Australia’s Invasion Day, which today marks two hundred thirty seven years of the terror and tragedy of the European Conquest of a continent as a day of indigenous mourning and solidarity of action, was held in protest against the national holiday Australia Day, a parallel with America’s dichotomous Columbus Day/Indigenous People’s Day.
Such tragedies of historical injustice and their legacies in ongoing multigenerational trauma and epigenetic harms are not isolated to any particular nation, but as systemic imperial conquest and colonialism and racist dehumanization and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and belonging weaponized in service to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and enforced by carceral states of force and control are endemic and pervasive throughout our world.
And this we must resist. Not only the tyrant and his policemen beyond the limits of our skins, but the possessing ghosts of authority within ourselves and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force from which they are created.
Our stories of national identity, our holidays, monuments, anthems, and symbols, are a ground of struggle in which power and autonomy are contested as ownership of identity, and as such they are of vital importance in our freedom, equality, and liberation from or subjugation by elite hierarchies and hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege. The stories we tell about ourselves and those which others tell about us create our identities of class, race, sex and gender, and the authorization of those identities versus our seizure of power over them is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
Discovery and confrontation with the truth of ourselves and our history is the first step to forging a better future, and a better humankind.
As written in the Invasion Day Editorial 2025 of Honi Soit; “The editorial team of Honi Soit recognise that we are all beneficiaries of settler-colonialism. We live, work, write, and resist on lands that were forcefully and are continually stolen. Beyond the impending global dread of an unmitigated climate crisis, the land on which we meet is being desecrated, disrespected, and irreparably damaged under the guise of national pride.
So-called ‘Australia’ is an established settler-colonial project. We must acknowledge and fight the narrative that January 26th is a day to celebrate the ‘beginning’ of so-called Australia. January 26th marks the beginning of a stolen, colonised land. It marks an ongoing oppression that First Nations communities have had to endure, not only historically but in the present day. Tomorrow, a large majority of the population will be celebrating ‘Australia Day.’ Many believe they’re celebrating a day of Australian culture and history. However, many forget (or blissfully ignore) that this day is a direct reflection of the invasion, rape, genocide and forced child removals that have led to an inherently racist, anglocentric, and unequal culture endemic to Australian society.
Such ignorance is preventing Australia from moving towards justice for First Nations people. In the past year, we have seen a staggering and worrying increase in violence against First Nations people globally. There have been over 540 deaths in custody of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people since the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody; there have been no criminal convictions in relation to these deaths. The rates of forced removals of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are consistently and appallingly high. Though they only make up 6% of the total population, 41% of children in out-of-home care are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. These are only a few of the inequalities and violence we are seeing in so-called Australia today. These issues were not 200 years ago. They were not a century ago. Not even a decade ago. This is today.
A narrative that greatly defined the voice referendum, leading the campaign to its “No” vote, was the idea that we’ve already reached a point of equality. What was meant to be an opportunity to push for real change in decolonising so-called Australia, instead, a debate arose with the arguments that law and policy are the only factors that play a part in equality. What we can see from the violence, overrepresentation and over policing of Indigenous people and communities distinctively disproves this narrative. We cannot accept or assume that our work is done.
We’re seeing this same narrative played out again with certain right-wing pundits and politicians suggesting that recognising the Aboriginal flag on a national level is divisive. These narratives have led to a major rise in racist, right-wing extremist attitudes, and a heightened level of censorship. Most recently, Sissy Austin, a Gunditjmara, Keerray Woorroong and Djap Wurrung woman presented an empowering TED talk detailing her deep connection to running marathons as an Indigenous woman, and overcoming her attack while running in the Lal Lal forest in 2023. When her speech was uploaded online, TEDx censored a line advocating for Palestinian lives. The media censorship of First Nations people internationally interrupts global solidarity and is the real divisive intervention that we must resist and overcome.
First Nations people suffer the inhumane treatment of these issues in a position of increased vulnerability. It is not a suffering they should undergo alone. We write and stand in solidarity with First Nations people to call for the abolition of ‘Australia Day’ and to work towards a future of decolonisation.”
As reported by Matilda Boseley and Natasha May in The Guardian; “The Greens senator and Gunnai Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung woman, Lidia Thorpe, said “a war was declared on the first people of this land” in 1788 and “that war has not ended”.
“In Melbourne, Thorpe said the only real solution to the debate over marking 26 January was a treaty.
“We can have all of those symbolic gestures, like changing the day, like constitutional recognition, and the word change in the anthem,” Thorpe told Guardian Australia. “But we need real action and that is a treaty.”
She told the crowd of up to 5,000 people the war that started in 1788 “has not ended – that war has been going on for almost 250 years”.
“We still have guns pointed to our heads. We still have a boot on our necks, our babies are still being stolen. Our babies are still being incarcerated and thrown in prison. Our babies are still being locked up in this country. Is that something to celebrate with people having barbecues?”
“Family members of Aboriginal people killed in custody spoke at the Sydney rally including Leetona Dungay, the mother of David Dungay Jr, and Kyah Patten, the niece of Eddie Murray.
Dungay stood in front of a banner with images of her son and George Floyd and said she wanted “to live in a country where black lives matter”. “I want justice where the life of an Aboriginal man is worth something,” she said.”
What is the meaning of this? Here I turn to Richard Flanagan, writing in The Guardian; “We are something other, and that other is deeply rooted in two things: this extraordinary land and 60,000 years of its human occupation. These two things have a claim on us, whether we wish to acknowledge them or not. We can pretend to deny them, to dismiss them, to claim it’s pretty ordinary to talk at all about such things.
We can continue to allow our politicians to seek to politicise everything and with their power to buy votes, electorates and government, and then dismiss as politics anyone who questions the association between their symbols – like Australia Day – and everything from the Big Bash to the Hottest 100. We can allow them to make an arts degree twice the price of a medical degree just to remind anyone who thought the life of the mind and soul mattered that here, in their Australia at least, these things did not and would not prevail.
But what the prime minister calls politics is no more or less than our story, which remains stifled and gagged, rendering us unable to honour it in its full complex majesty, tragedy and wonder.
Telling our story is not politics. Seeking to deny our story is power asserting itself over the past – which could also serve as a definition of politics in Australia in 2021.
For if we continue to remain unknown to ourselves, we are condemned to an ever more fractured, divided and unjust country whose future path is illuminated by the guttering lights of the USA, Hungary, Poland and Turkey. We need to understand these things so that we might understand ourselves and make something better of our country before we too find ourselves treading that same dangerous path.
That understanding is about something larger and greater than national symbols. But the national symbols still matter. Until they and we come together they block understanding, they deny truth, they divide us, and they feed the worst of what we are rather than the best.
Whatever the lyrics of our funeral dirge of a national anthem are, they are not about us. The national flag doesn’t depict a nation but the colony we will forever remain until we have our own symbols.
There is no longer a serious debate about Australia Day. A national day’s only purpose is to unite its people. On that measure – the only measure for a national day – Australia Day is an abject failure. A national day the biggest public gatherings of which are in opposition to its existence is not deserving of the name.
The date of 26 January has always been known by our leaders to be an insulting nonsense to Indigenous people. When in 1888, NSW celebrated a centenary of British colonisation, Henry Parkes, on being asked if Aboriginal people would be included, replied: “And remind them that we have robbed them?”
But still our leaders choose to remind them.
Australia Day as it is cannot unite us because it annually tears the great wound of our soul apart by reminding Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians that we can never be one until we acknowledge our Indigenous past – and that means the invasion and its attendant horrors and continuing injustice as well as its glory: what Galarrwuy Yunupingu rightly described as “the great gift” of 60,000 years of an extraordinary civilisation.
And thinking about these things, what keeps rolling around in my head are Archie Roach’s words from a story in the Age about the national anthem’s inadequacies:
“We belong to an ancient land, we belong to an ancient story … that’s not just talking about First Peoples. I believe that everybody who lives in this country, whether they understand it or not, they belong to that story.
“I always talk about us being authors; all of us being authors of a new story for this country. And I really believe that. One story, one song. If anything, that’s probably the best [hook]. We belong. We belong to this country, we belong to this story, we belong to this song. Yeah.”
But how can we be authors of our own story when only the politicians and their class define what our story is and deny everyone else their voice, and above all Indigenous Australia the voice it has asked for?”
As written by Professor Tom Calma, Aboriginal elder from the Kungarakan tribal group and a member of the Iwaidja tribal group whose traditional lands are in Australia’s Northern Territory, for CNN; “January 26 is, by coincidence, a significant date in the national calendars of two countries, with an important difference.
In India, January 26 marks Republic Day, and celebrates the date when the constitution of India came into effect in 1950. In short: official independence.
In Australia, January 26 marks the day 11 foreign ships sailed into what is now called Sydney Harbour and established a penal colony on the land of the Eora, the Aboriginal people of the area. This act was without permission, agreement or treaty. It set in motion events the Indigenous peoples of this country — Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples — are still reeling from today. In short: invasion.
I could not think of a starker contrast than these two national “celebrations.”
Not only does January 26 mark the day the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples began, it sets up European invasion as an important source of Australian identity and pride. In doing so, it ignores more than 60,000 years of pre-colonial history. As we approach the end of January 2022, many Australians are once again questioning why this date continues to be celebrated.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been challenging the date since at least January 26, 1938 when, as a culmination of years of work by the Australian Aborigines League (AAL) and the Aborigines Progressive Association (APA), the first Day of Mourning was held.
On this day, crowds gathered in Sydney to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the arrival of Europeans in Australia. Afterwards, hundreds of Aboriginal people and their supporters took part in a silent march in mourning of the devastating impact of colonization, the consequences of which include the theft and destruction of lands and cultures; decimation of populations by disease and massacres; destruction of families and kinship; ongoing discrimination; and economic, political and social exclusion.
Indeed, the 1938 protest was “against the callous treatment of our people by the white men during the past 150 years,” Day of Mourning organizer, Jack Patten, told fellow demonstrators.
Since then, January 26 has been symbolic for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as a lightning rod for protest and awareness raising.
This will be a particularly significant year, as 2022 marks 50 years since the Aboriginal Tent Embassy was established in the nation’s capital, Canberra, on January 26, 1972. It was on this day that four Aboriginal men with a beach umbrella — and the weight of history behind them — set up on the lawns in front of the then-Australian Parliament House to bring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land and justice back to the forefront of national debate.
The term “embassy” was used to bring attention to the fact Aboriginal people had never ceded sovereignty nor engaged in any treaty process with the British Crown. To this day, the Embassy remains a site of protest for Indigenous land rights, sovereignty, and self-determination.
In the intervening decades, the language we use to talk about January 26 has changed hugely. For at least the past 30 years, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have reclaimed the day as “Invasion Day” or “Survival Day” to highlight, promote and share the ongoing culture and survival of First Nations cultures through marches, protests, festivals, vigils, and memorials.
While some argue that a push to change the date is divisive, the intent is actually to bring us closer together.
Reconciliation is about fostering better relationships so that we can build a just, equitable and more unified tomorrow. Reconciliation must be based on a foundation of trust, truth and honesty regarding our past. Expecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Peoples to ignore or look past the significance of Australia Day and what it has meant for them is simply inconsistent with reconciliation.
To recognize and heal, action must be taken and changes made. A date change is as necessary as it is straightforward. So straightforward, in fact, we’ve done it several times in the past. Over the last century, there have been various dates celebrating “Australia Day,’ including on July 30 in 1915 as part of World War I fundraising efforts. It wasn’t until 1994 that January 26 became a national public holiday.
While we cannot change history, we must address how we deal with this day in a respectful way. Australia is not alone in this. We watch with interest as Columbus Day, a day that celebrates the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas, is now being negotiated in the United States. A growing number of US states and cities have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day, a holiday meant to honor the culture and history of the people living in the Americas both before and after Columbus’ arrival.
In mainstream Australia, we’ve also seen this change unfolding. A growing number of local councils recognize January 26 is not a national holiday all Australians can celebrate. Companies are offering employees flexibility regarding working on January 26. And it doesn’t get more mainstream than when Cricket Australia removed the words, “Australia Day,” from branding cricket matches on that day.
Reconciliation Australia’s bi-annual Australian Reconciliation Barometer shows these actions mirror changing community attitudes, with support for moving the date continuing to grow. The barometer also shows close to 90% of the general community understand we must tell and accept the truth of our history to move forward.
More than 230 years after the first fleet’s arrival, the ongoing impact of the events of January 26, 1788, can be seen and felt in Australia across many fronts, including disturbing rates of incarceration of First Nations peoples; the growing over-representation of Indigenous children in out-of-home care; the huge disparities in health outcomes for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, and the non-resolution of issues of sovereignty, land and representation.
No treaty was ever signed with Australia’s Indigenous peoples; no recognition ever given to our existence. January 26 cannot serve as a unifying date; not now or in the future, as more and more Australians in the wider community come to understand and respond to the truth of our history.
This year, we are once again asking all Australians to have brave conversations with family, friends and colleagues about how we celebrate January 26, and to reflect on the benefits of a new date for a truly unifying national day of reflection and celebration.”
In searching for a way to characterize the whole of the Conquest of Australia in a single image I turn to the infamous Arsenic Telegram, as described in The Guardian by Paul Daley; “Recently historian Chris Owen (to my mind the most incisive and courageous historian of the frontier violence that blights Western Australia and particularly the Kimberley) posted the Arsenic Telegram on his Facebook page, Darkest West Australia. Broome resident Chas Morgan sent it to Henry “Harry” Prinsep, the state’s then-Protector of Aborigines, on 20 July 1907.
“Send cask arsenic exterminate aborigines letter will follow,” it reads.
Eight words that speak a million about Australia’s foundations.”
Who are the Australians, what is their story, and how do authorized white versions of national identity enact the theft of the soul?
Australia
History
The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, Robert Hughes
Before the Invasion: Aboriginal Life to 1788, Mudrooroo, Colin Bourke, and Isobel White
Australian Dreaming: 40,000 Years of Aboriginal History, Jennifer Isaacs (Editor), Wandjuk Marika (Foreword)
Aboriginal Australians: A History Since 1788, Richard Broome
The World of the First Australians: Aboriginal Traditional Life Past and Present, The Speaking Land: Myth and Story in Aboriginal Australia, Ronald M. Berndt, Catherine H. Berndt
My Place, Sally Morgan
Jack Charles: Born-again Blakfella, Jack Charles
Literature
Dr Wooready’s Prescription for Enduring the End of the World, Master of the Ghost Dreaming, The Undying, Underground, The Promised Land, Aboriginal Mythology: An A-Z Spanning the History of the Australian Aboriginal Peoples from the Earliest Legends to the Present Day, Mudrooroo Nyoongah
The Female Eunuch, The Whole Woman, Sex and destiny, Slip-Shod Sibyls, Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood, Lysistrata – The Sex Strike, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work, Shakespeare’s Wife, Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of 17th-Century Women’s Verse, The Madwoman’s Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings, Daddy We Hardly Knew You, Germaine Greer
The Twyborn Affair, Voss, The Aunt’s Story, Tree of Man, Riders in the Chariot, Eye of the Storm, The Cockatoos, Patrick White
The Eye In The Mandala: Patrick White, A Vision Of Man And God, Peter Beatson
Illywacker, Oscar & Lucinda, Jack Maggs, True History of the Kelly Gang, My Life As A Fake, His Illegal Self, Parrot and Olivier in America, On The Chemistry of Tears, Amnesia, A Long Way From Home, Peter Carey
The Secret River, The Lieutenant, Sarah Thornhill, Searching for the Secret River, A Room Made of Leaves, Kate Grenville
Remembering Babylon, An Imaginative Life, The Great World, The Conversations at Curlow Creek, On Dream Stuff: Stories, Every Move You Make, Earth Hour, On A First Place, David Malouf
The Octopus and I, Erin Hortle
Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Wanting, Death of a River Guide, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, Richard Flanagan
The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow, Drylands, Thea Astley
On this my sister’s birthday I celebrate her life, her genius as a poet and her interventions in our history which include the creation of an artificial intelligence as a successor species to humankind, her role in the Fall of the Soviet Union, and her scholarship and refounding of the ancient faith of the Vikings as leader of the American branch of Asatru.
As I described her in a birthday greeting of years past, which referenced some of the Defining Moments of her personal history as I remember them; “I remember our family’s discovery when you were in seventh grade that you were writing poems and stories in some of Tolkien’s invented languages, had puzzled out his sources and taught yourself a working knowledge of several ancient languages in order to write in them (Old Norse, Old Welsh, Gothic, and Old English), when you gave the Valedictorian Address for the International College at UC Santa Cruz as a graduate in Soviet Foreign Policy and Russian Language, and then became Pushkin Scholar at a Soviet University in Moscow, when Rolling Stone called your reporting on the Fall of the Soviet Union the best political writing in America, and when we celebrated your six hundredth publication. I have always been glad that in writing and the world of literature you have found your bliss.”
Erin grew up as a student of mine in kung fu and of my father in fencing, and playing the family violin; in her seventh grade year we discovered that while barricaded in her room she had puzzled out the source languages of Tolkien and taught herself to write poetry in them. For four years in high school she was the sole Russian Language student of Lt. Colonel Sviatislav Shasholin USAF, who translated during the Nixon-Breznev talks and handled Russian defectors.
Our mother and I founded the Forensics program at Sonoma Valley High School because she was beginning Freshman year at a school that didn’t have one after our father who was my speech teacher and coach at a different school retired and the family moved, and we wanted her to be able to be on a debate team, that being my own most cherished and joyful experience in school. So, I was her teacher of both fighting and debate, and we share enthusiasms for languages and writing; but if she learned from me and we learned from our parents, I also learned from her, for she always counted her victories as finding common ground with others and turning competitions into cooperations and partnerships.
Its not only what you can do, but the gulfs of understanding you are able to cross, which measure our value and our humanity. And this too is something I learned from her.
She lives in the home we inherited from our mother in Las Vegas, where a swimming pool and jacuzzi provide solace from the terrible heat, and her many neighbors drop over for tea. In years past she owned the Science Fiction Store and operated an art collective and gallery in Las Vegas, and continues her Pagan Visibility Project, writing a blog and column in Pagans and Witches, and her editing and writing work.
Tea and fragrances have become central to her joy as of late, GLP-1 which is derived from actual Gila Monster venom and the wailing of fallen angels, enhancing the sense of smell as a side effect of its health benefits; she calls it her Gila Lizard Powers. When she first mentioned this, I thought she was having a Gila Monster bite her for medicinal purposes as a ritual of some sort; this may give you an idea of her life on the other side of the mirror from our surfaces, and hidden in the depths within the literary, knitting, and cat lady images.
Always parallel and interdependent, Maat the nurturer and Sekmet the huntress, the White and Black swans, and we are always both at once, all of us.
When I introduced her to the perfume community Fragrantica, within weeks she was creating her own scented products, using enfleurage from natural ingredients which is considered a gourmet kind of perfumery. As with everything, my sister pursues excellence and uniqueness; she’s made some bespoke items for myself and Dolly, all of which are exquisite, and labeled as Dollhouse Park products in her ebay store, which smell of black licorice, iris, and rose.
From Erin; I actually did it. You know that rant about how sunscreens all smell like a tropical beach vacation? I said I was going to make my own sunscreen with blackjack and hookers. I present:
The model and his image; Pygmalion or the Portrait of Dorian Grey? I admire how the tapestry recalls the form of a flying Tibetan dragon, the Sound of Thunder or Druk Yul; and I wonder if he dreams of being so, unfolding as sound with the storms, brother to the lightning
Before the Enshitification now ongoing, before the cowardly groveling to our enemies and feckless disloyalty to our allies, before the freak show of the nominations, before the treason and villainy of the pardonings of the Seditionists, before the absurd clown Traitor Trump’s second regime of Nazi revivalism, white supremacist terror, and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, there were a series of six coup attempts for which we must bring a Reckoning.
As I wrote in my post of March 12 2022, Crimes of a Russian Spy: A History of the American Fourth Reich’s Coup Attempts in Trump’s War Against America; Today I contemplate the crimes against humanity and subversions of democracy by Putin’s proxy and Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, a cautionary tale of the vulnerability of democracies to propaganda and enemy infiltration made newly relevant by the horrors and war crimes of Putin’s invasion and imperial conquest of Ukraine.
As Putin uses lies to manufacture consent among his own people after silencing all free speech and press, claims a casus belli of de-nazification while he bombs a Holocaust memorial and sends assassins to kill Ukraine’s Jewish President, and of nonexistent bioweapons as he threatens our world with nuclear annihilation and sends special thermobaric weapons which are mobile crematoriums in acts of mass genocide against civilians, I think of the America he shaped with the Stolen Election of 2016 and the many despicable crimes of his star agent Traitor Trump as unforgettable examples of the regime he would impose on a conquered Europe.
Herein I remember the lurid and bizarre details of his plot to decapitate the government, literally with a guillotine and gallows set up by his minions on the capitol lawn and abduction teams festooned with zip ties guided to their targets in both Republican and Democratic parties by infiltration agents among the capitol police and the secret Nazis among our legislature like Senator Josh Hawley, and their fascist enablers and conspirators in the Conservative Political Action Conference.
But the January 6 Insurrection was far from Trump’s first coup attempt against America. It is in fact his sixth attempted coup, if one does not count the Stolen Election of 2016 itself, whereby a Russian agent used vote suppression and a terrifying new form of propaganda to win election as President of the United States, a Presidency which has never been legitimate and whose sole purpose was the subversion of democracy and the shattering of our institutions of government to prepare for Trump’s assumption of tyranny and the degradation of our nation into a white ethnostate and fascist regime.
There are many other crimes for which Trump and his collaborators are responsible, and for which the people of America will call them to account if Congress cannot, beginning with the Russian bombs which fell on American troops he had betrayed and abandoned in Syria as he was being sworn into office, and foremost among them the massive death toll of the Pandemic which he downplayed, ignored, and sabotaged the development and deployment of vaccines as an instrument of genocide against the Black Lives Matter protests for equality and justice which were disrupting his plans for white supremacy. The Pandemic and quarantine also served to shut down the Extinction Rebellion and green protests and buy time for massive corporate profits from theft of public and heritage resources. Of special interest in this context are the first three coup attempts, provocations to violence intended to provide a fig leaf for the federal occupation of Democratic led cities.
Throughout months of sustained protests in over fifty major American cities, the triumvirate of Trump, Barr, and Wolf directed an attempted coup by using white supremacist terrorists, infiltration agents within the police, and other extra-governmental deniable assets as agents provocateurs to disrupt the Black Lives Matter protests throughout our nation in a campaign of arson, vandalism, and random violence, which failed when our military refused to abandon their oaths to the Constitution and occupy America’s cities under martial law.
This phase of the campaign ended with the June 8 failure to break the People’s Siege of the White House, when Trump ceded victory to democracy and rescinded his order to the military to place America under martial law as an occupation force.
During the Season of Fire throughout the three months of summer Trump and his cabal of fascists tried the same gambit, enacted this time by a specially formed mercenary force of black ops units of Homeland Security, without any legal authority or existence, who have sworn no oaths to anything and serve only wealth and power, who are without honor or loyalty.
We witnessed the failure of this phase of the campaign against democracy in the August 30 Assassination of Michael Reinoehl, an Antifascist comrade and American patriot who had returned fire when fired upon the day before, killing a member of the Patriot Prayer organization of Christian Identity and white supremacist terror which had seized the streets of Portland with a motorcade of 600 vehicles filled with armed lunatics, and who was then murdered without trial by an assassination team of secret police at the orders of Trump’s strategist of state terror, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf.
Yet America held the line against terror; there was no massive retaliation against the sacrificial goats of our police and security services deployed in the hope some would be lost to angry mobs in order to capture the narrative and delegitimize the movement for equality and racial justice.
The total victory of the people and the utter failure of the Fourth Reich to seize power by force was announced in the September Declaration and Articles of Capitulation by the United States declared by Trump and his fascist minions Attorney General William Barr and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf when they publicly admitted defeat of their occupation forces and ceded control to the people of the Autonomous Zones of Portland, Seattle, and New York.
As humankind weighs the judgement of history for the crimes of Trump as figurehead of the global Fourth Reich, we must never forget that his objectives were always racist and subversive of our values of liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
Here are some of my posts which document the secret history of America’s Fourth Reich and previous coup attempts by Trump:
November 5 2020 Trump’s Last Coup Attempt and Subversion of Democracy as His Ship of Fools Sinks in Pathetic Failure
As Trump’s Ship of Fools comes apart at the seams and sinks beneath the waves in pathetic failure, our Clown of Terror collapses in infantile tantrums and tries to take democracy down with him, a final gesture of madness and idiocy in his delusional quest to subvert our values and institutions of liberty and seize tyrannical power.
We must never forget how close we came to a repeat of the 1933 German Federal Election that set Hitler on the path to a tyranny of absolute power; this is clearly the most important electoral event in the history of humankind since then, and the two elections are terrifyingly parallel. Trump tried three times to use the Black Lives Matter protests to create fear and legitimize the federal occupation of America under the pretext of re-establishing law and order in an exact duplication of Hitler’s successful strategy using the Reichstag Fire, and failed.
We have escaped the jaws of the Fourth Reich which have held us fast for four years, since the Stolen Election of 2016, while Trump and his cabal of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, white supremacist terrorists, and plutocratic robber barons have violated everything about America which is noble and true, plundered the public wealth, dehumanized and divided us, sabotaged and subverted the institutions of our freedom, equality, truth, and justice, betrayed our allies and emboldened our foes, lost the American hegemony of global power and privilege and our position as a guarantor of democracy and universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world.
Let us never forget the bottomless depravities, treasons, and amoral predation and greed of Trump’s many enablers and conspirators in the Fall of America as we struggle in the years ahead to reclaim our nation and our souls. We must hold them to account, but we must also reimagine our society and the many systemic and structural flaws by which we came to this broken and lost state.
November 3 2020 One Hundred Years of Racist Vote Suppression and White Supremacist Terror: Anniversary of the Ocoee Massacre
This election has seen attempts at vote suppression unknown in our lifetimes; Trumps mission to subvert democracy includes intimidation by calling for armed white supremacists to deny nonwhite citizens access to the polls, an attack on Biden’s campaign caravan by the Trump Train mobile assault force, failed assassination attempts against Biden and other political figures, sabotage of the postal system, politization of the Justice department, and his farcical declaration of victory before the vote is counted, among his many treasonous crimes.
Today liberty and tyranny play for the soul of America and the freedom of the world.
I spent some time today at a Trump rally trying to defuse a hate crime in the making. A hey rube went up that a rally staged between our local mosque here in Spokane and a Middle Eastern grocery was becoming a violent mob; while others responded as a protection detail and placed themselves with great courage between potential perpetrators and their victims, I blended into the rally to assess and shape its development as an incubator of violence and work to defuse it through dialog and negotiation.
Today these angry young men chose not to allow fear, rage, and hate to master and dehumanize them, nor provoke them into violence which would be the ruin of their lives; what will all of the other angry young men choose tomorrow?
I’d like to believe this incident is atypical and not being played out a thousand times over across America; but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Tyranny weaponizes overwhelming and generalized fear as an instrument of subjugation. This we must resist, but unless we speak directly to those fears we cannot heal the divisions of our society which authority has so skillfully manipulated.
In the words of Sigmund Freud, “Civilization begins when we throw words instead of stones.” Sadly, we humans have often chosen stones when words would serve us better.
In all the madness of this election and of the deranged perversions and assaults upon our liberty, equality, truth, and justice of our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump’s kleptocracy of state terror and tyranny, we must not forget that though he exploited the flaws of our society to orchestrate the Fall of America and of democracy throughout the world, he did not originate them.
Trump has revealed, tested, and hammered at our flaws, yet we remain unbroken and unconquered. This we should celebrate; in the main we are voting and not shooting, because our faith in one another and in the ideals on which our society is founded remain intact, though the institutions of our government may need radical and revolutionary change.
Nor is there anything new in the threat to democracy of vote suppression; today is the one hundred year anniversary of the Ocoee Massacre, the most terrible incident of racist vote suppression in the history of our nation since the Civil War. What may give us hope now that failed us then is the emerging consensus of racial equality and the mass coalition for racial justice won for us by the Black Lives Matter movement and the heroic citizens who have seized the streets of our cities in an unparalleled months long mass action.
Regardless of the election results, anyone who wishes to actually govern must do so at the head of these protests and not barricaded against the will of the people. This is the true meaning of this years seizure of power by our citizens, and it is a genie which cannot be returned to the prison of its lamp, for each of us is now a Living Autonomous Zone.
September 29 2020 Trump Attempts to Steal the 2020 Election by Rendering the Vote Meaningless
Having been exposed as a traitor and Russian agent whose mission is the subversion of democracy and the inversion of our values of freedom, equality, truth, and justice, and having failed in no less than three coup attempts this year to seize tyrannical powers by directing his deniable assets among the white supremacist terrorists to disrupt and discredit the Black Lives Matter protests for equality and racial justice by committing arson, looting, and violence, in the first attempts by calling on the National Guard and the Armed Services to occupy our Democratic cities which was ended with their refusal to violate their oaths of service to the Constitution, in the third attempt to send a special force of secret police to enact state terror and tyranny and occupy America with federal troops under the auspices of Homeland Security, which failed utterly as Trump and his fascist minions Attorney General William Barr and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf have publicly admitted defeat of their occupation forces and ceded control to the people of the victorious Autonomous Zones of Portland, Seattle, and New York; having failed in his treasonous conspiracies to seize totalitarian powers by threat of force Trump now attempts to render the vote meaningless by misdirections and distortions of the truth, captured and lost in the myriad reflections, echoes, and false images of his 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.
These are the four primary duties of a citizen in any free society of equals regarding unjust authority; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, Challenge Authority.
How do you spell Trump? Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
As Barton Gellman writes in The Atlantic; “The political system may no longer be strong enough to preserve its integrity. It’s a mistake to take for granted that election boards and state legislatures and Congress are capable of drawing lines that ensure a legitimate vote and an orderly transfer of power. We may have to find a way to draw those lines ourselves.”
“Only once, in 1877, has the Interregnum brought the country to the brink of true collapse. We will find no model in that episode for us now.
Four states sent rival slates of electors to Congress in the 1876 presidential race between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. When a special tribunal blessed the electors for Hayes, Democrats began parliamentary maneuvers to obstruct the electoral count in Congress. Their plan was to run out the clock all the way to Inauguration Day, when the Republican incumbent, Ulysses S. Grant, would have to step down.
Not until two days before Grant’s term expired did Tilden give in. His concession was based on a repugnant deal for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, where they were protecting the rights of emancipated Black people. But that was not Tilden’s only inducement.
