In my previous journal entry in this series I provided a brief outline of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test as a tool of discovery and description of the processes of masculinity and femininity as interdependent aspects of a whole personality, in the context of gender identity and performance.
So we come to the final category of our interest here, sexual orientation. The most important thing to know about human sexuality as a dimension of experience is that it involves the whole person. Whereas a personality test can tell you who you are, and who others are or wish to represent themselves as, it cannot tell you who or what you desire. Desire remains ambiguous, and that is its great power as a force of liberation and autonomy.
The second is that desire is uncontrollable as the tides, an inherently anarchic and chaotic force of nature which is nonvolitional and for which we cannot be held responsible, unlike our actions toward others.
In this I speak to you of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh; we must claim our truths and celebrate what Walt Whitman called the songs of ourselves as victorious seizures of power, freedom, and joy.
In the mirror of our desires are revealed the truths of ourselves, and the infinite possibilities of becoming human. Herein I sing of glorious sins of rebellion against Authority, transgressions of the Forbidden, violations of normality, and subversions of imposed ideas of Virtue.
Love and desire are innate capacities of reimagination and transformative rebirth, which like Dorothy’s magic ruby slippers cannot be taken from us and bear the power to send us home to our heart’s desire, to restore to us the self which is truly ours.
My flesh is a map of private holocausts, written with silent screams, nameless loves, lost causes and victories forgotten by the memory of the world, ephemeral signs of our secret histories and the lies and illusions which capture and distort our images in a Wilderness of Mirrors and the pathologies of our falsification and disconnectedness.
We have but one escape from the limits of our flesh and the flags of our skin; and this is love. In love we transcend ourselves and become exalted; through the redemptive power of love we may heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As I wrote in my post of March 13 2021, A Year of Quarantine in Retrospect;
The quality of our humanity is not fixed, but always in motion, like the turbulent systems da Vinci studied in his fountain and which later with new mathematics came to be described as chaos theory. Identity is a process which is fluid, and our emotions are instruments with which it creates itself.
We create ourselves over time, through our history of defining moments; human being is a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation. What we call our self or our soul is no different in kind from the exoskeleton of an insect or the shell of a sea creature.
And we create ourselves through our interdependence with others, our relationships, friends, families, communities, and the systems of signs thereof.
Human being has in this scheme three orders of relationships; persona, history, and interdependence, and all of it is in motion, dynamic and inherently unstable.
Impermanence is the defining quality of nature and the material universe; so also is the controlling metaphor and condition of human nature, being, and identity the Rashomon Gate of our ephemeral, transitory, and protean forms. Nature is a mirror which reflects itself, and like the Hobgoblin’s fragmented mirror in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, reveals endless possibilities of becoming human; the inward and outward halves of the cosmos also create and define each other in mutual coevolution, like Escher’s Drawing Hands.
Humans are naturally polyamorous and are enculturated to be otherwise; we are shaped by sociohistorical forces in the sphere of gender identity and sexual orientation to deny our true nature. It is normality which is deviant, and from which misogyny, the system of Patriarchy inclusive of the institution of marriage which derives from that of slavery, and other destructive illnesses of the spirit arise, especially the drive to dominate and control others.
As Goethe wrote in Faust; “Let us extend our lives through our bodies in all directions possible”.
For me the origin of human evil is in unequal relationships and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, pathologies of violence and dominion which require the renunciation of love as their price; not in the violation of taboos, the transgression of the Forbidden, or the defiance of Authority, three things I count as sacred acts in pursuit of the truth of ourselves, but in the systemic and structural injustices and inequalities of hegemonic elites, their lies and illusions which falsify us and steal our souls, and the state tyranny and terror of brutal force and control which we must resist and refuse to submit to, that we may become autonomous and free as self- created and self-owned beings; for power and force are meaningless when met with disobedience, and in the moment of our refusal to submit to authority we become Unconquered and free.
I say again; human sexual orientation is not a spectrum with endpoint limits nor of fixed points of reference of any kind, but a Moebius Loop of infinite possibilities, and we are born and exist by nature everywhere along it at once. All else is limitation and control imposed artificially as dominion, captivity, and falsification by authorized identities, or a seizure of power and self-ownership in revolutionary struggle against such narratives, hierarchies, taxonomies, and divisions.
Writing of love in Letters to Milena, Franz Kafka gives us this witness; “I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your door in Vienna, and say, Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.
Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.”
Here is the true origin of Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Return as a test and praxis of Authenticity, and it recalls to me something I once said to Jean Genet. He had sat down at my table after my friends and I made our morning race against death, crossing a sniper alley to reach a cafe in Beirut that had the best strawberry crepes in the world.
“I’m told you do this every day, steal breakfast from death.”
To which I replied, “It’s a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason, and has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said,” I agree”; this was the beginning of our conversations at breakfast in the days of the terrible siege, which would reset the path of my life. We saw each other, Jean and I; and when this is true, nothing else matters.
My wish for all of us is that we may find such friends who can reveal to us our true selves and offer figural spaces into which to grow; such is my functional definition of love.
Through love and desire we pursue a sacred calling to discover our truths, truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh. Herein also we escape the limits of our flesh as we become sublimed and exalted in unification with others, who free our captive images from the wilderness of mirrors which falsify us. Love is an instrument with which we may liberate and empower each other and restore to one another our autonomy and authenticity.
What does love do? Love sublimes us into a unitary being, erases our limits as individuals defined by our form and liberates us from the event horizon of our flesh.
Love also reveals to us our true selves; a lover has the power to see the truth of others, and to reveal to others their true selves, and models thereby an ideal of human relationships. We choose partners who can help us become the person we want to be, and who embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves; a healthy relationship returns to us and helps us discover our true and best selves. To love is to transform others by the power of our vision to see who they truly are and set them free.
A lover is both a Pythian seer of truths who like Michelangelo can free us as images captive within the matrix of our bodies and our histories as material and social context, who in naming us like Adam naming the beasts defines our truth, and an inverted figure of Medusa, goddess and monster, a victim cursed for the crimes of her abuser like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, and whose power to turn men to stone appropriates the dehumanizing and objectifying power of the Male Gaze and transforms it into the power to see others true selves and release them to be free, and to mutually assimilate the qualities of the other and transform them both.
Love is a divine madness which defiles and exalts, reveals truths and confers authenticity, and the redemptive power of love can make glorious and beautiful the flaws of our humanity and bring healing to the brokenness of the world and the pathology of our disconnectedness.
Love and desire are forces of liberation, uncontrollable as the tides and inherently anarchic. They are our most powerful weapons against authority and tyranny; for they can neither be taken from us nor limited.
Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioner, for this is exactly what love is.
Love as liberation of our truth through the gaze of the Other; I Could Have Danced All Night song from My Fair Lady
Celebrate with us this 50th Anniversary of the Broadway debut of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which came to hold a unique position in our global civilization as audience participation theatre.
Something between a rite of passage and a community of refuge from our culture as systems of oppression, normality, authorized identities, boundaries of the Forbidden which define elite membership from otherness, and normie ideas of virtue and beauty, is Rocky Horror. To perform our uniqueness on the stage of history is an act of liberation struggle and becoming human; to do so in a context which celebrates strangeness is wonderful.
Here it was that I developed my idea of becoming human through defining moments of struggle, crisis, and trauma which is central to my political ideology and practice of psychology, history, philosophy, and literature, as a member of the Berkeley cast Indecent Exposure.
My thanks to all for the safe space of play.
As written by Laura Collins-Hughes in The New York Times, in an article entitled Just Before It Was a Cult Film, ‘Rocky Horror Show’ Was a Broadway Flop: Tim Curry and colleagues recall the musical’s misadventure at the Belasco Theater in 1975.
Tim Curry, left, as Frank-N-Furter and Kim Milford as Rocky in the Broadway stage production of “The Rocky Horror Show” in 1975.Credit…Martha Swope/Billy Rose Theatre Division, via The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
“Fifty years have passed, but the actor Tim Curry isn’t sure he has ever forgiven the reception that “The Rocky Horror Show” received in its original Broadway production, which was also his Broadway debut.
“I try not to think about it,” he said the other day by phone from Los Angeles. “There’s not much point in paddling through old failures.”
Curry was back on Broadway the fall after “Rocky Horror,” in Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties.” But, wanting not to be reminded, he has never returned to the Belasco Theater on West 44th Street, where the musical spoof that would soon become a cult-film phenomenon started previews on March 7, 1975, opened on March 10 and lasted just a month.
On the heels of the show’s successes in London, where it began in 1973 in the tiny upstairs theater at the Royal Court, and then in Los Angeles, at the Roxy nightclub, it was the kind of Broadway fizzle that seems baffling in retrospect — not least because some of its cast overlapped with the movie’s.
Arriving on Broadway after “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” was shot but several months before it was released, the musical starred Curry in the role he had originated in London, as the sexually omnivorous, corset-clad, extraterrestrial mad scientist Frank-N-Furter. Richard O’Brien, who wrote the musical, played the disquieting butler Riff-Raff, and Meat Loaf doubled as the doomed delivery boy, Eddie, and the scientist Dr. Scott.
Jim Sharman, who directed the film, restaged his Los Angeles production for Broadway. Lou Adler — the record executive, an owner of the Roxy and producer of the “Rocky Horror” film — produced.
The Broadway reviews reflected a peculiar mix of chip-on-the-shoulder indignation: about sitting at the cabaret tables that had replaced the theater’s orchestra seats; about enduring yet another British import; about being subjected to what some critics called “trash.” (Roundabout Theater Company plans a second Broadway revival next spring at Studio 54.)
Clive Barnes, who had enjoyed Sharman’s production in London, argued in The New York Times that it had lost some vital craziness en route to Broadway and should have been staged in “a filthy old cinema in the East Village.”
Curry, now 78; O’Brien, 82; Sharman, 79; and Adler, 91, recently spoke in separate interviews about that Broadway production, which came only a year before late-night movie screenings started turning “Rocky Horror” into a goth-camp classic. These are edited excerpts from those conversations.
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The Broadway cast, from left: Jamie Donnelly as Magenta; Bill Miller as Brad Majors; Richard O’Brien as Riff-Raff; Boni Enten as Columbia; and Graham Jarvis as the Narrator.Credit…Martha Swope/The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
JIM SHARMAN It was a very unusual show. It was kind of immersive and subversive in its original form. [In London] we played it in what appeared to be, with Brian Thomson’s design, demolished cinemas. Then Lou wanted to do it in the Roxy in L.A., and so it became a bit more of a rock ’n’ roll horror show there. A touch of a Weimar cabaret to it.
TIM CURRY A huge part of its charm was the small, insignificant places that we played in. That we made them hip.
RICHARD O’BRIEN We had a lovely time. It was a commitment to fun.
SHARMAN After the movie, I thought we were done, and I was getting ready to go back to Australia and do other things. And then it was kind of, “No, we’re doing Broadway.” It was certainly spoken of that they wanted to do Broadway prior to releasing the film.
LOU ADLER It was more a personal thing than anything else, feeling like I’d like to have it be successful in New York. I wasn’t looking for a traditional theater on Broadway. I was looking in the boroughs, something outside of Manhattan. I found a place that I really liked. A local theater that had bar mitzvahs and weddings and those kinds of things. And the guy, first he said I could have it, then he said he had to change the date because he had a bar mitzvah that was scheduled. So I started looking for another theater.
I liked the history of the Belasco. But I wanted to make it into a theater similar to what I had done at the Roxy.
CURRY I wasn’t sure at all about Lou Adler’s idea that, because when we played it at the Roxy there were tables and chairs and drinks, it should be the same kind of ambience. I didn’t know whether that would work. And it didn’t.
O’BRIEN That was a fatal mistake. So many people had to sit sideways-on. And you can’t ask people to watch a show sideways-on.
CURRY Some of the highlights of the show were dangerous, because there was a sort of tawdry feel about it. I don’t know that the new audience at the Belasco were up for that. They were just rather confused, I think.
ADLER At that time, Broadway was much stiffer. It was more traditional, and they weren’t really happy with anything that came from L.A.
O’BRIEN Meat Loaf was great. He had a voice to die for back then.
Meat Loaf as Eddie (with Enten).Credit…Martha Swope/The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
CURRY He was a force of nature. Good old boys believe in themselves. He was convinced that “Rocky Horror” was going to make him the kind of star that he wanted to be.
SHARMAN He did a very amusing Dr. Everett Scott, along the lines of Orson Welles.
CURRY I used to barge about the theater down a ramp, and I think I probably got way too close to the audience for some people. Audiences, on Broadway at least, were expecting substance. And the substance they got at the Belasco was not particularly to their taste.
O’BRIEN Theater in New York in those days was more precious. Those critics could make and break a show.
CURRY I lost so much confidence.
SHARMAN What we were doing with “Rocky Horror” back then was trying to move the theater out of theater, in a funny kind of way. Because it was still captive to a 19th-century proscenium idea of itself, and middle-class people seeing middle-class lives in middle-class rooms.
O’BRIEN It was far more stylized when we first started. The movie turned Frank-N-Furter glamorous. He wasn’t. We weren’t. It was much more expressionistic, you know, ghoulish, more gothic in a sense, and dirty, perhaps. But the weird thing was that this creature [Frank-N-Furter] would strut down the aisle and the women in the audience found him attractive. That was a change in social understanding, because that was a surprise to all of us as well. And not only that, the chap sitting next to the woman would go, “I see what you mean.”
An expressive-faced actress with a pixie haircut, wearing an embellished leotard and tap pants, white socks and tap shoes, posing, one hand on her hip.
With performers like Enten, here, the Broadway production had “a touch of a Weimar cabaret to it,” the stage director Jim Sharman said.Credit…Martha Swope/The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
CURRY I wasn’t skin-deep gorgeous. I was gorgeous in attitude. And I was gorgeous, I think, in a certain kind of courage. It took a certain amount of courage to do the show in the first place, let alone translating it to New York. But then I started going to Elaine’s, and that was my shelter. I used to go up to 88th Street and hide at Elaine’s and eat the veal chop.
O’BRIEN Recently, of course, and now with the authoritarian, far right, anti-gay, anti-rainbow brigade being loud and obnoxious, [“Rocky Horror” has] become a kind of sanctuary. It’s a rainbow event in a way.
SHARMAN Though the way the show’s being done these days, which is a bit like an imitation of the movie, it’s more like a Broadway show. It’s now the show that probably they would have loved in 1975.
ADLER What I learned immediately is if the critics didn’t like you, you didn’t have long. So at that point, not to spoil any of the excitement of coming out of London and L.A., and about the release of the film, I wanted to close as quickly as possible. If I regret it, I only regret it because I didn’t give it the chance to grow. I don’t know if it could have, but that might have been interesting, too.
CURRY I had to go to the Algonquin Hotel, where I was staying, and tell them that I couldn’t pay the bill. Because the show had been a flop. The manager was incredible and said, “Don’t worry, Mr. Curry. We know that you’ll be back — on Broadway, in New York. One or the other. Probably both.” Which was super encouraging and so generous. The next time I was in New York, I went in there and counted out the money in $5 bills.
O’BRIEN I remember standing with Tim outside the Algonquin — well, of the Royalton, actually, where I was staying. The Royalton was 40 bucks a night, which was fantastic. And I’m saying, “Well, I suppose that’s it.” We’d done the movie, and the show had closed. We both agreed that it had been a jolly nice ride.
CURRY But I had high hopes for the movie, and I really wanted it to be wonderful. When I went back to London, there was a screening, and I was very disappointed by the movie and particularly by my performance in it. Because I thought that it could have been a bit more subtle.
SHARMAN An interesting thing did happen because [the musical] lasted, what, a month? There was an audience that was still hungry for it. The film, which didn’t have any names in it, kind of opened and shut like a door. But when the late-night [screenings] started, which was also in New York, at the Waverly, there was an audience that hadn’t seen it that wanted to see it.
