourselves and other animals, not to me.
Religious terror and authoritarian tyranny are pervasive throughout the world; sectarian violence and faith weaponized as identity politics are responsible for the horrific massacres and ethnic cleansing of Islamic minorities in the twin Buddhist states of Sri Lanka and Burma and in India’s conquest of Kashmir, as well as the sectarian war in Yemen between Iran and the Arab-American Alliance, and combined horrifically with other forces in the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the genocidal Gaza War. Faith as submission to authority has always been a lever of subjugation by tyrants over their slaves, regardless of the form it takes.
There is always someone in a gold robe who claims to speak for God and anoints kings, armies, and police to enforce their dominion, authorizes elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and has fooled others into doing the hard and dirty work. This was called the Great Chain of Being in medieval Europe, and considered the natural order of things wherein some of us are better than others as chosen by God, and no one is created equal.
This is the world the American and French Revolutions were intended to overthrow, and our democracies designed to replace.
Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible, which calls out the injustices of the McCarthy anticommunist era in the context of the Massachusetts Bay Colony witch hysteria of 1692–93, remains among the finest interrogations of state tyranny and terror ever written. I make an annual ritual of watching the beautiful 1996 film with the magnificent Winona Ryder as Abigail Williams.
As I wrote in my post of July 29 2020 Weaponized Religion, the Subversion of Democracy, Lunatic Anti-Science Propaganda, and the Legacy of American Imperialism; In the now enormous category of lies and disinformation campaigns against objective truth and scientific rationality, Trump’s recent endorsement of the lunatic claims of a Nigerian doctor now practicing medicine in Texas who is a member of a Pentecostal Church which promulgates religious and medical nonsense that has resulted in an epidemic of children murdered as witches by their parents and a violent pogrom against LGBT people in Nigeria stands near the pinnacle of our Clown of Terror’s crimes against humanity, one which would be hilarious if it were not real and so very dangerous.
As you may be aware, the years-long wave of children murdered by their parents as witches in Africa was perpetrated by American religious fanatics in a coordinated campaign of colonialist and imperialist destabilization. In Nigeria this has the full collaboration of the government, with the persecution and orchestrated violence against LGBT persons being a dual campaign of mass hysteria and state terror.
It parallels the seizure of Guatemala and El Salvador by Pat Robertson and other Gideonite fundamentalists through his front man Rios Montt and the subsequent Mayan Genocide. The masses of refugees at our border are a direct result of the latter, part of American sponsored political subversion and economic warfare responsible for the collapse of Venezuela, Columbia, Mexico, and Central America.
America has weaponized religion as an instrument of dominion, and it is this same network of Pentecostal and Charismatic organizations which have achieved the capture of the Republican Party and the subversion of democracy here at home. Their brutal campaign against the equality, freedom of bodily autonomy, and reproductive rights of women is the wedge issue the Republicans use to goad the poor into voting against their own interest, but it is only the home front of a global programme of patriarchal cultural, political, and economic warfare intended to seize and maintain an American hegemony of power and privilege.
God With Us; it is an old motto from the Crusades, and it has a complex and nefarious history. It has been used by the Inquisition against the Jews and Muslims, in the medieval witch hunts to transfer and consolidate patriarchal power as described by Silvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch and Witch-Hunting and Women. Gott Mitt Uns was the battle cry of the magnificent King Gustav Adolf of Sweden in his epochal victory over the Catholic forces of Imperial Austria at the Battle of Breitenfeld in 1631 which liberated Protestant Germany during the horrific Thirty Years War, the monument of which reads ”Freedom of Religion for All Mankind” and is the origin of the doctrine of separation of church and state in America; Gott Mitt Uns was also appropriated by Hitler, who sought to recall the glorious legacy of his namesake.
There is no more dangerous person than one who believes God is on his side, for that belief can justify anything and conceal evil behind a mask of good.
As Agence France-Presse writes in scmp; “A Houston doctor who praised hydroxychloroquine as a miracle coronavirus cure in a viral video retweeted by President Donald Trump blames gynaecological problems on sex with evil spirits and believes the US government is run by “reptilians”.
Stella Immanuel’s viral speech has drawn attention to a little-known group calling themselves “America’s Frontline Doctors” who appear to exist to promote the common antimalarial drug in the fight against Covid-19.”
“Immanuel was born in 1965, received her medical degree at the University of Calabar in Nigeria.”
“Nobody needs to get sick. This virus has a cure – it is called hydroxychloroquine,” Immanuel exclaimed Monday as she stood on the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington at a so-called “White Coat Summit” of like-minded doctors.”
“Early on in the pandemic, scientists were eager to find out whether hydroxychloroquine’s antiviral properties would make it effective in real-world patients with SARS-CoV-2.
So far though, all the major clinical trials that have reported their findings on this question have found no benefit, and leading national health authorities have moved to restrict its use because of potential cardiac harm.”
“The clip was shared by Trump and described as a “must watch” by his son Donald Trump Jnr, but has since been deleted by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for promoting misinformation.
“Trump also complained about his plummeting approval ratings as compared to those of Dr Anthony Fauci, the top medical adviser on the White House coronavirus task force.”
“And the curious case of Immanuel and colleagues – first reported in depth by The Daily Beast – underscores just how far the drug’s advocates are willing to go.
The website for “America’s Frontline Doctors” was registered just 11 days ago, a web domain age checker revealed – and the site was taken down by Tuesday afternoon.
“Tea Party Patriots”, a right-wing political group backed by wealthy Republicans, said on its website it was responsible for organising the Washington summit.
Further research on Immanuel’s web page, now accessible only via an archived website viewer, as well as her YouTube account, reveal a long list of bizarre and unscientific beliefs.
These include that “tormenting spirits” routinely have “astral sex” with women, which in turn causes “gynaecological problems, marital distress, miscarriages” and more.
In a 2015 video, Immanuel, who leads a religious group called Fire Power Ministries, said: “There are people ruling this nation that are not even human,” describing them as “reptilian spirits” who are “half human, half ET.”
In the same video she rails against the use of “alien DNA” to treat sick people, which she said had resulted in human beings mixing with demons.
Other targets of her anger include gay marriage, which she said would result in adults marrying children.”
As written by Sady Dolye in her essay for In These Times, How Capitalism Turned Women Into Witches; “Sylvia Federici’s new book explains how violence against women was a necessary precondition for capitalism. Federici traces how capitalism affects and infects the “private,” feminine sphere of unwaged domestic and reproductive work.
The Italian socialist feminist Silvia Federici is mandatory reading to understand gender politics (today). The opening sentences of her 1975 pamphlet “Wages Against Housework”—“They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work”—will stick in your head and change your whole concept of family. Caliban and the Witch, her titanic 1998 work on witch trials as a tool of early capitalism, will take your head apart and put it back together.
Federici is not just relevant but getting more so every second. Throughout her work, she traces how capitalism affects and infects the “private,” feminine sphere of unwaged domestic and reproductive work; she excavates intimacy, uncovering all its toxic layers of lead paint and asbestos, until its exploitative foundations are clear. Her work is essential to decoding the present moment, as capitalism and patriarchy entwine to produce increasingly grotesque offspring: predatory adoption agencies coercing women into giving up their babies; the exorbitant cost of childcare causing single working mothers to go bankrupt; entire industries where the opportunity to abuse women with impunity is a perk for the powerful men up top. And, thank goodness, we seem to know it; half the young leftist women writing today are riffing on Federici’s work.
Federici’s latest, Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women, updates and expands the core thesis of Caliban, in which she argued that “witch hunts” were a way to alienate women from the means of reproduction. In the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Federici argues, there was an intervening revolutionary push toward communalism. Communalist groups often embraced “free love” and sexual egalitarianism—unmarried men and women lived together, and some communes were all-women—and even the Catholic church only punished abortion with a few years’ penance.
For serfs, who tilled the land in exchange for a share of its crops, home was work, and vice versa; men and women grew the potatoes together. But in capitalism, waged laborers have to work outside the home all the time, which means someone else needs to be at home all the time, doing the domestic work. Gender roles, and the subjugation of women, became newly necessary.
Early feudal elites in rural Europe enclosed public land, rendering it private and controllable, and patriarchy enclosed women in “private” marriages, imposing on them the reproductive servitude of bearing men’s children and the emotional labor of caring for men’s every need. Pregnancy and childbirth, once a natural function, became a job that women did for their male husband-bosses—that is to say, childbirth became alienated labor. “Witches,” according to witch-hunting texts like the Malleus Maleficarum, were women who kept childbirth and pregnancy in female hands: midwives, abortionists, herbalists who provided contraception. They were killed to cement patriarchal power and create the subjugated, domestic labor class necessary for capitalism.
“The body has been for women in capitalist society what the factory has been for male waged workers,” Federici writes in Caliban, “the primary ground of their exploitation and resistance.”
The elegance of this argument, the neat way it knots together public and private, is thrilling. There are moments when Federici makes sense like no one else. In this passage, she explains how sexuality—once demonized “to protect the cohesiveness of the Church as a patriarchal, masculine clan”—became subjugated within capitalism: “Once exorcised, denied its subversive potential through the witch hunt, female sexuality could be recuperated in a matrimonial context and for procreative ends. …In capitalism, sex can exist but only as a productive force at the service of procreation and the regeneration of the waged/male worker and as a means of social appeasement and compensation for the misery of everyday existence.”
The pleasures of Witches occur in quick little bursts of illumination. Federici dips in and out of her famous argument, expanding it, updating it and finding new angles on it. Some essays work better than others. Her exploration of gossip and its criminalization is a stand-out; she traces a concise and damning history of how “a term commonly indicating a close female friend turned into one signifying idle, backbiting talk,” and how that act of women speaking to each other—often about men, and in a way those men might not like—became punishable by torture and public humiliation, as in the case of the “scold’s bridle.” This torture device, which was used until the early 1800s, was a mask with a bit (sometimes lined with spikes) that kept a woman from moving her tongue. Gossips, like witches, were criminalized for being women. Federici is always timely: Today’s “whisper networks,” in which women share the identities of abusers and harassers to keep each other safe, are gossip too. And, as accused rapist Stephen Elliott’s lawsuit against Moira Donegan and the Shitty Media Men list proves, plenty of men still want gossips hauled into court.
The point of reading Federici is not to agree with her at all times—it’s to let her knock the dust and cobwebs out of your mind, to open up new roads of thought and spark new curiosities. Opening this book at random will always bring you to a sentence that does that, as when Federici explains why witches are commonly old: “Older women [can] no longer provide children or sexual services and, therefore, appear to be a drain on the creation of wealth”; or ties witches to other historical insurrections: “the portrayal of women’s earthly challenges to the power structures as a demonic conspiracy is a phenomenon that has played out over and over in history down to our times” (Witches was published a few weeks before a Catholic exorcist held a special mass to protect accused sexual predator Brett Kavanaugh from … witches). Each sentence will also open doors into her other work.”
Excerpted from Caliban and the Witch; “The witch hunt rarely appears in the history of the proletariat. To this day, it remains one the most understudied phenomena in European history, or rather, world history, if we consider that the charge of devil worshipping was carried by missionaries and conquistadors to the “New World” as a tool for the subjugation of the local populations.
That the victims, in Europe, were mostly peasant women may account for the historians’ past indifference towards this genocide, an indifference that has bordered on complicity, since the elimination of the witches from the pages of history has contributed to trivializing their physical elimination at the stake, suggesting that it was a phenomenon of minor significance, if not a matter of folklore.
Even those who have studied the witch hunt (in the past almost exclusively men) were often worthy heirs of the sixteenth-century demonologists. While deploring the extermination of the witches, many have insisted on portraying them as wretched fools afflicted by hallucinations, so that their persecution could be explained as a process of “social therapy,” serving to reinforce neighborly cohesion, or could be described in medical terms as a “panic,” a “craze,” an “epidemic,” all characterizations that exculpate the witch hunters and depoliticize their crimes.
Feminists were quick to recognize that hundreds of thousands of women could not have been massacred and subjected to the cruelest tortures unless they posed a challenge to the power structure. They also realized that such a war against women, carried out over a period of at least two centuries, was a turning point in the history of women in Europe, the “original sin” in the process of social degradation that women suffered with the advent of capitalism, and a phenomenon, therefore, to which we must continually return if we are to understand the misogyny that still characterizes institutional practice and male-female relations.
Marxist historians, by contrast, even when studying the “transition to capitalism,” with very few exceptions, have consigned the witch hunt to oblivion, as if it were irrelevant to the history of the class struggle. Yet, the dimensions of the massacre should have raised some suspicions. as hundreds of thousands of women were burned, hanged, and tortured in less than two centuries.
It should also have seemed significant that the witch hunt occurred simultaneously with the colonization and extermination of the populations of the New World, the English enclosures, the beginning of the slave trade, the enactment of “bloody laws” against vagabonds and beggars and it climaxed in the interregnum between the end of feudalism and the capitalist “take off” when the peasantry in Europe reached the peak of its power but, in time, also consummated its historic defeat. So far, however, this aspect of primitive accumulation has truly remained a secret.
Witch-Burning Times and the State Initiative
What has not been recognized is that the witch hunt was one of the most important events in the development of capitalist society and the formation of the modern proletariat. For the unleashing of a campaign of terror against women, unmatched by any other persecution, weakened the resistance of the European peasantry to the assault launched against it by the gentry and the state, at a time when the peasant community was already disintegrating under the combined impact of land privatization, increased taxation, and the extension of state control over every aspect of social life.
The witch hunt deepened the divisions between women and men, teaching men to fear the power of women, and destroyed a universe of practices, beliefs, and social subjects whose existence was incompatible with the capitalist work discipline, thus redefining the main elements of social reproduction. Contrary to the view propagated by the Enlightenment, the witch hunt was not the last spark of a dying feudal world. Witch-hunting reached its peak between 1580 and 1630, in a period, that is, when feudal relations were already giving way to the economic and political institutions typical of mercantile capitalism. It was in this long “Iron Century” that, almost by a tacit agreement, in countries often at war against each other, the stakes multiplied, and the state started denouncing the existence of witches and taking the initiative of the persecution.
Before neighbor accused neighbor, or entire communities were seized by a “panic,” a steady indoctrination took place, with the authorities publicly expressing anxiety about the spreading of witches, and travelling from village to village in order to teach people how to recognize them, in some cases carrying with them lists with the names of suspected witches and threatening to punish those who hid them or came to their assistance.
But it was the jurists, the magistrates, and the demonologists, often embodied by the same person, who most contributed to the persecution. They were the ones who systematized the arguments, answered the critics, and perfected a legal machine that, by the end of the sixteenth century, gave a standardized, almost bureaucratic format to the trials, accounting for the similarities of the confessions across national boundaries. In their work, the men of the law could count on the cooperation of the most reputed intellectuals of the time, including philosophers and scientists who are still praised as the fathers of modern rationalism.
There can be no doubt, then, that the witch hunt was a major political initiative. The political nature of the witch hunt is further demonstrated by the fact that both Catholic and Protestant nations, at war against each other in every other respect, joined arms and shared arguments to persecute witches. Thus, it is no exaggeration to claim that the witch hunt was the first unifying terrain in the politics of the new European nation-states, the first example, after the schism brought about by the Reformation, of a European unification.
Devil Beliefs and Changes in the Mode of Production
A first insight into the meaning of the European witch hunt can be found in the thesis proposed by Michael Taussig in his classic work The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980), where the author maintains that devil-beliefs arise in those historical periods when one mode of production is being supplanted by another. In such periods not only are the material conditions of life radically transformed, but so are the metaphysical underpinnings of the social order — for instance, the conception of how value is created, what generates life and growth, what is “natural” and what is antagonistic to the established customs and social relations.