The threat of military force was in the air. Grant let it be known that he was prepared to declare martial law in New York, where rumor had it that Tilden planned to be sworn in, and to back the inauguration of Hayes with uniformed troops.
That is an unsettling precedent for 2021. If our political institutions fail to produce a legitimate president, and if Trump maintains the stalemate into the new year, the chaos candidate and the commander in chief will be one and the same.”
September 24 2020 Leading the Charge Into the Future: the New York Autonomous Zone
First before all must be the true names of things.
Words matter. They can divide us, and they can unite us. Words can exalt and defile; they can shape our images and possibilities of becoming human and create or limit the worlds to which we can aspire, they can replace stones we hurl at one another and heal the pathology of our disconnectedness.
Always treasure words, for they represent the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and harbour imaginal creative power. We bear them forward as memories, histories, identities, like the shells of fantastic sea creatures; so also do they bear us forward, and await their moment of wakefulness as seeds of becoming.
In accord with Trump’s directive, the US Department of Justice has designated three cities, including Seattle, Portland, and New York City, as “anarchist” jurisdictions, officially ceding control to the free peoples who have seized their birthright and returned private property to the commons from which it was stolen and legitimacy from the government which has squandered it.
Henceforth let us call those cities for which power and ownership has been transferred to us by the President of the United States, Attorney General William Barr, and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, by their true names; the New York, Portland, and Seattle Autonomous Zones.
May they be the first of many, throughout America and the world.
Let us honor all those who have made the liberation of America from the grip of the Fourth Reich possible, both in their successes and in their sacrifices for the cause of democracy and humankind. Especially our hope for a better world owes a tremendous debt to the New York Autonomous Zone which has led the charge into the future, and the visionary and transformational leaders of the New York Democratic Socialists of America including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for whom I have declared for President of the United States in 2024, Julia Salazar, Alessandra Biaggi, Jamaal Bowman, Jabari Brisport, Phara Souffrant Forrest, Marcela Mitaynes, and Zohran Mamdani.
Here is my initial response posted on September 21; Thanks for official recognition of public ownership of our areas of control, federal government. Now get out of our cities and leave us in peace.
Our next step should be establishing international community and conducting independent foreign policy as Free America to counterbalance the imperialist militarism, corporate plutocracy, and fascism of the United States.
I will be founding Autonomous Zones throughout the world, and making mischief for tyrants. In this mission I bear no special credentials or authority other than simply being a Living Autonomous Zone, a human being who has refused to submit and become Unconquered, and any one of us may perform this role, and at best masses of us together united in Solidarity to set each other free. Join us.
And I personally want a partnership with Cuba so I can get those marvelous cigars. Last I had occasion to enjoy one was with my comrades in revolutionary struggle after we broke the dominion of Apartheid in the victorious Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, and its time we here in America join the free peoples of the world in celebrating our liberators.
This in reaction to the article written by Alan Smith of NBC News; “The Justice Department released a list of cities Monday that it has deemed “anarchist jurisdictions” under President Donald Trump’s instructions this month to review federal funding for local governments in places where violence or vandalism has occurred during protests.
That memo directed Attorney General William Barr, in consultation with Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought and acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, to identify jurisdictions “that have permitted violence and the destruction of property to persist and have refused to undertake reasonable measures to counteract these criminal activities (anarchist jurisdictions).”
On Monday, the Justice Department labeled New York City, Portland, Oregon, and Seattle as such areas. It said it was still working to identify other jurisdictions that meet the criteria outlined in Trump’s memo. The president has made ridicule of those cities a regular feature of his campaign appearances, and he has mocked their top officials for their responses to the violence that has taken place during the protests.
Barr said in a statement accompanying the announcement: “We cannot allow federal tax dollars to be wasted when the safety of the citizenry hangs in the balance. It is my hope that the cities identified by the Department of Justice today will reverse course and become serious about performing the basic function of government and start protecting their own citizens.”
As part of its rationale for labeling the cities, the Justice Department cited city councils’ voting to cut police funding, the refusal to prosecute protesters on charges like disorderly conduct and unlawful assembly, the rejection of federal intervention, and injuries suffered by law enforcement officials during violent outbursts.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan issued a joint statement calling the administration’s move “thoroughly political and unconstitutional,” adding that “the president is playing cheap political games with congressionally directed funds.”
“Our cities are bringing communities together; our cities are pushing forward after fighting back a pandemic and facing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, all despite recklessness and partisanship from the White House,” the mayors said. “What the Trump administration is engaging in now is more of what we’ve seen all along: shirking responsibility and placing blame elsewhere to cover its failure.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement Monday that Trump is “using the last few months of his presidency to sow more chaos, more hatred, and more fear,” and she pledged to defeat the administration in court over any such withholding of funding to the city and the state.
“This designation is nothing more than a pathetic attempt to scare Americans into voting for a commander-in-chief who is actually incapable of commanding our nation,” she said, adding that Trump “should be prepared to defend this illegal order in court, which hypocritically lays the groundwork to defund New York and the very types of law enforcement President Trump pretends to care about.”
Democratic mayors and governors this month bashed Trump over his latest effort aimed at what he calls “Democrat-run” cities and states. They said that it was illegal for the executive branch to unilaterally withhold funding from their jurisdictions and that Trump was merely seeking another distraction from the U.S. coronavirus death toll, which has topped 200,000.
“It is another attempt to kill New York City,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told reporters during a late-night conference call this month, adding that Trump “better have an army if he thinks he’s going to walk down the streets in New York.”
Yet there is truth in this wild allegation of anarchy, for in these among some fifty other cities throughout America protests for equality and racial justice have triumphed over brutal repression and state terror and tyranny to seize actual control of key government administrative landmarks and business districts for over one hundred days now. And the federal government has admitted defeat in their efforts to take our cities from us.
Therefore I declare victory, and celebrate the triumph of autonomous individuals as citizens of a free society of equals, each of us a living Autonomous Zone, wild and ungovernable as the tides like a force of nature.
God Bless America; we’re going to need it.
August 30 2020 Trump’s Third Coup Attempt Claims A Life In Portland
A shockwave runs through our Antifascist community and our nation with the first documented act of violence by a protestor in three months of action in one thousand seven hundred American cities in all fifty states; like many such incidents, the events are simple to relate but have far reaching consequences. A member of a racist and violent armed militia, the Proud Boys, shot frozen paintballs from concealment among hundreds of gun waving Trump enthusiasts in a six hundred car column which had descended on Portland from across the country to intimidate and provoke antiracist protestors, and someone in the crowd answered force with force, killing him.
I grieve with the family and friends of the slain, for we are all family who are human. This is a loss to us all and to the cause of freedom, for those who would enslave us have divided us against each other and our common interest both as citizens and as human beings.
In this terrible tragedy let us remember that everyone seduced by the propaganda of hate and fear and by submission to authority is a loss to the cause of liberty and a fellow victim of the state, who has been turned against his own class interest by patriarchy and racism as strategies of division by the plutocratic elite. Those in red hats, the color of the Republican Party which represents the blood of slaves who built this nation and the heroes who gave their lives to liberate them in the Civil War, are victims just as those whom they seek to harm, and represent our failure to reach out to them and help them to overcome overwhelming and generalized fear and to embrace others who are different from themselves as fellow Americans and as brothers, sisters, and others in our diverse human family.
And with this first violent act by a protestor who in a subsequent filmed interview claimed to have returned fire when fired upon in what he believed was a murder attempt, justifiable self defense by any standard, an incident which the police have falsely reconstructed using city surveillance camera evidence as an entirely different story, one in which he ambushes a victim long after the motorcade has left and night has fallen, clearly murder if true, and who the police assassinated to silence, a Rashomon Gate tale of confusion, relative truths, and unreliable witnesses, we have crossed a line which may be difficult to recover, and taken the fate of our nation down a much darker path.
The scope of choices in our possible futures and the destiny of humankind became lesser today.
This was the intention of Trump and the Fourth Reich of state terror and tyranny in organizing and directing a huge six hundred car caravan of fanatical followers brandishing guns to intimidate and provoke protestors into violent reaction, as with the white supremacist militia and their infiltration agents within the police force throughout our nation during the past three months of the Season of Fire who have committed arson, looting, and violence as agents provocateurs to discredit and capture the narrative of the protests and provide a causus belli for the federal occupation of Democratic cities. Trump set out his followers as stalking goats, hoping some would die.
If you point a gun or what looks like one at Americans to threaten and intimidate us, we will not submit; we will resist. If you shoot at us, we will reply in kind. If you send secret police in unmarked cars and in sterile uniforms without badges identifying them as officers of the law to kidnap and terrorize us, we will ambush and capture them. If you come to our cities to steal our rights as citizens to speak and organize against injustice, we will identify you and come to your home in return.
Trump and his strategist of state terror Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf know this, and are counting on it. This is pivotal to the Fourth Reich’s plan to overthrow democracy; they want to start a race war, and we must not take the bait. We must deny Trump a pretext for his coup.
Today America has survived Trump’s third attempt to stage a coup in as many months, something of a tradition on his part now, and one of us has died for it, sacrificed on the altar of his self-aggrandizement. Let it be the last; Trump isn’t worth the life of any one of us, no matter who that may be.
August 29 2020 Police Collaboration in White Supremacist Terror: the Case of Kenosha
Police have been infiltrated by white supremacist organizations since the Civil War. They are also a primary funnel and grooming onramp for terror and racism, a development of prewar slavecatching gangs.
Kenosha is part of a planned, organized campaign of terror in which police and white supremacist forces act together to repress dissent and create violence and destruction so that Trump can send federal troops to occupy Democratic cities. This is more than racist violence; it is a coup.
There can be only one reply to fascism and tyranny; Never Again.
We shall resist the Republican subversion of democracy and their cabal of white supremacist terrorists, Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, foreign puppetmasters, and plutocratic thieves of public wealth unto our liberation from inequalities of race and gender and divisions of exclusionary otherness.
Where there is fear, let there also be hope. This is the true mission of Antifa.
All those who remain loyal to their oaths to our Constitution and to America as a free society of equals, I call on you to stand together once again as a Band of Brothers, sisters, and others and resist the Fourth Reich and the Party of Treason. Let us remain unconquered and be free.
God Bless America; we’re going to need it.
July 22 2020 All the King’s Horses and All the King’s Men: At the Threshold of the Fall of America
It seems Trump is now close to finally achieving his lifelong dream of inciting a race war as a fig leaf for his subversion of democracy and his reign as tyrant of a triumphant Fourth Reich, a dream of white supremacy he was bequeathed as successor in the Trump dynasty of Klu Klux Klan enthusiasts, Confederate sympathizers, and patriarchal racists who made their fortune from sex trafficking and brothels in Alaska and reinvested it in real estate where as anti-Semites they made even more money preying on Jewish vulnerability and need for acceptance and protection.
We have chosen as leader of our nation and role model of our future the patriarch of a family whose rise to wealth and power resembles that of the slavers and grandees of Imperial Spain, and whose primary relation to others is that of a predator.
Each of us bears the weight of our history like a shell, and we ourselves are a kind of prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we have solved problems of adaptation and growth throughout our lives and across vast epochs of family legacy and cultural context. We must choose our actions in this time at the threshold of the Fall of America as a democracy with care and as a design for the future, for our descendants will live with the consequences of our choices for a long time, perhaps millennia.
Trump and his Party of Treason have used white supremacist ideology as a spike of division with which to drive apart the faultlines of America and of civilization, in the subversion of democracy and our values of freedom, equality, truth, and justice, and in the theft of our liberty and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few oligarchic families at the apex of a pyramid of patriarchs of Gideonite fundamentalism and misogyny, white supremacist terror and racism, and the authoritarianism of state force and control and a militarized society.
Of these systems and structures of inequality, tyranny, lies, and injustice, and the atavisms of barbarism which drive them, fear and hate as shaped by submission to authority, a Fourth Reich emerges from the shadows of the past which we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail to seize and claim us. In Portland this week, and throughout our nation if Trump’s plan of occupation is unopposed, secret police repress dissent with abductions and brutality in criminal disregard of our rights as citizens and as human beings.
This we must resist, for it is victory or death for our liberty and a free society of equals. Victory or Death was the battle cry of George Washington at Trenton
in the American Revolution against tyranny and the idea that some persons are by right of birth better than others. My family have preserved the idea of this triumphant moment of resistance and solidarity when all seemed lost at one of history’s turning points as a motto by which we have lived; so must it now be for us all.
The peace of the city at night is still shattered by the sounds of gunfire and songs of resistance as we gather to share what we have learned as the witness of history, and as my night watch begins I record some few thoughts here in my journal, reflecting on its purpose. Of what use are words against the madness of tyranny, violence, and the depravity of a regime of state terror? Why do I write, and for whom?
My purpose here is to mock, expose, and challenge authority; to incite, provoke, and disturb. I write for the powerless and the dispossessed, and against their silence, erasure, and marginalization. Especially do I champion the cause of transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden, celebrate chaos as the limitless possibilities of becoming human, and struggle against divisions of exclusionary otherness.
Often do I think of Camus while writing, for he also wrote in a time of darkness and decision, for those who must claw their way out of the ruins and make yet another last stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival. Yet countless numbers of people did exactly that, as heroes of nations or as anonymous members of the Resistance, and here we all are today to carry forward the struggle.
Our choice is now between liberty or tyranny, resistance or submission to force and control, and a future for humankind as a free society of equals or in subjugation to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Resist!”
July 18 2020 Fear and Loathing in Portland
Our government of tyranny and terror has loosed the dogs of war in Portland, kidnapping and illegally imprisoning random protesters who have done nothing but exercise their rights as citizens to free assembly and free speech.
This is a classic strategy of repression; an attempt to provoke armed revolt and discredit the protests for equality and racial justice. To those who now intend escalation and response in kind; this would play directly into the trap set by our rogue government.
In June Trump attempted a coup by using white supremacist terrorists as agents provocateurs to disrupt protests, which failed when our military refused to abandon their oaths to the Constitution. This month he tries the same gambit, enacted by black ops units of Homeland Security who have sworn no oaths to anything and serve only wealth and power, who are without honor or loyalty.
Don’t take the bait.
In the guerilla theatre of protest, occupation, and confrontation, victory is achieved by seizing the moral high ground and delegitimizing the enemy by maneuvering them into the public use of terror, torture, or other criminal acts. We have already won this contest when the fascist regime which has hijacked America openly sends troops to kidnap its citizens because without moral suasion or justice, empty force is all they have.
The acting Secretary of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, who will one day answer for his crimes, has called us anarchists. This is untrue as a group for the protesters in general, and an obvious deflection and misdirect as it is Trump and his minions among the forces of state terror and control who are the agents of racist violence and the subversion of democracy. Trump and Wolf wish to conjure anarchists as scapegoats for their reign of terror; let us teach them anarchy.
Renounce the use of social force and resist unjust authority by disobedience and disbelief. Leave evil to the minions of evil, and triumph over the seduction of power and the misogyny of violence.
June 20 2020 A Failed Re-Election Rally Follows a Failed Coup Against Democracy
The rats are abandoning a sinking ship; the failure of Trump’s coup against democracy earlier this month, in which his deniable forces of white supremacist terrorists enacted a national campaign of arson, vandalism, and violence, and coordinated with the assassination of police officers, to disrupt the peaceful protests for equality and racial justice and provide a pretext for a military occupation of America by the most successful agent the KGB ever ran against us, foundered on the shoals of our armed services loyalty to their oaths to our Constitution.
Restarting his re-election campaign at the site of the American Kristallnacht and using the red triangle of the Holocaust to refer to a boogeyman opposition which is nonexistent as an organization are acts of desperation by a tyrant who knows he is losing; also bareknuckle appeals to his white supremacist terrorist supporters.
The tik tok messaging campaign by young people was also stunningly successful and demonstrates that Trump can be defeated on his own ground of lies and deception. Plus, the average teenager is smarter and better educated than he is.
June 8 2020 Hope Dawns: Trump’s Regime of Tyranny and White Supremacist Terror Begins Its Collapse
Hope dawns with a new day in America and the first victories of the people as Trump’s regime of tyranny and white supremacist terror begins its collapse. With key figures and icons of conservativism declaring against him and his policies of racism and totalitarian force and control, and unable to break the People’s Siege of the White House, Trump has ceded victory to democracy and rescinded his order to the military to place America under martial law as an occupation force.
Trump’s coup is broken, his conspiracy to use deniable forces of armed racist lynch mobs and agents provocateurs and their infiltration agents within our police to disrupt the peaceful protests against racist police violence with greater racist police violence as a fig leaf for his seizure of totalitarian powers and the fall of democracy in America stands exposed before the world in its naked evil and threat to all humankind.
Much remains to be done. We must begin the transformation of our society to realize the dream of co-ownership of the state by its citizens in a true democracy anchored by our values of Freedom, Equality, Truth, and Justice, and secured by our universal human rights, and leverage our revolutionary movement for racial justice and a free society of equals into structural and systemic change.
We have taken the streets; now we must reclaim and reshape the institutions of our government which are the guarantors of our liberty. Let us celebrate and rejoice in our defiance and challenge of injustice and unequal power, and the necessary work of dethroning and bringing to justice tyrants and monsters like Traitor Trump, but we must not settle for their heads on our wall. Beyond these symbolic victories, we must bring meaningful change to the systems and structures in which such abominations arise and are embedded.
We must say to Trump and to all those who would enslave us, Never Again.
“Be merciful to the Stranger, for we were all once Strangers in this land”; with these immortal words truth teller Bishop Mariann Budde becomes our first hero of the Resistance to the Second Trump Regime of the Fourth Reich, now called the Enshitification.
We hold up the figure of Bishop Mariann Budde as an icon of Liberty and a role model of what it means to be a citizen in a democracy which struggles toward becoming a true free society of equals, a struggle which unites all humankind in interdependent processes of becoming human and emergence from the legacies of our history.
This is about revolutionary struggle and seizures of power over our ownership of ourselves, and we must be very aware of our goal as the abolition of unequal power itself to avoid the seduction of power once tyrants have been cast down from their thrones, for the historical record of revolutions that become tyrannies due to the imposed conditions of struggle must teach us one thing above all else; who holds power is less important than the systemic balance of power and the relative equality of the human beings who must live in it. If the power to create, shape, and direct the form and goals of society is not held equally by its members, that society will undergo systemic failures from its internal contradictions.
Catastrophic failures and systemic and structural collapse threaten us now as it has many times in the past, the survival of democracy against fascist tyranny and of humankind against ecological devastation and species extinction among the most terrible existential threats we now face.
Such moments can also be catalysts of change as the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization, for Chaos is a measure of the adaptive range of a system and its potential for growth. The Fourth Reich and its figurehead in America, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, have demonstrated the flaws of our system and will now continue to do so for four more years if not forever; history has given us a Defining Moment in which to seize our power to change, and to free ourselves from the shadows of our history and the legacies and multigenerational and epigenetic trauma of slavery, from the ghosts of fear and force which we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail.
In this great cause of becoming human as emergence from systemic harms and atavisms of instinct, we humans have intrinsic abilities as shaping, motivating, and informing sources which empower adaptation, among them being the redemptive and transformative power of love and its role in our duty of care toward others, hope as a form of autonomy which cannot be taken from us, and that most ambivalent, precarious, relative, and laden with historical significance of innate capacities, faith.
Faith is a ground of struggle between authority and autonomy, between the weaponization of faith and trust in authority in service to power by tyrants and those who would enslave us as opposed to faith as a sacred calling to pursue the truth, as an imperative duty of care for and interdependence and solidarity with others, and as a guarantor of autonomy as a personal relationship with the Infinite, and its instrumentalization can be determinative.
Who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
Here is the difference between liberation struggle as a praxis of faith as demonstrated by its role in the Abolition of slavery, coded by Lincoln as a sacred crusade, its forms in the Civil Rights movement of Martin Luther King and the Poor People’s Campaign, and on the reverse face its use as an apologetics of slavery by the Confederacy and its current forms deployed by the Gideonite fundamentalists who captured the Republican Party in 1980 and have morphed into a Fourth Reich which is now waging a total war on democracy and trying to steal the equality and citizenship of Black and other nonwhite Americans through vote suppression, gerrymandering, and other legislative subversions of our government, as well as terrorizing Latinx and other nonwhite migrants at our border.
Appeals to faith remain a powerful motive force in history, and the politization of churches as propaganda and organizing institutions of Christian Identity fascism and white supremacist terror remain a major threat to democracy, protected as free speech and freedom of religion, to which the most successful response has been that of Martin Luther King in setting a counterfire.
Heroes of the Resistance who speak truth to power, like Bishop Mariann Budde and her direct historical predecessor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, are among the most notable exemplars of our best selves.
Martin Luther King, a scholar of Paul Tillich and Kierkegaard, who bore forward the primary insight of Gandhi as a historical legacy from Tolstoy, forged a philosophy of action which describes for us how to wage Abolition against those who would enslave us, how to conquer hate with love, learned helplessness with hope, division with solidarity, and fear with our faith in each other and in our Ideals.
Let the faith of liberation and revolutionary struggle consume the force of the faith of authoritarian tyranny and fascist racism.
As I wrote in my post of March 20 2021, The Maiden Speech to Congress of Senator Raphael G. Warnock; We witnessed in the maiden speech to Congress of Senator Ralph G Warnock possibly the greatest American speech since Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream; there will be other times to interrogate the question of vote suppression, but for today I wish only to amplify his voice in the hope that it may bear transformational power wherever it is heard.
Here are the words of the great Senator Raphael G. Warnock to America, to the world, and to history; “Mr. President—earlier than I start my formal remarks in the present day, I wish to pause to sentence the hatred and violence that took eight valuable lives final night time in metropolitan Atlanta. I grieve with Georgians, with People, with individuals of affection all internationally. This unspeakable violence visited largely upon the Asian group, is one which causes all of us to recommit ourselves to the way in which of peace and lively peace that stops these sorts of tragedies from occurring within the first place. We pray for these households.
“Mr. President, I rise right here in the present day as a proud American and as one of many latest members of the Senate—in awe of the journey that has introduced me to those hallowed halls with an abiding sense of reverence and gratitude for the religion and sacrifices of ancestors who paved the way in which.
“I’m a proud son of the good state of Georgia, born and raised in Savannah, a coastal metropolis identified for its cobble-stone streets and verdant city squares. Towering oak timber, centuries outdated and lined in grey Spanish moss, stretched from one aspect of the road to the opposite, bend and beckon the lover of historical past and horticulture to this metropolis by the ocean. I used to be educated at Morehouse Faculty and I serve nonetheless within the pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church; each in Atlanta, the cradle of the civil rights motion. Like these oak timber, my roots go down deep and stretch huge within the soil of Waycross, Burke County and Screven County. In a phrase, I’m Georgia. A dwelling instance and embodiment of its historical past and hope, the ache and the promise, the brutality and the likelihood.
“Mr. President, on the time of my beginning, Georgia’s two senators had been Richard B. Russell and Herman E. Talmadge, each arch segregationists and unabashed adversaries of the civil rights motion. After the Supreme Courtroom’s landmark Brown v. Board ruling outlawing faculty segregation, Talmadge warned that “blood will run within the streets of Atlanta”. Senator Talmadge’s father, Eugene Talmadge, former governor of our state, had famously declared, “The South loves the Negro in his place, however his place is on the again door.” When as soon as requested how he and his supporters would possibly preserve Black individuals away from the polls, he picked up a scrap of paper and wrote a single phrase on it: “Pistols.”
“But, there’s something within the American covenant—in its constitution paperwork and its Jeffersonian beliefs—that bends towards freedom. Led by a preacher and a patriot named King, People of all races stood up. Historical past vindicated the motion that sought to push us nearer to our beliefs, to elongate and strengthen the cords of our democracy, and I now maintain the seat—the Senate seat—the place Herman E. Talmadge sat.
“And that’s why I like America. I like America as a result of we at all times have a path to make it higher, to construct a extra good union. It’s the place the place a child like me who grew up in public housing, the primary school graduate in my household, can now function a United States Senator. I had an older father, he was born in 1917; serving within the Military throughout World Conflict II, he was as soon as requested to surrender his seat to a younger teenager whereas sporting his soldier’s uniform, they stated “making the world secure for democracy.” However he was by no means bitter. By the point I got here alongside, he had already seen the arc of change in our nation. He maintained his religion in God, in his household and within the American promise, and he handed that religion on to his youngsters.
“My mom grew up in Waycross, Georgia. You already know the place that’s? It’s approach ‘cross Georgia. Like a whole lot of Black youngsters within the 1950’s she spent her summers choosing any individual else’s tobacco and any individual else’s cotton. However as a result of that is America, the 82-year-old fingers that used to choose any individual else’s cotton went to the polls in January and picked her youngest son to be a United States Senator. Ours is a land the place risk is born of democracy. A vote, a voice, an opportunity to assist decide the course of the nation and one’s personal future inside it. Chance born of democracy.
“That’s why this previous November and January, my mother and different residents of Georgia grabbed maintain of that risk and turned out in document numbers, 5 million in November, 4.4 million in January. Way over ever in our state’s historical past. Turnout for a typical runoff doubled. And the individuals of Georgia despatched the state’s first African American senator and first Jewish senator, my brother Jon Ossoff, to those hallowed halls.
“However then, what occurred? Some politicians didn’t approve of the selection made by nearly all of voters in a hard-fought election by which both sides received the possibility to make its case to the voters. And, slightly than adjusting their agenda, slightly than altering their message, they’re busy attempting to alter the principles. We’re witnessing proper now a large and unabashed assault on voting rights not like something we have now seen for the reason that Jim Crow period. That is Jim Crow in new garments.
“For the reason that January election, some 250 voter suppression payments have been launched by state legislatures all throughout the nation—from Georgia to Arizona, from New Hampshire to Florida. Utilizing the Huge Lie of voter fraud as a pretext for voter suppression. The identical Huge Lie that led to a violent riot on this very Capitol — the day after my election. Inside 24 hours, we elected Georgia’s first African-American and Jewish Senators, hours later the Capitol was assaulted. We see in just some valuable hours the strain very a lot alive within the soul of America. And the query earlier than all of us at each second is what’s going to we do to push us in the correct course.
“So politicians pushed by that massive lie goal to severely restrict, and in some circumstances, eradicate automated and same-day voter registration, mail-in and absentee voting, and early voting and weekend voting. They wish to make it simpler to purge voters from the voting roll altogether. As a voting rights activist, I’ve seen up shut simply how draconian these measures could be. I hail from a state that purged 200,000 voters one Saturday night time —in the midst of the night time. We all know what’s occurring — some individuals don’t need some individuals to vote.
“I used to be honored on a couple of events to face with our hero and my parishioner, John Lewis. I used to be his pastor however I’m clear he was my mentor. On multiple event we boarded buses collectively after Sunday Church companies as a part of our Souls To The Polls program, encouraging the Ebenezer Church household and communities of religion to take part within the democratic course of. Now just some months after Congressman Lewis’ dying, there are these within the Georgia legislature, some who even dared to reward his identify, that are actually attempting to eliminate Sunday Souls to the Polls, making it a criminal offense for individuals who pray collectively to get on a bus collectively and vote collectively. I feel that’s fallacious. In actual fact, I feel a vote is a form of prayer concerning the world we need for ourselves and our kids. And our prayers are stronger after we pray collectively.
“To make sure, we have now seen these sorts of voter suppression techniques earlier than. They’re part of an extended and shameful historical past in Georgia and all through our nation. However refusing to be denied, Georgia residents and residents throughout our nation braved the warmth and the chilly and the rain, some standing in line for five hours, 6 hours, 10 hours simply to train their constitutional proper to vote. Younger individuals, outdated individuals, sick individuals, working individuals, already underpaid, compelled to lose wages, to pay a form of ballot tax whereas standing in line to vote.
“And the way did some politicians reply? Properly, they’re attempting to make it a criminal offense to present individuals water and a snack, as they wait in traces which are clearly being made longer by their draconian actions. Take into consideration that. Take into consideration that. They’re those making the traces longer– by way of these draconian actions. Then, they wish to make it a criminal offense to convey grandma some water as she is ready in line they’re making longer! Make no mistake. That is democracy in reverse. Somewhat than voters having the ability to choose the politicians, the politicians try to cherry choose their voters. I say this can’t stand
“And so I rise, Mr. President, as a result of that sacred and noble concept—one individual, one vote—is being threatened proper now. Politicians in my house state and all throughout America, of their craven lust for energy, have launched a full-fledged assault on voting rights. They’re targeted on successful at any price, even the price of the democracy itself. I submit that it’s the job of every citizen to face up for the voting rights of each citizen. And it’s the job of this physique to do all that it may to defend the viability of our democracy.
“That’s why I’m a proud co-sponsor of the For The Folks Act, which we launched in the present day. The For The Folks Act is a significant step ahead within the march towards our democratic beliefs, making it simpler, not tougher, for eligible People to vote by instituting commonsense, pro-democracy reforms like:Establishing nationwide automated voter registration for each eligible citizen, and permitting all People to register to vote on-line and on Election Day; Requiring states to supply not less than two weeks of early voting, together with weekends, in federal elections—maintaining Souls to the Polls packages alive; Prohibiting states from proscribing an individual’s means to vote absentee or by mail;And stopping states from purging the voter rolls primarily based solely on unreliable proof like somebody’s voting historical past, one thing we’ve seen in Georgia and different states in recent times.
And It will finish the dominance of huge cash in our politics, and guarantee our public servants are there serving the general public.
“Amidst these voter suppression legal guidelines and techniques, together with partisan and racial gerrymandering, and in a system awash in darkish cash and the dominance of corporatist pursuits and politicians who do their bidding, the voices of the American individuals have been more and more drowned out and crowded out and squeezed out of their very own democracy. We should move “For The Folks” so that individuals might need a voice. Your vote is your voice and your voice is your human dignity.
“However not solely that, we should move the John Lewis Voting Rights Development Act. Voting rights was a bi-partisan concern. The final time the voting rights invoice was re-authorized was 2006. George W. Bush was president and it handed its chamber 98-0. However then in 2013, the Supreme Courtroom rejected the profitable method for supervision and pre-clearance, contained within the 1965 Voting Rights Act. They requested Congress to repair it. That was almost 8 years in the past, and the American persons are nonetheless ready. Stripped of protections, voters in states with an extended historical past of voting discrimination and voters in lots of different states have been thrown to the winds.
“We People have noisy and spirited debates about many issues. And we should always. That’s what it means to dwell in a free nation. However entry to the poll must be nonpartisan. I submit that there ought to be 100 votes on this chamber for insurance policies that can make it simpler for People to make their voices heard in our democracy. Absolutely, there must be not less than 60 individuals on this chamber who imagine, as I do, that the 4 strongest phrases uttered in a democracy are, ‘the individuals have spoken,’ due to this fact we should be certain that all of the individuals can communicate.