And so the same city that had slightly punished it, in a way, on Broadway, became the kernel for what is still playing today, 50 years later. Karma.”
In my post of June 9 2021, Masquerade: Identities of Sex and Gender as Culture, Ethnicity, and Performance, I posed a question of how we discover who we want to become. As a joke I imagined a field guide and called it Queer Tribes, and How to Find Yours.
In clarification, truth telling, writing as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth, and the openness of my soul and witness of history, I am not a member of the constellation of identities which may be referred to as queer, and I cannot speak as their voice or from within the lived experience of their truths.
As a metaphor of otherness, the idea of queerness remains a powerful means of leveraging change through solidarity of action versus authorized identities and systems of oppression, and this is why I use it here. Those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh possess vast autonomizing forces and numinous potential for the envisionment, reimagination, and transformation of ourselves, humankind, and how we choose to be human together.
As Mary Oliver framed the question; “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
In the following paragraph I speculated about what such a work might involve; If I were designing an instrument for this purpose in terms of sexual orientation and identities of sex and gender, I would base the process not on any precut selection of labels or prescriptive authorization of identities like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter, which involves both submission to authority and overdetermination as a limiting factor, but on descriptive taxonomy and a tool with which I am very familiar, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which could easily be modified for the discovery of identities of sex and gender.
How does that work? With nothing more than a change of emphasis in terms, though I’m sure diagnostic questions specific to sexual orientation and desire can be written for the purposes of finding oneself, viable partners, and communities where one belongs.
We must first define what we mean when we speak of identities of sex and gender. By gender I mean who you are; as identity a confluence of holistic and interdependent and evolving relations between all four categories of being, which include nature, thinking, feeling, and nurture, and as expression, social, cultural, and historical constructions of values and ideals of masculine and feminine beauty and gender roles as performances. By sex I mean biology and the morphology of our form including evolutionary influences, genetics, and hormones, and by sexual orientation I mean whom and what one desires, which can be influenced by both sex and gender but is determined by neither. Such identities are complex, layered, nuanced, and ambiguous, shifting and protean, as our identities of sex and gender shape each other as adaptive processes of change.
As I’ve often said, this is a primary ground of struggle, of life, growth, adaptation, and individuation, and the creation of ourselves as autonomous beings in revolution against authority and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and beauty, and idealizations of masculinity and femininity.
That the interplay of masculine and feminine signs of identity and modes of being is descriptively useful need not be determinative, but a space of free creative play.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves.
Let us answer the question of who we are with grandeur and the frightening of the horses; let us claim, I am a Bringer of Chaos and Transformation, I am a Fulcrum of Change, I am the Revolution. And with Loki the Trickster let us say; “I am burdened with a glorious purpose”, that of self discovery and self creation.
If we are to map the topologies of identities of sex and gender as possibilities of human being, meaning, and value, we must consider as distinct classes the social and interpersonal sphere of action and relations or gender expression and in a limited sense sexual behavior, what one does, as opposed to sexual orientation, what one wants, which include as motivating, informing, and shaping forces authorized gender identities and role models offered us by history, society, and culture, which are arbitrary and ephemeral, and those of the intrapersonal, what one is, our processes of thinking and feeling, which arise from within us rather than being imposed from without, but which are then shaped and conditioned by role modeling and how we are treated, especially by our parents.
I say again, gender identity is an artifact of being, which is influenced by all four levels of self.
These dyadic forces of sex and gender function interdependently to create and shape the highly relational and context-determined thing we call our selves; a dance of potentialities as feminine anima and masculine animus, and our persona or the masks we wear.
For such a mapping system and wayfinding compass, I turn first to Jung’s magisterial work Psychological Types, and to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator which was developed from it. It is a precision tool, which allows us to locate ourselves and others through our constellations of traits along the infinite Moebius Loop of human possibilities of sex and gender with predictive and explanatory power in terms of our relationships in romance, friendships, and work.
By direct word substitution of descriptors in the Jungian personality quadrants, we find a useful general theory of sexual and gender identity as a function of the interfaces between the bounded realms of biological determinants including genetics, neurotransmitters, and epigenetic or multigenerational historic legacies, and historical, cultural, and sociopolitical contexts which balances nature and nurture.
We begin at birth with sexual identity, which stands outside the system of personality but influences it, primarily through relative prenatal exposure to testosterone and estrogen in the intrapersonal sphere, which we can broadly think of as gender identity with awareness that identity is complex and nondeterminative, and dopamine and serotonin in the interpersonal sphere of gender performance. Everyone has degrees of both masculinity and femininity, just as a whole person possesses both a conscious self and an unconscious self which is of the opposite gender, our animus and anima. These anima-animus relations and processes are found at all four levels of being, of which we may or may not be aware and so have limited volitional control of or personal responsibility for, meaning that we cannot simply choose to be other than we are.
This means that any relationship is quadratic and includes our own relationship with our unconscious which is of the opposite gender from our conscious selves, our partner’s internal relations, our conscious relationship with our partner’s waking self, and our submerged unconscious relations of which we are not aware but which shape our conscious ones. Simple, no?
And we wonder why relationships can be laden with issues, when the answer is simple; relationships are complex because we are.
Jung’s primary layer of personality, mind, maps directly onto this dyadic anima-animus relation, and is a measure of masculinity or independent self construal, as Extroversion which includes dominance and assertiveness, and femininity or interdependent self construal, as Introversion or nurturance.
Masculine traits of Extroversion include Initiating, Active, Expressive, Gregarious, and Enthusiastic; the first two related to dominance and assertiveness, and the last three components of sociability.
Feminine traits of Introversion include Receiving, Contained, Intimate, Reflective, and Quiet.
This fundamental dichotomy is inborn and manifests in infants as preferences for attention, interests, and play; in boys for things and how they work as objects and motion, and in girls for human facial expressions and imaginative doll play.
Jung’s second layer of personality and the next to develop as a childhood stage of growth, energy, describes how we conceptualize the world and process information, a balance of feminine Intuitive and masculine Observant traits.
Masculine Observation involves part to whole reasoning, quantitative analysis, and how things work; logical-mathematical-mechanical cognition.
Jung’s third layer of personality, nature, describes how we make decisions and process emotions; here we have traits shaped most directly by hormonal factors, though hormones influence all three of our first layers of personality as developmental stages. Otherwise gender identity would be a function of this third layer, when it is a coevolutionary product of all four successive layers of personality. This area measures our Thinking, influenced by testosterone or masculinity, and our Feeling, influenced by estrogen or femininity.
Masculine Thinking traits influenced by testosterone include: decisive, focused, direct, logical-analytical, strategic thinkers, bold, competitive, excel at rule bound systems such as machines, math, and music.
Feminine Feeling traits influenced by estrogen include: holistic and contextual thinking, imaginative, superior at verbal skills and executive social skills like reading expressions, posture, gestures, and tone of voice; also nurturing, sympathetic, intuitive, and emotionally expressive.
In the fourth layer of personality, that of gender performance and expression or one’s strategic and tactical approach to life, relationships, and work; here we have traits shaped by acculturation and historical factors. This area measures our balance of structure versus spontaneity; our Perceiving, influenced by dopamine and corresponding to masculinity, and our Judging, influenced by serotonin and corresponding to femininity.
Masculine Perceiving or Prospecting traits influenced by dopamine include: seeking novelty, risk taking, spontaneity, curiosity, creativity, mental flexibility, optimism.
Feminine Judging traits influenced by serotonin include: calm, social, cautious, persistent, loyal, orderly, fond of rules and facts.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test gives us four categories of personality types, of four types each.
The Analyst Group contains the Architect (INTJ), Logician (INTP), Commander (ENTJ), and Debater (ENTP) types.
The Diplomat Group contains the Advocate (INFJ), Mediator (INFP), Protagonist (ENFJ), and Campaigner (ENFP) types.
The Sentinel Group contains the Logistician (ISTJ), Defender (ISFJ), Executive (ESTJ), and Consul (ESFJ) types.
The Explorer Group contains the Virtuoso (ISTP), Adventurer (ISFP), Entrepreneur (ESTP), and Entertainer (ESFP) types.
What does this look like in the context of real people? Here I will use myself as an example and case, for as written by Virginia Woolf; “If you cannot tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.”
I test as an ENFP or Campaigner; in my most primal layer of personality I am 65% Extrovert over 35% Introvert. This manifests in me as a love of risk and adventure, and a natural leadership and people-centeredness which has been useful in my professional career as a teacher and counselor. I instinctively and reflexively seek to dominate and seize power in any situation, even when consciously trying to keep myself in check as Extroversion favors competition over cooperation though my ideology construes this as a negative. My Extroversion also influences my idea of life as a game of transgression and chaos, to be played with creative freedom, improvisation, fearlessness, and a gourmet aesthetics which valorizes both the monstrous and the beautiful; you can count on me to ignore authority, change the rules of any game, delight in the violation of norms, and to play our games of human being, meaning, and value without any boundaries whatever.
I remain the boy who upon hearing the term Original Sin for the first time from a friend, said; “I’ll think of some new ones we can play, games of our very own.”
In the layer of Energy, how we direct our thoughts and passions, I am 83% Intuitive over 17% Observant, a balance enormously toward femininity. This means that I reason holistically and infer hidden relationships and patterns as a strength, that interpretation and qualitative analysis comes more easily than quantitative or mechanical tasks, and that I think outside the box and draw outside the lines, which makes me good at solving unknowns. On a team I’m the one you want as the fire brigade handling unforeseen issues, so long as I have a good forensic investigator for failure reconstruction and analysis at my right and a staff officer to handle logistics and planning at my left. I’m a natural at intelligence, strategy, and policy functions, investigations and putting puzzles together to make guesses about what the picture they make could mean and how to use it to achieve goals. This has been my role in my primary career of the last forty years as a revolutionary and hunter of fascists.
In the third layer of Nature, how we make decisions and process emotions, I am 92% Feeling and only 8% Thinking. This is an extreme score, statistically anomalous and my strongest personality trait; a preference for empathy and ungoverned passion. As an influence in relationships it makes me the caretaker of partnerships, and professionally I’m a natural at quickly reading people and profiling motives and intentions, sifting for truth, and assessing character. Combined as a multiplier with my No Boundaries preference and identity as a bringer of Chaos, it also makes me unpredictable, which has been very useful in games of revolutionary struggle and seizures of power.
In the fourth layer of personality, that of Tactics or one’s approach to life and work, I am 57% Prospecting and 43% Judging. This means my masculine/feminine balance in terms of gender performance and roles, the most outwardly visible part of oneself and the layer of being others interact with most often, is toward masculinity, and informs how I read to others as a system of signs.
To restate how I interpret my personality profile; both my intrapersonal gender identity and interpersonal gender performance as an observable external cueing system, the mask I wear in the social performance of myself, in my case controlled by my Extroversion and Prospecting traits in the first and fourth layers of personality, is masculine or animus, which makes my unconscious self, always a mirror image, feminine or anima, and comprised of the layers of personality which are internal and hidden, as reflected in my Intuitive and Feeling traits. I regard this as an achievement of integration and the work of finding balance and wholeness.
These two pairs of traits face Janus like as sides of a whole person in dynamic balance, and together form a quadratic personality type which can take 16 forms, which reflect and organize relative masculinity and femininity as adaptive processes.
As to type compatibility and the use of the MBTI system in sifting for partners, in general opposites attract in the first and fourth layers of personality, Introverts with Extroverts and Prospectors with Judges, dyadic masculine-feminine pairs and aspects of personality revealed in gender performance, and like aligns with or has no influence in the second and third layers, which are mainly concealed from public view and correspond to the unconscious.
The surfaces of ourselves and the masks we wear in our dances with others are but images and reflections moving atop a vast and bottomless sea, within whose chasms of darkness we are all interconnected.
And none of this tells you anything about the interdependent realm of love and desire as informing, motivating, and shaping sources which both act on us as their subject and through us as their figures and agents, though it tells us everything we need to know about what we would be like as a romantic partner, friend, colleague at work or comrade in action. A human being is a work of art shaped by such forces of our nature as well as history, like stone sculpted by the action of wind and water.
Insightful work in the influence of neurotransmitters on personality has been pioneered by Dr. Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist who built chemistry.com’s matching systems from her studies. Her schema, which modernizes and maps directly onto the Jungian theory of personality as I have described, dispenses with Jung’s first two categories, the Introvert/Extrovert primary layer and the Intuitive/Observant secondary layer, and yields a simple dominant and recessive binary personality type rather than the 16 types in the Myers-Briggs scale. This is why I am inclined to incorporate Fisher’s studies of hormone and neurotransmitter biochemistry into the Jungian model of personality and use her test as a quick reference tool in addition to the MBTI rather than a replacement; the Fisher model lacks predictive power because it is flawed. Personality is a developmental process which unfolds in stages as a child becomes a person, and if you ignore this and the first two stages of growth the results become unreliable. The Fisher model can be a useful tool for matching with partners using the test and essay together, if you don’t take it too seriously, but for a tool of self discovery I turn to the Myers-Briggs test.
Her Word Type study asked people to describe themselves in an essay for Chemistry.com and found the ten most common words each type used.
Explorers, Jung’s masculine Perceivers, used adventure most often, with the other ten in descending order being; venture, spontaneous, energy, new, fun, traveling, outgoing, passion, and active.
Builders, Jung’s feminine Judges, used family most often, then honesty, caring, moral, respect, loyal, trust, values, loving, and trustworthy.
Negotiators, Jung’s feminine Feelers, used passion most often, then real, heart, kind, sensitive, reader, sweet, learn, random, and empathetic.
Directors, Jung’s masculine Thinkers, used intelligent most often, then intellectual, debate, geek, nerd, ambition, driven, politics, challenging, and real.
Here you can take the Fisher Personality Type Test; read each statement and record the answer that best applies to you. Acronyms are Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree.
Scale 1
1. I find unpredictable situations exhilarating.
2. I do things on the spur of the moment.
3. I get bored when I have to do the same familiar things.
4. I have a very wide range of interests.
5. I am more optimistic than most people.
6.I am more creative than most people.
7. I am always looking for new experiences.
8.I am always doing new things.
9. I am more enthusiastic than most people.
10. I am willing to take risks to do what I want to do.
11. I get restless if I have to stay home for any length of time.
12.My friends would say I am very curious.
13. I have more energy than most people.
14. On my time off, I like to be free to do whatever looks fun.
Total
Scale 2
1.I think consistent routines keep life orderly and relaxing.
2. I consider and reconsider every option thoroughly before making a plan.
3. People should behave according to established standards of proper conduct.
4. I enjoy planning way ahead.
5. In general, I think it is important to follow rules.
6. Taking care of my possessions is a high priority for me.
7. My friends and family would say I have traditional values.
8. I tend to be meticulous in my duties.
9. I tend to be cautious, but not fearful.
10. People should behave in ways that are morally correct.
11. It is important to respect authority.
12. I would rather have loyal friends than interesting friends.
13. Long established customs need to be respected and preserved.
14. I like to work in a straightforward path toward completing the task.
Total
Scale 3
1. I understand complex machines easily.
2. I enjoy competitive conversations.
3. I am intrigued by rules and patterns that govern systems.
4. I am more analytical and logical than most people.
5. I pursue intellectual topics thoroughly and regularly.
6. I am able to solve problems without letting emotion get in the way.
7. I like to figure out how things work.
8. I am tough-minded.
9. Debating is a good way to match my wits with others.
10. I have no trouble making a choice, even when several alternatives seem equally good at first.
11. When I buy a new machine (like a camera, computer, or car) I want to know all of its technical features.
12. I like to avoid the nuances and say exactly what I mean.
13. I think it is important to be direct.
14. When making a decision, I like to stick to the facts rather than be swayed by people’s feelings.
Total
Scale 4
1. I like to get to know my friends deepest needs and feelings.
2. I highly value deep emotional intimacy in my relationships.
3. Regardless of what is logical, I generally listen to my heart when making important decisions.
4. I frequently catch myself daydreaming.
5. I can change my mind easily.
6. After watching an emotional film, I often still feel moved by it several hours later.
7. I vividly imagine both wonderful and horrible things happening to me.
8. I am very sensitive to people’s feelings and needs.
9. I often find myself getting lost in my thoughts during the day.
10.I feel emotions more deeply than most people.