Taussig developed his theory by studying the beliefs of Colombian agricultural laborers and Bolivian tin miners at a time when, in both countries, monetary relations were taking root that in peoples’ eyes seemed deadly and even diabolical, compared with the older and still-surviving forms of subsistence-oriented production. Thus, in the cases Taussig studied, it was the poor who suspected the better-off of devil worship. Still, his association between the devil and the commodity form reminds us that also in the background of the witch hunt there was the expansion of rural capitalism, which involved the abolition of customary rights, and the first inflationary wave in modern Europe.
These phenomena only led to the growth of poverty, hunger, and social dislocation, they also transferred power into the hands of a new class of “modernizers” who looked with fear and repulsion at the communal forms of life that had been typical of pre-capitalist Europe. It was by the initiative of this proto-capitalist class that the witch hunt took off, as a weapon by which resistance to social and economic restructuring could be defeated.
That the spread of rural capitalism, with all its consequences (land expropriation, the deepening of social distances, the breakdown of collective relations) was a decisive factor in the background of the witch hunt is also proven by the fact that the majority of those accused were poor peasant women — cottars, wage laborers — while those who accused them were wealthy and prestigious members of the community, often their employers or landlords, that is, individuals who were part of the local power structures and often had close ties with the central state.
In England, the witches were usually old women on public assistance or women who survived by going from house to house begging for bits of food or a pot of wine or milk; if they were married, their husbands were day laborers, but more often they were widows and lived alone. Their poverty stands out in the confessions. It was in times of need that the Devil appeared to them, to assure them that from now on they “should never want,” although the money he would give them on such occasions would soon turn to ashes, a detail perhaps related to the experience of superinflation common at the time.
As for the diabolical crimes of the witches, they appear to us as nothing more than the class struggle played out at the village level: the “evil eye,” the curse of the beggar to whom an aim has been refused, the default on the payment of rent, the demand for public assistance.
Witch-Hunting and Class Revolt
As we can see from these cases, the witch hunt grew in a social environment where the “better sorts” were living in constant fear of the “lower classes,” who could certainly be expected to harbor evil thoughts because in this period they were losing everything they had.
That this fear expressed itself as an attack on popular magic is not surprising. The battle against magic has always accompanied the development of capitalism, to this very day. Magic is premised on the belief that the world is animated, unpredictable, and that there is a force in all things so that every event is interpreted as the expression of an occult power that must be deciphered and bent to one’s will.
Magic was also an obstacle to the rationalization of the work process, and a threat to the establishment of the principle of individual responsibility. Above all, magic seemed a form of refusal of work, of insubordination, and an instrument of grassroots resistance to power. The world had to be “disenchanted” in order to be dominated.
By the sixteenth century, the attack against magic was well under way and women were its most likely targets. Even when they were not expert sorcerers/magicians, they were the ones who were called to mark animals when they fell sick, heal their neighbors, help them find lost or stolen objects, give them amulets or love potions, help them forecast the future. Though the witch hunt targeted a broad variety of female practices, it was above all in this capacity — as sorcerers, healers, performers of incantations and divinations — that women were persecuted. For their claim to magical power undermined the power of the authorities and the state, giving confidence to the poor in their ability to manipulate the natural and social environment and possibly subvert the constituted order.
It is doubtful, on the other hand, that the magical arts that women had practiced for generations would have been magnified into a demonic conspiracy had they not occurred against a background of an intense social crisis and struggle. These were the “peasant wars” against land privatization, including the uprisings against the “enclosures” in England (in 1549, 1607, 1628, 1631), when hundreds of men, women and children, armed with pitchforks and spades, set about destroying the fences erected around the commons, proclaiming that “from now on we needn’t work any more.” During these revolts, it was often women who initiated and led the action.
The persecution of witches grew on this terrain. It was class war carried out by other means.
Witch-Hunting, Woman-Hunting, and the Accumulation of Labor
It seems plausible that the witch hunt was, at least in part, an attempt to criminalize birth control and place the female body, the uterus, at the service of population increase and the production and accumulation of labor-power. We can, in fact, imagine what effect it had on women to see their neighbors, friends, and relatives being burned at the stake, and realize that any contraceptive initiative on their side might be construed as the product of a demonic perversion.
From this point of view, there can be no doubt that the witch hunt destroyed the methods that women had used to control procreation, by indicting them as diabolical devices, and institutionalized the state’s control over the female body, the precondition for its subordination to the reproduction of labor-power. The witch hunt, then, was a war against women; it was a concerted attempt to degrade them, dehumanize them, and destroy their social power.
When this task was accomplished — when social discipline was restored, and the ruling class saw its hegemony consolidated — witch trials came to an end. The belief in witchcraft could even become an object of ridicule, decried as a superstition, and soon put out of memory. Just as the state had started the witch hunt, so too, one by one, various governments took the initiative in ending it.
Once the subversive potential of witchcraft was destroyed, the practice of magic could even be allowed to continue. After the witch hunt came to an end, many women continued to support themselves by foretelling the future, selling charms, and practicing other forms of magic. But now the authorities were no longer interested in prosecuting these practices, being inclined, instead, to view witchcraft as a product of ignorance or a disorder of the imagination.
Yet the specter of the witches continued to haunt the imagination of the ruling class. In 1871, the Parisian bourgeoisie instinctively returned to it to demonize the female Communards, accusing them of wanting to set Paris aflame. There can be little doubt, in fact, that the models for the lurid tales and images used by the bourgeois press to create the myth of the petroleuses were drawn from the repertoire of the witch hunt.”
And for reimagined faith as feminine centered seizure of power from the Patriarchy, and as a reconstructed Celtic fairy faith of pre Christian Europe, there are no finer sources than those written by Starhawk, who had the wisdom to honor both the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves:
The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess,
On this day of One 1446 Hijri, Ramadan begins; a month of peace, fasting, prayers, celebrations of family and community, and acts of charity and kindness throughout the Islamic diaspora. Among humankind’s most universal global rituals of interdependence and the redemptive and transformative power of love, it retains its ancient origins as a time of truce and a festival of peace, in which war and the social use of force and violence are abandoned and solidarity, compassion, and mercy celebrated.
I think of these things as meanings of Ramadan in the context in which I first participated in it, in solidarity with a community under siege and foreign invasion in Kashmir over thirty years ago, and of all the peoples throughout the world who are not free to live and believe as they choose, the Uighur of Xinjiang and the Rohingya of Myanmar among them, of places where sectarian divisions have been exploited by imperial powers in conflicts of dominion like Yemen and Syria, and of the tragedy of Occupied Palestine and Israel’s genocidal Gaza War.
Humankind needs love, and its forms as mercy, compassion, empathy, community, solidarity, and trust, and all the hope we can salvage from the jaws of our destruction and the shadows of our fear and grief.
Like all things which bear the legacies of our history Ramadan has many other meanings, but this above all; the design of our humanity is such that we are stewards of each other, bearers of wounds which open us to the pain of others, but bearers also of the redemptive and transformative power of love which can heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As written by Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī; “Let the beauty we love be what we do.”
Peace be upon us all.
Saudi Arabia, other Muslim countries welcome start of Ramadan
1 آذار (مارس) 2025 طقوس التكافل واللطف ورموز قوة الحب التعويضية والتحويلية في مداواة جراح إنسانيتنا وانكسار العالم
رمضان مبارك يا أصدقاء.
في مثل هذا اليوم من 1446 هـ يبدأ شهر رمضان. شهر من السلام والصوم والصلاة واحتفالات الأسرة والمجتمع والأعمال الخيرية والعطف في جميع أنحاء الشتات الإسلامي. من بين الطقوس العالمية الأكثر عالمية للترابط والقوة التعويضية والتحويلية للحب ، فإنه يحتفظ بأصوله القديمة كوقت للهدنة ومهرجان للسلام ، حيث يتم التخلي عن الحرب والاستخدام الاجتماعي للقوة والعنف والتضامن والرحمة واحتفل بالرحمة.
أفكر في هذه الأشياء على أنها معاني رمضان في السياق الذي شاركت فيه لأول مرة ، تضامنيًا مع مجتمع محاصر وغزو أجنبي في كشمير منذ أكثر من ثلاثين عامًا ، وجميع شعوب العالم الذين ليسوا أحرارًا في يعيشون ويؤمنون كما يختارون ، من بينهم الأويغور في شينجيانغ والروهينجا في ميانمار ، بالأماكن التي تم فيها استغلال الانقسامات الطائفية من قبل القوى الإمبريالية في صراعات الهيمنة مثل اليمن وسوريا ، ومأساة فلسطين المحتلة.
يحتاج الجنس البشري إلى الحب ، وأشكاله كرحمة ورحمة وتعاطف ومجتمع وتضامن وثقة ، وكل أمل يمكننا إنقاذه من فكي دمارنا وظلال خوفنا وحزننا.
مثل كل الأشياء التي تحمل موروثات تاريخنا ، فإن رمضان له معاني أخرى كثيرة ، ولكن هذا قبل كل شيء ؛ إن تصميم إنسانيتنا يجعلنا وكلاء لبعضنا البعض ، وحاملين للجروح التي تفتحنا على آلام الآخرين ، ولكننا أيضًا حاملون لقوة الحب التعويضية والتغييرية التي يمكن أن تشفي عيوب إنسانيتنا وانكسار العالم.
كما كتبه جلال الدين محمد الرومي. “دع الجمال الذي نحبه يكون ما نفعله”.
السلام علينا جميعا.
هنا مرة أخرى جزء من قصيدتي الحب ينتصر على مر الزمن ؛
لم يتم تصميم البشر ليكونوا بمفردهم
لاننا ابواب تفتح بعضنا بعضا
ونعيد بعضنا البعض لأنفسنا في عالم غير مبال
عندما نكون متوحشين ومكسورين وضائعين ؛
الحب هو أعظم قوة لجميع القوى
التي تشكل وتحفز وتعلم الكائنات الحية
الحب يخلق ، الحب يعوض ، الحب يتحول ،
ينتصر الحب على علم أمراض انفصالنا
من الجمال ، من اللامتناهي ، ومن المجتمع البشري ؛
ينتصر الحب بمرور الوقت.
Persian:
1 مارس 2025 آیینهای وابستگی متقابل و مهربانی و تمثیلهای قدرت رستگاری و دگرگونکننده عشق در التیام زخمهای انسانیت ما و شکستگیهای جهان
مبارک رمضان دوستان.
در این روز 1446 هجری قمری، ماه رمضان آغاز می شود. ماه صلح، روزه، نماز، جشن خانواده و اجتماع و احسان و احسان در سراسر غربت اسلامی. در میان جهانی ترین آیین های جهانی بشر برای وابستگی متقابل و قدرت رستگاری و دگرگون کننده عشق، خاستگاه باستانی خود را به عنوان زمان آتش بس و جشنواره صلح حفظ می کند که در آن جنگ و استفاده اجتماعی از زور و خشونت کنار گذاشته می شود و همبستگی، شفقت. ، و رحمت جشن گرفت.
من این موارد را به معنای معنای ماه رمضان در زمینه ای که برای اولین بار در آن شرکت کردم ، در همبستگی با جامعه تحت محاصره و حمله خارجی بیش از سی سال پیش در کشمیر ، و همه مردم در سراسر جهان که آزاد نیستند ، در آن شرکت کنم. همانطور که انتخاب می کنند ، اویغور سین کیانگ و روهینگیای میانمار در میان آنها زندگی کنند و باور کنند ، مکانهایی که در آن اختلافات فرقه ای توسط نیروهای امپراتوری در درگیری های سلطه مانند یمن و سوریه مورد بهره برداری قرار گرفته است و فاجعه فلسطین اشغالی.
بشریت به عشق ، و اشکال آن مانند رحمت ، شفقت ، همدلی ، اجتماع ، همبستگی و اعتماد ، و همه امیدهایی که می توانیم از آرواره های نابودی و سایه های ترس و غم خود نجات دهیم ، نیاز دارد.
مانند همه چیزهایی که میراث تاریخ ما را به همراه دارند ، ماه رمضان معانی بسیاری دیگری نیز دارد ، اما این بیش از هر چیز دیگری است. طراحی انسانیت ما به گونه ای است که ما مهماندار یکدیگر هستیم ، حامل زخمهایی هستیم که ما را به درد دیگران باز می کند ، اما همچنین حامل قدرت رستگاری و تحول گرایانه عشق است که می تواند نقایص انسانیت ما و شکسته شدن جهان.
همانطور که جلال الدین محمد رامی نوشته است؛ “بگذارید زیبایی که دوست داریم همان کاری باشد که انجام می دهیم.”
درود بر همه ما
در اینجا دوباره قطعه ای از شعر من عشق با گذشت زمان پیروز می شود.
انسان ها به گونه ای طراحی نشده اند که تنها باشند
زیرا ما درهایی هستیم که یکدیگر را باز می کنیم
و در جهانی بی تفاوت یکدیگر را به خودمان برگردانیم
وقتی وحشی و شکسته و گم شویم
عشق بزرگترین قدرت همه نیروهاست
که موجودات زنده را شکل می دهد ، ایجاد انگیزه می کند و آنها را آگاه می کند
عشق ایجاد می کند ، عشق بازخرید می شود ، عشق تغییر شکل می دهد ،
عشق بر آسیب شناسی قطع ارتباط ما پیروز می شود
از زیبایی ، از بینهایت و از جامعه بشریت ؛
عشق با گذشت زمان پیروز می شود.
Turkish:
1 Mart 2025 Karşılıklı Bağımlılık ve Nezaket Ritüelleri ve İnsanlığımızın Yaralarını ve Dünyanın Kırıklığını İyileştirmede Sevginin Kurtarıcı ve Dönüştürücü Gücünün Alegorileri
Arkadaşlar Mübarek Ramazan.
Hicri 1446 yılının bu gününde Ramazan başlar; İslam diasporası boyunca barış, oruç, dualar, aile ve topluluk kutlamaları ve hayırseverlik ve nezaket eylemlerinin olduğu bir aydır. İnsanoğlunun en evrensel küresel karşılıklı bağımlılık ritüelleri ve sevginin kurtarıcı ve dönüştürücü gücü arasında, savaşın ve güç ve şiddetin toplumsal kullanımının terk edildiği, dayanışmanın, merhametin ve merhametin olduğu bir ateşkes zamanı ve bir barış festivali olarak kadim kökenlerini koruyor. ve merhamet kutlandı.
Bunları, ilk katıldığım bağlamda, otuz yılı aşkın bir süre önce Keşmir’de kuşatma altında olan ve yabancı işgali altındaki bir toplulukla ve özgür olmayan dünyadaki tüm halklarla dayanışma içinde Ramazan’ın anlamları olarak düşünüyorum. Yemen ve Suriye gibi egemenlik çatışmalarında ve İşgal Altındaki Filistin trajedisinde, emperyal güçler tarafından mezhepsel bölünmelerin sömürüldüğü yerlerde, Sincan Uygurları ve Myanmarlı Rohingyalar, seçtikleri gibi yaşıyor ve inanıyorlar.
İnsanlığın sevgiye ve merhamet, şefkat, empati, topluluk, dayanışma ve güven biçimlerine ve yıkımımızın çenelerinden ve korku ve kederimizin gölgelerinden kurtarabileceğimiz tüm umutlara ihtiyacı vardır.