“But when not, we should nonetheless move voting rights. The suitable to vote is preservative of all different rights. It’s not simply one other concern alongside different points. It’s foundational. It’s the motive why any of us has the privilege of standing right here within the first place. It’s concerning the covenant we have now with each other as an American individuals. E Pluribus Unum, out of many one. It above all else should be protected.
“So let’s be clear, I’m not right here in the present day to spiral into the procedural argument relating to whether or not the filibuster normally has deserves or has outlived its usefulness. I’m right here to say that this concern is greater than the filibuster. I stand earlier than you saying that this concern—entry to voting and preempting politicians’ efforts to limit voting—is so elementary to our democracy that it’s too essential to be held hostage by a Senate rule, particularly one traditionally used to limit the growth of voting rights. It’s a contradiction to say we should shield minority rights within the Senate whereas refusing to guard minority rights within the society. Colleagues, no Senate rule ought to overrule the integrity of the democracy and we should discover a technique to move voting rights whether or not we eliminate the filibuster or not.
“And in order I clos—and no one believes a preacher once they as I clos—as a person of religion, I imagine that democracy is a political enactment of a non secular concept. The sacred price of all human beings, the notion that all of us have inside us, a spark of the divine, to take part within the shaping of our personal future. Reinhold Niebuhr was proper: ‘[Humanity’s] capability for justice makes democracy doable; however [humanity’s] inclination to injustice makes democracy essential.’”
“John Lewis understood that and was crushed on a bridge defending it. Amelia Boynton, like so many ladies not talked about almost sufficient, was gassed on that very same bridge. A white lady named Viola Luizzo was killed. Medgar Evers was murdered in his personal driveway. Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, two Jews and an African-American standing up for the sacred concept of democracy, additionally paid the final word value. And we on this physique, could be stopped and stymied by partisan politics? Brief-term political acquire? Senate process? I say let’s get this performed it doesn’t matter what. I urge my colleagues to move these two payments. Strengthen and lengthen the cords of our democracy, safe our credibility because the premier voice for freedom-loving individuals and democratic actions all around the world, and win the longer term for all of our kids.
“Mr. President, I yield the floor.”
The maiden speech of Senator Raphael G. Warnock will resound through the history of America and the world as a pivotal event in the Restoration of Democracy and the epochal turning of the tides against the global Fourth Reich, the tyranny of authoritarian force and control, and the shadows of white supremacist terror.
We must challenge the tyranny of racist vote suppression, the impunity of an armed police whose primary mission is to enforce racist hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and repress dissent, attempts to capture the narrative and re-write history in order to falsify us and steal our souls through lies and propaganda such as directed against the 1619 Project and the Socratic questioning of our nation and our civilization now referred to as Critical Race Theory, and in support of the vile lunatic QAnon conspiracy and monuments and place names which glorify a Confederacy which was nothing other than a human trafficking syndicate which declared itself a nation, which all support and are interdependent with the second Big Lie of the Traitor’s regime and last hope of dominion of the Fourth Reich, Trump’s claim to be our President, for his Oath to defend our Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic is a Big Lie, and his Presidency can have no legal standing.
He was never our President, merely a Russian agent and figurehead of fascists. And he remains so now.
And to fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again.
As written by Anna Betts in The Guardian, in an article entitled Who is Mariann Edgar Budde, the bishop who angered Trump with inaugural sermon?
Budde, 65, asked president to ‘have mercy’ on immigrants and LGBTQ+ people in prayer service on Tuesday; “The Right Rev Mariann Edgar Budde made headlines this week after she used her sermon on Tuesday at the National Cathedral prayer service for the inauguration to implore Donald Trump to “have mercy upon” immigrants and LGBTQ+ individuals.
Budde, 65, is the first woman to serve as the spiritual leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. She has been leading the diocese since her election to the role in 2011. Before that, she served as the rector of St John’s Episcopal church in Minneapolis for 18 years.
On Tuesday, she made headlines for urging Trump during her sermon to show mercy to “gay, lesbian and transgender children” from all political backgrounds, some of whom, she said, “fear for their lives”.
She also used her sermon to ask that Trump grant mercy to families fearing deportation and to help those fleeing war and persecution.
She emphasized the contributions of immigrants, telling the president: “The vast majority of immigrants are not criminals,” adding that they were “good neighbors” and “faithful members of our churches, mosques and synagogues, gurdwara and temples”.
“Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were once strangers in this land,” she said.
This is not the first time that Budde has called out and clashed with Trump.
During Trump’s first term, Budde published an opinion piece in the New York Times. In the June 2020 article, she expressed outrage over Trump’s appearance in front of St John’s Episcopal church in Washington DC, when he held up a Bible for a photo after federal officers used force to clear a crowd of peaceful protesters demonstrating against the death of George Floyd.
Budde wrote that Trump had “used sacred symbols to cloak himself in the mantle of spiritual authority, while espousing positions antithetical to the Bible that he held in his hands”.
That same month, she was interviewed by ABC News and stated that she had “given up speaking to President Trump”, adding: “We need to replace President Trump.”
“We need leadership that will lead us in the ways that this country deserves,” she said.
On her social media at the time, she also expressed her support for those seeking justice for the death of Floyd through the “sacred act of peaceful protest”.
Budde is described on the Episcopal Diocese of Washington website as “an advocate and organizer in support of justice concerns, including racial equity, gun violence prevention, immigration reform, the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ persons, and the care of creation”.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Rochester, graduating magna cum laude. Budde also obtained both a master of divinity and a doctor of ministry from Virginia Theological Seminary. She and her husband, Paul, have two adult sons and are also grandparents.
In addition to her ministerial duties, Budde has authored three books – How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith, Receiving Jesus: The Way of Love, and Gathering Up the Fragments: Preaching as Spiritual Practice.
Just one day after she delivered her remarks in front of Trump, Budde said on The View on Wednesday morning that her responsibility on Tuesday was to reflect and “pray with the nation for unity”.
“As I was pondering what are the foundations of unity, I wanted to emphasize respecting the honor and dignity of every human being, basic honesty and humility,” she said.
“And then I also realized that in unity requires a certain degree of mercy and compassion and understanding.”
She added: “Knowing that a lot of people in our country right now are really scared, I wanted to take the opportunity in the context of that service for unity, to say we need to treat everyone with dignity, and we need to be merciful, I was trying to counter the narrative that is so so divisive and polarizing, and in which people, real people, are being harmed.”
As I wrote in my post of June 1 2024, Anniversary of Traitor Trump’s Seizure of St. John’s Church and Assault on a Protest as a Stage For Propaganda; “ On this day we remember the weaponization of faith in service to power as authorization of the use of state terror and repression of dissent against the Black Lives Matter protests of racial justice. In this obscene subversion of the message of the brotherhood of men and our duty of care for each other of the Sermon on the Mount, so beautifully written of by Tolstoy, Traitor Trump aped the gestural and rhetorical performance of his model Adolf Hitler as he often does, whose newsreels he studied for years as he sleeps with a copy of Mein Kampf on his nightstand in place of a Bible. This is the true faith of Trump, and his vision of a future for us all.
Let us remember, and bring a Reckoning; but we must remember also that Trump exploited but did not originate the weaponization of faith as authorization and legitimation of theocratic tyranny, white supremacist terror, and patriarchal sexual terror. This special form of totalitarianism is as old as the first city-states founded on mass slave agriculture and conquest as slave raiding, the first priest-kings who spoke for the gods and the first police enforcers who kept the slaves at their work. There is always someone in a gold robe who cons and bullies others into doing the hard and dirty work which creates his wealth and power. This we must resist and change.
As written by Alan Moore in V For Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”
As I wrote in my post of June 2 2020, The Great Dictator: Trump’s Reboot of the Chaplin Classic; As the world is gripped by images of Trump’s expulsion of the priests from the church and brutal repression of protestors against racist violence, of his photo op holding a Bible while invoking the use of the military against citizens to silence dissent and bolster his failing regime of white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, and authoritarian state force and control, I believe it is time to consider the relative merits of our Clown of Terror’s performance of the role of the Great Dictator as compared to its originator, Charlie Chaplin.
To this end I recommend Robert Coover’s 1968 satire The Cat in the Hat for President, written originally about Nixon and republished as A Political Fable, and the luminous and feral 1933 novel on which Trump has modeled his revised Theatre of Cruelty, Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist by Antonin Artaud.
Let us mock and deflate all such absurd monsters who would enslave us.
As written in the Charlie Chaplin website; “The Great Dictator was Chaplin’s first film with dialogue. Chaplin plays both a little Jewish barber, living in the ghetto, and Hynkel, the dictator ruler of Tomainia. In his autobiography Chaplin quotes himself as having said: “One doesn’t have to be a Jew to be anti Nazi. All one has to be is a normal decent human being.”
Chaplin and Hitler were born within a week of one another. “There was something uncanny in the resemblance between the Little Tramp and Adolf Hitler, representing opposite poles of humanity, ” writes Chaplin biographer David Robinson, reproducing an unsigned article from The Spectator dated 21st April 1939; “Providence was in an ironical mood when, fifty years ago this week, it was ordained that Charles Chaplin and Adolf Hitler should make their entry into the world within four days of each other….Each in his own way has expressed the ideas, sentiments, aspirations of the millions of struggling citizens ground between the upper and the lower millstone of society. (…) Each has mirrored the same reality – the predicament of the “little man” in modern society. Each is a distorting mirror, the one for good, the other for untold evil.”
“Chaplin spent many months drafting and re-writing the speech for the end of the film, a call for peace from the barber who has been mistaken for Hynkel. Many people criticized the speech, and thought it was superfluous to the film. Others found it uplifting. Regrettably Chaplin’s words are as relevant today as they were in 1940.”
Transcript of Charlie Chaplin’s Final Speech in The Great Dictator:
“I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone – if possible – Jew, Gentile – black man – white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness – not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost….
The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men – cries out for universal brotherhood – for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world – millions of despairing men, women, and little children – victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.
To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. …..
Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes – men who despise you – enslave you – who regiment your lives – tell you what to do – what to think and what to feel! Who drill you – diet you – treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate – the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!
In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” – not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power – the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
Then – in the name of democracy – let us use that power – let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world – a decent world that will give men a chance to work – that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!
Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world – to do away with national barriers – to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!”
As the notorious St John’s Church incident is described in The Washington Post in an article entitled Trump’s use of the Bible was obscene. He should try reading the words inside it., written by Rev. William J. Barber II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove; “On Monday evening, federal authorities used tear gas to clear Lafayette Square so President Trump could pose for a photo while holding a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church. It wasn’t the first time Trump has used the word of God as a political prop. But it was obscene, even for him.
Though Trump answered ambiguously when asked if the volume he was holding was his Bible, it appeared to be the Revised Standard Version of the text that he has used to signal to his Christian nationalist followers before.
According to David Brody and Scott Lamb’s unironic “spiritual biography,” “The Faith of Donald Trump,” the Revised Standard Version was a gift from Trump’s mother, Mary Anne, on the occasion of his graduation from Sunday Church Primary School at the First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, Queens. Since his 2016 campaign, Trump has publicly claimed that the Bible is “very special” to him, using it frequently to authenticate his faith among what he calls “the evangelicals.” When he took the oath of office at his inauguration, Trump placed that Bible on top of the Abraham Lincoln Bible from the Library of Congress.
Though Trump has said little more about this Bible publicly, charismatic television preachers such as his faith adviser, Paula White-Cain, have developed a mythos around it. According to the version of the story these preachers often recite in sermons, this Bible was sent to Trump’s mother by two aunts in Scotland who were instrumental prayer warriors in an early-20th-century revival there. Among so-called Christian nationalists who believe that America has strayed from its traditional values and must be redeemed by “Christian” leadership, this Bible has become a sort of talisman to convey spiritual authority to an unlikely “chosen one.”
Whether Trump believes any of this, millions of Christian nationalists do. For them, a picture of Trump with what appears to be his great aunts’ Bible in front of a beleaguered church is worth a thousand words of reassurance.
But for those of us who study and preach the Bible’s text, that Christian nationalism is an offense. The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry, tweeted on Monday evening that the president had “used a church building and the Holy Bible for partisan political purposes.” While that is true, we find it even more outrageous that Trump and the religious extremists he appeals to have turned Christian faith against itself.
As preachers in the South, one black and one white, we are painfully aware of the ways Christian faith has been used to justify slavery, white supremacy, legal segregation, corporate exploitation, the dominance of women and the dehumanization of LGBTQ people. As Frederick Douglass put it, “Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.”
Millions of Christians and other people of faith see and acknowledge this difference.
We read the prophet Isaiah’s cry, “Woe unto those who legislate evil … make women and children their prey,” and we know it is a challenge to this administration and any political leadership that neglects its responsibility to care for the poor and most vulnerable in our society.
We read the prophet Jeremiah crying out against those who say, “‘Peace, peace’ when there is no peace.” We hear it as a call to listen to the grief of Americans who are not only weary of racialized police violence but also of a pandemic that has fallen disproportionately on black, brown and poor communities who are often asked to do what the essential work of food preparation, sanitation and bodily care.
We read Jesus saying, “Woe unto you … hypocrites … you have neglected the weightier matters of the law,” and we know that, at the very heart of our faith, we are called to challenge those who try to twist belief to use it for their own ends.
The Bible as a talisman has real political power. But we believe the words inside the book are more powerful. If we unite across lines of race, creed and culture to stand together on the moral vision of love, justice and truth that was proclaimed by Jesus and the prophets, we have the capacity to reclaim the heart of this democracy and work together for a more perfect union.
To do that, we need to read the Bible and live it, not wave it for the cameras.”
BONHOEFFER Trailer
Chaplin’s The Great Dictator
How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith,
Tens of millions of American Christians are embracing a charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, which seeks to destroy the secular state.
November 22 2022 Faith Weaponized in Service to Power: a Mad Tyrant Dreams of Return in the Shadows of Thanksgiving and QAnon as Instruments of Authorized National Identity
December 11 2020 Principles of Democracy: A Secular State, or Why America May Be a Nation of Christian and Other Faiths, But Is Not A Christian Nation Nor Can We Ever Be Allowed To Become So
Fifty two years ago today America enacted women’s right to abortion, and it has remained a ground of struggle ever since.
Such a long, multigenerational struggle, over such a simple question; to whom does a woman’s body belong?
Half of humankind remains slaves to the other half; and I very much hope that we can sort this out before another fifty years pass.
As written by Simon Winchester in The Guardian on this day in 1973, in an article entitled Roe v Wade: US women win abortion rights; “In a long awaited decision the United States supreme court ruled today that a woman has a near-absolute right to an abortion, but only in the first three months of her pregnancy. During the later stages the State has an increasing power of intervention, the court ruled by a seven to two majority; and during the last trimester can refuse to allow the operation.
The decision, which came today as part of a lengthy ruling which declared the Texas and Georgia anti-abortion laws unconstitutional, has been generally welcomed by liberal groups here. Mrs Lee Giddings, of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, said today she was “absolutely thrilled.”
The court’s ruling is a rare reversal of long-settled law that will fracture the foundations of modern reproductive rights in the US.
But one of the two dissenting supreme court justices, the Nixon appointee Justice Byron White (the other dissenting justice was also a Nixon appointee, Mr William Rehnquist), later criticised the verdict as “improvident, extravagant, and an exercise of raw judicial power.”
In his ruling, Justice Harry Blackmun said that during the first three months of a pregnancy “the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the woman’s doctor.” After that, the State “In promoting its interest in the mother’s health” may regulate the abortion procedure by among other things, making laws, regulating the doctor’s terms of reference.
Only in the third three-month period, when a foetus could presumably live, if there was a premature birth, can the State “regulate or even forbid abortion.” The justices ruled the State could intervene thus “where it was necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of life or the health of the mother.”
The one dissenting voice raised today at the supreme court ruling came from the Women’s National Abortion Action Committee, which condemned the “artificial and arbitrary” time limits imposed by judges. A spokesperson, as they say here, says that “a woman should always have an absolute right to determine what happens to her own body.” Harsh reaction is also expected, of course, from the Roman Catholic church and other anti-abortion lobby groups.”
Where are we now with this issue, and of the larger question of the equality of women? As written by Carter Sherman in The Guardian, in an article entitled The fight for abortion rights: what to know going into 2024; “A presidential election and another major supreme court case is on the horizon, after a dramatic year in which pro-choice and foes have waged a state-by-state war.
More than a year after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, the dust from the landmark decision’s collapse has yet to settle.
It has been a dramatic year of fallout, with abortion rights supporters and foes now waging a state-by-state skirmish for abortion rights. They are sparring in state legislatures, courtrooms, voting booths and hospitals, with each side racking up victories and losses.
With a presidential election and another major supreme court case on the horizon, the coming year promises to be at least as eventful. Here’s what you need to know about the fight over abortion in 2023 – and what it means for 2024.
Abortion rights supporters keep winning at the ballot box.
In 2022, Republicans underperformed in the midterms and abortion rights activists won a string of ballot measures to preserve abortion rights, even in conservative states. This year, activists extended their winning streak – and they hope to replicate their successes in 2024.
In November, Ohio became the first reliably red state since Roe fell to vote in favor of proactively enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution, while Virginia Democrats successfully fended off Republicans’ attempt to retake the state legislature by campaigning on a 15-week abortion ban.
For activists and Democrats, these victories were proof that abortion is an election-winning issue – and, potentially, an issue that can draw in voters from across both sides of the ideological spectrum. Activists are already at work on 2024 abortion-related ballot measures in roughly a dozen states, including swing states like Arizona and Nevada.
Abortions are on the rise
After abortion clinics across the south and midwest were forced to shutter, patients overwhelmed the country’s remaining clinics. In the first year after Roe’s demise, the average number of US abortions performed each month rose rather than fell. Clinics and their advocates are now struggling to keep up. “What actually is happening is a complete disruption,” one expert told the Guardian.
There is also a gaping hole in the data, which was released in October by the Society of Family Planning: it does not include abortions performed at home, a practice known as “self-managed abortion”. Medical experts widely agree that it is safe to self-manage an abortion using pills early on in pregnancy, and a number of services shipping abortion pills have increased in visibility since Roe’s overturning. But while evidence suggests that self-managed abortion is on the rise, the lack of concrete data about the practice reflects a growing problem in the post-Roe United States: as abortion moves further into the shadows of US life, we will know less about it.
Legal battles over abortion bans are ongoing.
Abortion bans continued to cascade across the country in 2023, with near-total bans taking effect in Indiana, North Dakota and South Carolina. North Carolina and Nebraska, meanwhile, enacted laws to ban abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy. In total, 24 states or territories have now banned abortion before viability, or roughly 24 weeks of pregnancy, which would have been illegal under Roe.
Litigation over abortion restrictions is still unfurling in many of these states, and court cases have frozen bans in states like Wyoming and Iowa. Wisconsin abortion providers, meanwhile, found themselves in a unique position this year: after a judge ruled that an 1849 law that had been interpreted to ban abortions instead only banned feticide and did not apply to what she called “consensual abortions”, providers resumed performing the procedure – even though the ban is still technically on the books.
Lawsuits may force other hardcore anti-abortion states to soften their bans in 2024 to clarify exceptions when abortions are permitted in medical emergencies. While Tennessee and Texas carved out narrow exceptions in their abortion laws, abortion rights supporters have still filed lawsuits in those two states, as well as in Idaho, that challenge the language. One Texan mother of two filed a lawsuit seeking an emergency abortion while she was still pregnant. (She ultimately fled the state for the procedure.)
Theoretically, people in medical emergencies should be able to access the procedure even in states with bans – but doctors say that, in reality, these bans are so vaguely worded that they block doctors from helping sick patients. This summer, one of these lawsuits led women to testify in a Texas court about their experiences of being denied abortions. It was the first time since Roe fell, if not the first time since Roe itself was decided, that women did so.
Abortion pills are in peril.
The most common method of abortion, abortion pills, is at the mercy of deeply conservative courts in 2024.
In April, a conservative judge in Texas ruled to suspend the FDA’s approval of a key abortion pill, mifepristone, in response to a lawsuit brought by a coalition of rightwing groups determined to make the pill the next target in their post-Roe campaign against abortion. A federal appeals court soon scaled back that decision, ruling to keep the pill, mifepristone, available but impose significant restrictions on its use. The supreme court then stepped in and decreed that the FDA’s rules around mifepristone should stay the same while litigation plays out.
The Biden administration and a manufacturer of mifepristone in September have asked the supreme court to formally hear arguments in the case. In December, the justices agreed.
Although the justices indicated that they will only rule on the restrictions imposed by the appeals court, rather than on the overall legality of mifepristone, the case could still have enormous consequences. Rolling back the FDA’s rules could allow future lawsuits against other politicized medications, like gender-affirming care, HIV drugs or vaccines. Plus, the supreme court will probably rule by summer 2024 – just months before the presidential election.
Mifepristone is used in more than half the abortions in the country. If access to the drug is curtailed, many abortion clinics have said they will pivot to using doses of a different drug, misoprostol, to perform abortions, but misoprostol-only abortions are less effective and associated with more complications.
Doctors are fleeing states with abortion bans.
With abortion bans endangering their patients and threatening to send doctors to prison, doctors are fleeing states where the procedure is banned. After Idaho banned abortion, at least 13 reproductive health physicians left the state and at least two rural labor and delivery wards have closed. Doctors in Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, Ohio and Florida have also told reporters that they are leaving states with abortion bans or planning to do so.
OB-GYNs are already in short supply in the United States. About half of US counties do not have a practicing OB-GYN, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The US maternal mortality rates are also worsening, particularly for Black and Native people, at a time when the United States already has the worst maternal mortality rate among industrialized countries.
Doctors are now even afraid to get trained in states with abortion bans. Applications to OB-GYN residencies in states with near-total bans fell by more than 10% the year after Roe’s demise, according to data from Association of American Medical Colleges. Applications to US OB-GYN residencies overall dropped by about 5% – indicating that fewer doctors are planning to become OB-GYNs at all.”
And so the ground of struggle is defined, both here in America and throughout the world, and in all our possible futures, for all humankind.
As I wrote in my post of June 24 2023, Anniversary of the End of Roe Versus Wade and Women’s Right of Bodily Autonomy; On this day last year half our nation’s people were stripped of meaningful citizenship and their bodies declared property of the state by the Supreme Court.
Of this ongoing horror and crime against humanity I wrote in my summation of last year’s liberation struggle and electoral politics in America in my post of December 28 2022, This Year Was Defined in Politics by Resistance Against the Patriarchy and the Issue of Women’s Rights of Bodily Autonomy; 2022 was defined in politics by resistance against the Patriarchy and the issue of women’s rights of bodily autonomy, both globally in the glorious and spectacular revolution against theocracy and patriarchy originating in Iran and here in America the mass resistance to the end of Roe v Wade which galvanized a historic blue wave in our midterm elections.
While this has always been a wedge issue used by elites and forces of reaction to make women vote against their own interests, freedoms, and equality, and rode the wave of change of the #metoo movement, something has shifted and become new in this arena, forever transforming the ground of struggle and defining the terms of debate; it is now an existential crisis central to the survival of democracy itself, and women are responding not with the subjugation of learned helplessness, but with the fury of the oppressed and the solidarity of a dehumanized class.
In 2022, women realized they are enslaved and have begun resistance and revolutionary struggle. Patriarchal authority has lost its legitimacy, and begun its inevitable collapse. Without its fig leaf of theocratic lies and illusions, with the amoral brutality of its systemic and historical forces and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, there is only one way this ends.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Here follows my journal on this Defining Moment for America in 2022:
As I wrote in my post of June 24 2022, The End of Women’s Right of Bodily Autonomy; The Supreme Court has just declared women’s bodies to be property of the state and of men, and mass protests have once again erupted throughout America.
This is an area of ideological fracture and polarization in which few persuadable voters remain on either side, the classic wedge issue by which Patriarchy and sexual terror subjugates and dehumanizes us, and through which our enslavement by hegemonic elites of wealth, power, and privilege legitimize their regimes of weaponized faith.
Electoral politics and legislative change have failed, for in our system a few unelected and corrupt judges, infiltration and subversion agents placed at the apex of social power by hegemonic elites to replace democracy with theocracry, can rule by fiat in total disregard to the will of the people. Our Justice system has lost its legitimacy and become a junta, and this we must resist.
After all our hopes and dreams for Liberty and a free society of equals, we’re back to the Underground Railroad.
As written by Emily Janakiram & Lizzie Chadbourne in Truthout; “As reproductive rights organizers have long anticipated — and as a leaked memo all but confirmed last month — the Supreme Court has ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
The decision came in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which involves a Mississippi law prohibiting all abortions after 15 weeks except in the case of medical emergency or severe fetal abnormality. This suit is part of an effort by the right to legally challenge what was previously the constitutionally protected right to abortion in Roe, and the court has sided with the state of Mississippi to repeal that right. This ruling undoes the federal protection of abortion, resulting in the total or near-total ban of abortion in 26 states.
The right has long been organizing for this moment, creating “trigger bans” in expectation of Roe’s overturn, as well as mobilizing to harass and intimidate patients in places where abortion remains legal, like New York and Washington, D.C. Republicans are poised to attempt passing a federal ban on abortion.
Despite Justice Samuel Alito’s claim that the ruling does not affect contraceptive access, the anti-abortion right has also opposed hormonal contraception, the copper IUD and the morning-after pill on the grounds that they are “abortifacients” since from their perspective, human life begins at conception and these methods prevent the fertilized egg from implanting. Last month, Louisiana lawmakers deliberated over a bill which would have criminalized both the IUD and the morning-after pill. The bill ultimately failed, but we can expect to see similar initiatives gaining ground in states hostile to abortion rights.
The anti-abortion right frames the overturn of Roe as an act of democracy, “returning the decision to the states,” and correcting federal overreach. This is misleading at best. The states in which abortion is now illegal are heavily gerrymandered and undemocratic themselves; it is simply not true that abortion bans reflect the will of the people. In fact, a majority of Americans — about 60 percent — believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
The consequences of abortion restrictions in red states prior to this moment have been disastrous as residents have been forced to travel out of state to access care at significant personal cost. Texas’s notorious Senate Bill 8 law resulted in a significant number of patients from Texas with a gestational age past six weeks traveling to Oklahoma for abortion appointments — until Oklahoma passed a total abortion ban, leaving Texans seeking abortions with even fewer options.
We can expect this situation to spread further across the country, with abortion patients forced to travel even longer distances to access abortion. Of course, this will place an undue hardship on patients without the means to travel out of state — whether that be due to the financial burden, lack of access to child care, sick leave, or other reasons.
The right has long been organizing for this moment, creating “trigger bans” in expectation of Roe’s overturn, as well as mobilizing to harass and intimidate patients in places where abortion remains legal.
More grotesquely, abortion patients will not only have to face undue financial and logistical hurdles to access essential health care — but they will also have to brave the police, or in some cases, state-funded vigilantes, in order to do so. Texas’s SB 8 law allows literally anyone to file suit against someone who “aids or abets” in an abortion — though not the abortion patient themselves. Someone who drives a patient to a bus so that they can receive an abortion out of state could be sued, and the plaintiff would be awarded $10,000 in damages. Abortion patients themselves cannot be sued.
While the law has been carefully designed so that there is no criminal penalty — and thus, ironically, protecting it from certain legal challenges — it still invites police violence against abortion patients. Recently, 26-year-old Lizelle Herrera of South Texas was arrested and detained under suspicion of having induced her own abortion after a stillbirth. Even if the states that criminalize abortion only penalize providers and those who “aid and abet” abortion, patients themselves can still be subject to police violence in cases of self-managed abortions, which will become the only recourse available to many patients who cannot travel out of state to a clinic. Although only a handful of states currently criminalize self-managed abortion specifically, in over half the states there have been criminal investigations into pregnancy loss based on suspicion of self-managed abortion. People from communities that experience heightened levels of policing and state surveillance and who choose to self-manage their abortions will be at an increased risk of criminalization.
Even when abortion patients manage to reach less-restricted states, safe and unfettered abortion access in those places is by no means a given either. Many clinics are already functioning at capacity even before the heightened influx of patients from other states, and the anti-abortion movement has set its eyes on cities like New York. Their base has been galvanized to confront “the evil of abortion” at its center — the clinics where abortions happen. When abortion is halted in over half the states, we can expect that campaigns of harassment will expand at clinics in less-restricted states by anti-abortion groups shifting their focus to regions where abortions are still performed legally.
Abortion patients will not only have to face undue financial and logistical hurdles to access essential health care — but they will also have to brave the police, or in some cases, state-funded vigilantes, in order to do so.
In New York City, the Archdiocese leads a campaign of clinic harassment every month in all five boroughs — with the blessing and sanction of the police. The police do not help patients enter the clinic safely but escort the clinic harassers — whom they seem to be on friendly terms with — and threaten and intimidate clinic defenders. It is no secret that the police and the far right are closely allied, in some cases one and the same; we cannot count on them to protect abortion patients. We will need a militant response to counter the right in less restricted states.
Moreover, the criminalization of providing abortion care and aiding and abetting abortion puts pregnant people in grave danger. Some states may make “life of the mother” exemptions. But most United States hospitals are either for-profit or religiously affiliated nonprofits with ideological opposition to abortion. There is seldom a clearly demarcated point at which an abortion becomes absolutely, unambiguously medically necessary. A private health care facility may not risk criminal charges in order to save a patient’s life. Notoriously, Savita Halappanavar died of sepsis in an Irish hospital when doctors refused to perform an abortion because, though her pregnancy was no longer viable, a fetal heartbeat was still detected. As of this writing, an American woman, Andrea Prudente, is set to be airlifted out of Malta, the only country in the European Union with a total abortion ban. Even though her pregnancy is no longer viable, and without an abortion, she risks the same fate, a fetal heartbeat is still detected and doctors refuse to provide an abortion. Of course, the U.S. leads the developed world in mortality during childbirth. With the end of Roe, it will become even more dangerous to give birth in the U.S.
Many reproductive rights organizations advise that pro-choice activists put aside “coat hanger” imagery and refrain from dwelling on history of dangerous back-alley abortions. This is not to erase the history of violence that accompanied abortion bans, but because it unproductively obscures the abortion situation as it exists today. Self-managed abortions are safer than ever, thanks to the advent of the abortion pill and networks that provide access through the mail; and even abortions in the home can be performed safely using aspiration. In fact, they are more safe than home births, belying the right-wing canard that abortion and the abortion pill is more dangerous than childbirth. The right uses this lie to push for the closure of clinics and make obtaining the abortion pill unduly burdensome.