11. I have a vivid imagination.
12. When I wake up from a vivid dream, it takes me a few seconds to return to reality.
13. When reading, I enjoy it when a writer takes a sidetrack to say something beautiful or meaningful.
14. I am very empathetic.
Scoring the test
0 for each SD, 1 for each D, 2 points for each A and three for SA. Add each section separately.
Scale 1 measures Masculinity as Dominance, the degree to which you are butch or an Explorer based on your Perceiving traits.
Scale 2 measures Femininity as Submissiveness, Judging traits or the degree to which you align with Fisher’s Builder personality type.
Scale 3 measures Masculinity as logical-mathematical-mechanical cognition, Thinking quadrant traits or what Fisher calls the Director personality type.
Scale 4 measures Femininity as linguistic-emotional-interpersonal cognition or Feeling traits on the Myers-Briggs scale which Fisher calls the Negotiator personality type.
The two top scores are your primary and secondary traits.
For further study of the idea of gender, I refer you to the works of Judith Butler; including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Undoing Gender, and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, and to those of Anne Fausto-Sterling; Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, and Myths Of Gender: Biological Theories About Women And Men.
The nature versus nurture debate can be explored in the oppositional works of Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine, and Human Diversity: Gender, Race, Class, and Genes by Charles Murray.
In histories, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century,
by Charles King.
In biography, Monsieur d’Eon Is a Woman: A Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade by Gary Kates.
In fiction, we have Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Joseph Cassara’s House of the Impossible Beauties, Jordy Rosenberg’s Confession of the Fox, and Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, by T. Fleischmann.
The Sorting Hat, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
What is a woman or a man, how are such identities constructed, and who decides?
On this International Woman’s Day, I am wondering how we define such a thing, and how our idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty shape our range of choices in the performance of ourselves.
I am thinking of these things in the context of a conversation in which a friend described the primary trauma of realizing they were imprisoned in a body whose sex did not match their gender, and in this vulnerable space was multiply attacked on grounds of falsely identifying as female in order to appropriate female spaces of performance.
It seems to me that our idea of trans personhood is a test of how we imagine the role of biology in regards to identity; trans exclusion reinforces and originates in a narrow definition of gender restricted to biology, and one which privileges signs and forms over hormones, the psyche, memory and history, and inner experience; this ignores social construction of identity entirely, and also perpetuates systemic inequalities and authorized identities of sex and gender.
Is biology destiny? I phrase the question in this way because of its historic role in women’s liberation movements, and because outlaws of sex and gender teach us something about how we become human and how we choose to be human together, as seizures of power wherein our forms and their narratives of authorized identity are imposed conditions of struggle.
Gender is always fluid, relational, ambiguous, and a ground of struggle. It is also, like sexual orientation, distinct from biological sex and not a spectrum with endpoint limits but an infinite Moebius Strip where we are born and exist everywhere at once as polymorphosly perverse beings, to use Freud’s delicious phrase, who say yes to life and to all pleasure; except where identity is chosen as seizure of power or imposed by other people’s ideas of virtue, normality, the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden.
Freud was so right about humans being animals who are self aware as a primary conflict and a primary ground of struggle, and so wrong about the goal of growing up being control of our libido, our desires and imagination. And this is the great tragedy of our civilization; fear of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
To be an outcast is a terrible thing; but to be forced to create your own forms because you fit in no one else’s bottles can be a wonderful thing as well, though never an easy one.
Sartre described this with the phrase; ”We are condemned to be free,” in his 1946 lecture Existentialism Is A Humanism, and what this means is that in a universe empty of all meaning and value other than that which we ourselves create, we must balance the terror of our nothingness with the joy of our total freedom.
In such a universe, free of imposed meaning and of purpose, all rules are arbitrary and can be changed, rules which are legacies of our histories and the fictional laws of false and unjust authorities, wherein all normalities are negotiable, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human may be pursued as our uniqueness through the reimagination and transformation of poetic vision and metaphorical truths.
Life is a performance art, and we all have one problem in common; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
This process of becoming human or individuation is controlled by a second or historical principle; humans create themselves over time, and a third or social principle; humans create each other through their interdependence.
Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
Our identities, including those of sex and gender, are literally masks; social constructs and artifacts of our process of adaptation and becoming human. Herein the primary shaping, informing, and motivating source is the interface between authority and autonomy as an unknown and unclaimed potential, a blank space of limitless possibilities of the reimagination of humankind, like the places marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Let us pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Our performance of identities of sex and gender is a theatre of possibilities, of negotiations and dances with normativity and the transgression of boundaries, of the questioning and reimagination of idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of self-creation as liberation and autonomous total freedom, a quest for our uniqueness and for the human transcendent, and of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
This need not be determinative or prescriptive, but a space of free creative play.
All true art defiles and exalts.
As written by Amy M. Vaughn on the Surrealist site Babou691, in a brilliant interrogation of identity as performance art and of the boundaries of the Forbidden as interfaces of reimagination, transformation, and autonomy; “I love genderfuck. I love watching the disruption of enculturated norms, which is what genderfuck does to traditional notions of the male/female, masculine/feminine dichotomy.
While genderfuckery has had a place in both gay culture and, to a lesser extent, punk rock since the ’70s, it remained mostly underground until drag hit mainstream media. I am, of course, referring to RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR).
These days drag serves as an umbrella term for the work of several different types of performance artists. The most well-known of these are drag queens, who perform as women, and drag kings, who perform as men. Sometimes this traditional type of drag is campy, sometimes it’s realistic, but it’s always based on the idea of the gender binary—fucking with the binary, but still within it. Genderfuck rejects the binary, often aggressively, sometimes playfully, always purposefully.
I believe there may be something to gain from looking at these performative manipulations of gender though the ideas of the Surrealists of the early 20th century. The Surrealists saw themselves as a revolutionary cultural movement. Their goal was to free people from false and restrictive conceptions of reality. In other words, they wanted to disrupt enculturated norms. And their method was the juxtaposition of disparate entities with the intention of creating a surprising or startling effect.
I don’t think it’s too far a leap to say performative genderbending fits this approach. Whether we’re talking about overlaying feminine characteristics on a masculine form or vice versa, or combining the genders together in incongruous ways, done well, the effect is literally stunning.”
And RPDR has provided a platform for genderfuck, but because the goal of the competition is to find the “next drag superstar”—a person who can represent RuPaul’s polished, feminine brand to the world— genderfuck queens rarely excel. “May the best woman win,” has been one of the show’s catchphrases, repeated every episode until the current season. Now RuPaul says, “May the best drag queen win.” We could speculate that this change is due to the casting of the first ever trans contestant, though the point remains the same—RPDR is a safe space for gay males to express themselves through female impersonation.
Which is drag but not genderfuck.
However, something even more subversive has entered through the door that RPDR opened: The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula, an “alternative drag competition” based on the principles of horror, filth, and glamour. And the Boulets’ stage is far more welcoming of genderfuck.
While drag has traditionally been dominated by gay men performing as women, genderfuck is not gender specific or sexual-orientation specific. Disasterina, on season two of Dragula, described himself as hetero-fluid and is married to a woman, while season three featured two AFAB contestants: Landon Cider, a lesbian drag king, and Hollow Eve, who identifies as nonbinary.
At this point, spelling out all of these distinctions seems more than a little cumbersome and like a whole lot of nunya bizness, as if these descriptions have no place in the discussion of genderfuck because genderfuck is beyond them. In fact, jabs at traditional drag culture are not rare on Dragula, as can be seen in Evah Destruction’s disposable razor bikini on her hirsute body, a look which would not have a place in RPDR.
The Surrealists believed that art could bring about revolutionary social change through the process of the Hegelian dialectic—thesis, antithesis, synthesis. If we examine the recent history of drag and genderfuck through this lens, while vastly simplified, it might look something like this: the thesis that there are two heteronormative genders was met with the antithesis of an artform superimposing one gender over another to provoke the surreal effect of juxtaposing opposites in order to startled people out of ingrained cultural constructs. The synthesis has been greater acceptance of gay male culture and freedom of expression. Worthy goals, no question.
The dialectic for genderfuck, which I see as following traditional drag to further the same and expanded goals, would also start with the thesis that there are two genders but it would add three sexual identities (gay, straight, and bi). The antithesis is the performance of multiple expressions of gender and sexuality, provoking the surreal effect, and leading to the synthesis of radical freedom of expression and an existence untethered to preconceived cultural definitions—gay, straight, or otherwise.”
“Real progress has been made through queer art in providing a surrealist antithesis to the idea of a gender dichotomy, and the result has been to guide mainstream culture toward not just tolerance or acceptance but celebration of gender differences.”
Idealizations of Feminine Beauty in Performance of Identity: Ru Paul’s Drag Race: LaGanja’s Let’s Get Physical
Subversions of Idealizations of Masculinity and Femininity: The Boulet Brothers Dragula, Season 4 trailer
Here is my review of the book from 2018, when it was published:
One of the two best novels of 2018, House of the Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara is among the immortal classics of world literature, the books we’ll still be reading in a thousand years.
Joseph Cassara’s marvelous and beautiful debut novel must be accompanied by viewing the glorious celebration of our humanity which is the film Paris Is Burning, the primary source of the novel.
House of the Impossible Beauties is an investigation of idealized masculine and feminine beauty which poses fundamental questions regarding identity and the struggle for its ownership, the interplay of dreams and imagination with a sometimes cruel and unforgiving reality, and of the shaping forces of the families we have chosen and the ones imposed on us.
Under siege and on the stage; the profoundly human characters who inhabit this marginal realm are masters of negotiating the boundaries and interfaces between the Real and the Ideal, often discontiguous and filled with peril as seizures of power and revolutionary struggle versus authorized identities of sex and gender; herein are models of how to be human together and of challenging authorized versions of self, sometimes with life and death in the balance.
To be an Impossible Beauty; who cannot hear the siren call of this mad quest? Not the mere adoration of the Ideal, but its enactment. An Impossible Beauty; a title absolutely saturated in the whole Romantic project of the quest for the Ideal and its realization in the flesh and world of the senses, here especially referential to the poetry of Keats and also to Thomas Mann’s critique of Romanticism in Death in Venice.
Cassara’s work presents a communal, interdependant society as the medium in which we create ourselves and each other. Under siege from the forces of reaction, but within the community supportive and collaborative; mutualism here presented as a Platonic Republic. This image of an ideal society, praxis of his values of unconditional love and total freedom to choose the roles we will play, is equally important as his analysis of the performative nature of identity.
To whom are we responsible for who we are, if not ourselves? For whom are we responsible, if not one another?
Today we honor the heroes who helped secure freedom and equality for us all on this the 60th anniversary of Selma’s Bloody Sunday, when hundreds of Black citizens faced death and violence with none offered in return, a courageous stand of love against hate which will continue to inspire humankind for all eternity, a defiance of systemic and institutional racist terror and authoritarian repression of dissent, theft of citizenship by vote suppression, and re-enslavement through prison labor, a march of protest made simply to claim the power to exercise a hundred year old legal right and the most sacred duty of a citizen, the right to vote.
This was the turning point of the Civil Rights Movement, which like Gandhi’s Salt Tax protest exposed a corruptive and malign government of brutal force and the falsification of propaganda, lies, and false histories, for after this day the forces of white supremacy could never again claim a moral high ground nor conceal themselves within the legal and political structures they had infiltrated and subverted.
Sadly it remains a fight for liberty and equality today, as the heroes of Atlanta wage resistance struggle against a police state of white supremacist terror and repression of dissent, in the contest between democracy and tyranny brought into hideous relief by the plans of racist elites and the corrupt politicians who serve them to build a Cop City for the manufacture of police to replace the Klu Klux Klan as their primary enforcers and institutionalize the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison labor under the fig leaf of law and order.
This industrial production of force and control in a totalitarian society is the end result of the weaponization of fear in service to power by those who would enslave us.
No matter where you begin with Othering people, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
How does one lay siege to an unjust system and its fortress of state terror? First we must define the terms of struggle and control the narrative. Second comes the praxis of mass protests, general strikes, defunding tyranny and terror, isolation by Boycott, Sanction, and Divestiture, and other electoral and legislative actions. Third is Direct Action in all its forms, in this context especially the infiltration of the police and security services and the sabotage of their enforcement of authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
Let us teach the enemies of liberty a simple truth; security is an illusion. There is no level of force which can protect us from each other without also destroying each other, our defining relationships, and our humanity.
The great secret of power and the use of force and violence is that it is hollow and brittle, and fails at the point of disobedience.
The great secret of authority and legitimacy is that it is an illusion which fails when met with disbelief and questioning.
We each of us possess two powers which define our liberty, and cannot be taken from us; to disbelieve authority and to disobey in refusal to submit.
And when we do these things, we become Unconquered and able to liberate others as Living Autonomous Zones.
Resistance is victory.
As written by Jeff Martin and Jeff Amy in Huffpost , in an article entitled More Than 20 Charged With Terrorism In Atlanta ‘Cop City’ Protest:
The wooded area outside Atlanta has become a flashpoint of ongoing conflict between authorities and left-leaning protesters; “More than 20 people from around the country faced domestic terrorism charges Monday after dozens in black masks attacked the site of a police training center under construction in a wooded area outside Atlanta where one protester was killed in January.
The area has become the flashpoint of ongoing conflict between authorities and left-leaning protesters.
Flaming bottles and rocks were thrown at officers during a protest Sunday at “Cop City,” where 26-year-old environmental activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, or “Tortuguita,” was shot to death by officers during a raid at a protest camp in January. Police have said that Tortuguita attacked them, a version that other activists have questioned.
Almost all of the 23 people arrested are from states across the U.S., while one is from Canada and another from France, police said Monday.
Like many protesters, Tortuguita was dedicated to preserving the environment, friends and family said, ideals that clashed with Atlanta’s hopes of building a $90 million Atlanta Public Safety Training Center meant to boost preparedness and morale after George Floyd’s death in 2020.
Now, authorities and young people are embroiled in a clash that appears to have little to do with other high-profile conflicts.
Protesters who oppose what detractors call “Cop City” run the gamut from more traditional environmental environmentalists to young, self-styled anarchists seeking clashes with what they see as an unjust society.
Defend the Atlanta Forest, a social media site used by members of the movement, said Monday on Twitter that those arrested were not violent agitators “but peaceful concert-goers who were nowhere near the demonstration.” A representative of a public-relations firm involved in the group’s events said that it could not immediately comment.
After “Tortuguita” was killed, demonstrations spread to downtown Atlanta. A police cruiser was set ablaze, rocks were thrown and fireworks were launched at a skyscraper that houses the Atlanta Police Foundation. Windows were shattered. The governor declared a state of emergency.
On Sunday, Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum said at a midnight news conference, pieces of construction equipment were set on fire in what he called “a coordinated attack” at the site for the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center in DeKalb County.
Surveillance video released by police shows a piece of heavy equipment in flames. It was among several destroyed pieces of construction gear, police said.
Protesters also threw rocks, bricks, Molotov cocktails, and fireworks at police, officials said. In addition, demonstrators tried to blind officers by shining green lasers into their eyes, and used tires and debris to block a road, the Georgia Department of Public Safety said Monday.
Officers used nonlethal enforcement methods to disperse the crowd and make arrests, Schierbaum said, causing “some minor discomfort.”
Along with classrooms and administrative buildings, the training center would include a shooting range, a driving course to practice chases and a “burn building” for firefighters to work on putting out fires. A “mock village” featuring a fake home, convenience store and nightclub would also be built for rehearsing raids.
Opponents have said that the site would be to practice “urban warfare,” and the 85-acre (34-hectare) training center would require cutting so many trees that it would be environmentally damaging.