Tarihimizin mirasını taşıyan her şey gibi Ramazan’ın da pek çok anlamı vardır ama her şeyden önce; insanlığımızın tasarımı öyledir ki, birbirimizin hizmetkarları, bizi başkalarının acısına açan yaraların taşıyıcılarıyız, aynı zamanda insanlığımızın kusurlarını ve kırılganlığı iyileştirebilen sevginin kurtarıcı ve dönüştürücü gücünün taşıyıcılarıyız. Dünya.
Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rmī’nin yazdığı gibi; “Sevdiğimiz güzellik yaptığımız şey olsun.”
Hepimizin selamı olsun.
Urdu
1 مارچ 2025 باہمی انحصار اور مہربانی کی رسومات اور ہماری انسانیت اور دنیا کے ٹوٹنے کے زخموں کو مندمل کرنے میں محبت کی مخلصی اور تبدیلی کی طاقت کی علامتیں
رمضان مبارک، دوستو۔
اس دن 1446 ہجری کو رمضان المبارک شروع ہوتا ہے۔ امن کا مہینہ، روزے، دعائیں، خاندان اور برادری کی تقریبات، اور اسلامی ڈاسپورا میں خیرات اور احسان کے اعمال۔ بنی نوع انسان کی باہمی انحصار کی سب سے عالمگیر عالمی رسومات اور محبت کی چھٹکارا اور تبدیلی کی طاقت کے درمیان، یہ اپنی قدیم ابتدا کو جنگ بندی کے وقت اور امن کے تہوار کے طور پر برقرار رکھتا ہے، جس میں جنگ اور طاقت اور تشدد کے سماجی استعمال کو ترک کر دیا جاتا ہے اور یکجہتی، ہمدردی ، اور رحمت منائی گئی۔
میں ان چیزوں کو رمضان کے اس تناظر میں سمجھتا ہوں جس میں میں نے پہلی بار اس میں شرکت کی تھی، تیس سال قبل کشمیر میں محاصرے اور غیر ملکی حملے کی زد میں رہنے والی کمیونٹی کے ساتھ اظہار یکجہتی کے لیے، اور دنیا بھر کے تمام لوگوں کے ساتھ جو آزاد نہیں ہیں۔ اپنی مرضی کے مطابق جیو اور یقین کرو، سنکیانگ کے ایغور اور ان میں سے میانمار کے روہنگیا، ان جگہوں پر جہاں یمن اور شام جیسے تسلط کے تنازعات اور مقبوضہ فلسطین کے المیے میں سامراجی طاقتوں کے ذریعہ فرقہ وارانہ تقسیم کا استحصال کیا گیا ہے۔
بنی نوع انسان کو محبت کی ضرورت ہے، اور اس کی شکلیں رحم، ہمدردی، ہمدردی، برادری، یکجہتی، اور اعتماد، اور وہ تمام امیدیں جن سے ہم اپنی تباہی کے جبڑوں اور اپنے خوف اور غم کے سائے سے نجات حاصل کر سکتے ہیں۔
ہماری تاریخ کی وراثت رکھنے والی تمام چیزوں کی طرح رمضان المبارک کے اور بھی بہت سے معنی ہیں لیکن یہ سب سے بڑھ کر۔ ہماری انسانیت کا ڈیزائن ایسا ہے کہ ہم ایک دوسرے کے محافظ ہیں، زخموں کے علمبردار ہیں جو ہمیں دوسروں کے درد کے لیے کھولتے ہیں، لیکن محبت کی نجات اور تبدیلی کی طاقت کے علمبردار بھی ہیں جو ہماری انسانیت کی خامیوں اور ٹوٹ پھوٹ کو دور کر سکتی ہے۔ دنیا.
جیسا کہ جلال الدین محمد رومی نے لکھا ہے۔ “جس خوبصورتی کو ہم پسند کرتے ہیں وہی ہونے دیں جو ہم کرتے ہیں۔”
ہم سب پر سلامتی ہو۔
April 3 2022 Reply To An Accusation of Preaching
My essay on Ramadan as an institution of universal peace yesterday found an unforeseen question from an angle I never imagined, always an event to be cherished, savored, and given reign to provoke thought;
“Is preaching allowed in this group?”
To this I replied; I hope not. Herein I speak of a time of truce and peace, from a place of great horror in Mariupol. We humans must affirm our interdependence and universality if we are ever to abandon the social use of force and violence.
For myself, Ramadan is an example for us all from a culture which is reviled and demonized as otherness by our own, an example of fear weaponized in service to authority, the carceral state, and wars of imperial conquest and dominion.
All I ask us to believe is that love is better than hate, mercy better than revenge, solidarity better than division.
To this I received a reply; “So you answer with more preaching. Personally I find religion repugnant and your woo woo unrealistic.”
Here is my answer; I too generally mislike religion as authority and institutional power. Gott Mitt Uns; it is humankinds oldest terror, for it permits anything, as Voltaire teaches us in his famous principle “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”. Certainly this is true of America’s new religion, QAnon, and its uses in the fascist subversion of democracy.
As to woo woo, my life work and field of study is the origin of evil, a legacy of working through early trauma and near-death experiences, which I attribute to the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; and as his great operatic myth allegorizes, power over others requires the renunciation of love. This suggests a correlate; love can redeem the flaws of our humanity and answer division with solidarity.
Can we not celebrate a time of renunciation of war and violence, and universal brotherhood and love as transcendence of the flags of our skin?
In reflection I am surprised to have never before known my writing to be called preaching or religious in character or intent; I grew up with ten years of formal study in Taoism and Zen Buddhism from the age of nine, and among other things I am a former monk of the Kagyu Vajrayana order of Tibetan Buddhism and a scholar of the Naqshbandi order of Sufism within Sunni Islam, legacies of my time of revolutionary struggle in Nepal and resistance to conquest and occupation in Kashmir respectively. I was once similarly taken aback and startled by being addressed as General, being nonviolent except in revolutionary struggle, seizures of power from tyrants, and the hunting of fascists. Now as then, it provoked my rethinking and interrogation of my own motives, values, and ideals, and their praxis as action.
What do I believe?
I practice the art of believing “six impossible things before breakfast”; this is my faith, though if asked directly I normally quote either Keats; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty”, or Rumi; “Let the beauty you love be what you do”, depending on who is asking, and in what language and nation.
If we are speaking of belief as obedience to authority and institutions of temporal power, I am with Nikos Kazantzakis; ”I believe nothing, I hope for nothing, I am free.”
If however we are speaking of belief as Ideals and value systems, that is something entirely different. My test of disambiguation here is submission to organizations or figures of power and elite hierarchies of belonging and membership, for no matter where you begin along that path, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
Democracy as a free society of equals embodies ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, and requires a nonsectarian state and a free press as what Foucault called truth telling. I regard journalism, and Islam, as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth; for the Faithful are commanded to learn throughout their entire lives, regardless of the source or where it leads. This is surely the most radical position on testing claims, exploring unknowns, and scholarship of knowledge without limits of any faith, philosophy, or ideology of any kind in the history of the world, especially in an age when Christians were burning books, and I cherish it greatly.
Underlying our values and ideals at a greater level of abstraction are those which are also innate capacities of human being, truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh; including hope as freedom, love as equality and our universal human rights which are parallel and interdependent with those of a citizen, and fraternity or faith in each other as solidarity and our duty of care for others.
And the first principle of our civilization as founded in the Forum of Athens and the Trial of Socrates is that we must always question ourselves, a crucial dimension of truth telling. This value has as its action the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
All of this is a ground of struggle between liberty and tyranny, enslavement, falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
To tyranny and fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
We may also speak of poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization as a kind of faith, and of poetic and metaphorical truth as belief, as I have in reference to ibn Arabi, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, and Lewis Carroll’s principle of action in Alice in Wonderland, as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky.
On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”
To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”
“Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”
“That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”
Just so.
In reference to my philosophy and ideology, here is a poem which I wrote in French for a Swiss publisher; here the original is after the English version. This may be the most coherent articulation of what may be called my belief system, though I believe nothing on the basis of any authority other than the test of my own questioning, and regard the pursuit of truth as a sacred calling, truths which are ambiguous, relative, ephemeral, and shifting as consequences of the Rashomon Gate of time and our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
The Flag of My Skin
Time, memory, history, identity, and the revolution of becoming ourselves;
the skin I have escaped in serpentine transformation has become a flag,
but of what nation?
Who owns this kingdom of flesh that we share?
This realm of the senses is both a boundary we must transgress
to discover ourselves and seize ownership of our freedom and being,
and an interface by which we shape each other, a propulsive and generative force of the human sublime, of truths written in our skin.
We are interdependent, vast and oceanic beings, exalted by our passion beyond the limits of our form but also autonomous individuals who create ourselves and one another over enormous gulfs of time, limitless in our possibilities of becoming human but also forms described as negative spaces of each other.
Being is a dance of myriad partnerships, transforms of messages and principles of organization and growth which are recursive, chaotic, a beauty of strangeness and the bizarre, a realm of Medusa, goddess and monster.
There is but one rule in nature; anything goes.
Who authorizes and validates the possibilities and performances of our identity?
Shall we not dethrone, mock, and challenge such tyrannies of normality?
Let us forge an art of fire by which to liberate us from the shells of our history, a poetics of revolution by which to incite, provoke, and disturb.
There are no maps of the unknown; only of the history written in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation, assigned values, interpreted meanings, and created ourselves through our anchorages of civilization, a prochronism whose purpose is to buffer the shock of change and shield identity from loss.
Yet it is this history and memory we must escape to create ourselves anew as we wander this wilderness of mirrors and of echoes, a labyrinth of shifting paths which leads both inward to our true selves and outward to other peoples and to their different truths and possibilities of becoming human.
Our senses are transducers through which we change energy into messages and topologies of reality; it is this logosphere within which we live and from which we arise and recreate ourselves continually, transcendent and surreal.
Humans are a system for transforming things into ideas.
So also do we transform our world and each other by our ideas, the real and the ideal reflecting and shaping each other in recursion. And this revolutionary and ongoing coevolution and process of becoming human is the central creative force of existence and of humankind.
The struggle for ownership of identity between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight. And what of the flag of our skin, of our history which we have unwound from ourselves as an endless scroll of signs, as a shroud, a chrysalis?
This I leave to you, to those we claim and who in turn claim us, to others who are different as well as those alike, and to us all.
We may belong to our past, but the future belongs to us.
It is yours and ours, the undiscovered country; use it wisely.
Le drapeau de ma peau
Le temps, la mémoire, l’histoire, l’identité et la révolution de devenir nous-mêmes;
la peau que j’ai échappée dans la transformation serpentine est devenue un drapeau,
mais de quelle nation?
À qui appartient ce royaume de chair que nous partageons?
Ce royaume des sens est à la fois une frontière que nous devons transgresser
de se découvrir et de s’approprier notre liberté et notre être,
et une interface par laquelle nous nous façonnons, force propulsive et génératrice du sublime humain, de vérités écrites dans notre peau.
Nous sommes des êtres interdépendants, vastes et océaniques, exaltés par notre passion au-delà des limites de notre forme mais aussi des individus autonomes qui se créent et se créent au-dessus d’énormes gouffres de temps, sans limites dans nos possibilités de devenir humain mais aussi des formes décrites comme des espaces négatifs de L’une et l’autre.
L’être est une danse de myriades de partenariats, de transformations de messages et de principes d’organisation et de croissance qui sont récursifs, chaotiques, une beauté d’étrangeté et de bizarre, un royaume de Méduse, déesse et monstre.
Il n’y a qu’une seule règle dans la nature; tout va.
Qui autorise et valide les possibilités et les performances de notre identité?
Ne détrônerons-nous pas, ne nous moquerons-nous pas de ces tyrannies de la normalité?
Forgeons un art du feu pour nous libérer des coquilles de notre histoire, une poétique de la révolution pour inciter, provoquer et troubler.
Il n’y a pas de cartes de l’inconnu; seulement de l’histoire écrite sous notre forme de la façon dont nous avons résolu les problèmes d’adaptation, assigné des valeurs, interprété des significations, et nous nous sommes créés à travers nos ancrages de civilisation, un prochronisme dont le but est d’amortir le choc du changement et de protéger l’identité de la perte.
Pourtant, c’est à cette histoire et à cette mémoire que nous devons échapper pour nous recréer en nous promenant dans ce désert de miroirs et d’échos, un labyrinthe de chemins changeants qui mène à la fois vers nous-mêmes et vers d’autres peuples et vers leurs différentes vérités et possibilités. de devenir humain.
Nos sens sont des transducteurs par lesquels nous transformons l’énergie en messages et en topologies de réalité; c’est cette logosphère à l’intérieur de laquelle nous vivons et dont nous surgissons et nous recréons continuellement, transcendante et surréaliste.
Les humains sont un système pour transformer les choses en idées.
De même, nous transformons notre monde et les uns les autres par nos idées, le réel et l’idéal se reflétant et se façonnant mutuellement en récursivité. Et cette coévolution et ce processus révolutionnaires et continus de devenir humain sont la force créatrice centrale de l’existence et de l’humanité.
La lutte pour la propriété de l’identité entre les masques que les autres fabriquent pour nous et ceux que nous fabriquons pour nous-mêmes est la première révolution dans laquelle nous devons tous lutter. Et qu’en est-il du drapeau de notre peau, de notre histoire que nous avons déroulée de nous-mêmes comme un rouleau de signes sans fin, comme un linceul, une chrysalide?
Je vous laisse ceci, à ceux que nous revendiquons et qui à notre tour nous réclament, à ceux qui sont différents ainsi qu’à ceux qui nous ressemblent, et à nous tous.
Nous pouvons appartenir à notre passé, mais l’avenir nous appartient.
C’est le vôtre et le nôtre, le pays inconnu; fais-en bon usage.
What is to be done? Alice Slays the Jabberwocky:
Arabic
3 أبريل 2022 رد على اتهامه بالوعظ
وجدت مقالتي عن رمضان كمؤسسة للسلام العالمي بالأمس سؤالاً غير متوقع من زاوية لم أتخيلها أبدًا ، ودائمًا ما يكون حدثًا يستحق الاعتزاز به ويستمتع به ويمنحه السيادة لإثارة الفكر ؛
“هل الوعظ مسموح به في هذه المجموعة؟”
أجبته على هذا. لا اتمنى. هنا أتحدث عن زمن الهدنة والسلام ، من مكان مرعب في ماريوبول. يجب علينا نحن البشر أن نؤكد ترابطنا وعالميتنا إذا أردنا في أي وقت التخلي عن الاستخدام الاجتماعي للقوة والعنف.
بالنسبة لي ، يعتبر رمضان مثالاً لنا جميعًا من ثقافة يتم شيطنها وتشويهها كآخر من قبل ثقافتنا ، ومثال على الخوف الذي تم تسليحه في خدمة السلطة ، والدولة الجثثية ، وحروب الغزو والسيطرة الإمبرياليين.
كل ما أطلبه هو أن الحب أفضل من الكراهية ، والرحمة أفضل من الانتقام ، والتضامن أفضل من الانقسام.
تلقيت ردا على هذا. “لذلك تجيب بمزيد من الوعظ. أنا شخصياً أجد الدين بغيضاً وخطرك غير واقعي “.
هنا جوابي. أنا أيضًا لا أحب الدين بشكل عام باعتباره سلطة وقوة مؤسسية. جوت ميت Uns إنه أقدم إرهاب للبشرية ، لأنه يسمح بأي شيء ، كما يعلمنا فولتير في مبدأه الشهير “أولئك الذين يستطيعون جعلك تؤمن بالسخافات يمكن أن يجعلوك ترتكب الفظائع”. من المؤكد أن هذا ينطبق على دين أمريكا الجديد ، QAnon ، واستخداماته في التخريب الفاشي للديمقراطية.