Laws against aiding and abetting abortion — and the ensuing climate of fear, secrecy and isolation — are what kill pregnant people, not self-managed abortions.
However, the secrecy in which abortions have had to happen historically is what made them so dangerous — that people don’t know how such abortions can be performed safely, or even the basic facts of pregnancy (a situation that’s especially dire in red states given a lack of sex education in schools). This secrecy is enforced by the police. Laws against “aiding and abetting abortion” — and the ensuing climate of fear, secrecy, and isolation — are what kill pregnant people, not self-managed abortions.
If we are to resist abortion bans, each one of us must be prepared to aid and abet abortion, whether that’s being trained in administering a self-managed abortion, buying and donating abortion pills, driving someone across state lines to receive an abortion, participating in clinic defense, or donating to an abortion fund. But we cannot lose sight of the ultimate goal: a mass movement to establish free abortion on demand as an inalienable right.”
As written by Moira Donegan in The Guardian, in an article entitled Roe v Wade has been overturned. Here’s what this will mean; “Millions of women are now less free than men, in the functioning of their own bodies and in the paths of their own lives.
The story is not about the supreme court. Today, the sword that has long been hanging over American women’s heads finally fell: the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, ending the nationwide right to an abortion. This has long been expected, and long dreaded, by those in the reproductive rights movement, and it has long been denied by those who wished to downplay the court’s extremist lurch. The coming hours will be consumed with finger pointing and recriminations. But the story is not about who was right and who was wrong.
Nor is the story about the US judiciary’s crumbling legitimacy, or the supreme court’s fractious internal politics. In the coming days, our attention will be called to the justices themselves – to their feelings, to their careers, to their safety. We will be distracted by the stench of partisanship and scandal that emanates from the shadowy halls of One First Street; by the justices’ grievance-airing and petty backbiting in public; or by their vengeful paranoid investigation into the leak of a draft of Samuel Alito’s opinion some weeks ago. We will be scolded not to protest outside their houses, and we will be prevented, by high fences and heavy gates and the presence of armed cops, from protesting outside the court itself. But the story is not about the supreme court.
The story is not about the Democratic politicians, whose leadership on abortion rights has been tepid at best, and negligent at worst, since the 1990s. In the coming days, people who have voted to uphold the Hyde Amendment, a provision that has banned federal funding of abortion since 1976 – effectively limiting the constitutional right to an abortion to only those Americans wealthy enough to afford one – will tell us how terrible this is. They will issue statements talking about their outrage; they will make platitude-filled speeches about the worth and dignity of American women. They will not mention their own inaction, persisting for decades in the face of mounting and well-funded rightwing threats to Roe. They will not mention that they did nothing as all that worth and dignity of American women hung in the balance; they will not mention that most of them still, even now, oppose doing the only thing that could possibly restore reproductive freedom: expanding the number of justices on the courts. But the cowardice, hypocrisy, and historic moral failure of national Democrats is not the story. And certainly, the story is nothing so vulgar as what this withdrawal of human rights might mean for that party’s midterm election prospects.
The story is not, even, about the legal chaos that will now follow. It is not about the fact that in 13 states, today’s order has made all abortion immediately illegal, the consummation of sexist ambitions that had long been enshrined in so-called trigger laws, provisions that have been on the books for years and decades that ban abortion upon the court’s reversal of Roe – misogyny lying in wait. Nor is the story about the other 13 states that will almost certainly ban abortion now, too, meaning that the procedure will be illegal in 26 of the nation’s 50 states within weeks.
The story is not about how legislatures, lawyers and judges will handle these laws; it is not about whether they will allow merciful exemptions for rape or incest (they won’t) or impose draconian measures that aim to extend the cruelty of state bans beyond their borders to target abortion doctors, funders, and supporters in blue states (they will).
The story is not about the cop who will charge the first doctor or the first patient with murder – that’s already happening, anyway. The story is not about the anti-choice activists, sneering in their triumph, who will say that they only want the best for women, and that women can’t be trusted to know what’s best for themselves. The story is not about the women who will be imprisoned or committed at the behest of these activists, or the desperate pregnant people, with nowhere to turn, who will be ensnared by them into deceitful crisis pregnancy centers or exploitative “maternity ranches”.
The real story is not about the media who will churn out the think pieces, and the crass, enabling both-sidesism, and the insulting false equivalences and calls for unity. It is not about the pundits who will scold feminists that really, it is the overzealous abortion rights movement that is to blame; that really, women must learn to compromise with the forces that would keep them unequal, bound to lives that are smaller, more brutal, and more desperate. The story is not, even, about those other rights – the rights to parent, and to marry, and to access birth control – that a cruel and emboldened right will come for next.
The real story is the women. The real story is the student whose appointment is scheduled for tomorrow, who will get a call from the clinic sometime in the next hours telling her that no, they are sorry, they cannot give her an abortion after all. The real story is the woman waiting tables, who feels so sick and exhausted these past few weeks that she can barely make it through her shifts, who will soon be calling clinics in other states, hearing that they’re all booked for weeks, and will be asking friends for money to help cover the gas, or the plane, or the time off that she can’t afford. The real story is the abortion provider, already exhausted and heartbroken from years of politicians playing politics with her patients’ rights, who will wonder whether she can keep her clinic open for its other services any more, and conclude that she can’t. The real story is the mom of two, squinting at her phone as she tries to comfort a screaming toddler, trying to figure out what she will have to give up in order to keep living the life she wants, with the family she already has.
The real story is about thousands of these women, not just now but for decades to come – the women , whose lives will be made smaller and less dignified by unplanned and unchosen pregnancies, the women whose health will be endangered by the long and grueling physical process of pregnancy; the women, and others, who will have to forgo dreams, end educations, curtail careers, stretch their finances beyond the breaking point, and subvert their own wills to someone else’s.
The real story is in the counterfactuals – the books that will go unwritten, the trips untaken, the hopes not pursued, and jokes not told, and the friends not met, because the people who could have lived the full, expansive, diverse lives that abortions would allow will instead be forced to live other lives, lives that are lesser precisely because they are not chosen.
The real story is the millions of women, and others, who now know that they are less free than men are – less free in the functioning of their own bodies, less free in the paths of their own lives, less free in the formation of their own families.
The real story is not this order; the real story is these people’s unfreedom – the pain it will inflict and the joy it will steal. The real story is women, and the real story is the impossible question: how can we ever grieve enough for them?”
As I wrote in my post of May 14 2022, The Women’s March for Freedom; Throughout America today women have seized the streets in mass action for the right of bodily autonomy, the first of all rights of property and the defining quality of citizenship, for without ownership of our own bodies there is no freedom, and we are all made property of the state.
Democracy and dehumanization hang in the balance in the issue of women’s reproductive rights; but also life itself, for access to healthcare is a precondition of the right to life and thus among the first of all implied rights guaranteed by our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Without this, no other rights are meaningful.
This is a fight against enslavement and death, and for our equality as human beings and liberty as citizens.
How shall we give answer to our dehumanization and the theft of our citizenship?
Let us say to Gideonite patriarchy and to fascist tyranny with Dylan Thomas;
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
At stake here are issues affecting every American citizen and other persons within the boundaries of our law; freedom versus dehumanization as a means of enslavement, and our universal human right of access to healthcare as a precondition of our right to life.
How can the Gideonite fundamentalists and atavistic forces of Patriarchy deny the right of bodily autonomy, the first of all rights of property, our right to choose our own use of that body which speaks to the definition of being human and to the fundamental rights of a citizen in a democracy as a voting co-owner of our government, on the basis of our right to life which derives both from our citizenship and our humanity as a natural condition, when the right of the mother to life precedes that of her fetus and renders her the sole medical authorizing party in any such matter?
Only a woman’s right to choose her own destiny matters here, and no state or any other authority which operates in the place of a father or husband under the Patriarchal legal fiction of in loco parentis, nor the will or judgement of any other persons especially actual fathers and husbands, has any just role in a free society of equals; all else is slavery.
If one abrogates the separation of church and state and claims Biblical authority as a justification for government policy, surely an act of hubris if not madness, on abortion and for a definition of life, life clearly begins with breath.
As William Tyndale wrote in his beautiful poetic reimagination of traditional sources published as the King James Bible; “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul,” Genesis 2:7.
This is reinforced elsewhere; “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, And by the breath of His mouth all their host” Psalms 33:6. And again; “Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived,” Ezekiel 10. And yet again; “If he should set his heart to it and gather to himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust,” Job 34: 14-15.
Plus there’s the abortion method authorized in Numbers 5:11-31, the Ordeal of the Bitter Water, and the penalty for causing an abortion outside of this ritual such as by a violent blow, which is a fine paid to the woman’s husband because it is a crime against property or future economic benefit and not a crime against person as there is no life before breath or natural birth.
Abrahamic faiths regard as human only those who have been ensouled at first breath upon being born; prior to birth we are not human but part of the mother’s body; a fetus has no rights other than hers, and hers is the only legitimate voice regarding one’s own body as the primary right of property from which all others derive. This is because Abrahamic faiths regard the body as an organic machine and not a person until it is animated with a soul.
To argue that abortion is murder is to argue that there is no soul, that we are human prior to the animating breath of the Infinite, and that as mere beasts and organic machines each of our cells are individually sacrosanct and legally persons. Haircuts and manicures are murder in this absurd construction.
Let us not mistake the purpose and intention of those who would seize women’s power of bodily autonomy as both a human being and a citizen; this has nothing to do with faith, and everything to do with power.
As I wrote in my post of May 6 2022, There Is No Freedom Without That of Bodily Autonomy: On the Patriarchal Enslavement and Dehumanization of Women in the State Capture of Liberty and Equality in the Supreme Court’s Revocation of the Right to Abortion; There is no freedom without that of bodily autonomy.
Our Supreme Court just declared half of humankind to be less than human and property of the state, not merely as patriarchal enslavement but also as dehumanization and theft of citizenship. Next will be the right of women to vote, then of all nonwhite persons, then the right to own property and act legally in one’s own name will be restricted to white men as it was at our founding; no matter where it begins with subversion of democracy and the equality of all human beings, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Women’s reproductive rights exhibit dual aspects as both an issue of liberty, our freedom to choose our own identity without coercion by the state, and as a healthcare issue, as universal free access to healthcare is a precondition of our right to life and therefore a Constitutional guarantee upon which none may legally infringe.
This is a direct attack on the idea of citizenship which is central and foundational to democracy, on the personhood and self ownership of all women, and on our values and ideals of freedom and equality.
It is a telling sign of intent that Alioto has cited as precedent the law which legalized witch burning centuries go in his opinion claiming that the right to abortion is unconstitutional, as MSN has pointed out.
Once again, unequal power has been captured and institutionalized by elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege as a fascism of weaponized faith and systemic Patriarchy.
America’s Supreme Court, now a political bureaucracy of authoritarian power and without legitimacy, and which has delegitimized all law in America and subverted our courts as instruments of repression of dissent and the carceral state, the true goal of the Fourth Reich in the capture of our institutions and systems of Justice, has outlawed the universal right of abortion and given a woman’s power over her own body to the state.
Yes, we all knew this was coming but it is a life disruptive event and a point of fracture in our history. This we must resist with mass action and legislative judo, but the forces of patriarchy and fascism are enormously against us. What happens next, if half of humankind can be dehumanized as property of the state and citizenship with our universal human rights becomes meaningless? In this moment, all is in motion and chaotic change, but this is also a chance of action and a measure of the adaptive range of our system. Patriarchy has made a move which is irredeemable and cannot be walked back, and they are exposed; its our move now.
If we want to keep our system of Justice as a guarantor of our universal human rights and of our parallel and interdependent rights as citizens, and the meaning of citizenship itself, we must reform the Supreme Court. I suggest limiting terms to that of the President who appointed each member, or limiting terms and holding a vote to elect Justices on a one citizen one vote basis so that it is no longer a political appointment.
This must be part of a Restoration of democracy which redesigns our system to guarantee majority rule. We must abolish the electoral college and the parceling of votes by state, and change to a one citizen one vote direct electoral democracy.
The blindfold of Justice has slipped, and we must restore her impartiality to divisions including those of gender and race.
As I wrote in my post of October 3 2021, Women’s March for Reproductive Rights and Freedom of Bodily Autonomy; Institutionalized sexual terror and state tyranny in the legislative assault on women’s reproductive rights and the primary freedom of bodily autonomy were challenged in a mass action yesterday throughout America, organized by the Women’s March and coordinated with the riveting testimony in Congress of three of our representatives who have had abortions, Cori Bush, Pramila Jayapal, and Barbara Lee.
There is no freedom without that of bodily autonomy.
We can triumph over this wave of theft of our liberty which seeks to redefine the relationship of individuals to the state and render citizenship meaningless if we act in solidarity with coordinated mass action and legislative process. As the Oath of the Resistance given to me in 1982 in Beirut by Jean Genet goes; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Roe v Wade: US women win abortion rights – archive, January 1973
EXCLUSIVE: Hillary Clinton's first interview on the implications of this week's Roe v. Wade news: "It is not just about a woman's right to choose. It is about much more than that."
The Handmaid’s Tale: Teaching Dystopia, Feminism, and Resistance Across Disciplines and Borders, by Karen A. Ritzenhoff (Editor, Contributor), Janis L. Goldie (Editor, Contributor)
Depravities, violations, sadism, monstrosity; the horrors of opening night spew forth from the diseased and rotting mind of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, Rapist In Chief of a fallen America as our deranged idiot mascot of fascism and theocracy returns to the White House with his Theatre of Cruelty.
Elon Musk’s Nazi salutes typify the minions of the Clown and will be remembered forever as a symbol of the Party of Treason and the Deplorables who voted it into power, who slavering and ululating with mindless abandon cheer him on to greater performances of the grotesque and the bizarre.
After preening before the crowd and dropping his pants so that various wellwishers could kiss his grublike white butt, Trump grinned, leered, grunted like a pig and hopped up on a table to squat and excrete a mass of Executive Orders which like Thing One and Thing Two immediately set about creating chaos.
Then he summoned one of the migrant children he had stolen from their parents, cleverly tied up Shibari style and prodded along by handlers in KKK hoods with fireplace pokers, who made their prisoner jump through hoops like lion tamers to resounding applause. “Here’s my very first Executive Order, ladies and gentlemen; we’re going to round up all the migrants, only the ones who aren’t white mind you, just so nobody worries that we’re treating people unfairly because they’re not people, and we’re selling the bond of their labor on an open exchange so you can all buy some, everyone can buy some slaves, and you can do anything you want with them, anything at all, because I said so just now, and it doesn’t matter anyway because only our kind are really truly human. And you can forget about legal and illegal immigrants, or if they were born here or not, because it’s the bad blood I’m worried about and not what it says on paper, we’re just starting with the immigrants but don’t worry, we’ll get to the rest of them eventually”.
And the crowd laughed and threw money, which Trump snapped out of the air like a dog catching treats.
As written by Martin Pengelly in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump returns to White House and unleashes barrage of executive orders; “Donald Trump launched his second term as US president with a barrage of executive orders reaching into broad swathes of American life, from pardoning hundreds of supporters who attacked Congress on January 6, including rightwing extremists convicted of seditious conspiracy, to rolling back LGBTQ+ rights and environmental rules while declaring an immigration emergency on the southern border.
Trump and his allies had long promised a “shock and awe” approach. They did not hold back.
The first round of orders were signed on stage at the Capital One Arena in downtown Washington, where the inaugural parade was moved to avoid freezing temperatures outside. Many more orders were signed in the Oval Office.
Among measures signed on stage to cheers from a raucous crowd was an order for the US to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, a step Trump took in his first term before Joe Biden recommitted the US to that attempt to tackle the climate crisis.
He signed a slew of other high-profile orders.
Among them was an order for the US to withdraw from the World Health Organization. On immigration, Trump declared a national emergency at the US-Mexico border; designated criminal cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations”; and redefined birthright citizenship, a move against children of undocumented migrants born on US soil that contravenes the 14th amendment to the US constitution, which guarantees citizenship to anyone born on American soil.
Other measures included making federal workers easier to fire; a recision of 78 Biden-era measures; a federal regulatory freeze; a freeze on all federal hiring except in the military and some other categories; and a requirement that federal workers return to full-time in-person work. Trump directed every department of government “to address the cost of living crisis”, and issued directives “preventing government censorship” and ordering the end of the “weaponization of the government against the adversaries of the previous administration”.
Trump rescinded Biden’s removal of Cuba’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism, announced just last week, and removed Biden-era sanctions on Israeli settlers and entities in the West Bank. He told reporters he would impose tariffs on Canada and Mexico from 1 February.
Back in the flow of invective, untruths and orders, Trump signed an measure “unleashing Alaska’s energy potential for the entire nation”, related to his promise to focus on fossil fuels and “drill, baby, drill.” He also signed a declaration of a “national energy emergency”.
He reversed a Biden order that sought to reduce the use of private prisons. He signed an order “protecting women against radical gender ideologies”.
He signed an order delaying the federal ban on TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media app, as mandated by a law passed last year.
His national emergency at the southern border, he said, would halt “all illegal entry… [and] begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.”
Trump promised to “send troops to the southern border to repel the disastrous invasion of our country”, adding: “By invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 I will direct our government to use the full and immense power of federal and state law enforcement to eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks bringing devastating crime to US soil, including our cities and inner cities.”
Shifting to domestic policy, Trump said he would “end the Green New Deal” – a name for progressive environmental goals, rather than laws passed under Biden – and moved to end government support for electric vehicles.
Trump promised an External Revenue Service, to “tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens”; and established the “department of government efficiency”, a cost-cutting effort championed by the tech billionaire Elon Musk, a key ally and donor. The project is already the subject of legal challenges. At the arena, Musk appeared to give two fascist salutes.
Trump ordered the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, as the Gulf of America, and Denali, as Mount McKinley. He vowed to “take back” the Panama Canal and to “launch American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars”.”
What madness and evil may together do, we may expect of future performances of the Theatre of Cruelty by the psychopathic fascist clown now at the helm of our nation.
As I wrote in my post of July 8 2020, Our Clown of Terror: The Madness of Donald Trump; We now have two revelatory and electrifying exposes of the secret world of Trump’s psyche and intimate sphere of action from insider whistleblowers, which together form a portrait of America’s President not unlike that of Dorian Gray, a horrific monster and predator who moves among us concealed beneath a human mask by the sorcery of lies and illusions.
In this Mary Trump and John Bolton have done a great service to the witness of history and to our nation and all humankind as the fate of democracy and civilization hangs in the balance. Their books will be primary texts in any future civics and political history studies, unless of course Trump is given free rein by our citizen electorate to sabotage democracy in the cause of white supremacy and patriarchy.
While we await to discover whether the people will authorize the theft of their liberty by a state of force and control in abject submission to tyranny and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, or arise in resistance like a phoenix from the flames, The Guardian has thoughtfully clarified our choices by providing a precis of the exposes.
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary Trump includes the following insights; “1 Trump allegedly paid someone to take his high school exams, 2 Trump praised his own niece’s breasts, 3 Donald Trump’s sister appears to be a key source, 4 Mary Trump spoke to the New York Times about Trump family taxes, 5 Trump told Melania that Mary Trump took drugs, 6 Trump Christmases could be tough, 7 Jared Kushner’s father didn’t think Ivanka was good enough, 8 Trump’s character was shaped by ‘child abuse’.”
The Room Where It Happened by John Bolton includes these revelations; “1 Trump pleaded with China to help win the 2020 election, 2 Trump suggested he was open to serving more than two terms, 3 Trump offered favors to authoritarian leaders, 4 Trump praised Xi for China’s internment camps, 5 Trump defended Saudi Arabia to distract from a story about Ivanka, 6 Trump’s top staff mocked him behind his back, 7 Trump thought Finland was part of Russia, 8 Trump thought it would be ‘cool’ to invade Venezuela.”
My own opinion is that any understanding of the motives and likely actions of Trump rests with the two great shaping forces of his life; the etiology of his narcissism and psychopathy as a survivor of child abuse, and the influence of his primary model Roy Cohn, wonderfully depicted in the HBO documentary The Story of Roy Cohn as well as Tony Kushner’s luminous Angels in America.
As I wrote in my post of August 7 2019 Psychopathy and the Nature of Evil: the Parallel Cases of Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler; How are monsters created, and how does evil arise as a shaping force which grants them the power to change the topography of human souls and the course of history?
While sorting through Trump’s tweets and speeches by keyword looking for answers, I was reminded of another such project, the now-classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, which I read enthusiastically the year of its publication while a junior in high school. I had just finished reading Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird, which led me to an interest in the origins and consequences of evil, the route by which I developed a serious interest in psychology and its intersections with history, philosophy, and literature.
The parallels between Hitler and Trump are amazing and instructive, both in terms of the personal and political origins, shaping forces, and consequences of madness and evil.
Dr Justin Frank’s book Trump on the Couch is an excellent resource, particularly illuminating on Trump’s erotic relationship with his daughter, the fantasies of violence and power which are rooted in his childhood relationship with his tyrannical and abusive father, and his inability to love or empathize with others as a result of his abandonment by his mother.
Pathological lies, poor impulse control, and grandiose fantasies and delusions complete the picture of a narcissistic personality and psychopathic predator.
I’ve said it as a joke, but its quite true; how do you spell Trump? Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Actually, Donald Trump is very easy to understand, because literature provides a ready portrait of him in Frankenstein’s monster, which I have described in my celebration of Mary Shelly and her luminous novel as the figure of an abandoned and tormented child, a vessel of rage and vengeance, with the merciless iron will to enact subjugation of others in their turn, terrible and pathetic and with the grandeur of a tortured defiant beast trapped in the same flesh as the innocent who needs to be loved and cannot understand why he seems monstrous to others.
How Trump’s particular madness is expressed in our national policy is a horror which can described with precision; his fear of contamination and faecal fixation translate into his signature campaign against nonwhite others and a policy of ethnic cleansing and racist state terror, his misogyny into a patriarchal wave of legal disempowerment of women’s reproductive rights, his fragile ego, identity confusion, and need for attention into a governance of Nuremburg-like rallies, the cultivation of despicable autocrats, and the obsessive vengeance against anyone who refuses to offer adoration and submission.
Above all what unites Trump and Hitler as parallel figures and historical forces is the theory of politics as theatre of cruelty and government as performance art.
As written in my post of October 28 2019, Trump and al-Baghdadi: parallel lives and reflections; As the world celebrates the death of al-Baghdadi, both tyrant and monster, and Trump claims credit in this the sole victory of his administration, as if for the trophy head of some dangerous beast shot by a guide while enjoying cocktails at the hunting camp, it may be interesting to compare the parallel lives, methods, and goals of Trump and al-Baghdadi.
Both Trump and al-Baghdadi are megalomaniacs and psychopaths who seized power through manipulation of those who perceived themselves as victims and readily dehumanized others to change their status, using disruption of norms and a reimagination of reality through lies and misdirects to shape history, and enacted regimes of state terror and campaigns of religious and ethnic cleansing and of patriarchal misogyny and sexual violence against women.
Trump cannot distinguish truth from lies and delusions; his madness and childlike feeble mindedness, the tantrums and psychotic rages, the bullying and narcissism of a spoiled brat, does not however absolve him of responsibility for his actions, or those of the treasonous cabal of sex predators and fascists he has gathered around him.
Trump claims to have killed his dark reflection and shadow self by his spurious arrogation of a victory won by our intelligence and military services; but history will always see this second face behind his mask, a secret twin he bears into eternity, a face of power and twisted desires unrestrained by the laws and values of a democratic civilization and a free society of equals: the face of Trump’s heart of darkness, al-Baghdadi.
Also out of order per a timeline but next in thematic rank, October 19 2019, Trump the predator exposed in All the President’s Women; How do you spell Trump? Treason. Racism. Untruth. Misogyny. Predator.
Hey Republicans, thanks for showing us what’s under your masks.
You know, I can understand how the Fourth Reich conspiracy of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, Nazi-Klan white supremacists, and their plutocrat and foreign puppetmasters might claim the first four parts of the Trump program of subversion of democracy with defiant pride amongst themselves, but that last one baffles me. Its as if the whole Republican Party decided to adopt a new nickname on their first day of prison, and started introducing themselves as Short Eyes.
Its all recounted in horrific detail in All The President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator by Barry Levine & Monique El-Faizy; the casual sexual assaults committed in an arrogance of power and privilege which echoes the aristocratic Right of Seigneur, perversions of cruelty and ownership of others as a form of dominion which are extensions of his psychopathy, and among the most terrible signs of his inhumanity and amorality his acquisition of a beauty pageant monopoly for the purpose of access to underage girls.
Trump’s whole life purpose and goal is to perv Miss America. Republicans, are you really going to claim that legacy as your own? Are the rest of us going to let it go unchallenged?
Let us unite together in this purpose; to restore the honor and morality of America, and vote Trump out of our government.”
And as I wrote on September 13 2019, Trump’s foreign policy: sabotage of America’s global hegemony of power and privilege; “After three years of idiocy and madness, pathological lies and perversions, what is the legacy of Trump and his monkeywrenching of America?
Childstealing and whatever Trump and his Epstein buddies did which required the disappearance of witnesses and hundreds of missing migrant children.
Use of white supremacist terrorists as deniable assets to enable the theft of our freedoms and the transformation of our democracy into a police state of totalitarian force and surveillance.
Campaigns of racist ethnic cleansing and genocide against nonwhite immigrants and Muslims.
I could go on, but what is the point? What norms and values of America have Trump and the Republicans not violated? In domestic policy the Trump administration has been a disaster it will take a generation to recover from, if America survives at all.
As regards foreign policy, Trump has alienated our allies and emboldened our enemies, damaged our credibility and poisoned our diplomatic relations.
We have surrendered our ideals and our leadership of the world as its primary guarantor of democracy and human rights, and won nothing in return. I’m surprised anyone accepts our money; certainly the words of our President are meaningless and worth nothing.
In my post of September 16 2019, Trump’s New World Order: madness and tyranny; “ In a brilliant thumbnail analysis of Trump’s impact on the state of the world in terms of foreign policy, Simon Tisdall writing in The Guardian describes his policy of vacuous sound bites, staged publicity images, the diplomacy of a man totally ignorant of human relationships beyond the golf course and of any strategy of action to achieve goals other than grabbing the world by the crotch and hanging on while gobbling and ululating meaningless bestial sounds as if negotiating for slops in a hog trough.
Trump has discovered it’s not as easy to rape nations as it is to corner little girls in the dressing room of a beauty pageant, or even an adult one at Bloomingdales.
Not if we unite together in Resistance.
America now has a common cause with many nations of the world in overcoming fascist tyranny and rescuing democracy and the rule of law, of defeating the imperial conquest and subjugation of the earth by Trump and other figureheads of the Fourth Reich, and in the liberation of humankind and the restoration of the sovereignty of citizens.
And finally, herein is the text of my post in celebration of the start of the Impeachment process on September 24 2019, America rediscovers its values: the impeachment of Pennywise; ”Jubilation in the streets as America rediscovers its values and begins the impeachment of Pennywise, demonic clown and cannibalistic monster who dwells beneath the human face of Trump, a mask of flesh stolen from the abducted and enslaved women in the brothels his grandfather built the Trump family fortune on during the Alaska Gold Rush, and who today carries forward the legacy of terror and misogyny he was raised with, whose election should be de-certified as the coup of a foreign power and whose Presidency has no legitimacy.
History will remember Trump as the standard bearer of the global Fourth Reich and its assault on democracy, stealer of children for his vile and twisted purposes, author of genocidal ethnic cleansing and builder of concentration camps, pathological liar and ignorant fool, whose alliance of xenophobic racists and white supremacists, Christian Identity fanatics and other Gideonite fundamentalists who dream of the restoration of the Patriarchy under medieval Biblical law as a tyranny of the Elect, and amoral Plutocrats out to loot America for all the wealth they can send offshore while sabotaging our economy and driving our nation into collapse, thereby removing the major guarantor of freedom and human rights in the world and opening everything to exploitation.
A full accounting of the treasons and crimes of Trump and his Republican conspirators would fill a thousand pages and more, would roll on like the endless night litany of the death of God during an Orthodox Easter service; but this is the moment of its end, wherein the chanting turns to rapture and joy at the break of dawn, for Nancy Pelosi and the power brokers of the Democratic Party have rummaged around in Pandora’s Box and found at last our hope, calling for impeachment and the restoration of the rule of law just at the point of no return, before the legitimacy of our government and the values on which it is built, freedom, equality, truth, and justice, are forever lost and America falls to fascism and tyranny, and with it the world descends into a second Dark Age.
It took a millennia to emerge from the last one; civilization may not be recoverable again, should it fall under conditions of fascism and totalitarian regimes of absolute state power and surveillance, war, ethnostates and genocides, and unbridled extractive plunder of the earth. And this we must resist.
Therefore celebrate with me the call for impeachment, and prepare ourselves for the great struggle ahead to make it real, to reawaken America’s values and to save democracy and universal human rights throughout the world.
We Enter Now the Wilderness of Mirrors:
The Psychedelic Puppets String Theory Gang and the Cyberdelic Dream Pen
On a night of terrible windstorms and roaring gales, full of strange sounds both animal and unearthly in her Las Vegas neighborhood full of performers and celebrities from the casino shows and their exotic pets, of fragments of forgotten stories and conversations with the dead, my mother won her last struggle to free herself from the limits of her form, emerging from an outworn body as a transcendent and radiant being into the limitless possibilities of the Infinite unknown.
Wherever she may be, I hope there is laughter, joy, and dancing.
Dancing was the great joy of her life in retirement, teaching and her beloved students that of her professional life, and the company of her family and friends a joy always.
To all those who shared the journey of her life, I thank you and hope that in bringing joy to others you may also find your own such joys, whatever they may be.
The brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity is an immense sea of darkness, against which we have only the light we can give to each other.
May we all of us by our actions become such lights for each other, and find illumination, hope, and the redemptive power of love in those moments of exaltation offered by others.
These words I wrote five years ago on awakening from strange dreams to discover my mother had died, having come to help and spent some fine days with her in conversation.
In rereading my writings on this event I have come to realize it is a Defining Moment, one which I have interrogated only in terms of the trauma of death and the shape of grief process.
Years later in reflection, I am able to think of this also in terms of the joy my mother gave me and so very many others. I now have a quantitative measure of the half life of my heart as it transforms over time and my grief degrades like the forms we must all one day escape.