Many activists also oppose spending millions on a police facility that would be surrounded by poor neighborhoods in a city with one of the nation’s highest degrees of inequality.
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens has said that the site was cleared decades ago for a former state prison farm. He has said that it is filled with rubble and overgrown with invasive species, not hardwood trees. The mayor also has said that while the facility would be built on 85 acres, about 300 others would be preserved as public green space.
Many of those already accused of violence in connection with the training site protests are being charged with domestic terrorism, a felony that carries up to 35 years in prison. Those charges have prompted criticism from some that the state is being heavy-handed.
Lawmakers are considering classifying domestic terrorism as a serious violent felony. That means anyone convicted must serve their entire sentence, can’t be sentenced to probation as a first offender and can’t be paroled unless they have served at least 30 years in prison.
Meanwhile, more protests are planned in coming days, police said Monday.”
The heroes of this historic act of liberation generations ago in Selma, like those in Atlanta today, among them Martin Luther King and John Lewis, remain with us forever as totemic figures and guardian spirits of America and of revolutionary struggle throughout the world, and I honor and invoke them today for inspiration and guidance in the victories yet to be won.
Christopher Klein’s article in History describes the events of that day; “Nearly a century after the Confederacy’s guns fell silent, the racial legacies of slavery and Reconstruction continued to reverberate loudly throughout Alabama in 1965. Even the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 months earlier had done little in some parts of the state to ensure African Americans of the basic right to vote. Perhaps no place was Jim Crow’s grip tighter than in Dallas County, where African Americans made up more than half of the population, yet accounted for just 2 percent of registered voters.
For months, the efforts of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to register black voters in the county seat of Selma had been thwarted. In January 1965, Martin Luther King Jr., came to the city and gave the backing of the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) to the cause. Peaceful demonstrations in Selma and surrounding communities resulted in the arrests of thousands, including King, who wrote to the New York Times, “This is Selma, Alabama. There are more negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls.”
The rising racial tensions finally bubbled over into bloodshed in the nearby town of Marion on February 18, 1965, when state troopers clubbed protestors and fatally shot 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, an African American demonstrator trying to protect his mother, who was being struck by police.
In response, civil rights leaders planned to take their cause directly to Alabama Governor George Wallace on a 54-mile march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery. Although Wallace ordered state troopers “to use whatever measures are necessary to prevent a march,” approximately 600 voting rights advocates set out from the Brown Chapel AME Church on Sunday, March 7. King, who had met with President Lyndon Johnson two days earlier to discuss voting rights legislation, remained back in Atlanta with his own congregation and planned to join the marchers en route the following day. By a coin flip, it was determined that Hosea Williams would represents the SCLC at the head of the march along with 25-year-old John Lewis, a SNCC chairman and future U.S. congressman from Georgia.
The demonstrators marched undisturbed through downtown Selma, where the ghosts of the past constantly permeated the present. As they began to cross the steel-arched bridge spanning the Alabama River, the marchers who gazed up could see the name of a Confederate general and reputed grand dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, Edmund Pettus, staring right back at them in big block letters emblazoned across the bridge’s crossbeam.
Once Williams and Lewis reached the crest of the bridge, they saw trouble on the other side. A wall of state troopers, wearing white helmets and slapping billy clubs in their hands, stretched across Route 80 at the base of the span. Behind them were deputies of county sheriff Jim Clark, some on horseback, and dozens of white spectators waving Confederate flags and giddily anticipating a showdown. Knowing a confrontation awaited, the marchers pressed on in a thin column down the bridge’s sidewalk until they stopped about 50 feet away from the authorities.
“It would be detrimental to your safety to continue this march,” Major John Cloud called out from his bullhorn. “This is an unlawful assembly. You have to disperse, you are ordered to disperse. Go home or go to your church. This march will not continue.”
“Mr. Major,” replied Williams, “I would like to have a word, can we have a word?”
“I’ve got nothing further to say to you,” Cloud answered.
Williams and Lewis stood their ground at the front of the line. After a few moments, the troopers, with gas masks affixed to their faces and clubs at the ready, advanced. They pushed back Lewis and Williams. Then the troopers paced quickened. They knocked the marchers to the ground. They struck them with sticks. Clouds of tear gas mixed with the screams of terrified marchers and the cheers of reveling bystanders. Deputies on horseback charged ahead and chased the gasping men, women and children back over the bridge as they swung clubs, whips and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire. Although forced back, the protestors did not fight back.
Weeks earlier, King had scolded Life magazine photographer Flip Schulke for trying to assist protestors knocked to the ground by authorities instead of snapping away. “The world doesn’t know this happened because you didn’t photograph it,” King told Schulke, according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Race Beat.” This time, however, television cameras captured the entire assault and transformed the local protest into a national civil rights event. It took hours for the film to be flown from Alabama to the television network headquarters in New York, but when it aired that night, Americans were appalled at the sights and sounds of “Bloody Sunday.”
Around 9:30 p.m., ABC newscaster Frank Reynolds interrupted the network’s broadcast of “Judgment at Nuremberg”—the star-studded movie that explored Nazi bigotry, war crimes and the moral culpability of those who followed orders and didn’t speak out against the Holocaust—to air the disturbing, newly arrived footage from Selma. Nearly 50 million Americans who had tuned into the film’s long-awaited television premier couldn’t escape the historical echoes of Nazi storm troopers in the scenes of the rampaging state troopers. “The juxtaposition struck like psychological lightning in American homes,” wrote Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff in “The Race Beat.”
The connection wasn’t lost in Selma, either. When his store was finally empty of customers, one local shopkeeper confided to Washington Star reporter Haynes Johnson about the city’s institutional racism, “Everybody knows it’s going on, but they try to pretend they don’t see it. I saw ‘Judgment at Nuremberg’ on the Late Show the other night and I thought it fits right in; it’s just like Selma.”
Outrage at “Bloody Sunday” swept the country. Sympathizers staged sit-ins, traffic blockades and demonstrations in solidarity with the voting rights marchers. Some even traveled to Selma where two days later King attempted another march but, to the dismay of some demonstrators, turned back when troopers again blocked the highway at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Finally, after a federal court order permitted the protest, the voting rights marchers left Selma on March 21 under the protection of federalized National Guard troops. Four days later, they reached Montgomery with the crowd growing to 25,000 by the time they reached the capitol steps.
The events in Selma galvanized public opinion and mobilized Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, which President Johnson signed into law on August 6, 1965. Today, the bridge that served as the backdrop to “Bloody Sunday” still bears the name of a white supremacist, but now it is a symbolic civil rights landmark.”
Proof of Selma’s resilience as an informing and motivating source in the ongoing resistance to fascism and tyranny may be found in the words of one its leaders, John Lewis, who has given a life of service to America and to the cause of Liberty, and the massive voter turnout he helped inspire which has stunningly transformed the Democratic primaries this week and possibly changed the destiny of our nation and of humankind.
As Sanjana Karanth writes in Huffpost; “Civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) made a surprise appearance at Sunday’s commemorative “Bloody Sunday” march in Selma, Alabama, urging attendees to use their right to vote “to redeem the soul of America.”
White Alabama state troopers fractured Lewis’ head when he was 25 years old on what became known as Bloody Sunday, when Lewis and several hundred other voting rights activists faced state-sanctioned violence for peacefully marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma to Montgomery on March 7, 1965.
The commemorative gathering honored the Selma protest and those who suffered in the fight to ensure voting rights for Black Americans.
“Fifty-five years ago, a few of God’s children attempted to march from Brown Chapel AME Church across this bridge,” Lewis, 80, said in a passionate speech on Sunday. “We were beaten, we were tear-gassed. I thought I was going to die on this bridge. But somehow and some way, God almighty helped me.”
The Georgia congressman’s remarks came as the Democratic primary ramps up, with South Carolina voting on Saturday and 14 additional states voting in the upcoming Super Tuesday primaries this week. Lewis used the moment of the primaries and the nature of the Selma march to encourage everyone to exercise their right to vote.
“We cannot give up now. We cannot give in. We must keep the faith, keep our eyes on the prize,” he said. “We must go out and vote like we never, ever voted before.”
“Some people gave more than a little blood, some gave their very lives. So to each and every one of you, especially you young people … go out there,” he said. “Speak up, speak out. Get in the way. Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.”
Selma
The protestors needed sniper teams covering the bridge, for the horse cavalry. And if they opened ranks before the charging racist terror police, to reveal HMG emplacements, a barricade for grenadiers, and fire teams to support them and prevent flanking with point defense and to cover exfiltration of the bait from the killing zone the enemy had been lured into; but that would be a different story.
Maybe next time, friends; and there will always be a next time.
Historical Newsreel of the Crossing
Rev. Al on 60th anniversary of ‘Bloody Sunday’: I think about the progress and the threat
Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, by Raymond Arsenault, Mirron Willis (Narrator), Thurgood Marshall, John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr. (Contributors)
Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived in Selma, Alabama, in the 1960s, but the city’s voting rolls were 99% white. So in 1963, Black organizers in the Dallas County Voters League launched a drive to get Black voters in Selma registered. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a prominent civil rights organization, joined them.
In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, but the measure did not adequately address the problem of voter suppression. In Selma a judge had stopped the voter registration protests by issuing an injunction prohibiting public gatherings of more than two people.
To call attention to the crisis in her city, Amelia Boynton, a member of the Dallas County Voters League acting with a group of local activists, traveled to Birmingham to invite Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to the city. King had become a household name after delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, and his presence would bring national attention to Selma’s struggle.
King and other prominent members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference arrived in January to push the voter registration drive. For seven weeks, Black residents tried to register to vote. County Sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2,000 of them on a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.
Then on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed 26-year-old, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson had run into a restaurant for shelter along with his mother when the police started rioting, but they chased him and shot him in the restaurant’s kitchen.
Jackson died eight days later, on February 26.
The leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression. Expecting violence, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee voted not to participate, but its chair, John Lewis, asked their permission to go along on his own. They agreed.
On March 7, 1965, sixty years ago today, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate brigadier general, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured John Lewis’s skull and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.
Images of “Bloody Sunday” on the national news mesmerized the nation, and supporters began to converge on Selma. King, who had been in Atlanta when the marchers first set off, returned to the fray.
Two days later, the marchers set out again. Once again, the troopers and police met them at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but this time, King led the marchers in prayer and then took them back to Selma. That night, a white mob beat to death a Unitarian Universalist minister, James Reeb, who had come from Massachusetts to join the marchers.
On March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.
The marchers remained determined to complete their trip to Montgomery, but Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, refused to protect them. So President Johnson stepped in. When the marchers set off for a third time on March 21, 1,900 members of the nationalized Alabama National Guard, FBI agents, and federal marshals protected them. Covering about ten miles a day, they camped in the yards of well-wishers until they arrived at the Alabama State Capitol on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people.
On the steps of the capitol, speaking under a Confederate flag, Dr. King said: “The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.”
That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.
On August 6, Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Recalling “the outrage of Selma,” Johnson said: “This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.”
The Voting Rights Act authorized federal supervision of voter registration in districts where African Americans were historically underrepresented. Johnson promised that the government would strike down “regulations, or laws, or tests to deny the right to vote.” He called the right to vote “the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men,” and pledged that “we will not delay, or we will not hesitate, or we will not turn aside until Americans of every race and color and origin in this country have the same right as all others to share in the process of democracy.”
As recently as 2006, Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act by a bipartisan vote. By 2008 there was very little difference in voter participation between white Americans and Americans of color. In that year, voters elected the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, and they reelected him in 2012. And then, in 2013, the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision struck down the part of the Voting Rights Act that required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting to get approval from the federal government before changing their voting rules. This requirement was known as “preclearance.”
The Shelby County v. Holder decision opened the door, once again, for voter suppression. A 2024 study by the Brennan Center of nearly a billion vote records over 14 years showed that the racial voting gap is growing almost twice as fast in places that used to be covered by the preclearance requirement. Another recent study showed that in Alabama, the gap between white and Black voter turnout in the 2024 election was the highest since at least 2008. If nonwhite voters in Alabama had voted at the same rate as white voters, more than 200,000 additional ballots would have been cast.
Democrats have tried since 2021 to pass a voting rights act but have been stymied by Republicans, who oppose such protections. On March 5, 2025, Representative Terri Sewall (D-AL) reintroduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would help restore the terms of the Voting Rights Act, and make preclearance national.
The measure is named after John Lewis, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader whose skull law enforcement officers fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Lewis went on from his days in the Civil Rights Movement to serve 17 terms as a representative from Georgia. Until he died in 2020, Lewis bore the scars of March 7, 1965: Bloody Sunday.
Behold the perfidious crimes of an Absurd Clown, Russian agent, Nazi Revivalist, lunatic, idiot, and saboteur of democracy, our universal human rights and rights as citizens and co owners of the state, of America’s historic role as a guarantor of democracy globally and of American power, legitimacy, and hegemony; the mask has slipped, before the stage of history and the world, and proven the truth of my mother’s description to me of what Republicans are, as a child hiding from the brutal thugs who had donned Halloween masks and stripped off their police badges as they hunted student protestors in the wake of the attack by police ordered by then-Governor Ronald Reagan against the divestiture from Israel protest at People’s Park, Berkeley May 15 1969; “If you scratch one, there’s a Nazi underneath.”.
Thanks for showing us what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator. And remember, folks, you can always tell a Republican’s secret name; it’s their act of treason plus their sex crime.
The clown show at the White Man’s House, which I so name because it is a bastion of white supremacist terror and Nazi revivalism and no long a shrine of democracy as the embodiment of the Enlightenment and its values of liberty, equality, Truth, and Justice, but merely a symbol of the state as embodied violence and systems of oppression which include racism, theocratic patriarchal sexual terror of which our Rapist In Chief is a figure and authorized role model for young men, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and fascism of blood, faith, and soil, has in the Trump-Zelenskyy Incident been performed as a terrorist act by the aberrant, treasonous, and dishonorable Trump regime in accord with Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty in a failed attempt to seize power over Ukraine through fear, just as Traitor Trump has failed to seize power over us all through abjection, despair, and learned helplessness.
For just as we here in America refuse to submit in mass national protests, so Ukraine and all of Europe unite in Solidarity and refusal to submit to our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
Let us become a United Humankind as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights, among these being the right to self-determination as a free society of equals, a future set against that of Russian imperial conquest and dominion and an Age of Tyrants wherein our uniqueness and individuality ceases to exist, and there is only the will of the tyrant, the hegemonic elites he serves, the enforcers who serve them, and a mass precariat of slaves.
Those who would enslave us and steal our souls through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization must first trick us into giving them our power, and without our belief in their lies and claims to act in our name and our obedience they cannot subjugate us.
Disbelieve, disobey, and unite in solidarity of action to Resist.
For the great secret of power and authority is that without legitimacy and the freely given power of the people, power is hollow and brittle and fails at the point of disobedience, and force becomes meaningless.
Those who would enslave us can kill us, imprison and torture us, but they cannot rule us if we are unwilling to belong to them.
And this is a power which cannot be taken from us, a power which defines our humanity and is an inherent condition of it, and like the Magic Ruby Slippers bears the power to send us home and return to us our own best selves as we imagine and wish to become.
So I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was devised in Paris 1940 by the great Jean Genet from his oath as a Legionnaire, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a Last Stand as we were about to be burned alive by the Israeli Army in Beirut 1982; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows”.
As written by Moira Donegan in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s style of petty domination was in full display with Zelenskyy; “The last time Donald Trump did this, it was in secret, and he got impeached over it. In 2019, Trump, on a phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, demanded that the Ukrainian president produce – or fabricate – evidence of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden, the son of Trump’s eventual opponent in the 2020 election, in exchange for continued US military aid.