بالنسبة إلى woo woo ، فإن عملي في حياتي ومجال دراستي هو أصل الشر ، وهو إرث من العمل من خلال الصدمات المبكرة وتجارب الاقتراب من الموت ، والتي أنسبها إلى حلقة Wagnerian من الخوف والقوة والقوة ؛ وكما تقول أسطورة الأوبرا العظيمة ، فإن القوة على الآخرين تتطلب نبذ الحب. هذا يشير إلى وجود علاقة. يمكن للحب أن يصحح عيوب إنسانيتنا ويجيب على الانقسام بالتضامن.
ألا نستطيع أن نحتفل بوقت نبذ الحرب والعنف والأخوة والحب الكونيين كتعالي لأعلام بشرتنا؟
في التفكير ، أنا مندهش لأنني لم أعرف من قبل أن كتاباتي تُدعى وعظًا أو دينية في طبيعتها أو نواياها ؛ لقد نشأت مع عشر سنوات من الدراسة الرسمية في الطاوية والبوذية الزينية منذ أن كنت في التاسعة من عمري ، ومن بين أمور أخرى أنا راهب سابق من طائفة كاجيو فاجرايانا للبوذية التبتية وعالم في الطريقة النقشبندية للصوفية داخل الإسلام السني ، إرث من زمن النضال الثوري في نيبال ومقاومة الفتح والاحتلال في كشمير على التوالي. لقد شعرت بالدهشة والذهول ذات مرة من خلال مخاطبتي بصفتي جنرالًا ، وبكوني لاعنفًا إلا في النضال الثوري ، والاستيلاء على السلطة من الطغاة ، وصيد الفاشيين. الآن كما في ذلك الوقت ، أثار ذلك إعادة تفكيري واستجوابي في دوافعي وقيمي ومُثُلي وتطبيقاتها العملية كإجراء.
ماذا اعتقد؟
أمارس فن الإيمان بـ “ستة أشياء مستحيلة قبل الإفطار”. هذا هو إيماني ، على الرغم من أنني إذا سئلت مباشرة فأنا أقتبس عادةً من كيتس ؛ “لست متأكدًا من شيء سوى قداسة عواطف القلب وحقيقة الخيال – ما تعتبره المخيلة جمالًا يجب أن يكون حقًا – سواء كان موجودًا من قبل أم لا – لأن لدي نفس فكرة كل عواطفنا مثل الحب كلهم في جلالهم ، مبدعون من الجمال الأساسي “، أو الرومي ؛ “دع الجمال الذي تحبه هو ما تفعله” ، اعتمادًا على من يسأل ، وفي أي لغة وأمة.
إذا كنا نتحدث عن الإيمان كطاعة للسلطة ومؤسسات السلطة الزمنية ، فأنا مع نيكوس كازانتزاكيس ؛ “أنا لا أصدق أي شيء ، وآمل في لا شيء ، أنا حر.”
ومع ذلك ، إذا كنا نتحدث عن الإيمان كمثل وأنظمة قيم ، فهذا شيء مختلف تمامًا. اختباري في توضيح الغموض هنا هو الخضوع لمنظمات أو شخصيات ذات سلطة وتسلسل هرمي للنخبة من الانتماء والعضوية ، بغض النظر عن المكان الذي تبدأ فيه على هذا الطريق ، ينتهي بك الأمر دائمًا عند أبواب أوشفيتز.
من يقف بيننا وبين اللانهائي لا يخدم أيًا منهما.
تجسد الديمقراطية كمجتمع حر من أنداد مُثل الحرية والمساواة والحقيقة والعدالة ، وتتطلب دولة غير طائفية وصحافة حرة كما أطلق عليها فوكو قول الحقيقة.
الكامنة وراء قيمنا ومثلنا العليا على مستوى أعلى من التجريد هي تلك التي هي أيضًا قدرات فطرية للإنسان ، وحقائق متأصلة في الطبيعة ومكتوبة في جسدنا ؛ بما في ذلك الأمل كحرية ، والحب كمساواة ، وحقوق الإنسان العالمية الموازية والمترابطة مع حقوق المواطن ، والأخوة أو الإيمان ببعضنا البعض كتضامن وواجبنا في رعاية الآخرين.
والمبدأ الأول لحضارتنا على النحو الذي تأسس في منتدى أثينا ومحاكمة سقراط هو أننا يجب أن نسأل أنفسنا دائمًا ، وهو بُعد حاسم في قول الحقيقة. هذه القيمة لها من عملها الواجبات الأساسية الأربعة للمواطن ؛ سلطة السؤال ، وفضح السلطة ، والسلطة الصورية ، وسلطة التحدي.
كل هذا هو أرضية صراع بين الحرية والاستبداد
الغسل والتزييف والتسليع ونزع الصفة الإنسانية.
لا يمكن أن يكون هناك سوى رد واحد على الاستبداد والفاشية. لن يحدث مطلقا مرة اخري!
قد نتحدث أيضًا عن الرؤية الشعرية في إعادة تصور وتحويل أنفسنا وحضارتنا كنوع من الإيمان ، وعن الحقيقة الشعرية والمجازية كإيمان ، كما قلت في إشارة إلى مبدأ عمل كولريدج ، وبليك ، وكيتس ، ولويس كارول. في Alice in Wonderland ، كما تعلمنا أليس عند سرد الأشياء الستة المستحيلة في معركتها مع Jabberwocky.
في طريقها لمحاربة تنين ، ورؤيته لأول مرة مروعة ، تشير أليس إلى ماد هاتر في فيلم تيم بيرتون الجميل ؛ “هذا مستحيل.”
الذي يقول له حتر ، “فقط إذا كنت تؤمن بذلك”.
“في بعض الأحيان ، أؤمن بستة أشياء مستحيلة قبل الإفطار.”
“هذه ممارسة ممتازة ، ولكن الآن فقط ، قد ترغب حقًا في التركيز على Jabberwocky.”
هكذا فقط.
بالإشارة إلى فلسفتي وأيديولوجيتي ، إليكم قصيدة كتبتها بالفرنسية لناشر سويسري. هنا الأصل بعد النسخة الإنجليزية. قد يكون هذا هو التعبير الأكثر تماسكًا لما يمكن أن يسمى نظام إيماني ، على الرغم من أنني لا أصدق أي شيء على أساس أي سلطة بخلاف اختبار استجوابي ، وأعتبر السعي وراء الحقيقة بمثابة دعوة مقدسة ، وحقائق غامضة ، نسبي ، سريع الزوال ، ومتحول كنتيجة لبوابة راشومون الزمنية وإمكانياتنا اللامحدودة في أن نصبح بشرًا.
علم بشرتي
الوقت والذاكرة والتاريخ والهوية وثورة أن نصبح أنفسنا ؛
الجلد الذي هربت منه في تحول اعوج أصبح علمًا ،
لكن من أي أمة؟
من يملك مملكة الجسد هذه التي نتشاركها؟
عالم الحواس هذا هو حد يجب علينا تجاوزه
لاكتشاف أنفسنا والاستيلاء على ملكية حريتنا ووجودنا ،
وواجهة نشكل بها بعضنا البعض ، قوة دافعة ومولدة لسامية الإنسان ، للحقائق المكتوبة في جلدنا.
نحن كائنات مترابطة وواسعة ومحيطية ، يعلوها شغفنا الذي يتجاوز حدود شكلنا ولكن أيضًا الأفراد المستقلون الذين يخلقون أنفسنا وبعضنا البعض عبر فجوات زمنية هائلة ، لا حدود لإمكانياتنا في أن نصبح بشرًا ولكن أيضًا أشكال توصف بأنها مساحات سلبية من بعضها البعض.
إن الوجود عبارة عن رقصة من الشراكات التي لا تعد ولا تحصى ، وتحولات الرسائل ومبادئ التنظيم والنمو التي هي متكررة ، وفوضوية ، وجمال الغرابة والغرابة ، عالم ميدوسا ، إلهة ووحش.
لا توجد إلا قاعدة واحدة في الطبيعة. كل شيء مباح.
من يصرح ويتحقق من إمكانيات وأداء هويتنا؟
ألا يجب أن نخلع عن عرشنا ونستهزئ به ونتحدى هذه الاستبداد الطبيعي؟
لنصنع فنًا من النار نحررنا به من قذائف تاريخنا ، شاعرية للثورة يمكن بواسطتها التحريض والاستفزاز والتشويش.
لا توجد خرائط للمجهول. فقط للتاريخ المكتوب في شكلنا الخاص بكيفية حلنا لمشاكل التكيف ، والقيم المخصصة ، والمعاني المفسرة ، وخلق أنفسنا من خلال مراسي الحضارة ، وهي عملية استباقية تهدف إلى حماية صدمة التغيير وحماية الهوية من الضياع.
ومع ذلك ، يجب أن نهرب من هذا التاريخ والذاكرة لنخلق أنفسنا من جديد بينما نتجول في هذه البرية من المرايا والصدى ، وهي متاهة من المسارات المتغيرة التي تقودنا إلى الداخل إلى أنفسنا الحقيقية وإلى الخارج إلى الشعوب الأخرى وإلى حقائقهم وإمكانياتهم المختلفة. من أن يصبح إنسانًا.
حواسنا هي محولات طاقة نغير من خلالها الطاقة إلى رسائل وطوبولوجيا للواقع ؛ هذا هو عالم اللوغوسفير الذي نعيش فيه وننشأ منه ونعيد تكوين أنفسنا باستمرار ، متعال وسريالي.
البشر نظام لتحويل الأشياء إلى أفكار.
لذلك نحن أيضًا نحول عالمنا وبعضنا البعض من خلال أفكارنا ، الحقيقية والمثالية التي تعكس وتشكل بعضنا البعض في التكرار. وهذا التطور المشترك الثوري والمستمر وعملية التحول إلى إنسان هي القوة الخلاقة المركزية للوجود والبشرية.
الصراع من أجل ملكية الهوية بين الأقنعة التي يصنعها الآخرون لنا والأقنعة التي نصنعها لأنفسنا هي الثورة الأولى التي يجب علينا جميعًا النضال فيها. وماذا عن علم بشرتنا ، عن تاريخنا الذي فكناه عن أنفسنا بصفته لفيفة لا نهاية لها من العلامات ، ككفن ، شرنقة؟
أترك هذا لكم ، لأولئك الذين ندعيهم والذين بدورهم يطالبون بنا ، للآخرين المختلفين وكذلك لأولئك على حد سواء ، ولنا جميعًا.
On this day of national general boycott of Trump co-conspirators in fascist tyranny and terror and the subversion of democracy, let us bring a Reckoning to those who would enslave us in honor of Mangione the Avenger, Hero of the People.
Utterly destroy and pursue to extinction all financiers, apologists, enablers and co-conspirators of Trump in the subversion of democracy. Let us purge our destroyers from among us and bring a Reckoning to each and every one.
Why should we be merciful to those who do not regard us as fellow human beings and offer us no mercy?
By Any Means Necessary, friends; let us not make false moral equivalence between the violence of the slavemaster and the violence used by a slave to break his chains. We have no use for anything which limits our actions against fascists and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, tyrants and their carceral states of force and control, enforcers of authority and repression of dissent, propagandists and co-conspirators of theocracy and patriarchal sexual terror and of white supremacist terror, the amoral plutocrat class who enable and sponsor fascist tyranny and terror, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and the systems of unequal power and oppression which they create and maintain through our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
Everyone who goes hungry today, whose loved ones die from denial of medical care by insurance, whose children are crippled from not being vaccinated for polio, who is homeless, all who are the waste products of capitalism have a hunting license for plutocrats signed by the Infinite.
Who is The People’s Union, and what companies are we boycotting?
As written by Anne Marie Lee in CBS MoneyWatch, in an article entitled Talk of a “Feb 28 Economic Blackout” is spreading on social media. What is it?; “Over the past few weeks, information has been spreading on social media about a nationwide economic protest called the “Feb 28 Economic Blackout.”
The call to action — or rather inaction — is asking that American consumers refrain from making any purchases at major retailers on Friday, Feb. 28. The protest comes as people continue to endure rising prices on everything from food and gas to housing and utilities, epitomized by the soaring cost of eggs which in January averaged $4.95 a dozen.
“I’m just not going to spend any money tomorrow,” said Pat Gavin-Gordon, 83, who lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Gavin-Gordon learned of the boycott from an email circulated among a small group of friends of hers which she describes as “socially responsible women who try to do things for the community and help people.”
A lifelong social activist, Gavin-Gordon said she marched along highway I-25 in Denver with civil rights leader Cesar Chavez in the ’70s. She sees Friday’s protest as a way to voice her disapproval of many things she said she sees going on today, from the cancellation of DEI by corporations to the Department of Government Efficiency’s firing of thousands of federal workers.
“All these young people were being laid off for bad performance, which is not true at all,” said Gavin-Gordon.
Also supporting the Economic Blackout is Isabel Cotarelo from Kingston, New York. “I’m all for 2/28 Economic Blackout to demonstrate that the majority of people don’t agree with the way things are being taking over the richest man in the world, how the oligarchs are supporting this government and only care about enriching themselves,” the 69-year-old artist told CBS MoneyWatch.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk — the world’s richest person, with a net worth of $398 billion — has been tasked by President Trump to oversee DOGE, in slashing government spending and cutting the federal workforce.
“One day of Economic Blackout may not impact the corporations gravely, but they will see that there is action and that action, hopefully, will inspire more people to resist this horrendous path my dear country is going through,” Cotarelo said.
What is the People’s Union USA?
Behind the boycott is a group called The People’s Union USA, a self-described grassroots organization founded by John Schwarz, a 57-year-old dad originally from Queens, New York, who has been promoting the consumer blackout for weeks on social media.
Founded by Schwarz this month, The People’s Union says it has no political affiliation, but focuses on “fairness, economic justice and real systemic change.”
Some postings for the event created by online supporters have suggested a targeted boycott of retailers like Ford, McDonald’s, Meta, Target and Walmart that have ended their DEI programs to comply with an executive order signed by President Trump in January. However, official messaging from The People’s Union suggests a boycott of all major retailers, with the goal of enacting broader economic change.
“What we’re doing here is trying to cause economic resistance against the corporations and politicians to stand for the people,” Schwarz told CBS MoneyWatch. “I think people may be able to, at some point, begin to kind of realize those things they’re letting divide us don’t really exist.”
“I agree with both,” said Gavin-Gordon of the two simultaneous protests — one for DEI and one for economic change — taking place in the form of a nationwide boycott of corporations on Friday.
“I have stock in Target and they’re a local company,” she said, adding that the Minnesota-based company was “so great” before it decided at the end of January to scale back its DEI programs, in response to the White House’s crack down on diversity initiatives.
“Oh, they were always giving to LGBT, everything like that. And to think they turn around and cave so quickly … is just infuriating to me,” Gavin-Gordon said. “And I’m really glad that two of the other companies I like a lot did not,” she added, referring to Apple and Costco, both of which rejected shareholder proposals to scrap their DEI programs.
“Those are two companies I like, and they did not cave with the DEI. That makes a big difference to me,” Gavin-Gordon said.
In a protest separate from the Feb. 28 Economic Blackout, activists in January called for an indefinite boycott on Target stores starting Saturday, Feb. 1.