Like my father and myself, she was a high school English and Forensics teacher, and whenever students asked her if a thing was true or not, or asked for some pronouncement of interpretation of a book, current events, or political or religious ideologies, she held up her open hands and bounced them side to side, singing “Maybe, maybe not, Maybe, maybe not”. This was a demonstration of one of her Great Lessons, taken from a theatrical performance which included some of her students that toured America as The Reduced Shakespeare Company: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged Comedy; “We do not authorize truths, we question them. And there are no absolute truths.”
To this I wish to add; Your truths and mine will be different because we are, possessed by different histories and embedded in different informing, motivating, and shaping sources. This does not mean that one of us is right and the other is wrong, only that our uniqueness is born of different truths, both those written in our flesh and those we ourselves create.
Another such lesson regards the duty of witness and the sacred calling to pursue the truth; she would begin the first day of class each year with the story of how she asked questions about theology as a twelve year old girl in a private Catholic school until an enraged and brutally cruel nun, as they all seem to be, broke her finger with a ruler, whereupon she got up from her desk and walked out forever from the school and the Church; then she would hold up her crooked finger to the class and say; “We are not silent. We question, we demand proof, we take no authority at their word.”
To this I add, there is no just authority.
The great secret of power and authority, of force and control, is that without legitimacy it is hollow and brittle, and fails at the point of disbelief and disobedience. Therefore the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen are Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
Such was her art of education, the bringing forth of truths, both those immanent in nature and written in our flesh and those we ourselves create, and of becoming human.
Who was she as a person, and a primary influence on me?
First, she was funny, imaginative, empathetic, insightful, compassionate, and fearless in her performance of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen and action in Solidarity and Resistance to systems of oppression.
I rode on her shoulders when we seized the Palace of Justice, headquarters of the city police and courts, in San Francisco in 1968, and held her hand in the front line on Bloody Thursday 1969 in Peoples Park Berkeley when the police opened fire on the student peace protest against the Occupation of Palestine. We worked together in the Sanctuary and Anti-Apartheid Movements of the 1980’s and many other actions including the Liberation of Palestine and of Northern Ireland, that last being why she named my sister Erin, and she marched in protests until her final years, the very last in the 2017 Women’s March to save Roe Versus Wade and the right of bodily autonomy and to protest the inauguration of Traitor Trump and his capture of the state as a fascist theocratic patriarchy.
Her own personal joys included playing the piano as she had from childhood, Scrabble which we played together like I played chess with my father, playing bridge which she was quite good at and once won a Las Vegas championship tournament with a partner, and folk dancing which she learned at the wonderful Papa’s Taverna in Petaluma, Sunday gathering place of the Bay Area Greek community and venue for traveling musicians from Greece, and in retirement as a member of the Las Vegas Ethnic Express troupe which included show dancers and dance teachers from everywhere, who became some of her best friends with whom she traveled to Europe on dance tours. They danced at her 80th birthday party, which included a Flamenco performance by one of Spain’s greatest dancers.
She wrote jokes for comedians including Phyllis Diller, who served as a kind of alter ego of mom’s, a study of psychosomatic muteness from the childhood therapy journals and Soviet hospital records of Jerzy Kosinski which he had fictionalized as The Painted Bird, a master’s thesis on Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, and sold a short story she wrote about me, Little Bear Looks, to Maurice Sendak because I wanted to see it illustrated, which became a popular book and television series. Her full list of graduate studies included Biology, Psychology, and English Literature which she had switched to because “all the science jobs had Women Need Not Apply written on them in great big letters”. Always writing she was, and curious about everything. As a child I would ask her for stories with Oulipo-like parameters; she often spoke of my request “Tell me a story about an alligator, and make it rhyme.”
From her I learned to write, to organize political action, and to cook; she was a Chef of the French -Viennese cuisine of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire as a family legacy, an enthusiast of Greek and Russian cuisine, and of the wild game recipes passed down from my great grandmother Apollonia who was a hunting guide, often for expeditions which were like a royal procession and very grand. During my years as a teacher and counselor I used cooking as a reset activity to partition my work life from my personal life; chop things up, set fire to them, and eat them, and any lingering trauma from the day is consumed with them.
My love and receptivity for languages is a legacy from my mother and her family; here I must tell Apollonia’s story as told to me by my mother of how Jewish people saved our family, when no one else would, and without whom none of us would have ever lived.
Upon the docks of America arrived a nine year old girl, alone and without a penny to her name or a word of English. A Stranger, with no one waiting to meet her, no family, no friends, nothing. My maternal great grandmother Apollonia this was, with flaming red hair like my mother’s, whose family had put her on a ship to escape from Austria as their home burned, the sole survivor of her whole town so far as we now know.
She wandered the port of Seattle asking for help, in her five languages and in descending likelihood of recognition; French, Austrian, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, and finally, in despair and fear that the reaction would be far worse than being abandoned to starve and freeze to death lost and alone among strangers, Yiddish.
This like a magic spell summoned a crowd, by happy chance not one armed with torches and axes. So a stranger was taken in and raised by Jewish people, a family of whom I know nothing, and thus our family’s survival is owed to the entire Jewish community, diaspora, and people.
This happened in 1873, year of the glorious Vienna World’s Fair but also the stock market crash in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War which began a twenty year Depression in Europe and the Jewish persecutions as they were blamed for it; also conflicts between the Russian and Ottoman Empires in their borderlands.
What, there was already a Jewish community in Washington State? In 1875 Bailey Gatzert became Mayor of Seattle; in 1892 he co-founded Seattle’s first synagogue, Ohaveth Shalom. So yes there was; and Apollonia was raised as a Jew by kind benefactors who adopted her.
Not that she was terribly conventional by the standards of her time, regardless of her identity.
She it was who owned her own rifles and horses by the age of sixteen when she began her career as a hunting guide, and died in the saddle at the age of 95, rifle in her hand, having shot the bear that attacked her horses and killed her. The Indians buried her like the Huns buried Attila, on her horse and with her rifle, like a warrior princess.
I was born within days of her death, and as with all ancestors I bear her onward, literally as DNA and the stories which possess us as the ghosts of other lives; incarnated truths written in our flesh. As a child I claimed to be her reincarnation, imaginative and filled with stories I experienced as memories as if I had lived them, until around sixth grade or age twelve I realized how absurd this idea was; certainly I identified with her, enchanted by all the Wild West stories and those of her adventures abroad.
Historical context and the fact that my ancestor in the maternal line knew Yiddish makes it possible that under Jewish law we are Jews, and Apollonia had been raised as a member of the Jewish community and because of this influence was clearly Jewish by faith and culture if not by ancestry, though my mother never claimed so and moreover was a radical atheist who raised us with no religious traditions at all. In so doing the family faith she liberated herself from was Catholicism, an artifact of her Austrian paternal line who were exiles of the 1919 fall of the Hapsburg Empire after 600 years.
My mother’s speech was permeated with Yiddish words and phrases, a legacy of my maternal great grandmother; my maternal grandfather was the source of the family German, actually Wienerisch or the Viennese dialect of Austro-Bavarian, combined with the French-influenced Schönbrunner Deutsch of the imperial court. This was the home language of my mother’s family, though grandpa knew Latin, taught himself English, and to various degrees knew other languages of the Austrian Empire including Hungarian, Romanian, Ukrainian, Croatian, the Romance language Venetian and its Triestino dialect, and could speak Russian and Polish well enough to do business in their communities here in America.
As a teenager immersed in Holocaust literature while working through the trauma of a near death experience in Brazil the summer before high school, my execution by a police death squad while rescuing abandoned street children they were bounty hunting having been prevented by the Matadors, and conversations with my mother as she wrote her study of psychosomatic muteness from the Soviet medical records and childhood therapy journal of Jerzy Kosinski which he fictionalized as The Painted Bird, I once asked her directly, Are we Jews?
To this she replied; “Everyone is a Jew. Everyone is someone’s Jew, someone’s scapegoat, someone’s Other. The great task of becoming human is to embrace our uniqueness as we overcome our fear of otherness.”
I find this definition an interesting solution to the dilemma of the question of Jewish identity and the claims of ethnicity or being Jewish by maternal descent and of faith or being Jewish by the Three Knots of the Infinite, of Torah, and of Israel.
So, who decides how we may think of ourselves, our histories, memories, and identities? How is membership and belonging conferred? And even if is to be ourselves alone, sovereign, self owned, and possibly self created, by what criterion shall we define our terms?
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the defining act of becoming human, and the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
But this is not the end of such questions, and only a beginning; for identity is inherently ambiguous, relational, contingent, and a process in ceaseless motion as a chaotic system, an infinite Moebius Loop of being wherein we shift and change with the horizons of our imagination, the legacies of our history, and the stories we bear like warrior marks.
On this theme a final story for now; among my earliest memories is watching the burning cross my town set on fire on the front lawn of newlyweds, a Dutch Reformed Church man and a Swiss Calvinist girl, which the town was calling a mixed marriage because they were members of different churches, though both white Protestants speaking forms of German. It was like a carnival; I asked a neighbor boy why they were setting fires and he said “We’re punishing the bad people”.
Then I asked my mom, “Are they bad people?”
She said no, and pointed at the crowd with torches, “These are the bad people. And they are always our enemies, yours and mine.”
My next question was, “Why are they bad?”
And she forever simplified a complex set of issues for me with her answer; “Because they want to make everyone the same.”
As I wrote in my post of May 10 2020, On Life Disruptive Events As Gateways of Illumination, and Happy Mother’s Day; The tide crashes in, overwhelming what has been and become familiar, chaotic and ferocious, and we are devastated in that moment as our castles in the sand vanish like illusions that never were, and only emptiness remains.
The tide recedes, revealing wonders; for what is left behind is always extraordinary even if it is commonplace, for it is ours, and unique, belonging to whoever finds and cherishes it.
So with our memories over vast chasms of time; each has its own moment and in this endless impermanence of being some events become Defining Moments and leap across the boundaries of time and space, of our world and ourselves, to reorganize and awaken us like the unpredictable illumination of a lightning strike.
Awake and seize the terror and rapture of our totalizing disruption and sudden realization of nothingness, not in fear and despair at our loss of what we have known and been, but in joy and absolute freedom in who we may become.
Notes on the Composition:
As to form, my intention is to present the afore displayed poem on the left column in Jesuit dialectical journal format, side by side with the interpretive and narrative material which follows on the right, an old habit of mine when writing with a pen to give a full and daily report of my witness of history. In a responsive digital format, its easier to read on a mobile device as a single text block, as it is here.
Once again I find myself contemplating Gaston Bachelard’s description of sounds as shells of speech, coquilles au parole, as I have throughout my life when the realm of the senses and that of meaning and value seen incongruent and discontiguous, like a shadow moving as a living thing independently from the object which casts it, an echo which changes the meaning of its source and returns our words to us in strange languages, a reflection which distorts, falsifies, and reshapes our images in a recursive wilderness of funhouse mirrors.
Identity is like the seashells found along a beach; each one a history expressed in their form of how its bearer solved problems of adaptation and growth over time. Such structures protect us, but also limit us, and like the wise beings who create the shells we admire, we must learn when to cast them aside and create ourselves anew.
Death of our loved ones is the ultimate disruptive event; today I celebrated Mother’s Day having lost mine at the start of this year, with my partner Theresa and her dad Gene for whom I often cook dinner, she also having lost her mother and he his wife of 66 years only two years past. Yet with our shared grief there was also the strength of our bond as a family, humor, wit, and the anchorages of common memories.
On Mother’s Day we celebrate the redemptive and transformative power of love, and our interconnectedness with others through successive generations and our families and communities both natural to us and chosen by us.
May we all find the people through whom we can recreate ourselves as the person we want to become, and for whom we can empower and help actualize the same liberation.
What is death? I once told my mother, after returning from long moments most sincerely dead after the police grenade whose force wave hurled me from my body on Bloody Thursday 1969 and my vision of our myriad possible futures as I stood outside of time; “Don’t be afraid. Death is nothing; nothing but awakening from an illusion.”
Of late I have begun to think of death as a defining negative space within the dark mass of the Absurd of all the things we have not claimed as ours and all the hopes and dreams we have not made real by our actions. As I wrote in my post of June 1 2021, Death is a Secret Twin; Death is a secret twin which shares our face but not our dreams which lift and exalt us beyond the limits of our flesh, so he must steal the echoes and reflections of ours, a thing of shadows filled with secret histories, unspoken truths, unsworn oaths, thousands of myriads of loyalties to private loves and desires betrayed by our failures to make them live and become real by action.
Death is the terror of all that we may have been but did not become, the loss of our disconnectedness and the emptiness of meaning in a world where love cannot redeem us, the grief for beauty which loses context when it is no longer shared and is lost with the fragments of memories which like the genie of perfume escape their bottle to trigger moments out of time and then evanesce like the ghost of a beloved hand which no longer grasps ours back.
We are tattered and broken things, our secret shadows and ourselves, who live in the incandescent now with these repositories of our beautiful dreams and our terrible nightmares, bearing them on into eternity; for this is the great secret of being, that our best selves are formed of all we would deny and keep hidden, and which live beyond us as figures of our glorious sins.
Death is an ambush predator made of our histories, memories, and identities, which must steal these things to become real in the moment of our awakening into its realm of beautiful and terrible dreams, a realm of true being beyond the illusions of our lives which bears names including the Bardo in Tibetan Buddhism and the alam al mythal in Islam, called by Coleridge the Primary Imagination and by Jung the Collective Unconscious, and waits to seize us unawares and carry us off to eternity while it replaces us like a faery changeling with the image of our unrealized hopes and unexpressed desires.
Death is a unique and personal demon created by our denial of ourselves, a parasite which destroys its host and operates through a process of falsification like the distorted and captured images in a wilderness of funhouse mirrors, but it can become instead a symbiote, a terrible and monstrous guardian spirit and a guide of the soul which speaks from within our greatest darkness with Forbidden wisdom, like a remora borne by a shark on its journeys through chasms of the unknown not as its nemesis and conqueror but as a servant which grooms from us that which we must cast down from the thrones of our hearts; we humans and our silent and unseen partners the angels of our deaths whom we must wrestle not for victory, for everything in life is more powerful than we are, but to become Unconquered in resistance and free.
Thus may we bear without breaking the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, become greater and more real and alive than we were born, transcend the limits of our form, and become sublimed as figures of our truths in Sartrean total freedom and authenticity as an art of life, for all true art defiles and exalts.
Here is a faith which asks us to renounce nothing and embrace our true selves, to reimagine and transform ourselves; and offers a path of working with grief process and death transcendence not of control of our passions and dominion of nature, but as seizure of power and autonomy, of the embrace and celebration of our wildness as beings of nature and of those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
Let us embrace our monstrosity and say of this secret twin who knows no limits and is free as Prospero says of Caliban in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare ’s The Tempest; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
How shall we answer death and the terror of our nothingness? Let us challenge and defy such death, and while it waits to claim us with its cold hand of entropy and unraveled time we must seize and shake our shadow and secret twin of longing to become, transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden and perform our best selves, our hopes and our desires, as a guerilla theatre of identities upon the stage of the world in fearless grandeur, and let nothing be lost or remain untested among the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Let us answer death as Bringers of Chaos and Transformation, and make of our world and humankind a thing of beautiful, terrible truths written in our flesh, and of our dreams and nightmares a brave new world.
As I wrote in my post of January 20 2023, Some Thoughts On the Pandemic, the Fall of Democracy, and the Anniversary of My Mother’s Death; We are a nation which like humankind is united only by our shared public trauma and our grief; by the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world. The collapse of global democracy, which threatens centuries if not millennia of barbarism, genocides and wars, and an age of fascist tyranny now made more certain by yesterday’s refusal by our elected leaders to safeguard voting rights and the meaning of citizenship here in America, combines with ecological disasters and looming extinction of our species of which the pandemic is but a sign of nature’s fury, again driven by political decisions and our addiction to wealth and power conferred to us by dominion and control of fossil fuels as a strategic resource of hegemonic elites for whom these things are instruments of our subjugation as slave labor; such is the future to which we awake today.
On this anniversary of my mother’s death after her long struggle against cancer, which began with her first of many surgeries in the fall of 1982 when I took over teaching her classes in high school on the first day of the new semester, with my sister Erin among the students in the Forensics class we founded for her to attend that year, I cannot escape the feeling that the many horrible deaths and the fracture of social systems which result from the pandemic and quarantine and have made open wounds of our modern pathology of disconnectedness are parallel and interdependent disruptive events with the ambiguous and tentatively incipient subversion and fall of our democracy.
Like a nightmare from which we cannot awaken, the loss of our loved ones has been multiplied on a vast and incomprehensible scale, throughout the world and every stratum of society, leveling hierarchies and bridging divisions through shared trauma and grief as these disruptive natural and political events reveal the flaws of our systems and structures and suggest new and better ways of being human together.
The Pandemic has claimed my partner Theresa’s father Gene and my sister Erin’s partner Tom, and untethered us from our connectedness, and from our anchorages with the cherished past. And this trauma has repeated endlessly, everywhere, and for everyone.
We have been given a vision of our dehumanization and our meaningless mass death and extinction; what are we going to do about it?
When those who would enslave us come for us, as they always have and will, let them find neither an America nor a humankind submissive with learned helplessness nor divided by narratives of exclusionary otherness, but united in solidarity and refusal to submit to authority.
As I wrote in my post of December 26 2021, Reflections During the After Party; As the festivities of a wonderfully out of control after party swirl around me with raucous and dissonant sounds and the silent hungers, unanswerable pain, and strange desires of our guests press upon me like living brands, I sit among my ghosts, dreaming their dreams, both those they lived and those yet to be realized.
On such occasions as this, surrounded by feasts and family, I am also surrounded by chasms of darkness, loneliness, disconnection, and the voices and presences of the dead which interpenetrate my flesh with the shadows of their histories, literally in the case of our genetic code as transforms of messages about how to shape ourselves to the material world and its imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle to become human.
We are bearers of stories, made of memories and histories which echo back through the numberless unknown lives of our ancestors as an unfolding of human intention and poetic vision, prochronisms or histories expressed in our form of how we have solved problems of adaptation like the shells of fantastic sea creatures, songs which reverberate through our lives as epigenetic informing, motivating, and shaping forces which are not unique to us but part of an immense and incomprehensible wave of the limitless possibilities of becoming human, which can seize us with dreams of being, meaning, and value we ourselves cannot imagine.
Such is the power of vision as reimagination and transformation, and the nature of our persona and identities as performances in a theatre of which, as Shakespeare teaches us, all the world is a stage. What is important is to ask, whose stage is it? In whose story do we perform our lives? For these questions direct us not to the subjugation to authority of learned helplessness, but to seizures of power and revolutionary struggle.
How answer we the terrible pronouncement in MacBeth,
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
How shall we answer the terror of our nothingness and the legacies of our history? I have but one reply; to gather and cherish my trauma and pain, and make something beautiful with it. Thus may we stand against the darkness, and remain unconquered.
My answer to the suffering of the world is to give voice to the voices which have been stolen from us, the numberless generations of the silenced and the erased.
Welcome and embrace your pain and the terror of our nothingness as sacred wounds which open us to the pain of others.
Dance your demons before the stage of the world; go ahead, frighten the horses.
Forge great beauty from the flaws of your humanity and the brokenness of the world, and wield it as an instrument of reimagination and transformation in glorious change.
All true art defiles and exalts.
As I wrote in my post of September 20 2021, The Doom of Man Pandemic Has Come to the Ball; As twin systemic failures and existential threats, the Pandemic and the disasters of climate change have exposed the faultiness of our civilization, and the terrible humanitarian crises of disease, fire, and floods have hammered us into strange and new forms and confronted us with our limits through death and life disruptive events.
What can we learn from the Pandemic, and from death?
As public spaces empty, hospitals turn away patients for whom there are no beds, economies fail and both persons and nations sever the ties that bind us together in a global civilization and become islands unto themselves, and the modern pathology of disconnectedness and alienation becomes pervasive and institutionally reinforced in the wake of a great tide of fear and the terror of our nothingness, an emerging truth becomes clear; like the figure of the plague in Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, the Doom of Man Pandemic has come to the ball and no one is safe from its deadly embrace, not even the elites who had thought themselves beyond reach within the walls of their palaces.
It is a disaster created by political decisions and the Gordian Knot of oil as a strategic resource of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, privatization and plutocratic capitalism as instruments of authoritarian hierarchies of membership and exclusionary otherness which are interdependent with divisions of identitarian racism and patriarchy, fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and a carceral state of authoritarian force and control which manifests in police, prisons, borders, and universal surveillance and the falsifications of propaganda; and all of this combines as an engine of death and dehumanization to bring us ecological devastation and human extinction through climate change and the Pandemic.
Nor will the current Pandemic, terrible though it is, be the last test of our social cohesion, mutual interdependence, and solidarity we will face; I expect it is but the first of many successive and worsening waves of plagues to hammer us.
Our nation dies helplessly and alone in despair, like our loved ones whose breath and life are stolen by a disease of terror which need not have been unleashed, and the greatest horror is that they might have lived had they not been sacrificed in service to power. For each of us who has died has been murdered by Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his Party of Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, and Perversions as surely as if they had been delivered to the gas chambers of the Holocaust. Science denialism has been weaponized as a loyalty test in vaccine and mask denial, exactly like the suicide Kool-Aid that Jim Jones demanded his followers drink to prove their loyalty; the Fourth Reich of Trump and the Republican Party have betrayed their followers to their deaths, and possibly all of us with them.
For disease has no borders and moves among us like an ambush predator wearing the faces of our family and friends, waiting its moment to strike with silent and unseen death.
How can we respond to this existential threat? We must heal the failed systems from whence it comes.
As I wrote in my post of June 24 2021, What Does the Pandemic Warn Us Of?; The limits of control, the lies and illusions of authoritarian states, and the weaponization of faith in technocratic elites as Plato’s philosopher kings combine in the Pandemic as a man made disaster of political failures to leverage change through destabilization of ossified and hollow forms of power.
The failures of humankind’s responses to the Pandemic are a measure of the distances we have between us and a free society of equals, between authoritarian and democratic societies.
It is also a symptom of the mechanical failure of capitalism from its internal contradictions, like the widening gyre between social classes in the global precariat and the ponderous destabilization of the wealth of nations. Herein are direct consequences of privatization and the emergence of a corporate, oligarchic, and plutocratic elite as it frees itself from its host political systems and claims dominion over humankind.
Ecological disaster and the imminent threat of human extinction, driven by political and economic failures, a direct result of our civilizational dependence on fossil fuels as a strategic resource of global dominion and elite wealth and power, can be read in the signs of the Pandemic and of fire and drought, storms and flood, which have seized the earth in the past few years.
As we bid farewell to yet another summer of record heat waves and water scarcity, let us reflect on the year that may come in which the heat wave never subsides, but worsens, and the wells run dry. Such a time may now be inevitable, and we may have less than two decades in which to change our fate.
If we are to survive, what must change?
As I wrote in my post of February 23 2021, Origins of the Disaster: Elitism and Racist Inequalities and Injustices Drive Our Catastrophic Systems Failures in Our Responses to the Pandemic; Beyond the failures of our government and our economy of disaster capitalism which rig the game to serve the interests of power and wealth, there is the pervasive and endemic racism as the basis of both, the gorilla in the room of our legacy of historical injustices and inequalities like Klimt’s image of Typhoeus in the Beethoven Frieze, which reimagines Goya’s interpretation of a parallel myth in Saturn Devouring His Children, confronts us with a chthonic figure of America’s shadow self which we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail.
There is no liberty for anyone unless there is equality for everyone.
And like Klimt’s bestial rebel or Goya’s mad emperor, this power asymmetry and identitarian elitism creates authority and legitimates our subjugation by it, which in recursion authorizes identities and births tyrannies and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Fear, power, force; here lies the heart of state tyranny and terror, racist police gun violence and white supremacist terror, vote suppression and the subversion of democracy, the falsification of ourselves through propaganda and the shaping of some of us into monsters with which to terrorize and control the others; but also of our plutocratic and oligarchic capitalist kleptocracy and the policies of deregulation and privatization which are directly responsible for the systemic failures of our responses to the Pandemic, and to its origins in ecological collapse and disaster capitalism.
As so often, it was an observation by a friend which redirected my attention to what is important, in this case the need for shared rituals of grief; “We need mourning rituals for the dead and dying of this pandemic. Part of the soul fatigue is a failure to process grief.”
As I wrote in the wake of my mother’s death from cancer, over a year ago now, On the Wisdom of Our Darkness and the Brokenness of the World; Grief, despair, and fear, the trauma of loss, the torment of loneliness, and the guilt of survivorship; the realm of our darkest and most negative passions immerses us in atavistic states with totalizing and tidal force.
Life disruptive events can destabilize identity and realign personality, transform meanings and values, send shockwaves through our network of relationships, shift our worldview and unmoor us from the anchorages of our ideological paradigms and historical contexts.
Such traumas confront us with the unfiltered face of our shadow self as a healing process, a transformative journey filled with dangers but also with the limitless possibilities of rebirth. As redirections of our momentum disruptive events force reflection and redefinition of ourselves as intentional choice; among them the death of a loved one is surely the most terrible.
Overwhelming and painful as they may be, our negative emotions have adaptive value or we wouldn’t have developed them. How then do they help us survive? What is their purpose?
Grief, especially but not exclusively, connects us with other people, opens us to the pain of others, and brings us to a renegotiation of the terms of ourselves and our lives.
We are bound together by the flaws of our humanity, by our brokenness and our pain, by the fragile nature of our lives and our vulnerability to disruptive events.
The negative emotions are a biosocial tax on individuals which in part serve to drive us together to meet threats collectively as societies united in the cause of our survival, wherein the costs are shared among distributed resources. This is the origin of altruism; humans are designed to help each other. Each of us is marked by our nature as our brother’s keeper.
Far from wholly destructive, our darkness can be growth oriented and creative; destruction may be read as liberation and Chaos as the adaptive potential of a system.
Our darkness whispers, embrace your passion and your true self, and be reborn.
Passions of both light and darkness can act as warning buoys as we navigate into the future and the unknown; they can also illuminate and provoke us to abandon the known and discover new possibilities. Joy and sorrow, as with all our myriad passions, come as balanced pairs which help us process events by leveraging change.
Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
My mother Meta, here with her beloved Belgian grip sword which she used in the Hungarian liberation struggle of 1956. Among other things she and our father smuggled dissidents including members of the Hungarian Olympic fencing team to freedom from behind the Iron Curtain
En Garde!
Dancing on the Beach
The Reduced Shakespeare Company: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged Comedy
Her Last Great Cause: women’s rights of bodily autonomy, equality, and citizenship
Her lifelong political party membership: Peace and Freedom Party, California’s Feminist Socialist Political Party (Because their founding platform includes the goal to take In God We Trust off our money)
We celebrate today what is best and most human in us; our ability to transcend our differences and the legacies of historical and epigenetic inequalities and injustices in compassion for our enemies and solidarity with our fellows, and struggle toward a realization of our values as action and the possibility of redemption for all humankind; freedom, equality, truth, and justice.
We celebrate these things in the figure of a man, who like all human beings was beautiful not in spite of his flaws but because of them; for those who bear the wounds of their differences and allow this brokenness to open them to the pain of others transcend their limits and become a gateway through which others may do the same, and through which hope and love can enter the world.
We mourn today the Fall of America and democracy to a fascist regime of tyranny and terror in the Inauguration of Traitor Trump, most despicable criminal in the history of American public life, figurehead of the Fourth Reich, leader of the January 6 Insurrection and co conspirator in the murders of police officers and the attempted murders of members of Congress of both parties, Russian spy and saboteur of our institutions, values, and ideals of liberty, convicted rapist whose followers voted for him because he grants them permission for rape and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, and co conspirator in racist murders whose followers voted for him because he grants them permission for white supremacist terror.
In the chiaroscuro of good and evil, love and hate, mercy and cruelty, our history offers us few such clear and unconflicted choices in becoming human as those of Traitor Trump and Martin Luther King. American has chosen to abandon over two centuries of being citizens father than subjects and a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights, but if we now have devils to rule us we also have angels to show us how to refuse to submit, resist, seize our power, and set each other free.
This is the meaning of Martin Luther King Day to us all; a beacon in the darkness, and hope to balance terror, despair, grief, abjection, and learned helpless as the enemy of humankind unfolds its Theatre of Cruelty across the next four years.
Let us claw our way out of the ruins of our nation and our lives, and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival. Because in so doing we become Unconquered and free; and this defining act of becoming human is a power which cannot be taken from us. So long as we refuse to submit, to believe or to obey, and stand in solidarity with each other, hope remains.
Some of us may become mythic and archetypal figures of Liberty and liberation, like Martin Luther King, who bore a sacred vision passed to him from Gandhi to whom it was passed by Tolstoy; others may enact the praxis of our values and ideals in their private lives rather than on the stage of the world, but each of us can be an agent of change, reimagination, and transformation, and enact the role of the Lightbringer in defiance of authority and as champions of humanity.
In the words of Martin Luther King in a letter advocating passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; “There must be a change. There will be a change. For to deny a person the right to exercise his political freedom at the polls is no less a dastardly act as to deny a Christian the right to petition God in prayer.”
Rejoice with me that we have such figures and examples to illuminate our way through the darkness, and to remind us who we truly are and can become.
As written by Nicole Chavez for CNN, Here are the Martin Luther King Jr. words that inspire today’s social justice leaders; “More than a half a century has passed since the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial calling for freedom and equality — and the fight for social justice appears to be far from over.
Activists and athletes fighting for equality in the Black, Latino, Asian American, Native American and Muslim American communities took a moment to reflect on King’s words when asked by CNN last year.
They shared their thoughts weeks after the insurrection at the US Capitol and months after the police killing of George Floyd sparked widespread protests and rekindled the Black Lives Matter movement.
A year later, their views remain relevant as more than a dozen states have moved to enact restrictive voting laws and King’s family demands action on federal voting rights legislation.
Each of the activists and athletes who spoke with CNN selected a quote from the civil rights movement leader and shared why it resonates with them. Here are their responses, some of which have been edited for clarity:
Dolores Huerta
Huerta, a Mexican American civil rights icon, formed a farmworkers union with Cesar Chavez and is president of the Dolores Huerta Foundation. She chose a quote from King’s speech titled “The Three Evils of Society.”
“We are now experiencing the coming to the surface of a triple prong sickness that has been lurking within our body politic from its very beginning. That is the sickness of racism, excessive materialism and militarism.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
Why did Huerta pick that quote?
“Racism is a sickness. Many Americans with that sickness stormed the nation’s Capitol recently as racism feeds fascism. Racism stems from ignorance and creates, hate, fear violence and destruction,” Huerta said.