At the time, Russia had already seized control of the Ukrainian region of Crimea, and was funding violent insurgent groups in the country’s east; it was increasingly clear that a full-scale Russian invasion was coming, as it finally did in 2022. Since the end of second world war, it has been the US that checks Russian expansionist ambitions in Europe – the US that provided the backstop to the Nato alliance, the US that secured the independence of eastern Europe. The US president wanted to condition that longstanding role on the Ukrainian president doing him a personal political favor. The international order could be ended, he suggested, if those who depended on him didn’t do enough to indulge his vanity, self-interest and impulsive whims.
Something similar was already afoot earlier this week, when Trump summoned Zelenskyy to Washington at the last minute to pressure him to sign a mineral rights deal. Trump wanted to make continued US support for Ukraine’s military effort contingent on US involvement in the country’s mineral industry. But the deal that was offered to Zelenskyy in fact contained no security guarantees: it offered something less like a bilateral agreement and more like a shakedown. Nevertheless Zelenskyy, who is leading a besieged people in danger of losing their country, seemed willing to take it – even after Trump called him a “dictator” last week.
But things went downhill from there. Trump seemed determined to antagonize Zelenskyy, making a passive aggressive remark about what Zelenksyy was wearing when he arrived at the White House. (Sources close to Trump leaked to Semafor that the administration was also displeased with Zelenskyy’s “body language”.) In a meeting in the Oval Office, with film crews and reporters present, the US vice-president, JD Vance, began berating Zelenskyy for what he alleged was the Ukrainian president’s disinterest in diplomacy, by which he seems to have meant a Ukrainian surrender on Russia’s terms.
When Zelenskyy countered that Russia has not been a reliable partner, breaking promises to Ukraine repeatedly in past ceasefires, Vance began berating him that he was not grateful enough for US support. “I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media,” said Vance, who had initiated the confrontation with cameras in the room, in a practiced cadence. “Have you said thank you once?” Zelenskyy has in fact said “thank you” to the United States many times, including at the outset of the meeting. Both Trump and Vance began raising their voices, ignoring Zelenskyy’s attempts to speak and impugning both his leadership and his personal character. Zelenskyy was soon kicked out, and left the White House without signing the minerals agreement that Trump had nominally summoned him from Ukraine to conclude.
It is clear that the post-second world war international order is over. It is clear that Europe will have to look elsewhere, and not to the United States, for its security, and that the US will increasingly be isolated among nations, without allies to advance its interests abroad and without friends to share the benefits of science, culture and commerce. Few world leaders, after all, are willing to make deals with such a mercurial partner; fewer still are willing to try, if the attempt will be met with public humiliation in such brutish and bullying style.
It is clear that other great powers, including those who do not share what were once the US’s stated principles of justice, democracy and human dignity, will fill this vacuum, to America’s detriment. It is clear that Trump does not intend to check Vladimir Putin’s expansionist ambitions – that he will force a deal in the Ukraine war on Russia’s terms, that Zelenskyy himself will likely be exiled or killed in the aftermath, and that other countries in Europe are in danger.
In the hours after the meeting, many world leaders publicly voiced their support for Zelenskyy, including the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk. Like him, they stand on the edge of an uncertain future. Russia is on the march, indifferent to borders, laws and freedoms, and the United States will no longer stop them. As an American, I was embarrassed by the display. I am also, now, very scared.
Because what Trump did to Zelenskyy on Friday is not a departure from his style: it is entirely typical of his domineering approach to politics – one in which violence or harm is threatened to extort his preferred outcomes, and in which good faith negotiation or even basic dignity is shrugged off in favor of petty displays of domination and cruelty.
Trump and Vance, I now think, never really intended to have a conversation with Zelenskyy: they intended, instead, to try to make themselves look tough on TV by humiliating him. Jake Paul, a boxer, influencer and alleged crypto scammer who has been a booster of Donald Trump, said of the televised shouting match against a head of state, “This isn’t attacking. This is called being a MAN.”
Manliness seems to be all that Trump aspires to: and he defines it, almost exclusively as cruelty. Both on the international stage and on the domestic one, Trump and the crowd of racist, misogynist and endlessly immature idiots who surround him will stop at nothing to prove what men they are – no matter how much America suffers, or how many people die, in the process. At the meeting, when Zelenskyy tried to persuade Trump to feel differently about the prospect of Russian expansion, Trump cut him off. “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel,” he said. “We’re going to feel very good. We’re going to feel very good and very strong.” Maybe he does.”
As written in the Observer Editorial, entitled Zelenskyy clash: a moment of dark reckoning; “The treatment of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, by the US president, Donald Trump, during what appears to have been a staged confrontation in the White House in front of the world’s press, marks one of the most profoundly shocking moments in US diplomacy in decades.
In this crass and deeply disturbing performance, the wartime leader of a democratic European country that is fighting against an illegal invasion by Russia, which has seen its citizens killed and cities bombed indiscriminately, was subjected to a vicious, ignorant and mendacious attack that was designed to humiliate.
Many watching the antics of Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance – and the subsequent cheerleading from their far-right political allies – will have been sickened by what they saw: an American president channelling the words of Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin. In the cold light of the day that has followed, the world – and Europe in particular – has woken to the most uncomfortable of realities.
The US, the country that has styled itself the indispensable nation, has aligned itself with the enemies of peace and democracy. If “America first” marks simply a shattering moment of US isolationism not seen since the run-up to America’s entry into the Second World War, this would be devastating enough. But, as they gather in London tomorrow, European leaders, Keir Starmer among them, must recognise that the contours of European and global security have been transformed.
The first lesson should be acknowledgment of what has been obvious since Trump’s inauguration: the US cannot be relied on as a security, intelligence or trading partner. Washington’s underpinning of Nato, and international security, is no longer a given. By giving succour to a Russia already conducting hostile acts against European countries beyond Ukraine, including Britain, Trump has made common cause with the greatest threat facing Europe today.
That was reflected in the comment by Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, after Friday’s degrading White House spectacle, that the “free world needs a new leader”. In practical terms, that must mean an end to the pretence that Trump can be flattered and played.
The almost unanimous outpouring of support from European leaders for Zelenskyy and Ukraine after the White House meeting needs to be swiftly followed by a show of unity at the London summit – and by concrete measures to support Ukraine and to preserve the wider peace on the European continent.
All of which means hard decisions will need to be made, and quickly, in European capitals, not only on defence spending but in recognising and in communicating to the public that a wider conflict with Russia – and without US support – is not unthinkable but must be actively prepared for.
For, while it is easy to see Trump’s actions as the petulant, theatrical and narcissistic reaction of a deeply insecure individual, the consequences go far beyond that. If there is a glimmer of hope, no matter how dim, it is that Trump’s poisonous bluster is underpinned by incoherence and weakness that is open to being challenged.
It is important to take stock of the reality with which the world is confronted, not the fantasy some would wish to see. Washington’s abdication of leadership and support for Ukraine requires a rapid and united European response without caveats.
As Kallas suggests, that requires European leaders to articulate the values to which they are committed and how they will practically back them, including material aid to Kyiv. Because the Trump administration’s often bizarre and self-harming view of foreign and trade policy, merging unilateralism, territorial expansion and isolationism, can only work in our deeply connected world if other countries allow it to.
America, as Zelenskyy rightly observed, is as vulnerable to Putin’s acts as Ukraine and Europe. Starmer’s visit to Washington last week – following that of the French president, Emmanuel Macron – was a necessary attempt to influence Trump. That effort has failed and it should be clear that there are now red lines, the most obvious of which is the threat to end US aid to Kyiv. After Friday’s events, it is already highly questionable in many minds whether Trump should be granted a state visit to the UK.
What should be clear to No 10 is that ending aid to Ukraine would be a step too far for the UK, even for this highly abnormal regime in Washington. Above all, Starmer and other European leaders must insist on the primacy of one of the key founding principles of the post Second World War order, enshrined in international law: territory may not be acquired through military aggression.
The starting point for any peace in Ukraine must be to recognise the illegality of Putin’s aggressions, which began with the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Ukraine should have a seat at the table in all discussions, free from threats and extortion from Trump and his allies. The aim of those discussions should be to see both the full withdrawal of Russian forces and powerful guarantees for Kyiv’s security. At this moment of dark reckoning, we owe it not only to the people of Ukraine; we owe it to ourselves.”
As written by Simon Tisdall in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump has utterly changed the rules of engagement. World leaders must learn this – and quickly: The world’s most admired democracy is being held hostage by a clique of far-right thugs. It would be a mistake to placate them; “It’s not only about Donald Trump. It’s not just about saving Ukraine, or defeating Russia, or how to boost Europe’s security, or what to do about an America gone rogue. It’s about a world turned upside down – a dark, fretful, more dangerous place where treaties and laws are no longer respected, alliances are broken, trust is fungible, principles are negotiable and morality is a dirty word. It’s an ugly, disordered world of raw power, brute force, selfish arrogance, dodgy deals and brazen lies. It’s been coming for a while; the US president is its noisy harbinger.
Take the issues one at a time. Trump is a toxic symptom of the wider malaise. For sure, he is an extraordinarily malign, unfeeling and irresponsible man. He cares nothing for the people he leads, seeing them merely as an audience for his vulgar showmanship. His undeserved humiliation of Ukraine’s valiant leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was, he crowed, “great television”. As president, Trump wields enormous power and influence. But Potus is not omnipotent. America’s vanquished Democrats are slowly finding their voice. Connecticut senator Chris Murphy shows how it should be done. Don’t bite your lip. Don’t play by rules Trump ignores. When Trump tried to blame diversity hiring policies for January’s deadly Potomac midair collision, Murphy hit back fiercely.
“Everybody in this country should be outraged that Donald Trump is standing up on that podium and lying to you – deliberately lying to you,” Murphy fumed. Trump was at it again when he mugged Zelenskyy last week. But it is not passing unchallenged. Street protests in Britain and the US followed. A campaign gathers pace to block Trump’s planned UK state visit. Opinion polls show growing opposition.
It seems strange to talk about “resistance”, as if a Nazi-style wartime occupation is under way. Yet resisting Trump is what our leaders must do. The world’s most admired democracy is held hostage by a far-right clique of thugs and chancers. Its leader calls himself “king” and talks of a presidency for life. Elon Musk and Steve Bannon raise stiff-armed salutes. European neofascists drool adulation from afar.
Trump’s minions attack or subvert the agencies of government, the judiciary and free press, terrorising and intimidating those whose loyalty they impugn. Their propagandists, so-called tech barons, have a reach Joseph Goebbels would envy. And just like Vladimir Putin, Russia’s dictator, JD Vance, Trump’s loudmouth hitman, fights a regressive, anti-democratic culture war for “Christian values” and a narrow, bigoted orthodoxy.
Ukraine, despite Trump’s betrayal, remains the epitome of resistance. The Ukrainian people are fighting for freedom, sovereignty and democratic self-determination. The issue is simple. Since the US cannot any longer be relied upon, Europe’s leaders know what they must do: supply more and better weapons for Kyiv, such as Taurus missiles; provide more humanitarian aid and finance, obtained by seizing $300bn in frozen Russian funds; and collectively raise their defence spending. From leaders such as Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, we need less polite subservience and more honest defiance.
To be effective, European leaders need to put concerted pressure on the US government to provide credible, long-term security guarantees for Ukraine and a backstop for any force that the UK and Europe deploy to monitor the ceasefire. It’s reasonable to expect the US to support a European peace initiative. If it does not, an open rupture with Washington should not be dodged. Equally, they need to put more pressure on Russia, too, to halt its daily slaughter and bombing in Ukraine’s cities. Putin could stop this war today – after all, he alone started it. The fact he refuses to do so is proof, if it were needed, of Zelenskyy’s contention that he cannot be trusted in anything he says. He must be squeezed further.
Right now, the opposite is happening. Military analysts warn that a gleeful Kremlin, encouraged by western discord, may step up its offensive in the east and try to capitalise on Ukraine’s demoralisation, perhaps even reinstating Putin’s original plan to seize the whole country. To deter such scenarios, EU leaders, meeting again in Brussels on Thursday after their London weekend talks, must finally bury their differences and draw a line.
Starmer says that he and Macron are now developing a plan. Good. The leading European Nato powers should demand an immediate halt to all fighting in Ukraine and Kursk. They should launch a peace process inclusive of all interested parties, without preconditions or prior concessions. If Putin balks, they must withdraw their diplomats, close borders with Russia, move to interdict its exports, mobilise their armed forces – and set a deadline for providing defensive air cover for all unoccupied Ukrainian territory. Russia must be reminded that the west has teeth, too – and will, if forced, resist Putin’s unlawful aggression with everything it has got. Enough of Trump’s scaremongering nonsense about a third world war. Putin is a mass murderer, not a mad murderer. He’s also a coward.
Given Trump’s treachery and threats to cut military aid, only a strong, united Europe stands a chance of preventing Ukraine’s defeat on the battlefield. Were Ukraine forced to capitulate to a Kremlin deal and lose its sovereignty, it would set a disastrous precedent for free people everywhere, from Taiwan and Tibet to Moldova, Estonia, Panama and Greenland.
Marco Rubio, Trump’s obsequious secretary of state, spoke revealingly last month about his vision of a 21st-century world dominated by the US, Russia and China, and divided into 19th-century geopolitical spheres of influence. It was necessary to rebuild US relations with Moscow, Rubio argued, to maintain this imperious tripartite balance of power. This is the partitioned future that awaits if Trump’s surrender strategy prevails and he and Putin carve up Ukraine.
Such a global catastrophe was foretold. In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell describes a nightmare world divvied up between three great empires or superstates, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, which deliberately stoke unceasing hostilities. Their shared characteristics: totalitarianism, mass surveillance, repression, immorality, gross inhumanity. Sound familiar? Annalena Baerbock, foreign minister of Germany, a country that knows much about fascism, past and present, recently said that a “new era of wickedness has begun”. Ukrainians, under occupation, are only too familiar with the evil that has descended upon their heads. This is the violent, lawless dystopia towards which the Americans in the Oval Office are leading us. Unless they are stopped. Unless we fight. Unless Europe resists.”
And this is the Letter of Lech Wałęsa to Trump; “This is the text we signed:
Your Excellency Mr President,
We watched the report of your conversation with the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenski with fear and distaste. We consider your expectations to show respect and gratitude for the material help provided by the United States fighting Russia to Ukraine insulting. Gratitude is due to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who shed their blood in defense of the values of the free world. They have been dying on the frontline for more than 11 years in the name of these values and independence of their Homeland, which was attacked by Putin’s Russia.
We do not understand how the leader of a country that is the symbol of the free world cannot see it.
Our panic was also caused by the fact that the atmosphere in the Oval Office during this conversation reminded us of one we remember well from Security Service interrogations and from the debate rooms in Communist courts. Prosecutors and judges at the behest of the all-powerful communist political police also explained to us that they hold all the cards and we hold none. They demanded us to stop our business, arguing that thousands of innocent people suffer because of us. They deprived us of our freedoms and civil rights because we refused to cooperate with the government and our gratitude. We are shocked that Mr. President Volodymyr Zelenski treated in the same way.
The history of the 20th century shows that every time the United States wanted to keep its distance from democratic values and its European allies, it ended up being a threat to themselves. This was understood by President Woodrow Wilson, who decided to join the United States in World War I in 1917. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood this, deciding after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 that the war for the defense of America would be fought not only in the Pacific, but also in Europe, in alliance with the countries attacked by the Third Reich.
We remember that without President Ronald Reagan and American financial commitment it would not have been possible to bring the collapse of the Soviet Union empire. President Reagan was aware that millions of enslaved people were suffering in Soviet Russia and the countries it conquered, including thousands of political prisoners who paid for their sacrifice in defense of democratic values with freedom. His greatness was m. in. on the fact that he without hesitation called the USSR the “Empire of Evil” and gave it a decisive fight. We won, and the statue of President Ronald Reagan stands today in Warsaw vis a vis of the US embassy.