The Economic Blackout has also received support from celebrities including John Leguizamo, Stephen King and Bette Midler, each of whom has posted information on the Economic Blackout on their social media accounts.
Schwarz, who not long ago had 11,000 followers on Instagram, where he goes by the handle theonecalledjai, as of this week has 250,000 followers, an accumulation he says occurred within seven days.
“It’s been really overwhelming,” said Schwartz, adding that traffic on the People’s Union website spiked to more than 600,000 views over the past week and the group gained 55,000 signatures for its newsletter.
Why Feb. 28?
Schwarz explains on Instagram that he originally picked the Feb. 28 date to provide “time to get amped up, to push this out there and really spread the word.”
What is the 24-hour Economic Blackout?
According to an email circulating for the 24-hour Economic Blackout, The People’s Union is urging consumers to halt all purchases, both online and in stores, from starting at 12 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 28 through 11:59 p.m. that same day.
The idea is to halt spending at big corporations, Schwarz said.
“If you have automatic payments linked up to your bank account of course, we’re not talking about disrupting your life,” he says in a video on Instagram. “But do not go out and shop at any big, major store — if you have to, go to the local pizza place, the small local boutique.”
Will the Feb. 28 blackout make an impact?
Consumer spending is the bedrock of the U.S. economy, contributing almost 70% of GDP, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. But some critics say that halting spending for a single day isn’t likely to make much impact on major retailers.
“A lot of people dismiss the idea, arguing that a one-day spending freeze won’t move the needle for major corporations or the broader financial system. And I agree — it’ll likely have a minimal direct impact,” Kevin Thompson, the CEO of 9i Capital Group, told Newsweek.
But, he added, the economic blackout could become bigger, snowballing into more events across the U.S. The People’s Union is planning additional blackouts aimed at specific retailers, such as an event from March 7-14 to halt spending at Amazon.
Schwarz expresses optimism in his videos that the economic blackout could make an impact. “If a million people on the 28th do not spend a dime, you might not think out of 360 million people in this country that’s a lot, but a million people all on one day not spending their money, that is a hit,” he said.
What if nothing changes on Friday?
“If 10,000 people don’t go shop on Friday, or 10 million don’t go shop on Friday, it doesn’t matter to me. It’s already started,” Schwarz said. “Friday’s our metaphorical shot in the air. It’s us saying we’re here. Like, it’s everybody who’s tired and exhausted.”
As written by Lauren Aratani in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘They’ve lost my trust’: consumers shun companies as bosses kowtow to Trump
Americans are using their wallet to hurt where it matters – including during Friday’s planned ‘economic blackout’; “n late January, Lauren Bedson did what many would likely find unthinkable: she cancelled her Amazon Prime membership. The catalyst was Donald Trump’s inauguration. Many more Americans are planning to make similar decisions this Friday.
Bedson made her move after seeing photos of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, sitting with other tech moguls and billionaires, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai, just rows behind Trump at his inauguration.
“I just couldn’t stand to see them so cowardly,” Bedson, of Camas, Washington, told the Guardian. “I lived in Seattle for over a decade. I was a fan of Amazon for a long time, I think they have a good product. But I’m just so disgusted. I don’t want to give these billionaire oligarchs any more of my money.”
It’s a sentiment that many Americans have been feeling since Trump entered the White House. Companies and business leaders who were once passive or vocally critical of Trump are now trying to cozy up to him, leading consumers to question the values of the brands they used to trust. A recent Harris poll found that a quarter of American consumers have stopped shopping at their favorite stores because of shifting political stances.
Many are being inspired by calls to boycott coming from social media. One boycott has gone viral over the last few weeks: a “blackout” of companies that dropped some of their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) goals, including Target, Amazon and Walmart, is planned for 28 February with protesters planning to halt all spending at these corporations for the day.
But people are also making the decision to boycott at their kitchen tables, trying to figure out how to resist Trump, and perhaps corporate capitalism at large, within their own communities.
The Guardian asked readers how their shopping habits have changed over the last few months, as the political climate started to shift after Trump’s win. Hundreds from across the country said that they have stopped shopping at stores such as Walmart and Target that publicly announced the end of DEI goals. Dozens like Bedson had cancelled long held Prime accounts. Others have shut down their Facebook and Instagram accounts in protest of Meta.
“I’m just trying to do little things that make me feel a little bit empowered, to stake my claim against what’s happening and how companies are acting in ways that are opposed to my values,” said Kim Wohlenhaus, of St Louis, Missouri, who cancelled her Prime membership, deleted her Meta accounts and has stopped shopping at Target. “It feels good to be able to do something.”
Erica Bradley, of Reno, Nevada, said she stopped shopping at Target because of their changing DEI policies.
“I don’t plan on going there ever again, just because I feel like they’ve shown that they’re not really committed to these things,” Bradley said. “They’ve lost my trust.”
For many consumers, the shift away from the big companies has revealed how much they have come to rely on them. As of last spring, 75% of American consumers had Amazon Prime memberships, a total of 180m Prime accounts, according to Bloomberg.
Bedson said cancelling her account made her aware of a culture of consumerism in American where “in some ways, it feels like we don’t have a choice”.
“Amazon is so convenient,” she said. “I think we all have become very complacent or complicit, and it’s hard to make these changes. But on the other hand, what else can we do?”
It’s been a year since Bradley cancelled her Prime account, after she saw Amazon’s union busting. She recalls a transition period as she was adjusting to life without Prime, but it ultimately led her to spend less overall.
“I just decided I don’t really need a lot of these things. Like I don’t need more clothes, I don’t really need more house decorations, which are things I used to spend a lot of money on,” Bradley said. “It’s not retail therapy anymore.”
The Harris poll found that a third of Americans are similarly trying to “opt out” of the economy, cutting down on overall spending as the political stances of corporations have become murky.
Kim Wohlenhaus deleted her Meta accounts: ‘We don’t care about your products as much as we care about values that we cherish.’ Photograph: Kim Wohlenhaus
“It’s like a Whac-a-Mole now,” Wohlenhaus said. “You could really look in any direction and find something you dislike about the way corporations are caving to this administration.”
Wohlenhaus said she has started to prioritize shopping at local businesses. She kept her Costco membership, since the company affirmed its DEI policies.
During Joe Biden’s presidency, many of the boycotts against companies actually came from conservatives who felt corporations were caving to a “woke” mob. But boycotts didn’t amount to any serious consequences – with two exceptions. Bud Light saw a drop in sales after it sponsored a post by a transgender influencer and Target removed some of its Pride merchandise after conservative backlash.
It’s unclear what the consequences of the current backlash will be. But Wohlenhaus and others voiced optimism that consumers are thinking critically about the choices they’re making at checkout.
“Hopefully if thousands of other families are doing what we’re doing, I think they’ll start to feel it,” she said. “We don’t care about your products as much as we care about those values that we cherish.”
As written by Adria R Walker in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘Hit them where it hurts’: Americans boycott corporations to protest anti-DEI policies; “On Friday, Americans across the country are participating in an economic boycott for 24 hours.
Organized by the People’s Union USA, a nonpartisan, grassroots organization, the boycott quickly picked up steam across social media, with thousands of users sharing posts with related hashtags. Participants are asked not to spend any money, and if they need to, it is recommended that they shop at a local, small business and pay in cash.
“February 28 is a symbolic start to economic resistance, a day where we show corporations and politicians that we control the economy,” reads the organization’s website. “The date itself is not tied to any historical event, it is the beginning of something bigger.”
Spurred by anger about companies rolling back their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, in response to large-scale government cuts by Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), some consumers are attempting to show their discontent with their wallets.
Hundreds of people from across the country responded to a Guardian questionnaire in which they detailed their decisions to stop shopping at stores like Target or Walmart and to stop using companies like Amazon, Meta and X (formerly Twitter), even if it is inconvenient.
Eric Butcher, a support group leader for the Alpha-1 Foundation, an organization that supports and provides resources for people with Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, said that he decided to participate in the boycott because it is “the only way that we can make folks understand that their decisions are affecting everyone.
“These billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos – they have an unprecedented amount of access to the government, to the president, to the congressional members,” said Butcher, who is from Bakersfield, California. “All the dark and powerful money has always been in our politics, but now it’s unprecedented. It’s so public and in your face. The only thing that they understand is money. So we have to hit them where it hurts.”
Butcher participated in the campaign because it was Rare Disease Day, he said, and has both Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency and Addison’s disease.
“With all the cuts to federal funding for healthcare, NIH, CDC, the impending cuts for Medicaid, Ssnap, the suggested cuts for social security, Medicare – this is gonna kill people. It’s gonna kill people that are my friends,” he said. “It could kill me.”
Lisa Rayner, a small business owner in Santa Fe, New Mexico, said that participating in the boycott was “no decision”. She receives social security disability income, and said that she was “horrified about what Elon Musk and Trump are doing together to destroy the US government”. The economic boycott is not Rayner’s first time using her wallet to show her values.
“I’ve always participated in economic boycotts, like Buy Nothing Day, which goes back more than 25 years,” she said. “Even though I am disabled and I shop at Amazon for some items, I made a decision last year after the election to stock up on a few essential items that I really needed and to spend as little as possible to do so. I’ve already cut down on expenses.”
Rayner said that her 82-year-old mother was also participating in the economic boycott. They see participation as a way to show that people can come together and organize in solidarity.
“[I hope] people learn that they can live without these big corporations,” she said. “Maybe it gives them time to reflect on how to live their lives differently as citizens rather than consumers and to feel like, yes, we can do it. We can cooperate, and we can beat them.”
Friday’s boycott is occurring simultaneously with other economic protests: We Are Somebody, a labor advocacy group, launched a boycott of Target that started on 1 February, to coincide with Black History Month, in response to Target’s decision to roll back DEI initiatives. Starting on 5 March, the first day of Lent, some Black faith leaders are calling on Christians to participate in a 40-day boycott of the company.
The Latino Freeze movement, a nonpartisan grassroots effort that supports immigrant and Latino communities, keeps a targeted boycott list and is also asking people to stop spending at certain companies “until they show us they care about our minority and immigrant populations of the United States”.
What is the place of the Boycott Campaign in the Resistance and the Revolution?
As written by Bernie Sanders in The Guardian, in an article entitled America must not surrender its democratic values: Together, we must fight for our long-held values and work with people around the world who share them; “For 250 years, the United States has held itself up as a symbol of democracy – an example of freedom and self-governance to which the rest of the world could aspire. People have long looked to our declaration of independence and constitution as blueprints for how to guarantee those human rights and freedoms.
Tragically, all of that is changing. As Donald Trump moves this country towards authoritarianism, he is aligning himself with dictators and despots who share his disdain for democracy and the rule of law.
This week, in a radical departure from longstanding US policy, the Trump administration voted against a United Nations resolution which clearly stated that Russia began the horrific war with Ukraine. That resolution also called on Russia to withdraw its forces from occupied Ukraine, in line with international law. The resolution was brought forward by our closest allies, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and dozens more democratic nations. And 93 countries voted “yes”.
Rather than side with our longstanding allies to preserve democracy and uphold international law, the president voted with authoritarian countries such as Russia, North Korea, Iran and Belarus to oppose the resolution. Many of the other opponents of that resolution are undemocratic nations propped up by Russian military aid.
Let’s be clear: this was not just another UN vote. This was the president of the United States turning his back on 250 years of our history and openly aligning himself with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. This was the president of the United States undermining the independence of Ukraine.
And let us not forget who Putin is. He is the man who crushed Russia’s movement towards democracy after the end of the cold war. He steals elections, murders political dissidents and crushes freedom of the press. He has maintained control in Russia by offering the oligarchs there a simple deal: if you give me absolute power, I will let you steal as much as you want from the Russian people. He sparked the bloodiest war in Europe since the second world war.
It has been three years since Russia’s brutal, unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine. More than 1 million people have been killed or injured because of Putin’s aggression. Every single day, Russia rains down hundreds of missiles and drones on Ukrainian cities. Putin’s forces have massacred civilians and kidnapped thousands of Ukrainian children, bringing them back to Russian “re-education” camps. These atrocities led the international criminal court to issue an arrest warrant for Putin in 2023 as a war criminal.
Not only is Trump aligning himself with Putin’s Russia, he is prepared to extort Ukraine for its natural resources. While a proud nation desperately fights for its life, Trump is focused on helping his billionaire friends make a fortune excavating rare earths and other minerals.
But Trump’s turn toward authoritarianism and rejection of international law goes well beyond Ukraine.
The president sees the world’s dictators as his friends, our democratic allies as his enemies and the use of military force as the way to achieve his goals. Disgracefully, he wants to push 2.2 million Palestinians out of their homeland in order to build a billionaire’s playground in Gaza. He talks openly about annexing Greenland from Denmark. He says the United States should take back the Panama canal. And he ruptures our friendship with our Canadian neighbors by telling them they should become the 51st state in the union.
Alongside his fellow oligarchs in Russia, Saudi Arabia and around the globe, Trump wants a world ruled by authoritarians in which might makes right, and where democracy and moral values cease to exist.
Just over a century ago, a handful of monarchs, emperors and tsars ruled most of the world. Sitting in extreme opulence, they claimed that absolute power was their “divine right”. But ordinary people disagreed.
Slowly and painfully, in countries throughout the world, they clawed their way toward democracy and rejected colonialism.
At our best, the US has played a key role in the movement toward freedom. From Gettysburg to Normandy, millions of Americans have fought – and many have died – to defend democracy, often alongside brave men and women from other nations.
This is a turning point – a moment of enormous consequence in world history. Do we go forward toward a more democratic, just and humane world? Or do we retreat back into oligarchy, authoritarianism, colonialism and the rejection of international law?
As Americans, we cannot stay quiet as Trump abandons centuries of our commitment to democracy. Together, we must fight for our long-held values and work with people around the world who share them.”
As written by Thom Hartmann in The Hartmann Report, in an article entitled The Billionaire Coup is Almost Complete and No One Stopped It — Can We Return to Democracy?; “There is one thread that ties together Trump’s destruction of American government agencies, his offer to take the Gaza crisis off Israel’s hands and dump it on our military, and senators’ and representatives’ failure to challenge him: This is how kingdoms operate. Rule by decree.
It proves that we’re asking the wrong question.
Plug “Can American democracy survive Trump?” into a search engine and you’ll find thousands of websites, blogs, articles, and podcasts devoted to that one, single question.
But American democracy was kneecapped by five Republicans on the Supreme Court years ago when they ruled that money was the same thing as “free speech”; that corporations are “persons” with rights under the Bill of [Human] Rights; and that political operatives can engage in virtually unlimited purges of voting rolls, accompanied by racial- and gender-targeted laws to make it harder to vote.
The correct question is: “Can the American system — now that it’s become flooded with dark money and the ‘right to vote’ has become a mere privilege in Red states — ever again represent the interests of average citizens? Can we ever return to democracy?”
In an open call on X yesterday with Republican Senators Joni Ernst and Mike Lee, apartheid billionaire Elon Musk — whose father says he was chauffeured to school in white-run South Africa in a Rolls Royce — lit into the regulations that created and protect the American middle class and our democracy:
“Regulations, basically, should be default gone. Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.”
In a child-like echo of Ayn Rand, Musk added:
“These regulations are added willy-nilly all the time. So, we’ve just got to do a wholesale, spring cleaning of regulation and get the government off the backs of everyday Americans so people can get things done. … If the government has millions of regulations holding everyone back, well, it’s not freedom. We’ve got to restore freedom.”