“Dr. Martin Luther King warned us that racism threatened the very foundation of our democracy. Racism began with slavery, the oppression of workers, the subjugation of women and children.”
Huerta said that a national effort is needed to save the United States’ democracy from fascism and to end the racism which “is so ingrained in our body politic.”
“We have no choice but to heal.”
Patrisse Cullors
Cullors is an artist, political strategist, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, and author of the upcoming “An Abolitionist’s Handbook: 12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World.” She chose a quote from King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
“First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.” -Martin Luther King Jr.
Why did Cullors pick that quote?
“On January 6, the world witnessed a failed attempted coup by White supremacists extremists. These are the same people who have taunted, humiliated and threatened Black Lives Matter members and our leadership. And while these White supremacists are scary and dangerous, our movement has historically seen the White liberal as a barrier to the freedom of Black people,” Cullors said.
“To keep it plain. We need White folks to show up. Showing up in more ways than just saying ‘Black Lives Matter’ or putting ‘Black Lives Matter’ on their social media,” Cullors added.
“We need white folks to show up by following the leadership of Black folks, the very same Black folks who have transformed this country over and over again. On this MLK day let’s remind ourselves that Black people deserve dignity, care and power.”
Nneka Ogwumike
Ogwumike is a WNBA player and president of the Women’s National Basketball Players Association. She chose the following quote:
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
Why did Ogwumike pick those words?
“It is not enough for good people to know they are good for goodness to take place,” she said. “We must hold ourselves to actionable accountability that plants the seeds for sustainable change; allowing both its roots and branches to grow over time, naturally and intentionally.”
Nihad Awad
Awad is the national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. He chose a quote from King’s book “A Gift of Love: Sermons from Strength to Love and Other Preachings.”
Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
Why did Awad pick those words?
He said the quote speaks to the “five years of indoctrination and lies by (President) Donald Trump and his enablers created a poisonous environment in which millions of Americans believe in falsehoods and conspiracy theories that make our society and the world less stable and less peaceful.”
Sruti Suryanarayanan
Suryanarayanan is a spokesperson for the advocacy group South Asian Americans Leading Together. They chose a few sentences from King’s 1967 book “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”
Why is equality so assiduously avoided? Why does white America delude itself, and how does it rationalize the evil it retains? The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
Why did Suryanarayanan pick those words?
“Building a just world starts with the abolition of White supremacy, in all its forms — structural, institutional, and personal,” Suryanarayanan said. “But as non-Black people of color, we must also unpack and combat our own complicity in White supremacy and American imperialism. Without the deconstruction of anti-Black racism, no liberation is possible.”
Kimberlé Crenshaw
Crenshaw is the co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum. She chose a quote from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ – Martin Luther King Jr.
Why did Crenshaw pick that quote?
“Martin Luther King Jr.’s framing of the failures and promises of America makes clear how the nation’s unaddressed deficits become the justification for even greater disenfranchisement and expropriation. The right-wing attacks on his dream and the physical embodiment of the ideological assault on multicultural democracy that we witnessed last week are a repudiation of the very idea that there exists a ‘promissory note’,” Crenshaw said.
“King was often critical — most famously in his ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ — of those moderates who chronically advocated for a ‘more convenient season’ to pursue racial justice. On this Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, we should acknowledge — in the face of so much tragedy and depravity — that we are never going to be in a stable position when it comes to injustice. And it is from the illusion of stability that the further deterioration of Black people’s material status occurs. The fight for justice must continue — always.”
Crystal Echo Hawk
Echo Hawk is the founder and executive director of IllumiNative, a national Native-led non-profit group. She chose an excerpt from King’s book “Why We Can’t Wait.”
We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it…It was upon this massive base of racism that the prejudice toward the nonwhite was readily built, and found rapid growth. This long-standing racist ideology has corrupted and diminished our democratic ideals. It is this tangled web of prejudice from which many Americans now seek to liberate themselves, without realizing how deeply it has been woven into their consciousness.” -Martin Luther King Jr.
Why did Echo Hawk pick that quote?
“Dr. King taught us that racial injustice in the United States started with the arrival of colonizers on Native land. The violence these settlers used first against Indigenous peoples, then against Black slaves, was predicated on White supremacist beliefs. White supremacy is upheld by false origin myths about the United States, ignored by whitewashing brutal anti-Native and anti-Black policies, and sustained by stereotyped, inaccurate portrayals of Native people and people of color in popular culture,” Echo Hawk said.
“To create a just world, all people of every race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender expression, and age, must stand together and tell truthful stories about our past and hopeful stories about our future.”
A’ja Wilson
Wilson, who plays for the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces, is a member of the league’s Social Justice Council. She is also the founder of A’ja Wilson Foundation, which supports children who struggle with dyslexia. She chose a King quote that gives her hope.
We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
Why did Wilson pick that quote?
“There is so much going on in the world right now. So many disappointing, tragic and gut-wrenching moments,” Wilson said. “We all have to keep our foot on the gas but historically, we have always come together as a people to celebrate the wins, big or small, and that’s one of the greatest things about our culture. We can never give up.”
Jaren Jackson Jr.
Jackson Jr. plays for the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies. He chose a King quote that he said “resonated” with him the most.
“People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don’t know each other; they don’t know each other because they have not communicated with each other.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
Why did Jackson Jr. pick that quote?
“This quote resonated with me the most given our current climate because we have become so polarized. We no longer sit down and have conversations about our differences and as Dr. King said it is purely out of fear of what we don’t know about each other,” Jackson Jr. said.
“I believe in order for us to move past the horrible events of the past few months as well as the past several decades, we need to have open and honest dialogue. (We need) a conversation where no matter your race, religion, sexual orientation or any other difference, we listen with compassion and find a common ground. If the pandemic taught us nothing else, we must value time and we must talk to each other. We can’t let fear dictate who we are. We gotta be better than that. It’s time to achieve Dr. King’s dream.”
As written by Nicholas Powers in Truthout, in an article entitled Following in MLK’s Footsteps Means Resisting Christian Nationalism: King’s life gives us a blueprint to fight the religious right; “Martin Luther King Jr. yanked the burnt Ku Klux Klan Christian cross from his front lawn as his child looked on. It was 1960. Many Black families in Atlanta woke to charred crosses left as a warning to civil rights activists.
Sixty-one years later, a Christian nationalist group called Jericho’s Road stoked the January 6 insurrection with prayer vigils and marches. A right-wing mob waving flags emblazoned with “Jesus 2020” and “Jesus is My Savior” stormed the Capitol, armed and threatening to kill Democrats and Republicans. Outside, men prayed near a giant cross. A year after the January 6 attempted coup, the Christian far right is more isolated, extreme and preparing to strike again.
White Christian nationalists, the extreme fringe of the religious right, are increasingly turning to violence. They want to make Christianity the state religion, ban abortion, reinforce conservative gender roles and dramatically cut immigration to ensure a white majority. MLK Jr. endured attacks from racist evangelicals, using redemptive suffering and taking the moral high ground to unite a multiracial coalition, the Poor People’s Campaign. What worked for him then can work for us today.
The Cross or the Switchblade
Christian nationalists don’t turn the other cheek, they turn to the gun. Whether the targets are abortion doctors, mosques or immigrants, a rifle’s crosshairs is the real cross they pray to.
The United States has the largest number of Christians of any nation. Out of 333 million people, roughly 64 percent are Christian, a number in dramatic decline but nevertheless one that includes Catholics and evangelical Protestants, among others. More important is that conservative Christians, according to Pew Research, tend to be white, older, less educated, pray daily, believe in a literal Hell and Heaven, and skew Republican. They also tend to cultivate racist ideas and deny the reality of systemic racism.
On the conservative fringe are Christian nationalists, a toxic brew of American jingoism and Bible thumping. In an interview with The Young Turks, Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, said, “It basically is the idea that America is founded as a Christian nation … we’ve moved away from that and the right kind of Americans need to take it back … it divides ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ the ‘pure’ from the ‘impure’ … it is an organized quest for power.”
In this biblical struggle, white Christian nationalists imagine themselves as the foot soldiers of Jesus. Secular society looks to them, Stewart said, to be “Satanic. Demonic. Inhuman.” It is a theology that is anti-democratic and juvenile. It is a simple-minded story of good and evil that demonizes whoever is different; the gay person, the Muslim, the immigrant. Finally, the unconverted must kneel at the foot of the cross, by court order or force if needed.
“We should be proud to be Christian nationalists,” boasted Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the latest face of the movement. Today’s upsurge of white Christian nationalism is a reaction to the social protests that have rocked the U.S. — Black Lives Matter, the Supreme Court decision to legalize gay marriage, #MeToo and Occupy Wall Street. Each protest disrupted long accepted power dynamics and exposed the dirty underside of the “American Dream.”
How does one effectively handle this hatred? Turning to the past, we see that MLK took the Gospel back and used it to effectively expose their racism, sexism and classism.
The Two Faces of Christ
“I had to know God for myself,” Martin Luther King Jr. said in a 1967 sermon. “I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage … it seemed at that moment I could hear an inner voice saying, ‘Stand up for truth! Stand up for justice!’ … I heard the voice of Jesus say, ‘fight on’; he promised to never leave me.”
You can hear the fatigue and sorrow in his thunderous but trembling voice. The FBI file on King showed hundreds of threats against him, from bomb threats targeting planes he flew on to the KKK trying to hire a hit man. He lived in the shadow of death. A contract was put on his life, a cross burned on his lawn, his house bombed and finally King was shot and killed at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968, just a year after he wearily said, “Jesus promised to never leave me.”
Jerry Falwell, Sr., a Southern fundamentalist preacher, relished attacking the civil rights movement and King specifically as either ignorant, secret Communists or going against God’s will. He did not publicly advocate violence, but he laid the foundation for Christian nationalism with his mix of racism, patriotism and Bible scholarship.
“If Chief Justice (Earl) Warren and his associates had known God’s word … I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made. The facilities should be separate,” said Falwell in his 1950s era sermon, Segregation or Integration: Which?. “When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”
Just to put a fine point on it, Falwell added, “The true Negro does not want integration.”
In a contest over public support for civil rights, King and Falwell were two faces of U.S. Christianity. King read the same Bible as Falwell, but instead of Falwell’s vengeful Jesus, casting sinners into the fiery pit of Hell, King saw Jesus as a revolutionary pacifist.
What King found in the Bible were the Black voices, who across the generations had called out to God for deliverance from slavery. They prayed for the return of loved ones sold on auction blocks. They prayed to go from sunup to sundown without a whip cutting their skin to bloody rags. They prayed to walk free, to read and question and wonder, to hold children and dance with neighbors and live, just live.
King’s Jesus was a Black Jesus. He loved the poor. He healed the sick. He was willing to break an unjust law for the greater moral good of love. King wrote about unjust laws in his 1963, Letter from Birmingham Jail, “An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”
King’s Jesus did not reduce anyone’s humanity to skin color, class or sex. The Christian tradition he represents always transcended the limits of the Bible’s text to reach its spirit. In order to make it real, King and the millions who followed him risked their lives and suffered, in hopes to redeem — really rescue — the racists trapped in their hatred.
Falwell’s Jesus would have none of that. His Jesus was the Jesus of punishment and terror. It was tradition, too. A corrosive line can be drawn from the 1741 sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God by Jonathan Edwards, who ranted, “Men are held in the Hand of God over the Pit of Hell; they have deserved the fiery Pit, and are already sentenced to it,” to Falwell saying after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, “The pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle … I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”
Fire. Brimstone. Punishment. The secret of Christian nationalists is they are sadists. They love Jesus for the authority it gives them to hate others. And they hate Christians like King, who took the Bible back and made everyone into angels.
The Return of the King
The crisis today is the collision of these two traditions: King’s Jesus versus Falwell’s Jesus. As the United States (and the West overall) becomes more diverse while sliding into a deepening social chasm of inequality, the appeal of white Christian nationalism will grow for a shrinking majority.
King died in ’68. Falwell, in 2007. They live on in their legacies. In 1971, three years after King’s assassination, Falwell founded Liberty University, a think tank for the Christian right, and in 1979 established the Moral Majority, a political lobby hub for evangelicals. The Moral Majority got “souls to the polls” for Republicans and eventually in the ‘90s was overtaken by the Christian Coalition, a non-profit voter registration group, which is now controlled by pro-Trump Christian nationalists.
In 1971, Jesse Jackson, who fought alongside King, founded the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. He later ran for the presidency and said at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lies only a few miles from us tonight. He must feel good as he looks down upon us. We sit here together, a rainbow, a coalition.” He picked up where King had left off: “What’s the moral challenge of our day? We have public accommodations. We have the right to vote. We have open housing. What’s the fundamental challenge of our day? It is to end economic violence.”
Today the theological and political descendants of King and Falwell again fight for the direction of the nation. Former President Donald Trump seeks to lead a ramshackle, fascist coalition of Christian nationalists, Ayn Rand fanatics, plutocrats and hucksters. Should he fail, a new cast of characters are hungry to lead like Gov. Ron DeSantis, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and failed Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano.
Contrast them to King’s followers, a growing multiracial, democratic socialist America led by Dream Defenders, Cooperation Jackson, Extinction Rebellion, Rev. William Barber, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Christian socialist intellectual Cornel West and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The George Floyd protests were a glimpse of a possible future when the progressive youth outnumber and overpower MAGA reactionaries.
King stood at the edge of the promised land and urged us forward. Fifty years later, it’s time to enter.”
In a speech which for myself articulates the best of our limitless possibilities of becoming human, The Other America, Martin Luther King teaches us this; “Rev. Dr. Harry Meserve, Bishop Emrich, my dear friend Congressman Conyers, ladies and gentlemen.
I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight and to have the great privilege of discussing with you some of the vital issues confronting our nation and confronting the world. It is always a very rich and rewarding experience when I can take a brief break from the day-to-day demands of our struggle for freedom and human dignity and discuss the issues involved in that struggle with concerned people of goodwill all over our nation and all over the world, and I certainly want to express my deep personal appreciation to you for inviting me to occupy this significant platform.
I want to discuss the race problem tonight and I want to discuss it very honestly. I still believe that freedom is the bonus you receive for telling the truth. Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. And I do not see how we will ever solve the turbulent problem of race confronting our nation until there is an honest confrontation with it and a willing search for the truth and a willingness to admit the truth when we discover it. And so I want to use as a title for my lecture tonight, “The Other America.” And I use this title because there are literally two Americas. Every city in our country has this kind of dualism, this schizophrenia, split at so many parts, and so every city ends up being two cities rather than one. There are two Americas. One America is beautiful for situation. In this America, millions of people have the milk of prosperity and the honey of equality flowing before them. This America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies, culture and education for their minds, freedom and human dignity for their spirits. In this America, children grow up in the sunlight of opportunity. But there is another America. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this other America, thousands and thousands of people, men, in particular, walk the streets in search for jobs that do not exist. In this other America, millions of people are forced to live in vermin-filled, distressing housing conditions where they do not have the privilege of having wall-to-wall carpeting, but all too often, they end up with wall-to-wall rats and roaches. Almost forty percent of the Negro families of America live in sub-standard housing conditions. In this other America, thousands of young people are deprived of an opportunity to get an adequate education. Every year thousands finish high school reading at a seventh, eighth and sometimes ninth-grade level. Not because they’re dumb, not because they don’t have the native intelligence, but because the schools are so inadequate, so over-crowded, so devoid of quality, so segregated if you will, that the best in these minds can never come out. Probably the most critical problem in the other America is the economic problem. There are so many other people in the other America who can never make ends meet because their incomes are far too low if they have incomes, and their jobs are so devoid of quality. And so in this other America, unemployment is a reality and under-employment is a reality. (I’ll just wait until our friend can have her say) (applause). I’ll just wait until things are restored and. . .everybody talks about law and order. (applause)
Now before I was so rudely interrupted… (applause), and I might say that it was my understanding that we’re going to have a question and answer period, and if anybody disagrees with me, you will have the privilege, the opportunity to raise a question if you think I’m a traitor, then you’ll have an opportunity to ask me about my traitorness and we will give you that opportunity.
Now let me get back to the point that I was trying to bring out about the economic problem. And that is one of the most critical problems that we face in America today. We find in the other America unemployment constantly rising to astronomical proportions and black people generally find themselves living in a literal depression. All too often when there is mass unemployment in the black community, it’s referred to as a social problem and when there is mass unemployment in the white community, it’s referred to as a depression. But there is no basic difference. The fact is, that the negro faces a literal depression all over the U.S. The unemployment rate on the basis of statistics from the labor department is about 8.8 per cent in the black community. But these statistics only take under consideration individuals who were once in the labor market, or individuals who go to employment offices to seek employment. But they do not take under consideration the thousands of people who have given up, who have lost motivation, the thousands of people who have had so many doors closed in their faces that they feel defeated and they no longer go out and look for jobs, the thousands who’ve come to feel that life is a long and desolate corridor with no exit signs. These people are considered the discouraged and when you add the discouraged to the individuals who can’t be calculated through statistics in the unemployment category, the unemployment rate in the negro community probably goes to 16 or 17 percent. And among black youth, it is in some communities as high as 40 and 45 percent. But the problem of unemployment is not the only problem. There is the problem of under-employment, and there are thousands and thousands, I would say millions of people in the negro community who are poverty-stricken – not because they are not working but because they receive wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of our nation. Most of the poverty-stricken people of America are persons who are working every day and they end up getting part-time wages for full-time work. So the vast majority of negroes in America find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. This has caused a great deal of bitterness. It has caused a great deal of agony. It has caused ache and anguish. It has caused great despair, and we have seen the angered expressions of this despair and this bitterness in the violent rebellions that have taken place in cities all over our country. Now I think my views on non-violence are pretty generally known. I still believe that non-violence is the most potent weapon available to the negro in his struggle for justice and freedom in the U.S.
Now let me relieve you a bit. I’ve been in the struggle a long time now, (applause) and I’ve conditioned myself to some things that are much more painful than discourteous people not allowing you to speak, so if they feel that they can discourage me, they’ll be up here all night.
Now I wanted to say something about the fact that we have lived over these last two or three summers with agony and we have seen our cities going up in flames. And I would be the first to say that I am still committed to militant, powerful, massive, non-violence as the most potent weapon in grappling with the problem from a direct action point of view. I’m absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt. And I feel that we must always work with an effective, powerful weapon and method that brings about tangible results. But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquillity and the status quo than about justice and humanity.
Now every year about this time, our newspapers and our televisions and people generally start talking about the long hot summer ahead. What always bothers me is that the long hot summer has always been preceded by a long cold winter. And the great problem is that the nation has not used its winters creatively enough to develop the program, to develop the kind of massive acts of concern that will bring about a solution to the problem. And so we must still face the fact that our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. As long as justice is postponed we always stand on the verge of these darker nights of social disruption. The question now, is whether America is prepared to do something massively, affirmatively and forthrightly about the great problem we face in the area of race and the problem which can bring the curtain of doom down on American civilization if it is not solved. And I would like to talk for the next few minutes about some of the things that must be done if we are to solve this problem.
The first thing I would like to mention is that there must be a recognition on the part of everybody in this nation that America is still a racist country. Now however unpleasant that sounds, it is the truth. And we will never solve the problem of racism until there is a recognition of the fact that racism still stands at the center of so much of our nation and we must see racism for what it is. It is the nymph of inferior people. It is the notion that one group has all of the knowledge, all of the insights, all of the purity, all of the work, all of the dignity. And another group is worthless, on a lower level of humanity, inferior. To put it in philosophical language, racism is not based on some empirical generalization which, after some studies, would come to the conclusion that these people are behind because of environmental conditions. Racism is based on an ontological affirmation. It is the notion that the very being of a people is inferior. And their ultimate logic of racism is genocide. Hitler was a very sick man. He was one of the great tragedies of history. But he was very honest. He took his racism to its logical conclusion. The minute his racism caused him to sickly feel and go about saying that there was something innately inferior about the Jew he ended up killing six million Jews. The ultimate logic of racism is genocide, and if one says that one is not good enough to have a job that is a solid quality job if one is not good enough to have access to public accommodations if one is not good enough to have the right to vote if one is not good enough to live next door to him if one is not good enough to marry his daughter because of his race. Then at that moment, that person is saying that that person who is not good to do all of this is not fit to exist or to live. And that is the ultimate logic of racism. And we’ve got to see that this still exists in American society. And until it is removed, there will be people walking the streets of and living in their humble dwellings feeling that they are nobody, feeling that they have no dignity and feeling that they are not respected. The first thing that must be on the agenda of our nation is to get rid of racism.
Secondly, we’ve got to get rid of two or three myths that still pervade our nation. One is the myth of time. I’m sure you’ve heard this notion. It is the notion that only time can solve the problem of racial injustice. And I’ve heard it from many sincere people. They’ve said to the negro and/to his allies in the white community you should slow up, you’re pushing things too fast, only time can solve the problem. And if you’ll just be nice and patient and continue to pray, in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out. There is an answer to that myth. It is the time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. And I’m sad to say to you tonight I’m absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the forces on the wrong side in our nation, the extreme righteous of our nation have often used time much more effectively than the forces of goodwill and it may well be that we may have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words of the bad people who will say bad things in a meeting like this or who will bomb a church in Birmingham, Alabama, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say wait on time. Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability, it comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. And so we must always help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.
Now there is another myth and that is the notion that legislation can’t solve the problem that you’ve got to change the heart and naturally I believe in changing the heart. I happen to be a Baptist preacher and that puts me in the heart-changing business and Sunday after Sunday I’m preaching about conversion and the need for the new birth and regeneration. I believe that there’s something wrong with human nature. I believe in original sin not in terms of the historical event but as the mythological category to explain the universality of evil, so I’m honest enough to see the gone-wrongness of human nature so naturally, I’m not against changing the heart and I do feel that that is the half-truth involved here, that there is some truth in the whole question of changing the heart. We are not going to have the kind of society that we should have until the white person treats the negro right – not because the law says it but because it’s natural because it’s right and because the black man is the white man’s brother. I’ll be the first to say that we will never have a truly integrated society, a truly colorless society until men and women are obedient to the unenforceable. But after saying that, let me point out the other side. It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also.
And so while legislation may not change the hearts of men, it does change the habits of men when it’s vigorously enforced and when you change the habits of people pretty soon attitudes begin to be changed and people begin to see that they can do things that fears caused them to feel that they could never do. And I say that there’s a need still for strong civil rights legislation in various areas. There’s legislation in Congress right now dealing with the whole question of housing and equal administration of justice and these things are very important for I submit to you tonight that there is no more dangerous development in our nation than the constant building up of predominantly negro central cities ringed by white suburbs. This will do nothing but invite social disaster. And this problem has to be dealt with – some through legislation, some through education, but it has to be dealt with in a very concrete and meaningful manner.
Now let me get back to my point. I’m going to finish my speech. I’ve been trying to think about what I’m going to preach about tomorrow down to Central Methodist Church in the Lenten series and I think I’ll use as the text, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”
I want to deal with another myth briefly which concerns me and I want to talk about it very honestly and that is over-reliance on the bootstrap philosophy. Now certainly it’s very important for people to engage in self-help programs and do all they can to lift themselves by their own bootstraps. Now I’m not talking against that at all. I think there is a great deal that the black people of this country must do for themselves and that nobody else can do for them. And we must see the other side of this question. I remember the other day I was on a plane and a man starting talking with me and he said I’m sympathetic toward what you’re trying to do, but I just feel that you people don’t do enough for yourself and then he went on to say that my problem is, my concern is that I know of other ethnic groups, many of the ethnic groups that came to this country and they had problems just as negroes and yet they did the job for themselves, they lifted themselves by their own bootstraps. Why is it that negroes can’t do that? And I looked at him and I tried to talk as understanding as possible but I said to him, it does not help the negro for unfeeling, sensitive white people to say that other ethnic groups that came to the country maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty years voluntarily have gotten ahead of them and he was brought here in chains involuntarily almost three hundred and fifty years ago. I said it doesn’t help him to be told that and then I went on to say to this gentlemen that he failed to recognize that no other ethnic group has been enslaved on American soil. Then I had to go on to say to him that you failed to realize that America made the black man’s color a stigma. Something that he couldn’t change. Not only was the color a stigma, but even linguistic then stigmatic conspired against the black man so that his color was thought of as something very evil. If you open Roget’s Thesaurus and notice the synonym for black you’ll find about a hundred and twenty and most of them represent something dirty, smut, degrading, low, and when you turn to the synonym for white, about one hundred and thirty, all of them represent something high, pure, chaste. You go right down that list. And so in the language a white life is a little better than a black life. Just follow. If somebody goes wrong in the family, we don’t call him a white sheep we call him a black sheep. And then if you block somebody from getting somewhere you don’t say they’ve been whiteballed, you say they’ve been blackballed. And just go down the line. It’s not whitemail it’s blackmail. I tell you this to seriously say that the nation made the black man’s color a stigma and then I had to say to my friend on the plane another thing that is often forgotten in this country. That nobody, no ethnic group has completely lifted itself by its own bootstraps. I can never forget that the black man was free from the bondage of physical slavery in 1863. He wasn’t given any land to make that freedom meaningful after being held in slavery for 244 years. And it was like keeping a man in prison for many many years and then coming to see that he is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted. Alright good night and God bless you.
And I was about to say that to free, to have freed the negro from slavery without doing anything to get him started in life on a sound economic footing, it was almost like freeing a man who had been in prison many years and you had discovered that he was unjustly convicted of, that he was innocent of the crime for which he was convicted and you go up to him and say now you’re free, but you don’t give him any bus fare to get to town or you don’t give him any money to buy some clothes to put on his back or to get started in life again. Every code of jurisprudence would rise up against it. This is the very thing that happened to the black man in America. And then when we look at it even deeper than this, it becomes more ironic. We’re reaping the harvest of this failure today. While America refused to do anything for the black man at that point, during that very period, the nation, through an act of Congress, was giving away millions of acres of land in the west and the mid-west, which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor. Not only did they give the land, they built land grant colleges for them to learn how to farm. Not only that it provided county agents to further their expertise in farming and went beyond this and came to the point of providing low-interest rates for these persons so that they could mechanize their farms, and today many of these persons are being paid millions of dollars a year in federal subsidies not to farm and these are so often the very people saying to the black man that he must lift himself by his own bootstraps. I can never think … Senator Eastland, incidentally, who says this all the time gets a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a year, not to farm on various areas of his plantation down in Mississippi. And yet he feels that we must do everything for ourselves. Well, that appears to me to be a kind of socialism for the rich and rugged hard individualistic capitalism for the poor.
Now let me say two other things and I’m going to rush on. One, I want to say that if we’re to move ahead and solve this problem we must re-order our national priorities. Today we’re spending almost thirty-five billion dollars a year to fight what I consider an unjust, ill-considered, evil, costly, unwinnable war at Viet Nam. I wish I had time to go into the dimensions of this. But I must say that the war in Viet Nam is playing havoc with our domestic destinies. That war has torn up the Geneva accord, it has strengthened, it has substituted. . .(interruption). . .alright if you want to speak I’ll let you come down and speak and I’ll wait. You can give your Viet Nam speech now listen to mine. Come right on.
Speaker: Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Joseph McLawtern, communications technician, U.S. Navy, United States of America and I fought for freedom I didn’t fight for communism, traitors and I didn’t fight to be sold down the drain. Not by Romney, Cavanagh, Johnson–nobody, nobody’s going to sell me down the drain.
Alright, thank you very much. I just want to say in response to that, that there are those of us who oppose the war in Viet Nam. I feel like opposing it for many reasons. Many of them are moral reasons but one basic reason is that we love our boys who are fighting there and we just want them to come back home. But I don’t have time to go into the history and the development of the war in Viet Nam. I happen to be a pacifist but if I had had to make a decision about fighting a war against Hitler, I may have temporarily given up my pacifism and taken up arms. But nobody is to compare what is happening in Viet Nam today with that. I’m convinced that it is clearly an unjust war and it’s doing so many things–not only on the domestic scene, it is carrying the whole world closer to nuclear annihilation. And so I’ve found it necessary to take a stand against the war in Viet Nam and I appreciate Bishop Emrich’s question and I must answer it by saying that for me the tuitus? cannot be divided. It’s nice for me to talk about … it’s alright to talk about integrated schools and in integrated lunch counters which I will continue to work for, but I think it would be rather absurd for me to work for integrated schools and not be concerned about the survival of the world in which to integrate.
The other thing is, that I have been working too long and too hard now against segregated public accommodations to end up at this stage of my life segregating my moral concern. I must make it clear. For me justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Now for the question of hurting civil rights. I think the war in Viet Nam hurt civil rights much more than my taking a stand against the war. And I could point out so many things to say that. . . a reporter asked me some time ago when I first took a strong stand against the war didn’t I feel that I would have to reverse my position because so many people disagreed, and people who once had respect for me wouldn’t have respect, and he went on to say that I hear that it’s hurt the budget of your organization and don’t you think that you have to get in line more with the administration’s policy … and of course those were very lonely days when I first started speaking out and not many people were speaking out but now I have a lot of company and it’s not as lonesome now. But anyway, I had to say to the reporter, I’m sorry sir but you don’t know me. I’m not a consensus leader and I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or by kind of taking a look at a gallop poll and getting the expression of the majority opinion. Ultimately, a genuine leader is not a succor for consensus but a mold of consensus. And on some positions cowardice ask the question is it safe? Expediency asks the question is it politics? Vanity asks the question is it popular? The conscience asks the question is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politics nor popular but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.
Now the time is passing and I’m not going to… I was going into the need for direct action to dramatize and call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment. I’ve been searching for a long time for an alternative to riots on the one hand and timid supplication for justice on the other and I think that alternative is found in militant massive non-violence. I’ll wait until the question period before going into the Washington campaign. But let me say that it has been my experience in these years that I’ve been in the struggle for justice, that things just don’t happen until the issue is dramatized in a massive direct-action way. I never will forget when we came through Washington in 1964, in December coming from Oslo. I stopped by to see President Johnson. We talked about a lot of things and we finally got to the point of talking about voting rights. The President was concerned about voting, but he said Martin, I can’t get this through in this session of Congress. We can’t get a voting rights bill, he said because there are two or three other things that I feel that we’ve got to get through and they’re going to benefit negroes as much as anything. One was the education bill and something else. And then he went on to say that if I push a voting rights bill now, I’ll lose the support of seven congressmen that I sorely need for the particular things that I had and we just can’t get it. Well, I went on to say to the President that I felt that we had to do something about it and two weeks later we started a movement in Selma, Alabama. We started dramatizing the issue of the denial of the right to vote and I submit to you that three months later as a result of that Selma movement, the same President who said to me that we could not get a voting rights bill in that session of Congress was on the television singing through a speaking voice “we shall overcome” and calling for the passage of a voting rights bill and I could go on and on to show. . .and we did get a voting rights bill in that session of Congress. Now, I could go on to give many other examples to show that it just doesn’t come about without pressure and this is what we plan to do in Washington. We aren’t planning to close down Washington, we aren’t planning to close down Congress. This isn’t anywhere in our plans. We are planning to dramatize the issue to the point that poor people in this nation will have to be seen and will not be invisible.