Mr. President, material aid – military and financial – cannot be equivalent to the blood shed in the name of independence and freedom of Ukraine, Europe, as well as the whole free world. Human life is priceless, its value cannot be measured with money. Gratitude is due to those who make the sacrifice of blood and freedom. It is obvious for us, the people of “Solidarity”, former political prisoners of the communist regime serving Soviet Russia.
We are calling for the United States to withdraw from the guarantees it made with the Great Britain in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which recorded a direct obligation to defend the intact borders of Ukraine in exchange for giving up its nuclear weapons resources. These guarantees are unconditional: there is no word about treating such aid as an economic exchange.
Lech Wales, b. political prisoner, Solidarity leader, president of the Republic of Poland III
Mark Bailin, b. political prisoner, editor of independent publishing houses
Severn Blumstein, b. political prisoner, member of the Workers’ Defense Committee
Teresa Bogucka, b. a political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition and Solidarity
Gregory Bogut, b. political prisoner, activist of democratic opposition, independent publisher
Mark Borowik, b. political prisoner, independent publisher
Bogdan Borusewicz, b. political prisoner, leader of the underground Solidarity in Gdansk
Zbigniew Bujak, b. political prisoner, leader of the underground Solidarity in Warsaw
Władysław Frasyniuk, b. political prisoner, leader of the underground Solidarity in Wrocław
Andrew Gintzburg, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity
Richard Grabarczyk, b. a political prisoner, Solidarity activist
Alexander Janiszewski, b. a political prisoner, Solidarity activist
Peter Kapczy .ski, b. a political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition
Mark Kossakowski, b. political prisoner, independent publicist
Christopher the King, b. a political prisoner , independence activist
Jaroslav Kurski, b. a political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition
Barbara Swan, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity
Bogdan Lis, b. political prisoner, leader of the underground Solidarity in Gdansk
Henryk Majewski, b. a political prisoner, Solidarity activist
Adam Michnik, b. political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition, editor of independent publishing houses
Slavomir Najniger, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity
Peter the German , b. political prisoner, journalist, and printer of underground publishing houses,
Stefan Konstanty Niesiołowski, b. a political prisoner , independence activist
Edward Nowak, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity
Wojciech Onyszkiewicz, b. political prisoner, member of the Workers’ Defence Committee, Solidarity activist
Anthony Pawlak, b. a political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition and underground Solidarity
Sylwia Poleska-Peryt, b. a political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition
Christopher Push, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity
Richard Push, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity,
Jacek Rakowiecki, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity
Andrew Severn, b. political prisoner, actor, director of the Polish Theater in Warsaw
Witold Sielewicz, b. political prisoner, printer of independent publishing houses
Henryk Sikora, b. a political prisoner, Solidarity activist
Christopher Siemien Krski, b. political prisoner, journalist, and printer of underground publishing houses
Gra ,yna Staniszewska, b. a political prisoner, leaders of Solidarity of the Beskids region
George Degrees, b. a political prisoner, activist of the democratic opposition
Joanna Happy, b. political prisoner, editor of Solidarity underground press
Ludwik Turko, b. a political prisoner, activist of the underground Solidarity
Matthew Wierzbicki, b. political prisoner, printer and publicist of independent publishing houses”
Here I wish to signpost for the historical record that the Resistance to Putin’s regime and the invasion of Ukraine is based in Warsaw because Poland is among the most committed Antifascist nations of Europe, and remembers well her history when menaced with invasion by Russia and Nazi Revivalist forces which have a launchpad for the reconquest of Europe in Orban’s Hungary and Meloni’s Italy. Poland not only hosts a community of Ukrainian war refugees and fighters, but also Russian citizens working with their Ukrainian and European counterparts to bring regime change to Russia and end the invasion of Ukraine and the threat of invasion of Europe.
This is not a speculative threat, but one with several active plans now in motion; Russia intends to seize the Ukrainian port of Odesa as they did Mariupol, then the Romanian port of Constantia from which the whole of the Danube Basin can be invaded. This in concert with the invasion of Europe from Moldava and Poland with the recapture of Berlin the prize and also from the Baltic Sea and North Atlantic with the conquest of Britain the final goal.
Vichy America under Putin’s star agent Trump of course is already a Russian client state. Putin may or may not in time send an Russian Army of Occupation to rule us directly, but for the moment all he needs to do is monkeywrench democracy and its institutions and destroy our economy so that we cannot resist either the conquest of Europe or our own; and Trump is doing this for him now. A “useful fool”, Trump, as the KGB term describes such agents.
Putin has intended to launch the Baltic War this spring, just a few weeks from today. If get wins international recognition of his captured territories in Ukraine, he will be free to do so, for NATO and the international order born of the Second World War will have abandoned its mission to resist the acquisition of “Living Room” as Hitler termed it by war.
As written by Bret Stephens in The New York Times in an article entitled A Day of American Infamy; “In August 1941, about four months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill aboard warships in Newfoundland’s Placentia Bay and agreed to the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration by the world’s leading democratic powers on “common principles” for a postwar world.
Among its key points: “no aggrandizement, territorial or other”; “sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them”; “freedom from fear and want”; freedom of the seas; “access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity.”
The charter, and the alliance that came of it, is a high point of American statesmanship. On Friday in the Oval Office, the world witnessed the opposite. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s embattled democratic leader, came to Washington prepared to sign away anything he could offer President Trump except his nation’s freedom, security and common sense. For that, he was rewarded with a lecture on manners from the most mendacious vulgarian and ungracious host ever to inhabit the White House.
If Roosevelt had told Churchill to sue for peace on any terms with Adolf Hitler and to fork over Britain’s coal reserves to the United States in exchange for no American security guarantees, it might have approximated what Trump did to Zelensky. Whatever one might say about how Zelensky played his cards poorly — either by failing to behave with the degree of all-fours sycophancy that Trump demands or to maintain his composure in the face of JD Vance’s disingenuous provocations — this was a day of American infamy.
Where do we go from here?
If there’s one silver lining to this fiasco, it’s that Zelensky did not sign the agreement on Ukrainian minerals that was forced on him this month by Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary who’s the Tom Hagen character in this protection-racket administration. The United States is entitled to some kind of reward for helping Ukraine defend itself — and Ukraine’s destruction of much of Russia’s military might should top the list, followed by the innovation Ukraine demonstrated in pioneering revolutionary forms of low-cost drone warfare, which the Pentagon will be keen to emulate.
But if it’s a financial payback that the Trump administration seeks, the best place to get it is to seize, in collaboration with our European partners, Russia’s frozen assets and put them into an account by which Ukraine could pay for American-made arms. If the United States won’t do this, the Europeans should: Let the Ukrainians rely for their arms on Dassault, Saab, Rheinmetall, BAE Systems and other European defense contractors and see how that goes over with the “America First”-ers. Hopefully that could serve as another spur to Europeans to invest, as quickly and heavily as they can, in their depleted militaries, not simply to strengthen NATO but also to hedge against its end.
There is a second opportunity: While Trump’s abuse of Zelensky might delight the MAGA crowd, it isn’t likely to play well with most voters, including the almost 30 percent of Republicans who, even now, believe it’s in our interest to stand with Ukraine. And while most Americans may want to see the war in Ukraine end, they almost surely don’t want to see it end on Vladimir Putin’s terms.
Nor should the Trump administration. A Russian victory in Ukraine, including a cease-fire that allows Moscow to consolidate its gains and recoup its strength before the next assault, will have precisely the same effect as the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan: emboldening American enemies to behave more aggressively. Notice that, as Trump has ratcheted up pressure on Ukraine in recent weeks, Taiwan reported a surge in Chinese military drills around the island, while Chinese warships held live-fire exercises off the coast of Vietnam and came within 150 nautical miles of Sydney.
Those are points honorable conservatives should press: Can Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska — two Republicans who haven’t sold their souls on Ukraine — lead a delegation of like-minded conservatives to Kyiv?
More so, this should be an opportunity for Democrats. Joe Biden was right when he called this a “decisive decade” for the future of the free world; he just happened to be too feeble and cautious a messenger.
But there are tough-minded Democrats with military and security backgrounds — Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan come to mind — who can restore the spirit of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy to the Democratic Party. It’s a message of toughness and freedom they might also be able to sell to at least some Trump voters, who cast their ballots in November for the sake of a better America, not a greater Russia.
Still, there’s no getting around the fact that Friday was a dreadful day — dreadful for Ukraine, for the free world, for the legacy of an America that once stood for the principles of the Atlantic Charter.
Roosevelt and Reagan must be spinning in their graves, as are Churchill and Thatcher. It’s up to the rest of us to reclaim America’s honor from the gangsters who besmirched it in the White House.”
The perfidious crimes of an Absurd Clown, Russian agent, Nazi Revivalist, lunatic, idiot, and saboteur of democracy, our universal human rights and rights as citizens and co owners of the state, of our historic role as a guarantor of democracy globally and of American power, legitimacy, and hegemony.
In the Wilderness of Mirrors, is anything real and true? How would we know?
The figure of Our Clown of Terror and Rapist In Chief Traitor Trump confronts us with existential and ontological questions, ones with enormous real world consequences regarding who lives and who dies, who is human and who may be used as a thing for the profit of others, as conflicting visions of our future and of the nature of human being, meaning, and value collide in titanic struggle for power, wealth, and ideas of the Good and of public virtue; shall we be a free society of equals who are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s humanity and our parallel and interdependent universal human rights and rights as citizens, or masters and slaves, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege divided from slave castes by hierarchies and taxonomies of belonging and exclusionary otherness based on fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and enforced by systems of oppression as theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror, and by a police state of brutal repression of dissent, pervasive surveillance, and endemic propaganda and thought control, wherein all power is centralized to totalitarian authority wherein our uniqueness is obliterated and we become things and not human beings, subjects and not citizens, raw material for the power of others and consumed like Charlie Chaplin in The Factory by the great and terrible machine we serve.
Nothing but lies is trump, lies are the stuff of which he is made, and no true and real thing lives beyond the illusion. Hollow and without a soul or any human qualities is our Clown, but full of bottomless perversions, avarice, horrors, like the Party of Treason and Terror which he commands. A Lord of Misrule and a Mad King, whose mission is the subversion of democracy and abandonment of the ideas of equality, freedom, testable truths and impartial justice for all.
He is but the first of far more terrible tyrants to come, but he it was who broke democracy and began the Age of Tyrants.
As I wrote in my post of April 5 2023, With all the Lies Exposed and Let Out Of Him, Trump Becomes Nothing; A man made of lies means nothing; his words mean nothing, he means nothing, is nothing, can bear no witness or testimony, swear no binding oaths, pledge no loyalty, and we do not hear his words.
Today we witness in the defeated scowl of a pathetic loser and dishonorable traitor the realization of the truly damned that he is T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Man, without any redeeming human qualities, utterly worthless and alone for no one can trust or believe his words, and we should be horrified.
That a human being can become this empty thing, consumed by the demons he serves, is pitiable; but it must not compel our mercy.
To those who would enslave us and to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil we must give the only reply it merits; Never Again!
Nor does the Republican Party, captured by organized theocratic Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchal sexual terror and tyranny in the guise of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in 1980 and infiltrated by Nazi revivalists and Confederate KKK white supremacist terrorists resulting in the Fourth Reich of our Vichy America under the Trump regime elected through massive Russian propaganda and the dark money of oligarchs and Russian crime syndicates, have any ideology to offer other than submission to those who would enslave us.
As I wrote in my post of February 8 2023, The Limits of Fear and Lies: the Republican Party Has No Story to Tell Beyond These Instruments of Subjugation, Division, Tyranny and Terror, and the Wealth, Power, and Privilege of Hegemonic Elites It Represents and Enacts; The Republican Party is a political machine of amoral nihilism beneath the gilded mask of patriarchal Gideonite fundamentalist sexual terror and faith weaponized in service to power.
Though our money has been branded In God We Trust implying divine authorization of wealth, power, and privilege and legitimation of the hegemonic elites who monopolize them as apex predators and the asymmetrical and unequal hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness which our systems and institutions are designed to enforce and perpetuate, this does not make it true.
Coequal with patriarchy as systemic oppression is white supremacist terror; both are forces of authorized identity and subjugation to authority. Insidious, pervasive, and endemic in our civilization, these parallel and interdependent evils are among the legacies of our history from which we must emerge if we are to realize the dream of America as a free society of equals.
In the Republican rebuttal to Biden’s visionary and unifying State of the Union address, the vacuity and cruelty of the Republican Party and their organization of infiltration of the state and subversion of our values is exposed to all the world.
This way lies madness, ruin, tyranny and terror, the loss of meaningful citizenship and universal human rights especially of Black and other nonwhite peoples and of women’s rights of bodily autonomy as property of the state in subjugation to men; falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
No matter what marginalized others or precariat are the initial targets of unequal power, regardless of who you begin with in division and exclusion which is the Republican Party brand and with all fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Let us give to fascist tyranny and terror the only reply it merits; Never Again!
This is the future the Republicans would damn us to, and it remains the primary mission of any democratic society to prevent as institutional liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
Here in the Democratic Party’s State of the Union address and the Republican Party’s reply we have a chiaroscuro not of policies to achieve common goals as it should be, but of competing visions of who we are and wish to become.
Who do we want to become, we Americans, we humankind? Masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
Let us answer hate with love, division and exclusion with diversity and inclusion, fear with hope, and tyranny and terror with liberty and Resistance.
God Bless America; we’re really going to need it.
As I wrote in my post of January 31 2025, Trump Unfurls His Tongue of Lies; Trump unfurls his Tongue of Lies like a red carpet for celebrities of wickedness, marked with the sigil of the demon he worships and is possessed by; Moloch the Deceiver.
Pestilence comes forth wearing the zombie form of Robert F Kennedy Jr the Truly Awful, his brain eaten by a swarming mass of worms and bearing his Plague Doctor’s mask at the ready.
Here follows his comrade Civil War possessing the leering and drunken Christian Nationalist Pete Hegseth, dragging behind him the shadows of the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, patriarchy, and the Divine Right of Kings, bearing the Cross he wishes to nail us all to.
Famine appears as Tulsi Gabbard, Russian spy, collaborator in Assad’s regime of torture in Syria and in Putin’s atrocities of imperial conquest in Ukraine, whore of tyranny who seeks our ruin for the benefit of her evil paymasters, not to protect American interests and markets but to undermine and sell them off as we wither and become Hollow Men, gaunt and starving, consumed from within by the hunger and avarice which consumes them like the cannibal Wendigo while our enemies fatten as we die and become nothing, bearing a wizened apple doll like the picture of Dorian Gray as a sign of our future ruin and moral collapse and hissing serpentine curses like the figure of Hunger in the film Pan’s Labyrinth, a perfect allegory of the Trump regime.
Death of the state and nation of America arrives with the fanfare of trumpets as an all-conquering shadow of our darkness, fears and self-hatred and internalized oppression made manifest in the figure of the fake Jethro of questionable pronouns and tattooed eyeliner JD Vance, whose mission is the fall of the world order of democracy, the dismantling of the American state, and its replacement with a plutocracy of tyrant CEO’s wherein citizenship is meaningless and we are all slaves of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and white male privilege, bearing the manacles which symbolize terminal stage capitalism as it seeks to free itself of its host political system.
A parade of fools follows the Four Horsemen of Our American Apocalypse, each representing the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, their praises sung by the multi-headed beast of fascist propaganda led by X CEO Elon Musk and others yapping in chorus and jostling for position.
And last, crawling on his belly like a submissive dog, comes the husk of Rudy Giuliani, utterly vacuous and eaten from within by the demons he serves. Such is the fate of all who serve and are loyal to Traitor Trump, who serves and is loyal only to himself.
Truly, “Hell is empty and all the devils are here” as Ariel’s line in The Tempest goes, prancing and capering in their many guises.