Both capitalism and democracy could be likened to a game — say, football — ideally played to benefit the largest number of people by creating and guaranteeing “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
But imagine if the NFL were to suspend their regulations just before this Sunday’s Super Bowl. And the Chiefs, like most elected Democrats, chose to continue playing by the old regulations, but the Eagles started gut-punching, facemask-pulling, and even threw five extra players onto the field.
The only team that would ever win would be the one most willing to play dirty or buy off the refs. And, increasingly, that’s where we are today, both with our democracy and our economy.
We know this is crazy: Every state in the union has put into place an agency to regulate insurance companies because that very industry has a long, horrible history of ripping people off and refusing to pay claims unless the power of the state is invoked against them.
We regulate banks and brokerages for the same reason; when we deregulated them in the 1920s and the late 1990s the result was huge rip-offs that produced the Republican Great Depression and the Bush Crash of 2008.
We regulate automobile manufacturers because they have a history of putting profits over the lives of their customers (Ford Pinto 900 dead, GM trucks 2000 dead, etc.); refineries because their emissions cause cancer and asthma; drugs because unscrupulous manufacturers killed people in previous eras; workplace safety after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed 146 young women; voting because corrupt politicians rigged elections.
We regulate traffic with signs and stoplights to keep order and reduce accidents; we regulate police to prevent them from abusing innocent people; we regulate building codes so peoples’ homes don’t collapse or catch on fire from faulty cheap wiring.
And there was a time in America when we regulated money in politics and guaranteed the right to vote.
Those two types of regulations were passed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries after multiple scandals, like in 1899 when William Clark — then the nation’s second-richest man — openly bribed Montana legislators by standing outside the legislative chamber passing out brand new $1000 bills to the men who voted his way. Or when state after state — most all former Confederate states — repeatedly refused to allow Black people to vote.
We passed regulations guaranteeing a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, and the right to unionize to create the world’s first large-scale middle class. And we regulated the morbidly rich with a 90% income tax rate to prevent them from amassing so much wealth that their financial power could become a threat to our democratic republic.
And, of course, it’s those regulations — money in politics, the right to vote, and preventing the accumulation of dangerous levels of wealth — to which today’s broligarchs most strenuously object.
In each case, it was five Republicans on the US Supreme Court who gutted our protective regulations and put America on a direct collision course with today’s oligarchic neofascist takeover.
— They ruled that billionaires can buy politicians because giving money in exchange for votes isn’t bribery, but merely an expression of First Amendment-protected “free speech.”
— They claimed that corporations aren’t soulless creations of the law but are “persons” with the same right to share their “free speech” with politicians who do their bidding.
— And they ruled that voting is not a right in America — in open defiance of US law — but a mere privilege, giving the green light to Republicans to purge or refuse to count over 4 million votes in the 2024 election.
The result of all this Republican corruption is that the will of the majority of American voters hasn’t been fulfilled in two generations. The last time our political system was truly responsive to the voters was in the 1960s, when Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps were created, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed. And in the early 1970s, when we outlawed big money in politics.
Then, in 1978, five Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled in the Bellotti decision (written by Lewis Powell himself) that corporations are persons and money is merely free speech. Two years later, Reagan floated into the White House on a river of oil money and systematically began gutting the protective regulations that had built the largest and most successful middle class the world had ever seen.
Since then, big money has frozen us like a mosquito in amber. Even Obama’s big effort to establish a national healthcare system with an option for Medicare had to kneel before the throne of rightwing billionaires and the insurance industry.
Every developed country in the world has some variation on a free or low-cost national healthcare system, and free or even subsidized higher education. In most developed countries homelessness is not a crisis, nobody goes bankrupt because somebody in their family got sick, and jobs pay well enough (and have union pensions) so people can retire after 30 or 40 years in the workforce and live comfortably for the rest of their lives.
But not in America. Since the Reagan Revolution, rightwing billionaires have blocked any of those things from happening because they’d be paid for with taxes, and there’s nothing rightwing billionaires hate more than paying taxes.
— Dark money has destroyed the notion of one-person-one-vote.
— Monopoly — allowed because corporations can now buy politicians — has destroyed the small businesses that once filled America’s malls and downtowns.
— And voter suppression and voter list purges handed the 2024 election to Trump, as reporter Greg Palast documented in a recent, shocking report.
So, yeah, let’s do away with all the regulations like wannabe Kings Elon and Donald say. And make the United States look and operate more like Syria and its failed-state relatives than anything Americans would recognize.
After all, freedumb!”
‘Hit them where it hurts’: Americans boycott corporations to protest anti-DEI policies
Everyone knows the shelves will soon be empty and the stock market will crash if the tariffs happen. Recovery from the Fourth Reich sabotage of the state will take two generations, around forty years. This is by design, for we will not have an economy able to resist conquest and Occupation by Russia. Every dollar of our GNP will be needed for brute survival of famine, plagues, and universal poverty
US consumer confidence plunges in February in its biggest decline in four years
Hundreds of Antifascist groups from all over Europe and beyond were in attendance and met over several days organizing the Antifascist International plans of action on several fronts, including the Ukraine and Palestine theatres of war wherein our Abraham Lincoln Brigades and other forces continue to fight for our freedom and our humanity.
This in balance with the CPAC meeting of fascists in Washington D.C. in the captured state of Vichy America; for tyranny and the social use of force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and always creates its own Resistance.
The Trump regime and Musk’s Destruction Of Government E-Hooligans have been illegally sending federal workers firing notices, demands to quit, and to send a list of what they have accomplished this week. A massive firewall of Resistance has blossomed throughout our government in response, and is pushing back with myriads of lawfare suits against this dark state of unelected and unvetted saboteurs of democracy, which seems to be winning.
My own list for this week includes intelligence, strategy, and policy guidance and planning for actions in Russia versus the Putin regime, in America versus the Trump regime, in Israel versus the Netanyahu regime, direct actions in solidarity with the liberation struggles of the people of Palestine, Ukraine, Myanmar, democracy and Resistance movements in Hong Kong, China, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, West Papua, the Philippines, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, East Timor, India, Kashmir, Haiti, Argentina, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Libya, and Africa, and antifascist operations in Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, and elsewhere.
From the Antifascist International World Congress in Berlin I went directly to Kyiv where representatives of national, EU, UN, and NATO governments where meeting in conferences to coordinate support of Ukraine without America, and in the shadows other forms of solidarity, allyship, and direct action against Russian forces and the Putin regime were gathering. Crucially this includes not only elements of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and their International Legionnaires, and the foreign intelligence and special operations forces who fight with them, but also members of the Russian Army who work with them against Putin and the invasion, Russian citizens who are democracy and peace activists, and other volunteers and partisans like myself and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of Ukraine which I founded and operates within Russia from Warsaw with our Russian counterparts. I was there to open a second headquarters in Kyiv to directly support Ukrainian and allied forces.
Zelensky must now negotiate for the survival of Ukraine with an American President who is a Russian agent, a lunatic, and an idiot; Zelensky intends to put a gold ring through Trump’s nose and teach him to dance like a circus pig, without being eaten in the process. In this Forlorn Hope Zelensky needs all the help he can get, and what we can do, will be done.
We are now at war in America against our own government, and we fight a war both of Resistance as disobedience, disbelief, and refusal to submit which includes bringing a Reckoning to those who would dehumanize, falsify, commodify, and enslave us, and of Revolution as bringing change to systems of unequal power and oppression, most especially those of white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror which includes class war and seizures of power.
All Resistance is War to the Knife, beyond pity, fear, and remorse, beyond all laws and all limits, for those who do not regard us as fellow human beings and respect no laws and no limits may hide behind none.
Let us run amok and be ungovernable.
In this sacred cause of our liberty and our universal human rights, wherein we unite in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s rights and as Chamberlain phrased it at the Battle of Gettysburg; “We are an army out to set other men free”, we who resist and refuse to submit to authority cannot be defeated and will inevitably be victorious in the end, for who cannot be compelled by force is free and has become Unconquered.
If we all do our part in whatever ways we can, and as the Oath of the Resistance goes “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
This, this, this.
When they come for us, as those who would enslave us always have and will, let them find not a people subjugated by division, learned helplessness, and despair, but a United Humankind in which we are all of us guarantors of each other’s humanity.
Our choices and actions in such Defining Moments become a forge of the soul by which we may reinvent ourselves. In the end what determines the quality of our humanity and who we will become among the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value and of becoming human as a seizure of power and self ownership of our identity is a simple thing, but not an easy one; how will you use your power?
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
Patriarchy and racism are systems of unequal power and oppression as sexual and white supremacist terror, and these are systemic mechanisms of control, falsification, commodification, and dehumanization spun of lies, illusions, false histories, and alternate realities, a wilderness of mirrors which distort and capture our images, and a nightmare from which humankind must awaken.
To this pathology of disconnectedness and the terror of our nothingness, to division, abjection, learned helplessness, and despair in the face of overwhelming force, I make reply with Buffy the Vampire Slayer quoting the instructions to priests in the Book of Common Prayer in episode eleven of season seven, Showtime, after luring an enemy into an arena to defeat as a demonstration to her recruits; “I don’t know what’s coming next. But I do know it’s gonna be just like this – hard, painful. But in the end, it’s gonna be us. If we all do our parts, believe it, we’ll be the one’s left standing. Here endeth the lesson.”
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
What is to be done, as Tolstoy and Lenin asked with such different results, the founding of nonviolence as a faith winnowed down do the Sermon On The Mount and carried onwards by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and in relief the Russian Revolution and all those it spawned.
For us the lesson of CPAC and the capture of the state by the Fourth Reich in Vichy America is clear and determinative as imposed conditions of struggle, in which all power is held by elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and the carceral state as embodied violence, in a world where law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just Authority; we are no longer bound by a false morality defined by those who would enslave us and who do regard us as human beings, and we may act to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness, beyond hope of victory or even survival, by any means necessary.
Everyone who goes hungry today, whose loved ones die from denial of medical care by insurance, whose children are crippled from not being vaccinated for polio, who is homeless, all who are the waste products of capitalism, have a hunting license for elites, fascists, racists, theocrats, enforcers, apologists, and functionaries of authority signed by the Infinite.
No state can legislate away our humanity and duty of care for each other. To this and to fascist tyranny and the aberrant and criminal regime of Traitor Trump, Rapist in Chief and his wrecking crew of hooligans bent on destruction of the state and the ideals and values of democracy, let us give the only reply it merits; Never Again!
What we’re fighting for: Chamberlain’s speech at Gettysburg
Here Endeth the Lesson: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season seven, episode eleven
“L’Internationale”
No ceasefire without security guarantees for Ukraine, says Zelenskyy – video
They Tried to Silence Her – They Failed | Francesca Albanese’s Berlin Keynote on Gaza Genocide
Despite police intimidation and last-minute venue changes, Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, delivered a historic speech in Berlin, at an event organised by DiEM25, Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, Eye4palestine and the Gaza Committee Berlin.
After the original venue was pressured into canceling the event, Junge Welt stepped in at the last minute to ensure this critical discussion could take place. But those who sought to silence it failed. Over 2,700 people tuned in live throughout the 8 hours of proceedings as Albanese exposed the brutal reality: the genocide in Gaza is undeniable, Germany is complicit, and free speech and international law are under attack.
This is a must-watch for anyone who believes in justice and refuses to be silenced.
Moderated by Wieland Hoban from Jewish Voice for Peace in the Middle East.
This week’s CPAC gathering of global fascist leadership holds up a mirror to the world the Fourth Reich and their front organization the Republican Party of America wants to condemn us to.
The Four Horsemen of the Fascist Apocalypse were performed by Trump, Musk, Vance, and Bannon who sieg heiled the crowd to triumphant and ecstatic cheers.
Fascism means that totalitarian power resides in one apex predator of systems of oppression and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, a carceral state of force and thought control wherein power is centralized absolutely and as Mussolini defined it adds corporate wealth and power to that of the state. It has re-emerged from the shadows globally because of one single driving force; capitalism is dying and in its terminal stage all wealth and power flow to the top, creating a mass precariat of de facto slave labor; we are witnesses to the process of capitalism freeing itself from its host political system of democracy.
This includes the use of faith and race in divide and conquer strategies of authoritarian state tyranny and terror and the institutionalization of white supremacist terror, theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and Gideonite Christian fundamentalist identity politics, as well as the total control of all information and history by the state as propaganda.
Fascism requires others who define the limits of membership and belonging; to make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence and a crime of hate.
Remember always the names of the fascists attending CPAC, among the most notorious Fourth Reich organizations of global tyranny and terror which in the arrogance of power does not conceal itself and its members, unlike myriads of other such cabals which conceal secret power and agendas of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege which wait as ambush predators to pounce on us from the shadows.
Remember, and bring a Reckoning.
When I call CPAC a terrorist organization of fascists and Nazi Revivalists, I mean this literally and not as a figure of speech.
As I wrote in my post of February 28 2021, Nazi Terror and Tyranny: SS Black Magic and Madness at the CPAC Anti-Democracy White Supremacist Rally;
When I write of hunting Nazis, I don’t mean people I disagree with; I mean actual Nazis, and only those who intend death and harm to others they consider subhuman. This week’s Conservative Political Action Caucus was designed and attended by Nazis, among them the descendants of war criminals our government collected to use against Communists and others they deemed subversive during the Red Scare of the 1950’s McCarthy Era.
They form a global network which I refer to as the Fourth Reich, a club whose membership is exclusive to families of the original Nazi loyalists, such as the Skorzenys and von Brauns among many others, thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands who have had seventy years in which to infiltrate the world’s governments and elites. I say this not as speculation or as a conspiracy theory, but as a simple fact, one which remains a threat to our liberty.
Someone knew enough about black magic as it was practiced by the SS to design the CPAC stage as a Nazi symbol, soul-stealing magic aimed at transferring the life force of the audience to the speaker for the purpose of submission to the leader’s will, exactly as it was used at the Nuremberg Rallies. It is a masterpiece of propaganda, a dog whistle hidden in plain sight which would have gone entirely unnoticed by outsiders but for the many vigilant Norse pagan antifascists who monitor social media.
Among them is my sister Erin, an infamous Nazi hunter and prominent Norse pagan and gythia or priestess, author of Asatru A Beginners Guide to the Heathen Path and manager of the Asatru facebook forum, literate in Old Norse and medieval forms of Celtic and German, and practitioner of the traditional arts of galdur or poetic vision, seidr or sacred trance, and berserkergangr or martial arts, and like myself an admirer of Loki the Trickster.
Here is her post on Witches and Pagans;
“The Nazi Symbol That Is the CPAC Stage
There are photos circulating on social media of the stage of CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Caucus. One is included in this blog post. The stage is an odd and awkward looking design that could not have arisen purely from functionality, it looks like “the Odal Rune,” and it appears that the speakers at CPAC will be standing on a Nazi platform.
Let’s talk about Othala as distinct from “The Odal Rune.” The symbol you see in the photo is “The Odal Rune” which is 100% a Nazi symbol. The upturned feet on the ends of the legs appear only on the Nazi version, Odal, not on any version of Othala, the historical rune used in historical heathen alphabets.
A curious thing, though. Modern rune magic has adopted the “symbol upside down = opposite” thing that is common to Tarot cards, aka regular or reversed, and of course the dichotomy between the regular cross and the upside down cross. From the perspective of speakers backstage, the symbol is right side up in this photo, but from the perspective of the audience it’s upside down. Regular Othala in rune readings basically means real estate or psychic inheritance, but the “Odal Rune” is usually said to mean “heritage.” So, whose “heritage” is being protected and encouraged in this photo? Not the audience’s. If whoever designed this stage actually understands magic, the intent is to concentrate power in the hands of the speakers, away from the general public. Magically, it would take heritage energy from the audience and allow the people standing on the platform to vampirize that energy for their own use.