Now let me finally say something in the realm of the spirit and then I’m going to take my seat. Let me say finally, that in the midst of the hollering and in the midst of the discourtesy tonight, we got to come to see that however much we dislike it, the destinies of white and black America are tied together. Now the races don’t understand this apparently. But our destinies are tied together. And somehow, we must all learn to live together as brothers in this country or we’re all going to perish together as fools. Our destinies are tied together. Whether we like it or not culturally and otherwise, every white person is a little bit negro and every negro is a little bit white. Our language, our music, our material prosperity and even our food are an amalgam of black and white, so there can be no separate black path to power and fulfillment that does not intersect white routes and there can ultimately be no separate white path to power and fulfillment short of social disaster without recognizing the necessity of sharing that power with black aspirations for freedom and human dignity. We must come to see. . .yes we do need each other, the black man needs the white man to save him from his fear and the white man needs the black man to free him from his guilt.
John Donne was right. No man is an island and the tide that fills every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. And he goes on toward the end to say, “any man’s death diminishes me because I’m involved in mankind. Therefore, it’s not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” Somehow we must come to see that in this pluralistic, interrelated society we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And by working with determination and realizing that power must be shared, I think we can solve this problem, and may I say in conclusion that our goal is freedom and I believe that we’re going to get there. It’s going to be more difficult from here on in but I believe we’re going to get there because however much she strays away from it, the goal of America is freedom and our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America. Before the Pilgrim fathers landed at Plymouth we were here. Before Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence we were here. Before the beautiful words of the Star-Spangled Banner were written we were here. And for more than two centuries our forbearers labored here without wages. They made cotton King, they built the homes of their masters in the midst of the most humiliating and oppressive conditions and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to grow and develop and if the inexpressible cruelties of slavery couldn’t stop us, the opposition that we now face including the white backlash will surely fail.
We are going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the Almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands. So however difficult it is during this period, however difficult it is to continue to live with the agony and the continued existence of racism, however difficult it is to live amidst the constant hurt, the constant insult and the constant disrespect, I can still sing we shall overcome. We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.
We shall overcome because Carlisle is right. “No lie can live forever.” We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right. “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.” We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right. “Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.” Yet that scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because the Bible is right. “You shall reap what you sow.” With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when all of God’s children all over this nation – black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old negro spiritual, “Free at Last, Free at Last, Thank God Almighty, We Are Free At Last.”
Remember Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his legacy of dishonor, treason, and fascist tyranny; his jests did distract us from his subversion of democracy until too late. Idiot madman of monstrous perversions that he is, we must give the devil his due; Trump is the greatest foreign agent to ever attack America, and he has brought our democracy down into fascist tyranny, white supremacist terror, and theocratic Patriarchal sexual terror.
Remember the Clown, and his absurd empire of lies and depravities, his subversions of democracy and violations of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, his kleptocracy of looting the public wealth, his Wall of Hate, his syndicate of Epstein sexual terror and human trafficking, his orchestration of white supremacist terror and treason, his use of racists in disrupting the Black Lives Matter protests in a campaign of violence, arson, vandalism and looting to discredit the mass action for equality and racial justice and provide a pretext for the federal occupation of Democratic cities and the founding of a fascist tyranny, and the pathetic puppet show of Traitor Trump and his master Putin.
Remember him and all his Deplorables as his second capture of the state begins, for we enter a new era of fascism as the collapse of values becomes the Fall of America, for the enemies of democracy never rest, and neither must we.
And now we have the Jack Smith report made public and part of the historical memory and character of America; a witness and chronicle of how America, democracy, and our first pan-human civilization fell.
Thanks for showing us all what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
And remember, you can always discover someone’s secret Republican name whereby they recognize each other; its their act of treason plus their sex crime.
We live now within a Labyrinth of nested puzzle boxes, each a possible future and universe. The choices our nation made in our election this November has opened gates and let angels through, or devils, and deliver us to heavens or hells. We may never know which we have chosen, but this one true thing I can tell you with absolute certainty; America and humankind will never be the same, for in this Defining Moment we will be forever changed.
Who do we want to become, we humans? Masters and slaves divided against each other in an Age of Tyrants and wars our species cannot long survive, or a free society of equals who are guarantors of each others universal human rights in solidarity? May we each of us choose wisely.
As written by David Smith in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump would have been convicted over 2020 election, says special counsel: Report by Jack Smith says evidence ‘was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction’ had Trump not won re-election in 2024; “Donald Trump would have been convicted of crimes over his failed attempt to cling to power in 2020 but for his victory in last year’s US presidential election, according to the special counsel who investigated him.
Jack Smith’s report detailing his team’s findings about Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy was released by the justice department early on Tuesday.
After the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, Smith was appointed as special counsel to investigate Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. His investigation culminated in a detailed report submitted to the attorney general, Merrick Garland.
In it, Smith asserts that he believes the evidence would have been sufficient to convict Trump in a trial if his success in the 2024 election had not made it impossible for the prosecution to continue.
“The department’s view that the constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a president is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the government’s proof or the merits of the prosecution, which the office stands fully behind,” Smith writes.
“Indeed, but for Mr Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.”
Trump was impeached for his role in spurring the January 6 riot, accused by a congressional panel of taking part in a “multi-part conspiracy” and ultimately indicted by justice department on four counts, including “conspiracy to defraud” the US.
Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges.
After the release, Trump, in a post on his Truth Social site, called Smith a “lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the election”.
He has depicted the cases as politically motivated attempts to damage his campaign and political movement. He also calculated correctly that he could outrun the law by staging a spectacular political comeback and regaining the White House.
Volume one of Smith’s report meticulously outlines Trump’s alleged actions, including his efforts to pressure state officials, assemble alternate electors and encourage supporters to protest against the election results.
Smith writes: “Significantly, he made election claims only to state legislators and executives who shared his political affiliation and were his political supporters, and only in states that he had lost.”
The report underscores Trump’s persistent spreading of “demonstrably and, in many cases, obviously false” claims about the 2020 election. These served as the basis for his pressure campaign and contributed to the January 6 attack.
Much of the evidence cited in the report has been made public previously. But it includes some new details, such as that prosecutors considered charging Trump with inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol under a US law known as the Insurrection Act.
Prosecutors ultimately concluded that such a charge posed legal risks and there was insufficient evidence that Trump intended for the “full scope” of violence during the riot, a failed attempt by a mob of his supporters to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election.
The indictment charged Trump with conspiring to obstruct the election certification, defraud the US of accurate election results and deprive US voters of their voting rights.
Smith’s office determined that charges may have been justified against some co-conspirators accused of helping Trump carry out the plan, but the report said prosecutors reached no final conclusions. Several of Trump’s former lawyers had previously been identified as co-conspirators referenced in the indictment.
Trump and his legal team have characterised the report as a “political hit job” aimed at disrupting the presidential transition and waged a protracted legal battle to prevent its release.
Smith, who left the justice department last week, directly addresses accusations from Trump and his allies that the investigation was politically motivated. He asserts that his team operated solely on the basis of facts and law.
Smith writes: “My office had one north star: to follow the facts and law wherever they led. Nothing more and nothing less. To all who know me well, the claim from Mr Trump that my decisions as a prosecutor were influenced or directed by the Biden administration or other political actors is, in a word, laughable.”
Smith acknowledges the justice department’s policy prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president, a factor that ultimately led to the dropping of charges against Trump after his 2024 victory. The report also references a supreme court ruling expanding presidential immunity, which complicated the case.
But Smith wrote in a letter to Garland attached to the report: “While we were not able to bring the cases we charged to trial, I believe the fact that our team stood up for the rule of law matters. I believe the example our team set for others to fight for justice without regard for the personal costs matters.”
A second section of the report details Smith’s case accusing Trump of illegally retaining sensitive national security documents after leaving the White House in 2021. The justice department has committed not to make that portion public while legal proceedings continue against two Trump associates charged in the case.
Trump, who will be inaugurated as the 47th president on Monday, was last week sentenced to an unconditional discharge for 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a hush-money payment during the 2016 election.”
As written by Chris Stein in The Guardian, in an article entitled Five key takeaways from Jack Smith’s report on alleged Trump election crimes; “ A special counsel report detailing Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy was released by the justice department early on Tuesday and concluded that the president-elect would have been convicted of crimes over his failed attempt to cling to power in 2020.
However, Trump’s victory in November’s US presidential election scuppered the investigation.
Jack Smith was appointed as special counsel and his report was published after a fierce legal battle by Trump’s team to keep it under wraps. In it, Smith asserts that he believes the evidence would have been sufficient to convict Trump in a trial if his success in the 2024 election had not made it impossible to continue the prosecution into his attempts to stay in the Oval Office despite his electoral loss to Joe Biden in 2020.
Here are some key findings:
1. Trump did not cooperate fully
Smith laid out the challenges he faced during the investigation, including Trump’s assertion of executive privilege to try to block witnesses from providing evidence, which forced prosecutors into sealed court battles before the case was charged.
Another “significant challenge” was Trump’s “ability and willingness to use his influence and following on social media to target witnesses, courts, prosecutors”, which led prosecutors to seek a gag order to protect potential witnesses from harassment, Smith wrote.
2. Smith calls allegations of political interference ‘laughable’
Smith hit back at claims by the president-elect that he pursued the charges for political reasons.
“While I relied greatly on the counsel, judgment, and advice of our team, I want it to be clear that the ultimate decision to bring charges against Mr Trump was mine. It is a decision I stand behind fully,” wrote Smith, who resigned from the justice department on 10 January.
He added that “nobody within the Department of Justice ever sought to interfere with, or improperly influence, my prosecutorial decision making.
“And to all who know me well, the claim from Mr Trump that my decisions as a prosecutor were influenced or directed by the Biden administration or other political actors is, in a word, laughable,” Smith wrote.
3. Trump knew his allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election were false
Smith wrote that Trump knew his allegations of fraud in the 2020 election were false – but he continued to make them anyway.
“Mr Trump’s false claims included dozens of specific claims regarding certain states, such as that large numbers of dead, non-resident, non-citizen, or otherwise ineligible voters had cast ballots, or that voting machines had changed votes for Mr Trump to votes against him. These claims were demonstrably and, in many cases, obviously false,” Smith said.
4. Smith believed Trump should be charged despite supreme court immunity ruling
Despite a supreme court ruling on presidential immunity, Smith wrote that he believed the charges he filed against Trump still held water.
He notes that his team was able to secure a superseding indictment from a grand jury after the top court handed down its ruling, which gave Trump immunity for official acts taken as president.
“The Supreme Court’s decision required the office to reanalyze the evidence it had collected. The original indictment alleged that Mr Trump, as the incumbent president, used all available tools and powers, both private and official, to overturn the legitimate results of the election despite notice, including from official advisors, that his fraud claims were false and he had lost the election.
“Given the supreme court’s ruling, the office reevaluated the evidence and assessed whether Mr Trump’s non-immune conduct – either his private conduct as a candidate or official conduct for which the office could rebut the presumption of immunity – violated federal 33 laws. The office concluded that it did. After doing so, the office sought, and a new grand jury issued, a superseding indictment with identical charges but based only on conduct that was not immune because it was either unofficial or any presumptive immunity could be rebutted.”
5. Trump is furious
In a typically incoherent social media post put online in the early hours of Tuesday, Trump’s rage at the release of the report was clear.
Trump, who returns to the presidency on 20 January, wrote: “Deranged Jack Smith was unable to successfully prosecute the Political Opponent of his ‘boss,’ Crooked Joe Biden, so he ends up writing yet another ‘Report’ based on information that the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs ILLEGALLY DESTROYED AND DELETED, because it showed how totally innocent I was, and how completely guilty Nancy Pelosi, and others, were. Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide. THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!”
As I wrote in my post of August 2 2024, Anniversary of the Trump Indictment For Insurrection, Treason, Subversion of Democracy, and Conspiracy To Overturn the 2020 Election; We remember this first anniversary of the trial of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump indicted on four counts of attempts to overturn the 2020 election and seize control of the state as a tyrant of the Fourth Reich’s white supremacist terror and theocratic-patriarchal sexual terror.
This anniversary is shadowed by Trump’s performance of his signature Theatre of Cruelty in an interview with Black journalists, where his contempt for women and nonwhite people and for the ideals, values, and institutions of democracy was on full display, along with his vacuous idiocy, arrogance, trivial bluster, entitlement and delusions of grandeur; but by now I believe we can stipulate the psychopathy of Trump the rapist who would be king.
But if there is darkness which seethes among us like an annihilating leprous swarm of Christian Identity fascism, there is also light and hope for the Restoration of America; Biden and Harris have brought home our journalists imprisoned in Russia by Trump’s puppetmaster, and the sanctity of journalism as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth has been re-established.
There can be no greater and more clear and immediate image of the choices we now face in our election and in choosing a vision of a future America; of liberty and tyranny, loyalty and treason, good and evil, Democrat or Republican versions of ourselves.
Let us act in Solidarity as guarantors of each others freedoms and universal human rights, to forge a free society of equals which upholds our uniqueness in a diverse and inclusive civilization, and elect Kamala Harris as our next President. Let us choose not masters and tyrants to subjugate us, but champions to liberate us.
As I wrote in my post of August 2 2023, Strike Three For Trump and the Party of Treason; We remain a chiaroscuro of darkness and light; we Americans, we human beings. Such boundaries define us, written in blood; I hope that one day these may also become interfaces.
As I wrote in my post of February 11 2021, Profiles in Treason and Terror; The dishonorable and the mad, the delusional and the sadistic epicures of brutality and perversions, the feral predators hooting and champing before the gallows and guillotines they have brought to murder members of congress with and their partners in uniform unleashing racist terror and gun violence in the streets, and the amoral and predatory grifters and puppetmasters of fascism who have subjugated and enslaved them and stolen their honor and their souls; these are among the idolators of Traitor Trump who conspired, enabled, and collaborated in his plot to subvert democracy and overthrow America in the January 6 Insurrection which attempted to seize Congress and execute its members, which like Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch on which it was modeled was intended to decapitate the government of the people in a single stroke.
As details emerge of the internal operations and massive scale of the plot against America, in terms of its central coordination and logistics under direct operational command of Trump and his cabal of conspirators, we are offered not only the spectacle of his aberrance and monstrosity as a mad idiot Clown of Terror drooling and gloating in bestial depravity at the destruction of our values and institutions, the violation of our ideals and the endless suffering he has caused, but of those of his freakish and degenerate followers as well.
As I wrote in my post of June 13 2023, The Monster Brought to Judgement; Rejoice with me in the spectacle of the monster brought to judgement, his numberless crimes and perversions and those of his treasonous and dishonorable minions and collaborators in a loathsome regime of patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror as theocratic fascism and tyranny, designed and perpetrated for the purposes of infiltration and subversion of democracy and capture of the state, are displayed before the stage of history and the world as defining limits of the human and branded into the soul of America.
Like the thief’s brand of Milady de Winter in Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, may the actions of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, forever remind us who the enemies of Liberty truly are, regardless of the masks they wear and the web of lies in which they seek to trap us as the raw material of their power.
Saboteurs of our justice system and agents of the Fourth Reich have conspired to deny us a public viewing of the trial, a trial whose functions are not limited to the espionage of one Russian agent and ex President, but include the restoration of the legitimacy of the justice system, of America as both state and idea, and of democracy globally.
We must see the monster disempowered to harm us, exposed and cast out, if we are to find catharsis in this morality play, for Trump is a figure of the diseased heart of America as a Sin Eater for all of his followers and those who voted for him and his policies of division and theft of the soul. We must purge our destroyers from among us; most especially those who once believed his lies and enabled him as voters and co-conspirators including the whole of the Republican Party must now be granted the chance to disavow him and free themselves of their subjugation to theocratic fascism, or be judged with him by history.
This process of catharsis and the Restoration of America is by now two and a half years along since the January 6 Insurrection marked the high tide and collapse of fascism in America, progress we can measure by the few supporters who came to the trial in response to Trump’s dogwhistled orders to storm the court as a demonstration of power, as compared to the masses who perpetrated the storming of Congress in the Insurrection. Trump is still proclaiming madness and issuing terroristic commands, but almost no one is listening anymore.
The tide of fascist tyranny and terror in America has turned, and now is the time to bring a Reckoning for its evils.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As I wrote in my post of March 30 2023, Victory For America and Democracy: the Indictment of Traitor Trump; Jubilation and dancing in the streets erupts across America as the most dangerous foreign agent to ever attack our nation in the capture of the state with the Stolen Election of 2016 is indicted for illegal hush money payoffs to a prostitute; not yet for his trafficking of the stolen migrant children, the political assassination of our Antifa comrade Michael Reinoehl, the abduction and torture of Black Lives Matter protestors by Homeland Security’s army of occupation, his six coup attempts ending with the January 6 Insurrection, or treason in the subversion of democracy, but such a Reckoning will come.
This is the first step of Trump’s descent into hell, where he will join his buddy Epstein and his idol Hitler.
I will remember always the moment when I realized Trump is actually an enemy agent and not merely a vile buffoon; watching as he took his Oath of Office swearing to uphold the Constitution and defend America from all enemies foreign and domestic, while Russian bombs fell on the American servicemen he had abandoned to their deaths in Syria. This too I shall avenge.
Of Trump’s regime and the Fourth Reich we may say as Mark Twain did of the French Revolution and the epochal system of unequal power as monarchy which it overthrew; “THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
How shall future histories of the American Fourth Reich and the tyranny and terror of Traitor Trump’s Russian puppet regime remember and characterize him as its figurehead?
As I wrote in my post of June 29 2020, Traitor Trump, Bad Monkey William Barr, and the Subversion of the Rule of Law; Bad Monkey Barr gibbers and champs in his cage, rattling the bars and hurling scoops of his poo at the visitors. Trump the Incorrigible Brat makes faces and taunts him, spurring him on to displays of vicious foulness and depravity, alike in their embrace of the power to hurt others and thereby elevate themselves in vainglorious drooling dominance through fear.
Trump the Clown of Terror and his pet beast of pain and despair William Barr; carnival sideshow freaks of like nature, Trump upon his golden toilet of self-aggrandizement and Barr scampering at his feet and uttering perversions for treats.
Stay well back from the cage, children; the President grabs. His every action is calculated to generate helplessness from his victims, his strategies of politics an elaborate ritual of personal superiority through the submission of others which he offers to the demons which possess him, whispering their incantations of violation and depravity in the hollow rottenness beneath his orange painted husk of illusions and lies.
Such is the true purpose and intention of Trump’s psychopathic game of power as the figurehead of a fascist tyranny of white supremacist terror, misogynistic patriarchy and theocratic Gideonite fundamentalism, and plutocratic disaster capitalism, of authoritarian force and control and the subversion of democracy, in his monstrous acts of treason against our values and institutions of freedom, equality, truth, and justice; the destruction of America and of liberty and the universal human rights we are heir to throughout the world and from the future possibilities of becoming human.
Trump and his fascist conspirators and enablers want nothing less than to devour our souls and enslave us, beginning with the capture of America as a Theatre of Cruelty and the abandonment of our historic role as a guarantor of democracy and the Rights of Man.
In the darkness of his warrens beneath the White House, Trump howls and lashes out in rage through his proxies like William Barr, who with somersaults of avarice joins him in a delirium of madness and evil. From his lair and cabal of intimates Trump’s Sith-like influence ripples out through networks of master-disciple relationships to engulf our nation and our world in a vast web of deceit, and this network of secret power must be fought on its own terms with exposure and mass action.
As I wrote in my post of June 9 2023, We Celebrate the Indictment of Traitor Trump, Russian Spy and Most Effective Enemy Agent Ever to Attack America, For Espionage in the Theft of State Secrets; How do you spell Trump? Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Take a moment to savour with me the indictment of Trump for the crime of espionage. Ahhh, the bliss.
A commentator on MSN’s Eleventh Hour this night pronounced the magic words which I hope will awaken our nation from the long nightmare of capture by the Fourth Reich; “I think Trump is done.”
It has been a fairytale from which we may learn many kinds of morals, a story which begins in the 1980 capture of the Republican Party by Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority movement as a fundamentalist theocracy and the Presidency of its figurehead Ronald Reagan and the Mayan Genocide they unleashed together, and found its true form in the Presidency of a pedophile rapist and Russian agent who for years slept with a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf on his nightstand in place of a Bible.
Here in the trial of Traitor Trump is a morality play which is also a Rashomon Gate of our possible futures, for it is more than a legal last stand of the rule of law and the idea of democracy in America against a rigged electoral process which offers capture of the state to its enemies, but also a trial of democracy in America and of our infiltrated and subverted justice system whose court of ultimate appeal is a Supreme Court which is become a whorehouse.
What is the meaning of the Trump regime in the story of America and our future possibilities of becoming human as a free society of equals?
As I wrote in my post of November 5 2020. Trump’s Last Coup Attempt and Subversion of Democracy as His Ship of Fools Sinks in Pathetic Failure; As Trump’s Ship of Fools comes apart at the seams and sinks beneath the waves in pathetic failure, our Clown of Terror collapses in infantile tantrums and tries to take democracy down with him, a final gesture of madness and idiocy in his delusional quest to subvert our values and institutions of liberty and seize tyrannical power.
We must never forget how close we came to a repeat of the 1933 German Federal Election that set Hitler on the path to a tyranny of absolute power; this is clearly the most important electoral event in the history of humankind since then, and the two elections are terrifyingly parallel. Trump tried three times to use the Black Lives Matter protests to create fear and legitimize the federal occupation of America under the pretext of re-establishing law and order in an exact duplication of Hitler’s successful strategy using the Reichstag Fire, and failed.
We have escaped the jaws of the Fourth Reich which have held us fast for four years, since the Stolen Election of 2016, while Trump and his cabal of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, white supremacist terrorists, and plutocratic robber barons have violated everything about America which is noble and true, plundered the public wealth, dehumanized and divided us, sabotaged and subverted the institutions of our freedom, equality, truth, and justice, betrayed our allies and emboldened our foes, lost the American hegemony of global power and privilege and our position as a guarantor of democracy and universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world.
Let us never forget the bottomless depravities, treasons, and amoral predation and greed of Trump’s many enablers and conspirators in the Fall of America as we struggle in the years ahead to reclaim our nation and our souls. We must hold them to account, but we must also reimagine our society and the many systemic and structural flaws by which we came to this broken and lost state.
As I wrote in my post of June 9 2022, The Greatest Show on Earth: Presenting the January 6 Committee; Tonight our puppets will dance upon the stage of history and our imaginations, while a chiaroscuro of light as truth and democracy versus darkness as fascist tyranny and falsification, lies, illusions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, conspiracy theories and propaganda play for the kingdom of our souls and the fate of America and the world.
Who do we want to become, we humans? A free society of equals or a prison planet of masters and slaves?
Now begins a great Reckoning, and we shall see.
As I wrote in my post of February 10 2021, Treason, Tyranny, and Terror on Trial: As the Second Impeachment of Traitor Trump Begins, I Submit Charges Before the People’s Tribunal of Crimes Against Humanity for Which Trump and His Collaborators Should Now Be On Trial; Among the many crimes against humanity for which Traitor Trump and his collaborators should be on trial but are not yet include the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Mexican and other nonwhite migrants, the concentration camps at our border, the orphaning and torture of children, and the state tyranny and terror of fascist and racist violence as national policy perpetrated by the ICE and Border Patrol components of Homeland Security, forces of repression which are antidemocratic by their nature and which should be abolished as a top priority of the Restoration of America.
Just as villainous and reprehensible is the parallel program of racist police violence and the carceral state to re-enslave Black American citizens and enforce systemic forms of inequality and injustice through state terror, repression of dissent, the force of a militarized police and the counterinsurgency model of policing which has transformed our security services into an army of occupation with primarily political objectives, and the control of pervasive and endemic surveillance and propaganda, lies, illusions, and subversions of the truth.
Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his circus of fools, degenerates, and barbarians, his enablers and collaborators both within the government and his shadow forces rallying under the Confederate flag to bring violence and insurrection to our nations capital and to the streets of our cities throughout America, are co-conspirators and instigators in the murders of every Black American killed by police shooting or other racist violence since its authorization by Trump in the wake of Charlottesville.
And every missing child kidnapped by the state and disappeared into what abominable slavery or human trafficking designed in the diseased imagination of Trump and his Epstein buddies we know not of, every migrant of the huddled masses yearning to be free who died in the quest to reach the safety of America because the water caches had been intentionally sabotaged by criminals in the uniform of our nation who were “just following orders” like their counterparts in the SS during the Holocaust, every prisoner who died in custody because they were denied water or medical care; the blood of these and countless other victims of Trump’s narcissistic self-aggrandizement and regime of fascist corruption, racism, and patriarchal sexual terror is on the hands of every Republican who voted for him and fails now in this trial to repudiate him publicly and renounce his works as among those of the devils which he serves.
For in his actions Trump has been not only a foreign agent and Putin’s puppet whose mission is the subversion of democracy and the Fall of America, but also a slave of Moloch the Seducer, Demon of Lies, in that he is not merely a pathological liar but also an idiot madman who cannot distinguish truth from lies, and who has weaponized his delusions and psychopathy as instruments of our falsification and subjugation in his quest for tyrannical power.
The bizarre and lurid dark fairytales of the QAnon conspiracy theory movement, like the charges of the Inquisition and the Nazis which othered witches and Jews on which QAnon is constructed, serves as deflection from Trump’s loathsome perversions and sexual terrorism. What terrors did he conceal behind the beauty pageant and modeling syndicate he once controlled?
His Stop the Steal campaign is a similar deflection which shields him from inquiry into the Stolen Election of 2016 and the fact that his Presidency was entirely illegitimate and due to Russian interference; it was also the rhetorical and organizational basis of his final attempted coup on January 6, for which he is now being impeached for the second time.
We must cast out the monsters from among us, the racists and white supremacist terrorists, the Gideonite fundamentalists and patriarchs of Christian Identity fascism and sexual terror, and the amoral forces of repression of those who would enslave us and who enforce hegemonies of elite power and privilege and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness armed with guns and badges and the authority of a government which has been infiltrated by the Fourth Reich, an implacable and relentless enemy which has come just short of seizing us in its jaws.
We must give fascism no second chances.
As written by Nick Visser in Huffpost, in an article entitled 7 Key Takeaways From Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 Indictment; “Former President Donald Trump has been indicted over his attempt to remain in power after he lost the 2020 presidential election, yet another moment of reckoning amid a torrent of criminal charges.
Trump faces four felony charges as part of a sweeping, 45-page indictment filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Special counsel Jack Smith’s team of investigators accused the former president of multiple conspiracies to defraud the United States, to obstruct an official proceeding and to deprive people of their right to vote and have that vote counted under the Constitution.
1. Trump knew his claims were false but spread them anyway to create an “intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger.”
Prosecutors note that Trump, like every American, had the right to speak publicly about the election “and even to claim, falsely,” that there had been “outcome-determinative fraud.”
But his efforts became unlawful when he moved to defraud the United States and attempt to subvert the process of collecting, counting and certifying the election results. That plan, the indictment says, included a multi-prong approach to spread lies, install slates of fake electors in swing states and convince election officials and then-Vice President Mike Pence to subvert the will of the people.
“Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power,” the indictment says.
2. The indictment identifies six co-conspirators.
Trump was aided in his effort to overturn the 2020 election by six unnamed co-conspirators, the indictment says.
Five of them are identifiable through details and information provided in the filing documents:
1. Rudy Giuliani is listed as “an attorney who was willing to spread knowingly false claims and pursue strategies that the Defendant’s 2020 re-election campaign attorneys would not.”
2. John Eastman is listed as “an attorney who devised and attempted to implement a strategy to leverage the Vice President’s ceremonial role overseeing the certification proceeding to obstruct the certification of the presidential election.”
3. Sidney Powell is listed as “an attorney whose unfounded claims of election fraud the Defendant privately acknowledged to others sounded ‘crazy.’”
4. Jeffrey Clark is identified as “a Justice Department official who worked on civil matters and who, with the Defendant, attempted to use the Justice Department to open sham election crime investigations and influence state legislatures with knowingly false claims of election fraud.”
5. Kenneth Chesebro is listed as “an attorney who assisted in devising and attempting to implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding.”
6. The sixth co-conspirator is so far unknown but is identified as “a political consultant who helped implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding.”
3. People in Trump’s orbit repeatedly told him there was no evidence of voter fraud.
The indictment alleges Trump and his co-conspirators made repeated, “prolific” claims of election fraud despite knowing they were false. Prosecutors say that Trump was repeatedly told by his inner circle his claims were untrue but that he “deliberately disregarded the truth.”
Smith’s team pointed to conversations Trump had with Vice President Mike Pence, senior leaders at the Justice Department, the director of national intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security and many aides, White House attorneys and campaign staffers, all of whom said his claims were unsubstantiated.
4. Trump acknowledged claims about election fraud and voting machines pushed by a co-conspirator sounded “crazy.”
The indictment notes that even as Trump’s legal advisers were working to undercut election results in Georgia, he knew the claims were unfounded and even described Co-Conspirator 3’s plan as “crazy.”
That sentiment spread through Trump’s close advisers as the effort to install slates of fake electors in swing states began in force in an effort to obstruct a true count of the Electoral College votes.
“Here’s the thing the way this has morphed it’s a crazy play so I don’t know who wants to put their name on it,” Trump’s deputy campaign manager at the time texted to other aides. No one agreed to put their name on the plan as they couldn’t “stand by it.”
5. Trump pressured the Justice Department to support him and threatened to remove those who refused to go along with his plan.
Trump repeatedly tried to get the Department of Justice to support his false claims of election fraud, “thus giving the Defendant’s lies the backing of the federal government.” But the acting attorney general and acting deputy attorney general both refused, saying the agency would not and could not change the outcome of the election.
“Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump replied, the indictment says.
The former president then attempted to install Co-Conspirator 4 as acting attorney general to help further the plot. Trump backed down after many in the White House threatened a mass resignation.
6. Pence’s notes helped the special counsel craft his case.
Trump heavily pressured Pence to support his effort to remain in power and reject the ceremonial certification of Joe Biden as the winner of the election.