In the audience the treasonous and dishonorable brutes of theocratic patriarchal sexual terror who voted for a Rapist In Chief that he may grant them permission for the same and of white supremacist terror who voted for a Nazi Revivalist that they may imagine themselves superior to anyone else in their wretchedness and degenerate villainy and enact genocide and slavery, both forms of power as subjugation and dehumanization of others born of fear and weaponized in service to the centralization of authority to a carceral state of force and control, hooting and champing and each bearing a sign and flaw of their subhuman degenerate nature, a tail or a horn, seize upon the prancing embodied lies with avarice and eat them up in the primary ritual of a Trump rally black mass.
Thus for an America and ideals of human being, meaning, and value rendered meaningless by misdirections and distortions of the truth, captured and lost in the myriad reflections, echoes, and false images of Trump’s funhouse mirrors of lies.
Lies are all Trump has; strip him of his Cloak of Illusions and Lies and his true nature as a monster and predator is revealed to the world.
This week Trump and his clown show caused a nationwide panic by defunding, deregulating, abolishing independent oversight, trying to force mass resignations of federal workers, and shutting down the government. Among the first side effects of the federal spending freeze was the medicare portal for payments going down which shut down our nation’s hospitals and healthcare system and the crash of a jet in Washington DC because no one in in the flight control tower or at the helm of the FAA. This is only the beginning of what a nation which abandons the institutions of state entirely looks like; the nation falls apart. And this is exactly what the Trump regime wants, as capital tries to free itself of its host political system.
We see you, enemies of democracy and humanity, and we will neither believe your lies not obey your commands.
And while our systems of oppression and unequal power are doomed and must inevitably collapse, our seizures of power and liberation struggle cannot be defeated while we disbelieve and disobey, refuse to submit and unite in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s rights as citizens and as human beinbgs.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As I wrote in my post of October 10 2024 Lies, Misdirections, and the Fog of War: the Information Front of the Climate Crisis and the Party of Treason’s War on Truth and Democracy; So wishful I was when I wrote these words on April 29 2019, Trumps Ten Thousand Lies; On this day we count ten thousand lies since Trump has taken office as President of the United States; obviously he is a pathological liar who is unable to tell the difference between truth and lies.
The sounds he makes are as meaningless as the squeals of a mindless gluttonous brute animal that he so resembles.
His words mean nothing; he also means nothing, and we do not hear him.
If only we like Ulysses beset by the sirens could stop our ears, and free ourselves from capture by the tide of lies unleashed upon us by Traitor Trump and his Fourth Reich minions which include the Republican Party.
But it is never simple, liberation struggle against systems of oppression and thought control, alternate realities, myriads of lies and illusions, phantasms of subjugation to authority and the weaponization of fear in service to power, and the legacies of history from which we must emerge if we are to become human, self created and self owned beings, glorious and Unconquered.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
We ourselves are the primary ground of struggle between tyranny and liberty, for what we choose to believe and how we judge the choices and stories offered to us determines our subjugation to authority or our liberation from it. And truths are ambiguous, ephemeral, relative, and constantly shifting and in processes of change, and can be Rashomon Gate Events which shatter time into myriads of possible futures.
We wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors, echoes and reflections which capture and distort like the images of ourselves in a funhouse mirror labyrinth, and the only guidance I can offer you is to ask; Whose story is this?
So it is with the disinformation campaign surrounding the twin hurricanes which have devastated Florida and the work of FEMA and other humanitarian aid workers in savings the lives of our citizens from a disaster unleashed by the greed for wealth and power of those who would enslave us.
Trump rambles witlessly before the world once again, displaying his freakish monstrosity as an idiot madman of delusions and perversions. For beneath the mask lies the demon whom he worships and to whom he would sacrifice America and us all; Moloch the Deceiver, Demon of Lies.
For an excellent interrogation of how tyranny operates through falsification, lies, illusions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, and conspiracy theories in our subjugation, enslavement, and the theft of the soul, see Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season one, episode 8; I, Robot…You, Jane. Crucial to the understanding of conspiracy theories is that Moloch, whose name means King, is claimed as the Big Bad of QAnon; the first principle of propaganda is deflection or to claim your enemies are doing whatever you actually are. The second is to assault the idea of truth itself by exaggerating claims to the point where belief becomes an act of perverted faith and a loyalty test.
For a brilliant fictionalization of how conspiracy theories work as falsification in the context of QAnon’s previous iteration, the Nazi blood libel against the Jews, read Umberto Eco’s magisterial novel The Prague Cemetery.
In disambiguating truth from lies, consider the source and who benefits. And remember always the First Rule of Resistance; everything the enemy says is a lie.
Of our history, memory, and identity there are those which must be kept, and those we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
As I wrote in my post of November 17 2020, Lies, Delusions, and the Subversion of Democracy: the Legacy of Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty; As our Clown of Terror’s Theatre of Cruelty prepares to surrender the keys to a kingdom which no longer open any doors and the lights begin to wink out one by one, I reflect on the legacy of the Stolen Election of 2016 and the illegitimate Trump Presidency which has so crippled America and devoured the hearts of her people as a disease of the spirit; lies, delusions, and the subversion of democracy.
Fascism, patriarchy, and the corrupt kleptocracy of a plutocratic and oligarchic regime of elites has been turned back with the dark tide of atavistic barbarism of hate and greed on which it is borne, and for now we the people have triumphed; but we must be vigilant lest it return.
Trump has been the most successful agent any foreign power has ever fielded against America, and he has damaged our ability to respond to threats more than any event in our history, exceeding even Pearl Harbor and 9-11. Yet like those who planned the attack on Pearl as a pre-emptive strike to render us powerless to oppose conquest and dominion, our enemies have underestimated the resilience of democratic institutions and the unconquerable will of a free and united people.
Let us celebrate our victory over fascism and the glorious defiance of authority by which we won; let us also give no opportunity nor moment of rest to the enemy, for he is always at the gate, testing our weaknesses and biding his time, and we must give him nothing to exploit.
As I wrote in my post of November 13 2020, The Trump Era: A Legacy of Shame, Amorality, Fear, Tyranny, Lies and Delusions, and Now We Are Become Ridiculous; Traitor Trump has already sabotaged America’s role as a guarantor of democracy and the universal rights of man, and with it any fig leaf of moral supremacy and our global hegemony of power and privilege which derives from it.
The Trump regime has been a parallel of the Salt Tax in India which brought down the British Empire; a delegitimizing event which exposes the amoral hollowness of our rapacious imperialism and any apologetics of power.
While I welcome the death of the American Empire of capitalist plunder and military colonialism, this unintended consequence of the Fourth Reich’s subversion of democracy does not offset the loss of our freedom, equality, and human rights.
Our Clown of Terror has long since made America a figure not of hope but of fear, not of liberty but of tyranny; now he has made us ridiculous as well.
As I wrote in my post of September 16 2020, A Wilderness of Mirrors: Lies, Illusions, and the Theft of the Soul; As truth becomes uncertain and malleable through the instruments of media and reduces everything to identitarian partisanship, as reality becomes a social consensus model authorized for us by others, as we wander in a wilderness of mirrors, distorted images as if in a funhouse which falsify and abstract us from ourselves in infinite reflections, of misdirects, lies, and illusions, we become colonized by these falsehoods and shaped to the uses of their puppetmasters and those who would enslave us. Thus do we become puppets of the thieves of souls.
And somewhere in the funhouse, a Clown of Terror laughs.
Among the most successful propaganda campaigns of this election season is the QAnon conspiracy narrative, a modern reformulation of the charges against the Jews during the Inquisition which were later repurposed by the Nazis. Of the many great works on this subject, I recommend beginning with a novel by Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery.
“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”; so argues Oscar Wilde in his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying, a Socratic dialogue in which he deconstructs Aristotle’s theory of mimesis, memory as the basis of identity, and also a critique of Marx’s historical determinism. In this he expanded Keat’s Idealism, “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not”, into an anarchist humanism embracing both political and personal spheres, in which self-creating autonomous individuals are the origin of all meaning and value.
As such Wilde prefigures Sartre and forms a link between Romantic Idealism and Existentialism; I digress to point this out because Wilde’s breaking of the Great Chain of Being and causality, from the Infinite to kings and priests and then to their subjects, levels hierarchy and social station, interrogates authorized truth, democratizes the ownership of ourselves, and seizes and reclaims our power of choice regarding bodily autonomy and identities of sex and gender.
In Oscar Wilde’s solution to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, reality and its imitation shape each other as a recursive process, circular and infinite; and between these mutual negative spaces which create one another like Escher’s Drawing Hands is a liminal interface, full of possibilities and transformative power. The nature and relativity of time, order as an emergent function of chaos, the polymorphism of identity, and the necessity of rebellion against authority which interposes itself between the free conscience and ideas of autonomous individuals and our direct relationship with the Infinite in order to enslave us; all these are major themes of Oscar Wilde; but what is important to us in the context of designed lies and illusions by authority in a political context is that he signals a way out of the maze of propaganda and control which enforces falsification and dehumanization, or simply put the theft of the soul by those who would enslave us.
If fictions can enslave us to the ideas of other people, our own fictions can also liberate us from them.
At its best, true art allows us to transcend the limits which ensnare and diminish us; to rise above the troughs of our social position and of exclusionary categories of otherness and divisions from each other and to see the true shape of our possibilities and the seas in which we must swim from the crests of its waves.
Art is revolutionary struggle which reconnects us and transforms human relationships, reveals new possibilities of becoming human together as yet undreamed, and with these functions of vision, self-ownership, transformation, and seizure of power becomes an instrument and process of Liberty.
Let us forge an art of being human which returns to us our true selves.
As I wrote in my post of August 3 2019, The Age of Lies and Illusions; We live in the funhouse of mirrors, images which reflect lies and illusions and which steal our souls through falsification. The truth is the frontline in the battle for freedom against tyranny and fascism, requiring new definitions of freedom in the age of digital propaganda and subversive disinformation targeting social media microcommunities.
Part of our vulnerability to influence messaging is its ability to disguise its source and masquerade as communication from friends; another dimension is the ease with which big data can be gathered and deployed against an electorate with precisely targeted messages, as for example Netflix benignly and brilliantly uses viewing habits to sort people into thousands of preference categories and suggest other shows they might enjoy. These first two vulnerabilities can be rendered harmless if we have the political will to do so; but what truly terrifies me is the context in which modern propaganda occurs, in an overwhelming and pervasive environment of lies.
Ours is a world in which Big Brother is not only watching, he wears the masks of our most trusted friends and lives in our pocket, following us everywhere, listening, reporting our location constantly, and sending our information home to whoever buys it. We have become commodities and resources as well as markets; we are the greatest frontier of our age, gold mines for oligarchs and tyrants.
Information is not only the best defense of democracy; it is also its greatest existential threat. How we balance these dual aspects of our freedom will determine the survival of freedom, and the possibilities of our future humanity.
As I wrote in my post of August 25 2020, Welcome to Bizarro World, Where Truth and Lies Change Places and All Our Values Are Reversed; The Republican Party held up a mirror to America in the figure of Trump at last night’s National Convention, and I’m hoping most of us didn’t like what we saw.
A funhouse mirror, filled with distorted images, a thing of surfaces without substance which offering a mirage of illusions, lies, and reflections into infinite regress of our atavisms of fear and hate, shadows which we drag behind us in our wake like an invisible reptilian tail, and which like the picture of Dorian Grey reveal our disfigured souls and our failures as Americans and as human beings.
It is an image designed to terrorize us into submission, and to steal our souls.
Among the freaks and monsters, the litanies of victimhood and retribution, of dominion, white supremacy, patriarchy, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil sung by the barkers and screaming johnnies who warmed up the main show, among all these and reigning over them like a ringmaster was the tyrant himself, Traitor Trump, spewing abominations and depravities as the puppet of the demons he worships, the lies of those who would enslave us.
Thanks for showing us what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
So for Traitor Trump, Rapist In Chief and Russian agent and puppet tyrant ruling a Vichy America by terror, and the treasonous and dishonorable criminals of white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror who voted for him in the hope that they too may commit crimes against humanity, violations of truth, justice, and the American Way, and the fracture and disruption of our institutions of democracy.
To all these enemies of the People I wish the ruin of their fortunes and their lives; may they come to nothing and be forgotten, may their bodies be all they possess as prisons of suffering for their soulless ghosts of memories and the humanity they have abandoned, for Republicans are zombies consumed by the demons they worship just as Trump is an empty husk and a puppet animated and inhabited by Moloch, Prince of Lies.
Trump is an illusion made of lies, but how is he constructed and how may we unmake him?
Herein I look to the historical process of his creation, like a Frankenstein’s Monster of deceptions, illusions, misdirects and conspiracy theories, and ultimately alternate realities wherein good and evil become meaningless or change sides and the subversion of democracy and its replacement by the Fourth Reich of tyranny and terror becomes possible.
This has unfolded in stages of mass derangement, the Rush Limbaugh era, the Fox news era of Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and Tucker Carlsen, and the Twitter-Musk era of social media which includes the transitional figure of Alex Jones with whom he is linked.
Exhibit One in the Museum of Future Holocausts; as I wrote in my post of February 18 2021, Death of a Monster: In Memory of Rush Limbaugh, Master Propagandist of Fascist Terror; Today we celebrate the death of a monster, master propagandist of fascist terror Rush Limbaugh, who with his partner Roger Ailes brought the methods of Goebbels and the ideology of Hitler into the modern American cultural context and political arena, creating a mass of radicalized voters which transformed and seized the Republican Party and America.
An independent and self-taught but brilliant, meticulous, and obsessive scholar of classical rhetoric and Nazi propaganda, whose radio broadcasts bear the marks of his studies and who may not have shared Trump’s habit as related by a former wife of keeping Hitler’s Mein Kampf on his bedstand where one might usually find a Bible, to read last before sleep and first upon awakening in hopes the master’s words might overwrite his soul, did share it as his primary source and reference. Rush Limbaugh created the model for the transformation of mass media from news to propaganda under the guise of entertainment.
Among the meandering labyrinth of its poisonous ramblings, Mein Kampf contains a clear and precise manual of propaganda, which together with his decades of study and explication of Nazi propaganda, the principles of Goebbels, and especially the example of Julius Streicher’s newspaper Der Stuermer, served as Rush Limbaugh’s university of hate and its ideology and methods.
He led the assault on truth, and as the principal architect of the Fourth Reich as an ideological union of Confederate and Nazi racists and white supremacist terrorists and Christian Identity Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs of sexual terror has authored a climate of fear and hate in submission to authority, advanced the cause of tyranny and the subversion of democracy, and caused incalculable harm; death, violence, and destruction.
He began not as a criminal mastermind of racism and misogyny, but as a young man who grew up in a typical conservative Southern Republican family and as a teenager with a radio license began crafting his humor of insults, nicknames, and storytelling through invented personalities, which became a profession when he was 22. From this beginning as a “shock jock” radio host throughout the seventies and several failed shows, then five years as a public
relations assistant, he returned to radio in 1983 and in 1984 was hired by a Sacramento station as a right wing commentator and talk show host, with instant success.
His satire, inventive skits, and wild monologues won national syndication, yet they were the result of a decade of self-reinvention modeled on the rhetoric and public personas of his heroes, George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, and Spiro Agnew.
Chosen by William F. Buckley as his successor and mentored by key ally Henry Kissinger, Limbaugh’s emergence as the voice of American conservatism and the Republican Party came in 1987, when Ronald Reagan abolished the FCC Fairness Doctrine to clear the way for his strategist of propaganda Roger Ailes’ market test of a new television station in The Rush Limbaugh Show. This soon became Fox Network, which formed the Echo Chamber with its news shows, its star Limbaugh, and the editorial column of the Wall Street Journal.
A sympathetic reading of Rush Limbaugh might interpret him as the protagonist in Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night; a man who became what he pretended to be. For myself, I am concerned in this case more with the consequences of evil than with its origins; more with actions than with motives.