If the intent behind the choice of the shape was not magical, though, it’s probably meant to be a dog-whistle to neonazis. Experts on neonazis are mostly being more cautious about calling this out. American Iron Front tweeted the picture and called it “probably a coincidence.” I’m glad that the anti-fascist community is being careful not to stomp on heathens and pagans when they aren’t sure what symbol they’re looking at. But I’m an expert on heathen symbols and I know this isn’t one. There is no possible way an actual Asatruar drew the footed or winged version on a design program thinking it was a nice historical heathen rune. It’s unlikely the stage designer is heathen, anyway. That is not Othala, the heathen rune, it’s Odal, the Nazi symbol.
You can read about more symbols in my article Heathen Vs. Hate in the latest issue of Witches & Pagans Magazine.”
As written of this year’s CPAC by David Smith, in an article in The Guardian entitled The deification of Trump will be complete’ at CPAC 2025: The conservative conference, dismissed as ‘an extremist freak show’, has been revived under the president’s hand; ““I am your retribution.”
When Donald Trump made this solemn promise to his supporters at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) two years ago, millions of Americans felt comfortable looking the other way.
After all, opinion polls suggested that Trump was a spent force in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, disappointing midterm elections and a lacklustre start to his US presidential election campaign. He was the closing act of a CPAC that critics dismissed as a fringe freak show with obscure speakers addressing a half-empty ballroom.
It won’t feel like that this time. CPAC 2025 kicks off at the National Harbor in Maryland on Wednesday with Trump set to return in triumph after regaining the White House and with Republican allies in control of Congress. The conference will be a vivid demonstration of how his “Make America great again” (Maga) movement has gone from the margins to the mainstream.
“CPAC always been the ideological north star for the conservative grassroots movement,” said Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill who used to regularly attend the conference. “Unless you weren’t paying attention, CPAC was the roadmap for what Maga becoming mainstream would look like and what they wanted to accomplish.”
The history of CPAC mirrors the recent history of the Republican party. It began in 1974 in the throes of the Watergate scandal and the birth of a new conservative movement. The first CPAC was addressed by Ronald Reagan, then governor of California and destined for the White House. An annual dinner is still held in Reagan’s honour.
The event spent years in the wilderness during Barack Obama’s presidency: the further its voices were from power, the louder they shouted. Among the speakers in 2011 was a businessman, TV celebrity and former Democrat from New York named Donald Trump, airing a grievance that America was being ripped off by China.
In 2015, CPAC heard from nearly all the major Republican presidential candidates, including Trump and Jeb Bush, but a year later Trump cancelled his planned appearance amid fears that he would be booed by protesters. It did not prevent his hostile takeover of the Republican party by winning both the nomination and the presidency.
CPAC impresario Matt Schlapp, a veteran of the George W Bush White House, then made a big bet on Trump as the future. The conference went all-in for Maga, casting Trump as a messianic figure saving America from illegal immigration and woke culture. His 2020 election defeat and the January 6 riot made no difference. A dedicated marketplace inside the event continued to sell Maga merchandise.
At last year’s event, as he closed in on the Republican nomination again, Trump described himself as a “proud political dissident” and his myriad legal troubles as “Stalinist show trials” orchestrated by then president Joe Biden. He promised the election would be “liberation day” for his supporters but “judgment day” for perceived enemies who had weaponised the government against him.
The old Republican party, meanwhile, was left far behind. Trump has used CPAC to attack its establishment figures as “freaks, neocons, globalists, open border zealots, and fools”. Out are Liz Cheney, Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence; in are far-right nationalists such as Steve Bannon from the US, Viktor Orbán from Hungary and Nigel Farage from Britain.
The lineup of speakers announced so far this year includes both Bannon and Farage along with the border czar, Tom Homan; the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, the US ambassador-designate to the United Nations, Elise Stefanik; senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Rick Scott of Florida; the rightwing media personality Megyn Kelly; Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder; the Argentinian president, Javier Milei; and the British ex-prime minister Liz Truss.
CPAC did not respond to an email asking whether this year’s conference will also include Elon Musk, the tech oligarch appointed by Trump to shrink the federal government, or individuals recently pardoned by the president for taking part in the January 6 insurrection.
But nothing will top the expected appearance by Trump himself after what has been billed as the greatest political comeback in history. His early efforts to crush illegal immigration, transgender rights and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes are sure to receive ecstatic cheers. His claim that, in surviving an assassination attempt, he was “saved by God to make America great again” will be embraced with religious fervour.
Setmayer, who now leads the Seneca Project, a women-led super political action committee, commented: “The deification of Trump will be complete ad nauseam at CPAC this year. We’ve already seen a golden calf-like statue of him. I’m not quite sure what’s next, but they’ll figure it out.”
One potential measure of CPAC’s devotion to Trump will be its annual straw poll, which asks attendees to state their preference for the next Republican presidential nominee. Senator Rand Paul topped the poll in 2013, 2014 and 2015 while Ted Cruz prevailed in 2016 with 40% of the vote, ahead of Marco Rubio at 30% and Trump at 15%.
Trump has dominated ever since. He is constitutionally barred from running for a third term but has repeatedly hinted that he might try. Congressman Andy Ogles has even introduced a constitutional amendment that would allow Trump to run again. Setmayer believes that next week’s CPAC straw poll will include him – and he will win it again.
“They absolutely will do it again and Trump will overwhelmingly win at North Korea-style numbers and he will continue to talk about a third term,” she said. “This is not a joke. He has been talking about this since his first term. He talked about it during the election in ‘jest’ and he’s been talking about it already three weeks into his new term. We need to pay attention to what they are doing concerning our elections.”
Trump’s resurrection is a boost for CPAC, which has survived scandals of its own. Schlapp was hit by allegations that he groped a Republican operative’s genitals when the two men were alone in a car after a campaign event in Georgia in 2022. Carlton Huffman’s lawsuit was dropped last year after a reported $480,000 settlement.
Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, observed: “They never got him. He was so close. Of course in this day and time nothing matters. Trump has made anything possible.”
In recent years Schlapp has sought to ride the nationalist-populist wave by staging CPAC events in Hungary and Argentina. Next week’s return to the National Harbor in Maryland will feel like vindication for a movement that just a few years ago seemed to be heading off a cliff to irrelevance. Now CPAC believes it represents the new political orthodoxy.
Steve Schmidt, a political strategist and former campaign operative for George W Bush and John McCain, said: “This is an extremist freak show that retains that quality but has taken political power in the United States. By any reasonable definition, what you’re looking at is a gathering of fascists, political extremists coming together, a fusion of the youth arm, the Christian nationalist arm, the Catholic Maga extremist arm.”
Schmidt added: “It is an event that portends what’s coming. These people have immense power. This should all be taken literally and seriously. Millions and millions of Americans who voted for Donald Trump should appreciate that this is what they purchased and what they purchased is now emboldened. There will be a very pungent nationalism present – and extremism lurking below the surface.”
CPAC Motivational and Recruitment film, screened at offsite facility under the title The World We Fight To Win:
The Triumph of the Will (1935) (English Subtitles)
Who shall say what we have been and may become, we humans? Who shall be granted this power, and are they to be chosen by us for their wisdom and vision, or by themselves in service to their own power and our subjugation and dehumanization?
Time is a Rashomon Gate of relative truths, alternate realities, the destruction and creation of possible futures by subtle actions like a hurricane driven by the movements of a hummingbird’s wings.
Each of our lives is such a fulcrum of change, filled with numberless beginnings of possible selves and the Defining Moments of terror and joy which make us human.
In Ukraine, Palestine, and other lines of fracture in our humanity and the world order of democracy, our solidarity as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and faith in each other is tested, as are the founding principles, values, and ideals of our civilization and world order as a praxis of the Enlightenment and democracy.
What is the meaning of the invasion of Ukraine?
Here we may look to its precedents as Last Stands, battles, and sieges; Thermopylae, Malta, Washington crossing the Delaware and the Battle of Trenton, Gallipoli, Stalingrad, and its direct parallel the Siege of Sarajevo. Moments of decision wherein the civilization of humankind hung in the balance, and with it our future possibilities of becoming human.
Who do we want to become, we humans; slaves and tyrants or a free society of equals? And how much of our humanity are we willing to trade for the chance of such futures?
What of ourselves can we not afford to lose, without also losing who we are? How much of our humanity can we claw back from the darkness in refusal to submit to those who would enslave us, and in solidarity with each other?
We must each of us face our own Gate of Fire, as did the Spartans at Thermopylae, and choose.
What are we worth, if we permit ruthless bandit kings to commit atrocities, plunder, and enslave others?
What is western civilization worth, if we will not live up to our fine words? And fine words they remain, such as these written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a synthesis and revisioning of ideas from Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
What is America, if not a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights, and a beacon of hope to the world?
Let us reply with the words written by J.R.R. Tolkien between 1937 and 1955 in his luminous reimagination of the Second World War and the conflict of dominion which immediately followed it between tyranny and democracy, first against fascism and then between the allies who defeated it as spheres of dominion and systems of economic and political organization but both for different dreams of a free society of equals, in the iconic speech of Aragorn at the Black Gate in The Return of the King which unites ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos; “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight.”
Join us.
As I wrote in my post of June 3 2022, One Hundred Days of the Invasion of Ukraine; For one hundred days now, a great struggle between democracy and tyranny, love and hate, hope and fear has been raging in Ukraine, where the fate of humankind hangs in the balance and our future possibilities of becoming human are being chosen in the great game of chance that is war.
Here, as in far too many times and places, a few unconquerable heroes and those who stand with them in solidarity as a band of brothers against the darkness of barbarian atavisms of brute fear and force and a nihilistic regime wherein only power has meaning and fear is the only means of exchange, die in the forlorn hope of buying with their lives time for civilization to awaken to the threat of fascist tyranny and imperial conquest.
How will we answer the test of our humanity in this moment of existential threat? Who do we want to become, we humans? A free society of equals or a world of masters and slaves?
For these are the stakes of this game in which we now play, the Third World War; liberty or tyranny.
When those who would enslave us come for us, as they always do, let them find not a people subjugated by learned helplessness nor divided by hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, but a United Humankind unconquerable in solidarity and refusal to submit.
To tyranny and fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
Herein is my witness of history and truth telling in this, the First General History of World War Three. As with all things human, it is also fiction except when it is not, myth when it can be, poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value and of our limitless future possibilities of becoming human.
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 ownership of ourselves.
Herein I offer apology for my digressive ars poetica; once I sailed upon the Lake of Dreams, was wooed by Beauty but claimed by Vision; and in such visions I fell into a sea of words, images, songs, histories, layered and interconnected with one another like a web of reflections and the echoes of voices lost in time, a wilderness of mirrors which capture and distort and extend ourselves infinitely in all directions.
Here is a shadow self of our histories which we drag around behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tale, legacies from which we must emerge to create ourselves anew and those which we cannot abandon without losing who we are.
Here my intertexts are manifest, seize and shake me with tumultuous voices and untrustworthy purposes, for where do our histories end and we begin?
We cannot escape each other, my shadows and I.
War transforms the question of our authorship of ourselves with existential primacy; where do we ourselves end, and others begin? How may we negotiate this boundary of the Forbidden and interface with alien realms of human being, meaning, and value, with division and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness or with solidarity, diversity, and inclusion, with fear or with love?
How much of our humanity are we willing to sacrifice for the chance of a better future, and to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness?
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
There are no Ukrainians, no Russians; only people like ourselves, and the choices they make about how to be human together.
This Day We Fight: Aragorn’s Speech at the Black Gate
Origins of the Third World War
March 14 2022 Origins of the Third World War, Part 1: the Syrian Theatre in the Russian-Turkish Conflict for Dominion of the Middle East
A History of the Third World War, Part Nine: the Ukraine Theatre of War
This chapter you are reading now, and now are also writing, for it is each of us who will together choose a future for humankind. The nature of that choice is become unambiguous and simple with the invasion of Ukraine and the dawn of World War Three; tyranny or liberty?
In one of these choices and one only, we may win a future where something resembling ourselves looks back centuries from now on this moment of civilizational collapse or rebirth, with questioning, hope, and wonder.
“God Bless Us, every one” as Dickens wrote in A Christmas Carol, the story which founded the modern holiday and originated Liberation Theology in wedding Marx to the Sermon on the Mount. In this time of darkness, we must answer division with solidarity, fear with love, despair with hope, fascism and tyranny with resistance, and the terror of our nothingness with the joy of total freedom.
The Tenth Theatre of World War Three: Palestine
(Yes, it’s all the same war)
January 29 2024 Where Do We Go From Here? As the Gaza War Becomes A Great Powers Proxy War and a Theatre of World War Three, and the Arab-American Alliance With Our Colony Israel Versus the Iranian Dominion of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen With Their Key Ally Russia Make A Wishbone of the Holy Land
25 лютого 2024 р. Перша загальна історія Третьої світової війни
Хто скаже, ким ми були і можемо стати, ми люди? Кому буде надано цю владу, і чи вони будуть обрані нами за їхню мудрість і бачення, чи самі для служіння своїй власній владі та нашому підкоренню та дегуманізації?
Час — це Рашомонська брама відносних істин, альтернативних реальностей, руйнування та створення можливого майбутнього за допомогою витончених дій, як ураган, керований рухами крил колібрі.
Кожне наше життя — це така точка опори змін, наповнена незліченними початками можливого «я» та визначальними моментами жаху й радості, які роблять нас людьми.
В Україні перевіряється наша солідарність як гарантів універсальних прав людини та віра один в одного, а також основоположні принципи, цінності та ідеали нашої цивілізації та світового порядку як практики Просвітництва та демократії.
У чому сенс вторгнення в Україну?
Тут ми можемо поглянути на його прецеденти, такі як останні битви, битви та облоги; Фермопіли, Мальта, перехід Вашингтона через Делавер і битва при Трентоні, Галліполі, Сталінград і його пряма паралель Облога Сараєво. Моменти рішення, коли цивілізація людства зависла на волосині, а з нею й наші майбутні можливості стати людьми.
Ким ми хочемо стати, ми, люди; раби і тирани чи вільне суспільство рівних? І скільки нашої людяності ми готові обміняти заради шансу на таке майбутнє?
Що з себе ми не можемо дозволити собі втратити, не втративши при цьому те, ким ми є? Скільки нашої людяності ми можемо вирвати з темряви, відмовляючись підкорятися тим, хто хотів би нас поневолити, і солідарними один з одним?
Кожен із нас має зіткнутися зі своїми Вогняними Воротами, як це зробили спартанці у Фермопілах, і вибрати.
Чого ми варті, якщо дозволяємо безжальним королям-бандитам чинити звірства, грабувати та поневолювати інших?
Чого варта західна цивілізація, якщо ми не будемо відповідати нашим гарним словам? І вони залишаються гарними словами, такими як написані Томасом Джефферсоном у Декларації незалежності 1776 року, узагальненні та перегляді ідей Гоббса, Локка, Монтеск’є, Вольтера та Руссо; «Ми вважаємо ці істини самоочевидними, що всі люди створені рівними та наділені їхнім творцем певними невід’ємними правами, серед яких Життя, Свобода та прагнення до щастя».
Що таке Америка, як не гарант демократії та наших універсальних прав людини, а також маяк надії для світу?