Prosecutors pieced together details of Trump’s conversations and thinking around the time using Pence’s “contemporaneous notes” in the days leading up to Jan. 6.
The vice president rejected Trump’s attempts, telling him to his face that he didn’t believe he had the authority to do what Trump asked.
Trump later told Pence that he would have to publicly criticize him, the indictment says, which prompted his chief of staff to inform the Secret Service about fears for Pence’s safety.
7. Trump waited and watched on TV as his supporters stormed the Capitol.
The indictment claims Trump exploited the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and resisted pleas from his aides and supporters to speak out as the insurrection grew.
“When advisors urged the Defendant to issue a calming message aimed at the rioters, the Defendant refused, instead repeatedly remarking that the people at the Capitol were angry because the election had been stolen,” the document says.”
As written by Heather Cox Richardson in her newsletter of August 2; “There have been more developments today surrounding yesterday’s indictment of former president Trump for conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding as he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election and install himself in office over the wishes of the American people.
Observers today called out the part of the indictment that describes how Trump and Co-Conspirator 4, who appears to be Jeffrey Clark, the man Trump wanted to make attorney general, intended to use the military to quell any protests against Trump’s overturning of the election results. When warned that staying in power would lead to “riots in every major city in the United States,” Co-Conspirator 4 replied, “Well…that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”
The Insurrection Act of 1807 permits the president to use the military to enforce domestic laws, invoking martial law. Trump’s allies urged him to do just that to stay in power. Fears that Trump might do such a thing were strong enough that on January 3, 2021, all 10 living former defense secretaries signed a Washington Post op-ed warning that “[e]fforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory.”
They put their colleagues on notice: “Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.” Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo recalled today that military leaders told Congress they were reluctant to respond to the violence at the Capitol out of concern about how Trump might use the military under the Insurrection Act.
Political pollster Tom Bonier wrote: “I understand Trump fatigue, but it feels like the president and his advisors preparing to use the military to quash protests against his planned coup should be bigger news. Especially when that same guy is in the midst of a somewhat credible comeback effort.”
On The Beat tonight, Ari Melber connected Trump Co-Conspirator John Eastman to Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX). Just before midnight on January 6, 2021, after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Eastman wrote to Pence’s lawyer to beg him to get Pence to adjourn Congress “for 10 days to allow the legislatures to finish their investigations, as well as to allow a full forensic audit of the massive amount of illegal activity that has occurred here.” On the floor of the Senate at about the same time, Cruz, who voted against certification, used very similar language when he called for “a ten-day emergency audit.”
An email sent by Co-Conspirator 6, the political consultant, matches one sent from Boris Epshteyn to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, suggesting that Epshteyn is Co-Conspirator 6. The Russian-born Epshteyn has been with Trump’s political organization since 2016 and was involved in organizing the slates of false electors in 2020. Along with political consultant Steve Bannon, Epshteyn created a cryptocurrency called “$FJB, which officially stands for “Freedom. Jobs. Business.” but which they marketed to Trump loyalists as “F*ck Joe Biden.” By February 2023, Nikki McCann Ramirez reported in Rolling Stone that the currency had lost 95% of its value.
Since the indictment became public, Trump loyalists have insisted that the Department of Justice is attacking Trump’s First Amendment rights to free speech. Indeed, if Giuliani’s unhinged appearance on Newsmax last night is any indication, it appears that has been their strategy all along. Aside from the obvious limit that the First Amendment does not cover criminal behavior, the grand jury sidestepped this issue by acknowledging that Trump had a right to lie about his election loss. It indicted him for unlawfully trying to obstruct an official proceeding and to disenfranchise voters.
Today, Trump’s former attorney general William Barr dismissed the idea that the indictment is an attack on Trump’s First Amendment rights. Barr told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “As the indictment says, they’re not attacking his First Amendment right. He can say whatever he wants. He can even lie. He can even tell people that the election was stolen when he knew better. But that does not protect you from entering into a conspiracy. All conspiracies involve speech. And all fraud involves speech. Free speech doesn’t give you the right to engage in a fraudulent conspiracy.”
As written by Ed Pilkington in The Guardian, in an article entitled The 45 pages that skewer Trump’s bid to destroy American democracy; “More than 1,000 people charged over the US Capitol riot, millions of pages of evidence compiled by the House January 6 committee, hundreds of hours of depositions of key players – all this has finally been boiled down to a 45-page indictment that accuses Donald Trump of attempting to destroy American democracy.
“Why didn’t they do this 2.5 years ago?” the former president asked peevishly on Tuesday, shortly before the indictment came down. The answer lies in the document itself: in its painstaking command of detail and in the cool, crisp legal language deployed by special counsel Jack Smith to make his case.
This is the third time that Trump has been criminally indicted, and to some extent the shock value has worn off. Much of the content of the grand jury indictment filed in a federal court in Washington DC is familiar.
But no one can doubt the significance of its contents. For the first time in US history, legal charges have been brought against a president for attempting to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power that until 6 January 2021 had stood as a pillar of American values since a defeated John Adams quietly snuck out of the capital on 4 March 1801.
It’s taken two and a half years, sure, but Smith wastes no time in getting to the point. The second sentence of the indictment reads: “The defendant lost the 2020 presidential election”, taking us straight to that place where Trump so consequentially refused to go – the acceptance that he was a loser.
By the fourth sentence, it is clear that Smith has no intention of mincing his words. He rolls out the L-word – “lies” – with an ease which belies the months of angst that the editors of American newspapers went through before they felt comfortable enough to attach it to Trump.
Later, he accuses the former president of “fraud”, a charged word given the sequence of events. It was precisely that word that Trump used as the foundation stone of his bid to overturn the election – his lie that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud –and now it was being directed back at him.
Smith portrays the former president as a man who was prepared to tear down everything to stay in office. “Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power.”
The Trump who emerges from the 45 pages is a frustrated man who, together with his unnamed and as yet uncharged co-conspirators, unleashed a concerted, relentless and fully conscious plan to subvert the 2020 election. Smith dates the plot to 14 November 2020, the day after Trump’s campaign lawyers had conceded defeat in court in Arizona, signalling that he had lost the presidential election.
That day, Trump turned to “Co-Conspirator 1” – a clear description of his lawyer Rudy Giuliani who is referenced at least 40 times – and who “executed a strategy to use knowing deceit in the targeted states to impair, obstruct and defeat the federal government function”.
“Knowing deceit” is critical, as it speaks to Trump’s state of mind that is likely to be a key legal battleground if and when the case goes to trial. Smith devotes pages to the subject, repeatedly underlining the allegation that Trump made “knowingly false claims” of fraud in the casting and counting of votes.
“These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false,” the document reads. It goes on to list the many people and institutions that directly informed Trump that there was no evidence of fraud, from Vice-President Mike Pence down.
Familiar though they are, some of the details remain just too delicious for Smith – and by extension the Guardian – not to recount. He recalls that during the notorious call between Trump and Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which the president asked him to “find” 11,780 votes, the defendant also claimed that 5,000 dead people had voted.
“The actual number were two,” Raffensperger replied. “Two. Two people that were dead that voted.”
The indictment largely follows the roadmap set out by the January 6 committee in its relatively elephantine 845-page final report. It traces the story of the fake electors who were convened in key battleground states lost by Trump in an effort to send illegal false electoral certificates to Congress.
Smith emphasises the extraordinary lengths to which Trump and his co-conspirators went, filing a petition to the US supreme court from Arizona on 11 December 2020 “as a pretext to claim that litigation was pending in the state”. Giuliani was concerned, the indictment alleges using his “Co-Conspirator 1” moniker, that it “could appear treasonous for the AZ electors to vote if there is no pending court proceeding”.
Sure enough, all 16 fake electors in Michigan have now been charged by the state attorney general, and further criminal counts are expected soon against some of the fake electors in Georgia.
The lengths to which the conspirators would go is another searing theme running through the indictment. In a previously untold tableau, we see Co-Conspirator 4, clearly identifiable as the former justice department official and Trump loyalist Jeffrey Clark, confronting a White House lawyer who warned him that if Trump refused to leave the presidency there would be “riots in every major city”.
“That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act,” Clark is alleged to have replied, alluding to the 1807 provision that empowers the US president to deploy the military to suppress civil disorder.
There are other surprises in the document. In the passage on the pressure applied on Pence in the run-up to his ceremonial counting of the electoral college votes on January 6, Smith nonchalantly drops in a mention that prosecutors have obtained the former vice-president’s contemporaneous notes.
That’s a revelation that should send a shiver down the spines of Trump’s defence team.
We learn, too, that on the day of the US Capitol riot, Trump and Giuliani continued to exploit the violence by calling lawmakers to implore them to delay certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Giuliani was badgering US senators even as late as 7.18pm.
The one argument that is absent here, significantly perhaps, is any suggestion that Trump personally orchestrated the uprising on January 6. It’s a striking omission, given some of the evidence that was heard by the House committee, including the sensational claim that Trump had tried to grab the wheel of his security vehicle and drive towards the Capitol building as the uprising was under way.
Its absence, though, points to the careful, cautious tone of the indictment, and to its purpose. Unlike the January 6 committee report, the job of this document is not to lay down a record for history.
Its task is to make a watertight legal case that Trump committed criminal acts that cut to the quick of the American experiment. There’s a lot riding on it: next year’s presidential election, the future of American democracy and that other consideration – a maximum sentence of 55 years in federal prison.”
As written in The Guardian’s editorial, entitled The Guardian view on Donald Trump’s new indictment: America needs this trial: A healthy body politic cannot allow its core values and principles to be trashed with impunity; “he indictment served on Donald Trump on Monday marks the beginning of a legal reckoning that is desperately required, if American democracy is to properly free itself from his malign, insidious influence. Mr Trump already faces multiple criminal charges relating to the retention of classified national security documents and the payment of hush money to a porn star. But the gravity of the four counts outlined by the special counsel, Jack Smith, is of a different order of magnitude.
Mr Trump stands accused of conspiring, in office, to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. Following Joe Biden’s victory, the indictment states, Mr Trump “knowingly” used false claims of electoral fraud in an attempt “to subvert the legitimate election results”. A bipartisan congressional committee report last year came to similar conclusions and provides much of the basis for the charges. But this represents the first major legal attempt to hold Mr Trump accountable for events leading up to and including the storming of the Capitol by a violent mob on 6 January 2021.
The stakes could hardly be set higher. Democratic elections and the peaceful transfer of power are the cornerstones of the American republic. The testimony given to Congress indicates that Mr Trump used his authority to try to bully federal and state officials into supporting his claims that the election had been “stolen” from him. Repeatedly told that his assertions were baseless, he then mobilised a hostile crowd on 6 January to intimidate lawmakers charged with ratifying Mr Biden’s victory.
It is inconceivable that Mr Trump should not be made to answer for actions that imperilled the constitutional and democratic functioning of the United States. The prosecutors’ case will hinge on their ability to prove that he knew his claims of a stolen election were bogus. But beyond the trial itself, it would be foolish to underestimate Mr Trump’s ability to turn even this situation to his own political advantage.
The legal fronts on which Mr Trump is now engaged will drain his financial resources. But a narrative of victimhood and persecution has become, and will remain, the galvanising theme of his campaign. Two previous criminal indictments saw his poll ratings lift, helping him to establish a huge lead in the race for the Republican presidential nomination for 2024. Whatever the evidence to the contrary, a sizable proportion of American voters will continue to back Mr Trump’s self-serving version of reality.
One of the most dangerously polarising elections in US history thus looms as, over the next 15 months, Mr Trump uses political cunning to evade the legal net that is closing around him. Through his lawyers, he will do all he can to delay matters, hoping eventually to dictate the course of events from the White House. For his part, Mr Smith said on Monday that the justice department will seek “a speedy trial”.
It is in the interests of American democracy, to which Mr Trump represents a clear and present danger, that the justice department gets its wish. A healthy body politic cannot allow its founding values and core principles to be trashed with apparent impunity. Prosecutors will need to proceed with care and be alert to the complex political dynamics. But this climactic reckoning in court needs to take place before Mr Trump gets the chance to besmirch the country’s highest office all over again.”
As written by Moira Donegan in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s indictment proves he might not be bright, but he is dangerous: Donald Trump’s frantic, cynical and preposterous attempts to hang on to power after losing the 2020 election were a dark moment in US history; “In the 1976 political drama All the President’s Men, Robert Redford’s Bob Woodward meets the secretive FBI source, Deep Throat, in a parking garage to ask him what he knows about the Watergate break-in. Deep Throat – in real life, the FBI deputy director Mark Felt – is ominous and taciturn, refusing to say all that he knows. “I have to do this my way,” he tells Redford. “You tell me what you know, and I’ll confirm.” But he offers a blunt assessment of the inner workings of the Nixon administration. “Forget the myths that the media has created about the White House,” Deep Throat tells Woodward. “The truth is these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”
Few moments in history, including the Watergate scandal, have done so much to puncture the dignified mystique of American government as Donald Trump’s frantic, cynical and preposterous attempts to hang on to power after losing the 2020 election. The indictment against him related that effort, unsealed on Tuesday by the office of special counsel Jack Smith, charges Trump with engaging in three conspiracies: to defraud the United States in seeking to overturn the election, to obstruct the government in seeking to derail the January 6 proceedings, and perhaps most meaningfully, to deprive American voters of their right to have their votes counted. The charges are serious; the violence was deadly. But every one of the indictment’s 45 pages evokes Deep Throat’s words: these are not very bright guys.
The document unsealed on Tuesday charges only Trump. But it also implicates six co-conspirators. These include a justice department official, probably the then assistant attorney general Jeff Clark, along with an unidentified political consultant. Also implicated are four Republican lawyers, seemingly including Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani; the law professor John Eastman, who concocted the false theory that the vice-president had the authority to intervene in the electoral vote counting ceremony; Ken Chesebro, an author of the fake electors scheme; and the quack pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell.
It was with these accomplices that the special counsel alleges that Donald Trump embarked on a series of frauds, fabrications and cockamamie schemes to reverse the election outcome between November 2020 and early January 2021. That project had multiple successive fronts, with the conspirators moving on to new strategies as the previous ones failed. They tried to use the justice department to pursue frivolous and fraudulent allegations of election malfeasance; then they tried to conscript state officials into advancing false claims of election fraud; then they tried to send fake electors to congress; finally, they tried to stop congress from certifying the election results on January 6.
All the while, they flooded the media with what the indictment calls “knowingly false” claims that the election was stolen, in the hope of creating public distrust in the election outcome and pressure on the officials who they believed could reverse it. None of these schemes were especially well-thought-out, and none would have been plausible without both a willingness by many Republican officials to lie on Trump’s behalf, and a willingness by many Trump supporters to commit violence. But those, sadly, are not in short supply.
That Trump and his co-conspirators failed in their effort to subvert the election was largely a matter of luck; that they are now being charged in this most significant of Trump’s crimes was not at all guaranteed.
Much of what is recounted in the indictment is not new. The facts presented by the special counsel hew closely to those laid out by the House January 6 committee in a series of televised hearings last year, and Smith, like that committee, spends a great deal of time eradicating any doubt about Trump’s state of mind or his certainty that his own statements about the election were false. But the indictment does contain new tidbits of information gleaned from the special counsel’s investigation, ones that make both the incompetence and the malice of the conspiracy plain. Copious testimony and contemporaneous notes provided by Mike Pence, for example, make it clear the extent to which Trump’s former vice-president, against whom he incited a murderous mob, is cooperating with the special counsel. Emails obtained by the investigation also add texture to the story of the election subversion effort. One campaign adviser, tasked with encouraging false claims of election fraud in Georgia, wrote in an email that the allegations being advanced by the Trump camp were “conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership”. Not exactly the words of a man convinced of the righteousness of his own cause.
More disturbingly, the indictment reveals the extent to which Trump and his co-conspirators were conscious of the possibility that their actions might lead to violence, and that violence might be required to achieve their goals. This does not seem to have disturbed them, or even to have prompted much hesitation.
Pence’s lawyers allegedly told John Eastman that if the vice-president usurped the January 6 certification ceremony as Eastman wanted him to, the result would lead to a “disastrous situation” in which the election would “have to be decided in the streets”. On 3 January, just days before the riot, a member of the White House counsel’s office told Jeff Clark that if the president tried to remain in office as planned, there would be “riots in every major city in the United States”. To which Clark allegedly replied: “Well, that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.” Clark was referring to a law that empowers the sitting president to deploy the military to suppress unrest.
It has long been clear that far-right extremist militia groups, such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, planned for violence at the Capitol on January 6; it has been less clear the extent to which the Trump camp communicated with these groups, if at all, about the event and that possibility. It was a connection that has long been speculated about, but which the House committee on January 6 did not firmly make, and the special counsel’s indictment doesn’t, either.
In December 2020, just weeks before Clark’s conversation, the leader of the Oath Keepers had called on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. This rhyming thinking doesn’t indicate coordination, but it does suggest a sympathy of mind, and of tactics, between the extremist groups and the Trump camp. It is an affinity that will only become clearer if Trump becomes the Republican nominee again, as he is all but certain to. These are not very bright guys, but they’re still quite dangerous ones.”
What happens next, as Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, fundraises off his indictment and uses it to centralize power in his domination of the Republican Party for his campaign to recapture the state in our next election, and move us nearer to a civil war?
As written by Robert Reich in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump is gearing up for his ‘final battle’. So should we; “Not once has Donald Trump veered from his core campaign theme.
Recall the first rally of his 2024 election campaign on 25 March in Waco, Texas – exactly 30 years after a deadly siege between law enforcement and the Branch Davidians resulted in the deaths of more than 80 members of that religious cult and four federal agents.
He opened with a choir of men imprisoned for their role in the January 6 insurrection singing “Justice for All”, intercut with the national anthem and with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance with his hand on his heart. Behind, on big screens, was footage from the Capitol riot.
Trump then repeated his bogus claim that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged”. He praised the rioters of January 6.
He raged against the prosecutors overseeing multiple investigations into his conduct as “absolute human scum”. He told the crowd that “the thugs and criminals who are corrupting our justice system will be defeated, discredited and totally disgraced.”
He then declared:
“Our enemies are desperate to stop us and our opponents have done everything they can to crush our spirit and to break our will. But they failed. They’ve only made us stronger. And 2024 is the final battle, it’s going to be the big one. You put me back in the White House, their reign will be over and America will be a free nation once again.”
Since then, as indictments have piled up against him and his poll numbers among Republicans have risen, Trump’s “final battle” comes into ever sharper focus: it is a battle against the rule of law and democracy.
The mega indictment we have all been waiting for – the indictment against Trump for his attempted coup against the United States – will be announced very soon.
Trump is prepared to use it in his final battle.
Tuesday, on an Iowa radio show, he warned it would be “very dangerous” if Special Counsel Jack Smith put him in jail, since his supporters have “much more passion than they had in 2020”.
Unfortunately for the nation, the Republican party is uniting behind Trump’s side of this battle line.
If not defending the January 6 rioters outright, Republican lawmakers are attacking Special Counsel Jack Smith, the justice department, the Manhattan district attorney, and other current and prospective prosecutors seeking to hold Trump accountable.
A Trump indictment for attempting the overthrow of the constitutional order and the verdict of the electorate will guarantee that 2024 will be more of a referendum on Trump than a referendum on Biden, as was the 2020 election.
It will make it harder for Republican candidates across the nation to focus on their fake nemeses – “woke” teachers and corporations, trans youth, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants and “socialism” – and force them instead to defend Trump’s side in the final battle.
Trump and the Republicans will lose this battle. Even if they win Republican primaries, they will lose the general election.
Recall that last November, virtually every 2020-election-denying Republican who sought office in a truly contested election went down to defeat.
Those who care about democracy and the rule of law should welcome the battle, and not just because it will help Biden and the Democrats.
It will also help clarify what’s at stake for the nation in 2024 and beyond.
It will show how eager Trump and the Republican party are to abandon democracy and the rule of law in order to gain power. It will show that the vast majority of Americans reject their position.
Americans hold different views about many things, but most of us oppose authoritarianism. We reject fascism.
We value the constitution and the Bill of Rights. We are committed to democracy, even with its many flaws. We support the rule of law.
We want to live in a nation where no one is above the law. We want to be able to sleep at night without worrying that a president might unleash armed lackeys to drag us out of our homes because he considers us to be his enemy.
The pustule of Trump has been growing since 2016, and the authoritarian impulses underlying this infection have been allowed to fester for decades.
Folks, it is finally time to lance this boil. It is time to decidedly rescue democracy and the rule of law. It is time to defeat Trump and his enablers who are determined to defy the core values of America.
Let the battle begin.”
As I wrote in my post of June 15 2022, Act Three of the Greatest Show on Earth: Where Do We Go From Here?; Where do we go from here?
Democracy in America survived its most terrible moment of peril from internal threat in the January 6 Insurrection, yet here we are, witness to the public exposure of the plot and its treasonous conspirators on television as Congress brings a Reckoning to the Fourth Reich.
Like the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 on which it was modeled, it failed; but in doing so also achieved all of its strategic goals, moving our great enemy nearer to victory by staging a Lost Cause which established the fascist counternarrative as iconography that Trump remains our legitimate President. Next time, and there will always be a next time, we may not be so lucky.
Not only do the forces of fascism remain an active threat, through open allegiance to the Lost Cause which echoes horrifically with that of the Confederacy and the KKK whose adherents are among the networks of deniable assets now among us as they were at the Capitol on that fateful day, but the vast resources of wealth and power at their command after seventy years of infiltration of global elites and governments remain undiminished.
But none of this is relevant to the true threat which fascism poses to us all today; for America has been divided against itself, and as we are warned by Abraham Lincoln in 1858 in his House Divided speech in reference to the synoptic Gospels of Luke 11:17, Mark 3:25, and Matthew 12:25; “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.
We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.
Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented.
In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed –
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
As we are taught with the lyrics of the song Where Do We Go From Here?, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode 7 of season 6, Once More With Feeling, possibly the greatest musical episode of any telenovela yet created;
“Where do we go from here
Where do we go from here
The battle’s done,
And we kinda won.
So we sound our victory cheer.
Where do we go from here.
Why is the path unclear,
When we know home is near.
Understand we’ll go hand in hand,
But we’ll walk alone in fear. (Tell me)
Tell me where do we go from here.
When does the end appear,
When do the trumpets cheer.
The curtains close, on a kiss god knows,
We can tell the end is near…
Where do we go from here
Where do we go from here
Where do we go
from here?”
Here is an elegy for the Fall of America, a hymn to a dying hope and the lost grandeur of a fallen nation. When in a distant future the artifacts of our civilization begin to puzzle whatever beings arise from our carrion, and they ask who were the Americans, I hope such music as this lamentation remains to guide their questions.
Yet hope remains when all is lost, and whether it becomes a gift or a curse is in our hands. These lyrics speak of the modern pathology of disconnectedness, of the division and fracture of our Solidarity, of subjugation through learned helplessness and the dominion of fear. But this is not the end of the story, nor of ours.
Once More With Feeling ends not with abjection, but with The Kiss, between the Slayer and Spike, one of the monsters she hunts. A very particular kind of monster, who is also the hero of the story in its entire seven year arc; one who is made monstrous by his condition of being and forces beyond his control, against which he struggles for liberation and to recreate and define himself as he chooses, a monster who reclaims his humanity and his soul. This is why we continue to watch the show twenty years after its debut; we are all Spike, locked in titanic struggle for the ownership of ourselves with authorized identities and systemic evils, a revolution of truths written in our flesh against imposed conditions of struggle and orders of human being, meaning, and value.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an allegory of Sartrean freedom in a world without inherent value or meaning, of the joy of total freedom versus the terror of our nothingness, and above all a song of the redemptive power of love to return to us our true selves.
This is how we defeat fascist tyranny in the long game, after we bring a Reckoning for its crimes against humanity and its subversion of democracy; let us answer hate with love, division with solidarity, fear with hope, and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 6 episode 7- Once More, with Feeling – Where Do We Go From Here?
Trump would have been convicted over 2020 election, says special counsel
Today the people gathered throughout America to protest the Inauguration of Rapist In Chief Trump, and also to plan and coordinate actions of Resistance to the capture of our nation by the Fourth Reich he represents.
We do not consent to be governed, not by anyone who does not regard us as equals or even as fellow human beings.
In this moment we find ourselves entrapped by systems of oppression which have subverted our institutions of democracy and turned them against us, as those who would enslave us begin again to dismantle the state.
But hope for our future remains, for the great secret of power and authority, of force and control, is that without legitimacy it is hollow and brittle, and finds its limit in disbelief and disobedience.
To Resist is to become Unconquered and free; this is our victory, and it is a power which is inherent to being human and cannot be taken from us.
Our mass actions, protests, and performances of Resistance and refusal to submit today are echoes and reflections of the historic 2017 Women’s March; but we are looking to the future and not the past.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As the publisher’s summary of the book Why I March: Images from The Women’s March Around the World edited by Emma Jacobs and Samantha Weiner describes the watershed event of 2017; “On January 21, 2017, five million people in 82 countries and on all seven continents stood up with one voice. The Women’s March began with one cause, women’s rights, but quickly became a movement around the many issues that were hotly debated during the 2016 U.S. presidential race–immigration, health care, environmental protections, LGBTQ rights, racial justice, freedom of religion, and workers’ rights, among others. In the mere 66 days between the election and inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States, 673 sister marches sprang up across the country and the world.”
Now as then, and in every generation of humankind, we are defined by how we face those who would enslave us and the darkness within ourselves which threatens to consume us, the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world; in solidarity as a band of brothers and a United Humankind, or subjugated through hierarchies and divisions of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, as a free society of equals or with fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. As the Oath of the Resistance given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut goes; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
He said it was the finest thing he ever stole, but I often think of this in terms of a definition of the beauty of human beings; to become Unconquered and free as self created beings in refusal to submit to authority and its instruments of violence, force and control, and the repression of dissent, to refuse our dehumanization and the theft of our souls and autonomy and to do all of this in solidarity and absolute loyalty to each other.
As he once said to me; “Is this not the beauty of men, to resist and never yield, to cede nothing to the enemy, not love nor hope, not our history nor the chance for a future of our own choosing, neither our monstrosity nor our grandeur, nothing of our humanity nor of any human being whose life is in our power to harm or help, to live beyond all limits and all laws and to risk everything to do this for each other?”
Should you ever find it necessary to look for idealizations of masculine beauty as compassion, loyalty, fearlessness, beyond the fetishization of violence or the addiction of power, look to examples of solidarity and our duty of care for each other in the heroism of our mutual defense, in our glorious history of resistance and liberation struggle as a Band of Brothers, sisters, and others such as The People’s March and countless others like it. When everything else is stripped away, this is what remains, and what we truly are.
This our common humanity, this solidarity, this United Humankind. This, this, this.
May we all find within ourselves the will to refuse to submit to force and control, and to remain Unconquered.
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 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.
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.”
As I wrote in my post of October 3 2024, Third Anniversary of the Women’s March for Reproductive Rights and Freedom of Bodily Autonomy;
Institutionalized sexual terror and state tyranny in the legislative assault on women’s reproductive rights and the primary freedom of bodily autonomy were challenged in a mass action on October Second of 2021 throughout America, organized by the Women’s March and coordinated with the riveting testimony in Congress of three of our representatives who have had abortions, Cori Bush, Pramila Jayapal, and Barbara Lee.
There is no freedom without that of bodily autonomy.
This election year the Women’s March on Washington D.C. and throughout the nation will be held on November 2; join us.
We can triumph over this wave of theft of our liberty which seeks to redefine the relationship of individuals to the state and render citizenship meaningless if we act in solidarity with coordinated mass action and legislative process. As the Oath of the Resistance given to me in 1982 in Beirut by Jean Genet goes; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As I wrote in my post of November 4 2024, The Stakes of the Game; omorrow America chooses between theocratic sexual terror, white supremacist terror, and enslavement and dehumanization in service to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil under a mad idiot tyrant of deranged perversions and nonsensical but deadly pronouncements on the one hand, between the Fall of American and the and the Restoration of America as a democracy and a free society of equals wherein we are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and rights of citizens, between Traitor Trump the Russian spy, Nazi revivalist, rapist, felon, and would-be tyrant and Kamala Harris, figure of Lady Liberty and champion of the people who in defying and challenging Trump and the Fourth Reich has placed her life in the balance with all whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
Who do we want to be, we Americans, we human beings everywhere and through all of time and history; masters and slaves, or equal partners in a diverse and inclusive society?
We cast now the dice, and choose.
As I wrote in my post of November 4 2020, Where does freedom lie now?; America is held in the grip of despair and fear in this election, like Humpty Dumpty at the tipping point of a fall which may or may not shatter our hopes and dreams into loss and ruin; America rides the crest of a wave of liberation with joy and triumph as we enter a transformational state at the dawn of a new humankind.
We are all Schrödinger’s Cat now, waiting to discover which universe chance has brought us to as the votes are counted. It is a national trauma, this collective anxiety and existential threat, and our Clown of Terror and his deniable forces of white supremacist terrorists are using fear to attempt to steal another election.
One of my friends posted in some alarm that they were offered a safe house to escape racist violence. It is indeed hard to believe our nation has come this far to degradation and collapse.
One of the comments cut directly to the true issue at hand. “Our ancestors huddled in safe houses on their way to freedom. Where does freedom lie now? In our hearts.”
To this I give a twofold reply; one which reaches outward through our connections with others to extend human consciousness into our material world in coevolution, and one which reaches inward to our possibilities of human being, meaning, and value. As Monet said, “Man has two eyes through which he sees the world; one looks outward, but the other looks inward, and it is the juxtaposition of these two images which creates the world we see.”
We strange beings are a synthesis of immanence and transcendence; of truths written in our flesh and those we must create, of the stories which shape us as memory and history over vast epochs of time like the shells of fantastic sea creatures, and of our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Freedom indeed lives in the secret chambers of our hearts, a condition achieved when we refuse to submit to authority and to force, for in resistance we become unconquered. As the great philosopher Max Stirner said; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
Freedom also lies with our solidarity, interdependence, and refusal to abandon our brothers, sisters, and others to authoritarian force and control. We must write, speak, teach, and organize to build a free society of equals.
If the forces of fascism and white supremacist terror are unleashed by the results of today’s election, they will find not an America driven into submission by learned helplessness and shattered by divisions of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, but united in resistance against both the seduction and the state tyranny and terror of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again.
Here Endeth the Lesson: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season seven, episode eleven
Why I March: Images from The Women’s March Around the World, Emma Jacobs, Samantha Weiner (Editors)
Torch of Liberty 