Давайте відповімо словами Дж.Р.Р. Толкієн між 1937 і 1955 роками у своєму яскравому переосмисленні Другої світової війни та конфлікту панування, що одразу послідував за нею, між тиранією та демократією, спочатку проти фашизму, а потім між союзниками, які перемогли його як сфери панування та системи економічної та політичної організації але обидва для різних мрій про вільне суспільство рівних, у знаковій промові Арагорна біля Чорних воріт у «Поверненні короля», яка об’єднує етос, логос, пафос і кайрос; «Може настати день, коли мужність людей занепаде, коли ми покинемо своїх друзів і розірвемо всі узи товариства, але це не цей день. Година вовків і розбитих щитів, коли вік людей рухається, але це не цей день. Цього дня ми боремося».
Приєднайся до нас.
Як я писав у своєму дописі від 3 червня 2022 року, Сто днів вторгнення в Україну; Ось уже сто днів в Україні точиться велика боротьба між демократією і тиранією, любов’ю і ненавистю, надією і страхом, де на волосині висить доля людства і у великій грі вибираються наші майбутні можливості стати людьми. випадковість, тобто війна.
Тут, як у надто багато разів і місць, кілька непереможних героїв і ті, хто солідарний з ними, як група братів, проти темряви варварських атавізмів грубого страху та сили та нігілістичного режиму, де лише влада має сенс і страх є єдиним засобом обміну, помирають у марній надії купити за своє життя час, щоб цивілізація прокинулася перед загрозою фашистської тиранії та імперського завоювання.
Як ми відповімо на випробування нашої людяності в цей момент екзистенційної загрози? Ким ми хочемо стати, ми, люди? Вільне суспільство рівних чи світ панів і рабів?
Бо це ставки цієї гри, в яку ми зараз граємо, Третя світова війна; свобода чи тиранія.
Коли ті, хто хотів би нас поневолити, прийдуть за нами, як вони це завжди роблять, нехай вони знайдуть не людей, підкорених вивченою безпорадністю чи розділених ієрархіями приналежності та виняткової відмінності, а Об’єднане Людство, непереможне в солідарності та відмові підкорятися.
На тиранію і фашизм може бути лише одна відповідь; Ніколи знову!
Ось моє свідчення історії та правди в цій, Першій загальній історії Третьої світової війни. Як і з усім людським, це також
вигадка, за винятком випадків, коли вона не є, міф, коли вона може бути, поетичне бачення та переосмислення та трансформація людського буття, значення та цінності та наших безмежних майбутніх можливостей стати людьми.
Хіба ми не ті історії, які розповідаємо про себе, собі та іншим?
Завжди залишається боротьба між масками, які ми робимо для себе, і тими, які роблять для нас інші.
Це перша революція, в якій ми всі повинні боротися; боротьба за володіння собою.
Тут я прошу вибачення за моє відступне ars poetica; одного разу я плив по Озеру Мрій, мене залицяла Краса, але вимагало Бачення; і в таких видіннях я потрапляв у море слів, образів, пісень, історій, багатошарових і взаємопов’язаних одне з одним, як мережа відображень і відлуння голосів, загублених у часі, пустелю дзеркал, які захоплюють, спотворюють і нескінченно розширюють нас у всіх напрямках.
Ось тінь нашої історії, яку ми тягнемо за собою, як невидима рептилійна історія, спадщина, з якої ми повинні вийти, щоб створити себе заново, і те, від якого ми не можемо відмовитися, не втративши те, ким ми є.
Тут проявляються мої інтертексти, захоплюють і стрясають мене бурхливими голосами та недостовірними цілями, бо де закінчуються наші історії і починається ми?
Ми не можемо втекти одне від одного, мої тіні і я.
Війна перетворює питання про наше авторство самих себе на екзистенціальний примат; де закінчуються ми самі, а починаються інші? Як ми можемо подолати цю межу Забороненого та зіткнутися з чужими сферами людського буття, значення та цінності, з поділом та ієрархіями приналежності та винятковою відмінністю чи з солідарністю, різноманітністю та включеністю, зі страхом чи любов’ю?
Зрештою, все, що має значення, це те, що ми робимо зі своїм страхом і як ми використовуємо свою силу.
Немає ні українців, ні росіян; лише такі люди, як ми, і вибір, який вони роблять щодо того, як бути людьми разом.
Russian
25 февраля 2024 г. Первая всеобщая история Третьей мировой войны
Кто скажет, кем мы были и можем стать, люди? Кому будет предоставлена эта власть, и должны ли они быть выбраны нами за их мудрость и дальновидность, или они сами будут служить своей собственной власти и нашему порабощению и дегуманизации?
Время — это Врата Расёмон относительных истин, альтернативных реальностей, разрушения и создания возможного будущего тонкими действиями, подобными урагану, вызванному движениями крыльев колибри.
Каждая из наших жизней — это точка опоры перемен, наполненная бесчисленными началами возможных «я» и определяющими моментами ужаса и радости, которые делают нас людьми.
В Украине проверяется наша солидарность как гарантов универсальных прав человека друг друга и вера друг в друга, а также основополагающие принципы, ценности и идеалы нашей цивилизации и мирового порядка как практики Просвещения и демократии.
В чем смысл вторжения в Украину?
Здесь мы можем рассмотреть его прецеденты, такие как «Последние сражения», сражения и осады; Фермопилы, Мальта, форсирование Вашингтона через Делавэр и битва при Трентоне, Галлиполи, Сталинград и его прямая параллель – Осада Сараево. Моменты принятия решения, когда цивилизация человечества висела на волоске, а вместе с ней и наши будущие возможности стать человеком.
Кем мы хотим стать, мы, люди; рабы и тираны или свободное общество равных? И какую часть нашей человечности мы готовы отдать за шанс на такое будущее?
Что из себя мы не можем позволить себе потерять, не потеряв при этом самих себя? Какую часть нашей человечности мы сможем вырвать из тьмы, отказываясь подчиниться тем, кто хочет нас поработить, и проявляя солидарность друг с другом?
Каждый из нас должен встретиться со своими Огненными Вратами, как это сделали спартанцы в Фермопилах, и сделать выбор.
Чего мы стоим, если позволяем безжалостным бандитским королям совершать зверства, грабить и порабощать других?
Чего стоит западная цивилизация, если мы не будем соответствовать нашим прекрасным словам? И они остаются прекрасными словами, такими как слова, написанные Томасом Джефферсоном в Декларации независимости в 1776 году, представляющие собой синтез и пересмотр идей Гоббса, Локка, Монтескье, Вольтера и Руссо; «Мы считаем самоочевидными истины, что все люди созданы равными и наделены своим создателем определенными неотъемлемыми правами, среди которых жизнь, свобода и стремление к счастью».
Что такое Америка, если не гарант демократии и наших всеобщих прав человека и маяк надежды для мира?
Ответим словами Дж.Р.Р. Толкин между 1937 и 1955 годами в своем ярком переосмыслении Второй мировой войны и последовавшего сразу за ней конфликта доминирования между тиранией и демократией, сначала против фашизма, а затем между союзниками, которые победили его как сферы доминирования и системы экономической и политической организации. но оба они о разных мечтах о свободном обществе равных, в культовой речи Арагорна у Черных ворот в «Возвращении короля», которая объединяет этос, логос, пафос и кайрос; «Может наступить день, когда мужество людей иссякнет, когда мы оставим наших друзей и разорвем все узы товарищества, но это не этот день. Час волков и разбитых щитов, когда эпоха людей рухнет, но это не этот день. Сегодня мы сражаемся».
Присоединяйтесь к нам.
Как я писал в своем посте от 3 июня 2022 года «Сто дней вторжения в Украину»; Вот уже сто дней в Украине бушует великая борьба между демократией и тиранией, любовью и ненавистью, надеждой и страхом, где на волоске висит судьба человечества и в большой игре выбираются наши будущие возможности стать человеком. случайно это война.
Здесь, как и во многих других местах и временах, несколько непобедимых героев и те, кто солидарны с ними, как группа братьев, против тьмы варварских атавизмов грубого страха и силы и нигилистического режима, в котором только сила имеет смысл и страх. являются единственным средством обмена, умирают в тщетной надежде купить своей жизнью время, чтобы цивилизация пробудилась к угрозе фашистской тирании и имперского завоевания.
Как мы ответим на испытание нашей человечности в этот момент экзистенциальной угрозы? Кем мы хотим стать, мы, люди? Свободное общество равных или мир господ и рабов?
Таковы ставки в игре, в которую мы сейчас играем, в Третью мировую войну; свобода или тирания.
Когда те, кто хочет поработить нас, придут за нами, как они всегда это делают, пусть они найдут не народ, порабощенный выученной беспомощностью и не разделенный иерархиями принадлежности и исключающего инаковости, а Единое Человечество, непобедимое в солидарности и отказе подчиняться.
На тиранию и фашизм может быть только один ответ; Больше никогда!
Вот мое свидетельство истории и правды в этой «Первой всеобщей истории Третьей мировой войны». Как и все человеческое, это также
вымысел, за исключением тех случаев, когда это не так, миф, когда это возможно, поэтическое видение, переосмысление и трансформация человеческого существа, смысла и ценности, а также наших безграничных будущих возможностей стать человеком.
Разве мы не те истории, которые мы рассказываем о себе, себе и другим?
Всегда остается борьба между масками, которые мы делаем для себя, и масками, которые делают для нас другие.
Это первая революция, в которой мы все должны бороться; борьба за право собственности на себя.
Здесь я приношу извинения за свое отступление от поэтического искусства; однажды я плыл по Озеру Снов, за мной ухаживала Красота, но требовало Видение; и в таких видениях я падал в море слов, образов, песен, историй, наслоенных и связанных друг с другом, как паутина отражений и отголосков голосов, затерянных во времени, пустыня зеркал, которые захватывают, искажают и расширяют нас бесконечно во всех направлениях.
Это теневое «я» нашей истории, которое мы тащим за собой, как невидимая сказка рептилий, наследие, из которого мы должны выйти, чтобы создать себя заново, и то, от чего мы не можем отказаться, не потеряв того, кто мы есть.
Здесь проявляются мои интертексты, захватывают и потрясают меня шумными голосами и ненадежными целями, ибо где кончаются наши истории и начинаются мы?
Мы не можем избежать друг друга, мои тени и я.
Война трансформирует вопрос о нашем авторстве самих себя, приобретая экзистенциальное превосходство; где кончаются мы сами и начинаются другие? Как мы можем преодолевать эту границу Запретного и взаимодействовать с чуждыми сферами человеческого бытия, смысла и ценностей, с разделением и иерархиями принадлежности и исключающей инаковости или с солидарностью, разнообразием и включением, со страхом или с любовью?
В конце концов, имеет значение только то, что мы делаем со своим страхом и как мы используем свою силу.
Нет ни украинцев, ни русских; только такие люди, как мы, и выбор, который они делают в отношении того, как быть людьми вместе.
Ukraine Solidarity Under the Trump Administration
Ukraine Solidarity Network
On the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the United States under the Trump administration is now pushing negotiations for a “peace” settlement. The Ukraine Solidarity Network-U.S. (USN) opposes any attempt to impose a settlement that is not acceptable to the Ukrainian people.
Anyone with an ounce of compassion wants this war to end as soon as possible, but it is morally unacceptable for outsiders to demand that Ukraine surrender. USN continues to support the right of the Ukrainian people to self-determination and to decide for themselves what are acceptable terms for a peace deal. USN will continue to build moral, political, and material support for the people of Ukraine in their resistance to Russia’s invasion, to its occupation of Ukrainian lands, and to its repressive rule over people in the Russian-occupied territories. USN will continue to support Ukraine’s war of resistance, its right to determine the means and objectives of its own struggle, and its right to obtain the weapons it needs from any available source.
USN opposes the changes in US policy on Ukraine for the worse under the new Trump administration. The Biden administration at least condemned Russia’s illegal war of aggression and supported Ukraine’s self-defense, even if that military aid came with many strings attached and was often too little and too late to defeat the Russian army on Ukrainian land.
Now the Trump administration is posturing as a “neutral” broker between Russia and Ukraine, as if the aggressor and its victim are equally at fault. But in practice, the Trump administration is publicly supporting Russian demands and rejecting Ukrainian demands. Trump’s calls for U.S. “ownership” of Gaza in Palestine and for U.S. annexation of Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal are as brazenly imperialist as Putin’s attempt to annex Ukraine.
USN opposes any attempt by the Trump administration to make a deal with Putin over the heads of the Ukrainians and to try to force it on Ukraine by threatening to withdraw humanitarian, economic, and military support for Ukraine. We further condemn the Trump administration’s demands for effective control of Ukraine’s mineral resources and other economic assets. The Trump administration has already frozen billions of dollars in humanitarian and economic aid that supports millions of Ukrainians, including:
Millions of displaced war refugees inside Ukraine and abroad
Tens of thousands of disabled veterans
More than 100,000 HIV/AIDS patients
Firewood for people without power due to Russia’s war crime of bombarding civilian energy infrastructure
Repair and reconstruction of power plants and distribution grids
Grants to small farmers for seeds, fertilizer, and the replacement and repair of war-damaged farm equipment, grain storage silos, and ports for food exports
Independent media and civic organizations
Budget support for social services and public utilities
The Trump administration has also disbanded the Department of Justice task force charged with enforcing sanctions and anti-corruption laws against Russia’s wealthy political elites and oligarchs.
As the Russian war against Ukraine enters its fourth year, USN will continue to work for Ukraine’s victory over the Russian invaders, criminal accountability for their war crimes, and their payment of reparations to fund reconstruction.
We support the armed and unarmed resistance of Ukrainians against the Russian occupying power.
We support economic sanctions against Russia’s war machinery, including its political, military, and economic elite, its access to the international financial system, its imports of weapons-related technology, and its exports of fossil fuels.*
We demand that all Russians incarcerated for war resistance and political dissent be freed and that war resisters and political dissidents seeking refuge abroad be granted asylum.
We demand that the tens of thousands of Ukrainian children kidnapped to Russia and Belarus be returned to Ukraine.
We demand that the tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians from Russian-occupied territories incarcerated for opposition to the occupation be released and returned to Ukraine.
We support asylum in the U.S. for Ukrainians, Russians, Belorussians, Haitians, Venezuelans, Afghans and all people seeking refuge from political repression and war.
We demand the cancellation of all of Ukraine’s illegitimate and unjust foreign debts.
We demand the confiscation of Russian assets abroad to be used to support Ukraine’s military self-defense, social services, and post-war reconstruction.
We oppose the U.S. policy of imposing a neoliberal economic agenda on Ukraine today and for its post-war reconstruction.
The Ukrainians’ struggle for self-determination, democracy and social justice will continue. We support the political struggles of Ukrainian trade unions, women’s organizations, environmental initiatives, and progressive political organizations to reverse the neoliberal anti-labor and anti-social policies of the Ukrainian government, to expand social, labor, and democratic rights, and to implement a just and ecological reconstruction of Ukraine. We will continue to build material aid and public education campaigns linking trade unions, civic organizations, and progressive political organizations in the U.S. with their counterparts in Ukraine. We urge all opponents of imperialism to join us.
* The question of sanctions is complicated and controversial among activists committed to Ukraine’s struggle. It’s especially important in the USA that we do not accommodate to the predatory politics of the imperialist U.S. state. The Ukraine Solidarity Network will be discussing these issues as the betrayal of Ukraine unfolds in collaboration with our Ukrainian comrades whose lives and national freedom are on the line.
Torch of Liberty 