There are two stellar works which contain critical analyses of Limbaugh, Rodger Streitmatter’s book Mightier than the Sword: How the News Media
Shaped American History, and Media, Culture, and the Religious Right, edited by Linda Kintz and Julia Lesage. His rhetorical techniques are investigated fully in Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment, by political communication scholars Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella.
Helene Megaard’s 2012 thesis for her Masters in Literature at the University of Oslo, The Rush Effect, is excellent; she argues that he is not a true propagandist as he does not conceal his goals, sources, identity, or the opposing side of issues; Goebbels would not approve. He does often use traditional techniques of name calling, stereotyping, and card-stacking, and modern ones including repetition, simplification of choices, reinforcement of existing bias, and the manufacture or release of tension.
Last night I celebrated the death of Rush Limbaugh with fireworks at eleven; for this breach of decorum I received the following criticism; “Never take pleasure in someone’s death. Hatred is killing this country.”
To this my answer was and must ever be; Provocateurs and apologists of racist and patriarchal hate crimes are enemies of humankind. Who denies the humanity of others merits none.
I hate no one. I find moral lepers such as Rush Limbaugh monstrous, defining the limits of the human, precisely because his incapacity for empathy with others places him beyond the boundaries, where any evil becomes possible. Such freaks of nature are pitiable figures, like Alberich in Wagner’s Ring, forever disconnected from humankind and from the ability to feel love.
Yes, hate is destructive to humankind; this is why it must be opposed with love, and the violence from which it is born with healing, though this does not mean failing to confront evil and pursue it to destruction. Any argument which seeks to discredit and steal our ability to resist evil and refuse to submit to authoritarian force and control, as the critic of my fireworks attempted in the use of a classic fascist apologetics of accusing the objection, must be recognized as specious and as an attack. This, too, merits nothing, and one must not engage them on this ground of their choosing.
Therefore celebrate with me the death of a monster, and the end of an existential threat.
As to the judgement of history, we may say of Rush Limbaugh what was said of his model Julius Streicher by the prosecution at his trial in Nuremberg, “that while Streicher was not directly involved in the physical commission of these deadly crimes against humanity, his crime is no less worse for that reason…. It was to the task of educating and poisoning the people with hate, and of producing murderers, that Streicher set himself. For 25 years, he continued unrelentingly the perversion of the people and youth of Germany. He went on and on as he saw the results of his work bearing fruit. In the early days, he was preaching persecution. As persecution took place, he preached extermination and annihilation and, as millions of Jews were exterminated and annihilated in the Ghettos of the East, he cried out for more and more.
“The crime of Streicher is that he made these crimes possible, which they would never have been had it not been for him and for those like him. In its extent Streicher’s crime is probably greater and more far-reaching than that of any of the other defendants. The misery which they caused ceased with their capture. The effects of this man’s crime, of the poison that he has put into the minds of millions of young boys and girls goes on, for he concentrated upon the youth and childhood of Germany. He leaves behind him a legacy of almost a whole people poisoned with hate, sadism, and murder, and perverted by him. That people will remain a problem and perhaps a menace to the rest of civilization for generations to come.”
Exhibit the Second as I wrote in my post of April 28 2023, Tucker Carlson, Voice of the Fourth Reich and Nazi Ideology in the Era of Traitor Trump, Is Disavowed by Fox and Now Free to Run For the Presidency; Rupert Murdoch, our current version of William Randolph Hearst in wagging the dog, has fired and disavowed his star apologist of fascism, white supremacist terror and Gideonite patriarchal sexual terror, after his many years of loyal service to our enslavement. Tucker Carlson is now free to replace Traitor Trump, the clown he cheer led and served as barker for his show, or to act without restraint in helping him recapture the state for a second term.
Go us? The deplatforming of Tucker Carlson is a partial victory, which leaves our enemies free to pursue our destruction.
Fox News is a hostile intelligence service of the Fourth Reich, designed for the mission of subversion of democracy.
What is to be done? as Lenin asked in the essay which started the Russian Revolution.
As I wrote in my post of March 15 2019, Evildoer of the Week Tucker Carlson; Watch Samantha’s Bee’s takedown of racist, misogynist Tucker Carlson. Revile him not because he is a loathsome slave of the devil, but because his hate speech motivates unspeakable crimes.
Tucker Carlson is a remora servicing a shark as its garbage scavenger, a funhouse mirror reflection of his secret twin Alex Jones and a distant echo of his direct model Rush Limbaugh.
What is the nature of this interdependence and symbiosis of Nazi ideology and the Republican Party, of hate and power, lies and subjugation?
And what of Roger Ailes, creator of Fox News as a propaganda venue for the Fourth Reich, whose torch Rupert Murdoch bears forward?
As I wrote in my post of December 14 2019, Fox News, Roger Ailes, & a model for patriarchy as tyranny and terror; What is interesting to me is not the personal venality of Roger Ailes as a de facto cult leader, but in Fox News as a model of patriarchy as tyranny and terror. Fox News is important as a private propaganda arm of Traitor Trump and the cabal of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, white supremacist terrorists, and their Russian paymasters and amoral plutocrats willing to capture ephemeral and very temporary wealth and power as the world is destroyed by their greed.
Of course the ultimate goal of Fox News and the Party of Treason remains the fall of democracy and western civilization globally, and the subversion of America’s values; liberty, equality, truth, and justice. And in the example case of Roger Ailes and Fox News, we may find an instructive model of what the world would look like if the Patriarchy achieves these objectives and seizes control.
Here is the nightmare alternate reality of The Handmaid’s Tale in operation now within our democracy, metastasizing until it consumes its host civilization. That Fox News operates in near identical fashion to Stalin’s regime of lies should surprise no one; that we allow an open enemy of freedom to conduct operations against America without restrictions or the shadow of the hangman’s noose surprises me continually.
In the words of Alisyn Camerota, writing in Vanity Fair; “As the credits rolled at a recent screening of Bombshell, out today, several of us former Fox News Channel staffers were left reeling. Watching John Lithgow’s spot-on performance as Roger Ailes, the Fox chairman and CEO who was ousted amid a sexual harassment investigation, had a PTSD-inducing effect, transporting us back to the years we spent under the control of the all-powerful leader. Even the audience members who had never set foot inside Fox seemed shaken by the scenes of what some women endured in Roger’s office. I know that office. I was summoned there many times. And I can attest to the bizarre, parallel-universe experience of being alone with Roger Ailes.”
“But what the movie mostly brought back for me was that Roger’s sexual harassment was only the beginning of his manipulation and mind games. Roger Ailes always reminded me of a different omnipotent, fear-inducing wizard, one who maintained control over a kingdom of nervous minions through smoke, mirrors, endless corridors, and devastating demands.”
“It’s interesting; from the outside, the people we believe to be omnipotent seem invincible. But having met a few of them up close, I’ve learned that maintaining their masquerade requires a huge suspension of disbelief from those around them. There’s nothing quite like a finale with a big reveal. Roger always appreciated that TV trope—and he got one. It was Gretchen Carlson, then Megyn Kelly, and many other women harnessing their own power who ultimately pulled back the curtain and brought him down. Once the spell is broken and the truth revealed, wizards can fall surprisingly fast. “
As written by Adam Gabbatt in The Guardian, in an article entitled Tucker Carlson leaves a toxic legacy at Fox News. What’s next?; “Tucker Carlson, the far-right TV host whose embrace of racist conspiracy theories came to signify a shift further towards the right at Fox News, leaves behind a legacy of mainstreaming extremism after exiting the channel, and speculation is turning to any next step in an incendiary career.
The departure of Carlson, Fox News’ most-watched and highest-profile host, came as a shock. It is the second seismic moment at the news channel in a matter of days, after Fox News agreed to pay a $787.5m settlement to Dominion Voting Systems last week after airing election conspiracy theories.
Fox News announced the split in a terse statement on Monday, stating that the channel and Carlson had “agreed to part ways”. But the pithiness of the statement barely hinted at the dubious repercussions of Carlson’s seven-year tenure as a regular host: a spell in which he seemed to grow into a force that Fox News wouldn’t, or couldn’t, control.
“Tucker Carlson basically leaves a superhighway to the rightwing fever swamps,” said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, an organization that monitors rightwing media.
“Tucker took things from what otherwise would have been considered the fringes: Infowars [a far-right conspiracy theory website], these white nationalist communities online, he took that content and laundered it into the Fox News ecosystem, and basically built up an appetite for this amongst the Fox News audience.
“And once they sort of got a taste for blood, that’s all they wanted. That’s going to be a challenge for Fox moving forward, but what’s his legacy? His legacy is bloodthirstiness and bigotry.”
Carlson’s eponymous show, which aired at 8pm ET, averaged more than 3 million viewers a night, and was generally the most watched cable news program.
The 53-year-old might have been an unlikely hero to Fox News’ coastal-elite loathing audience. A multimillionaire who was privately educated in California, Switzerland and the Waspy environs of New England, Carlson hosted most of his shows from a specially built studio in Maine, where he spends much of the year (he also has a home in Florida).
Yet night after night, millions tuned in to watch Carlson’s furious, reddening face, under a neatly parted, country club hairstyle, as he fed viewers a daily dose of fury and victimhood and painted a dystopian picture of America.
Among Carlson’s most passionately pursued topics was the idea – contrary to all able evidence – that white people were being persecuted in the US.
Across his tenure at Fox News, Carlson pushed the concept of the great replacement theory – which states that a range of liberals, Democrats and Jewish people are working to replace white voters in western countries with people of color, in an effort to achieve political aims – in more than 400 of his shows, a New York Times analysis found.
“No singular voice in rightwing media has done more to elevate this racist conspiracy theory than Tucker,” Joy Reid, a MSNBC host, said in 2022, and his peddling of the claim brought multiple calls for him to be fired across the years, all of which Fox News ignored.
“Carlson positioned himself as the voice of the Maga base of the party and really leaned into the kinds of conspiracy theories, the white nationalist ideas that he thought would appeal to that base,” said Nicole Hemmer, a political historian at Vanderbilt University and author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.
“He really was able to give a voice to this kind of grievance that Donald Trump was so good at tapping into. It was Tucker Carlson who was out there saying: ‘They’re coming for you, white people.’”
Fox News gave no indication as to the reason for splitting with Carlson, but on Monday the Los Angeles Times reported that Rupert Murdoch, the omnipotent chairman of Fox Corporation – the parent company of Fox News – had forced Carlson out of the news channel in relation to a looming discrimination lawsuit.
Another thing that may not have helped were the embarrassing disclosures of Carlson’s text messages and emails, published as part of the Dominion lawsuit. Those messages revealed that privately Carlson held very different views from those he espoused on air, including about Donald Trump.
“I hate him passionately,” Carlson said of the former president, describing Trump’s behavior in the weeks following the 2020 election as “disgusting”.
In another text, Carlson said of “the last four years” under Trump: “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”
It is difficult to say what comes next for Carlson. Newsmax and One America News Network, two other rightwing cable news channels, could be possible homes, but they have a much smaller audience, and would probably be unable to match Fox News’ salary.
“I don’t think he goes to a competing cable network,” Carusone said.
“He’s too sensitive to ratings and that would be an embarrassment – they could never match the ratings, they could never give him the reach.”
One thing that is likely, however, is that Carlson “attacks Fox”, Carusone said.
“He wasn’t shy about attacking his colleagues and management when he was at a company – he’s certainly not going to be shy about attacking them now,” Carusone said.
The idea of an aggressive response is “tightly tied into his brand”, Carusone said “And he’s also just a venomous, spiteful guy, so the reflex will be to take a shot.”
Carlson’s unexpected departure meant he had no opportunity to say goodbye to his viewers. On Friday, in what turned out to be his last show, he had once more voiced that issue which is so close to his heart: the great replacement theory.
“The defining strategic insight of the modern Democratic party is they don’t really need to convince anyone of anything,” Carlson said in his monologue on Friday’s show.
“What matters is demographics. To import enough people from elsewhere, people who are financially dependent on you in order to live.”
Perhaps Carlson can take some comfort in knowing that his persona on Fox died as he lived: sitting in a TV studio, looking upset, and pushing a racist conspiracy theory to an increasingly rabid rightwing audience.”
As written by Matt Shuham and Christopher Mathias in Huffpost, in an article entitled Tucker Carlson Brought TV Racism Into The 21st Century; “
The sudden departure of cable’s top news host shocked the country. But his legacy won’t disappear so quickly; “Monday brought the news that Tucker Carlson and Fox News “have agreed to part ways,” according to a statement from the network. The surprise announcement that cable news’ top-rated host was unceremoniously and suddenly dumped sent shock waves through media and political circles. The decision was so sudden that Fox News doesn’t have a replacement lined up, and will instead use a cycle of rotating hosts until they determine what’s next for the critical 8 p.m. hour.
Regardless of who takes over, Carlson has already changed the network — and the country. For years, he used his cable news platform not only to broadcast racist conspiracy theories, but to bring televised racism into the 21st century.
Carlson beat a pathway from far-right corners of the internet into millions of Americans’ living rooms, laying the groundwork for Donald Trump and dozens of other high-profile Republicans to seize on racial grievance as an animating issue for voters.
He’d occasionally aired his repellent views before reaching Fox News. During the George W. Bush administration, when he was employed at MSNBC, Carlson vilified Iraqi citizens, claiming during a radio appearance that they “don’t use toilet paper or forks.” Iraq is “filled with a bunch of semiliterate primitive monkeys,” he said in 2008.
But once he took the main chair for Fox’s 8 p.m. hour, Carlson fired with both barrels. He used his prime-time slot to deliver talking points that were manufactured on the internet’s most noxious message boards and websites, normalizing them for a nightly audience of millions. Carlson’s message sounds familiar at this point because of its dominance in politics: America’s liberal elite, he spent years alleging, is destroying the country by subverting white people’s place atop the U.S. political hierarchy.
“Let me just state, unequivocally, the country’s being stolen from American citizens as we watch,” he said in 2021, during a discussion of undocumented immigrants in the United States. The liberal watchdog group Media Matters has kept an ongoing tally of such racist one-liners. It runs to dozens of pages.
To justify his apocalyptic language, Carlson frequently framed political debates as civilizational struggles. The Black Lives Matter movement, which led racial justice protests around the country in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, was actually “a totalitarian political movement, and someone needs to save the country from it.” Where could Americans turn to preserve their free speech rights, which were supposedly in mortal peril? “Only Republicans can save us,” Carlson said.
On the other side of the debate, according to Carlson, was nothing less than widespread violence ― the emasculation of his viewership. People taking a critical view of Christopher Columbus, Carlson argued, were actually telling Americans: “You don’t have the right to defend yourself against our assaults. You don’t have the moral legitimacy to defend your own country.” The jury that found police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of murdering Floyd, Carlson said, was actually pleading with Black Lives Matter protesters: “Please don’t hurt us!” Black Lives Matter itself, he said, is “poison.”
Perhaps Carlson’s most notable contribution to 21st-century racism came from his pioneering work amplifying the so-called “Great Replacement” theory ― the idea that Democrats support greater immigration levels and lax border enforcement because they are trying to replace white American voters with voters of other races, who would supposedly be more likely to vote for Democrats.
The racist conspiracy theory takes as a given that certain immigrants inherently hold certain political beliefs, and that America’s political fate should rightfully be determined by white people.
“I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World,” Carlson said in April 2021. “But … let’s just say it: That’s true.”
America’s most prominent white supremacists were overjoyed at Carlson’s support for their favorite theory. “This week Tucker redpilled 4 million people and there’s nothing liberals can do about it,” Nick Fuentes, the Adolf Hitler-loving leader of the “America First” movement, tweeted at the time. (In modern fascist parlance, being “redpilled” means adopting a white supremacist worldview.)
VDARE, a far-right website that frequently trafficks in similar theories, was also thrilled. “This segment is one of the best things Fox News has ever aired and was filled with ideas and talking points VDARE.com pioneered many years ago,” the website’s account tweeted. “You should watch the whole thing.”
Steve Sailer, a VDARE writer, saw Carlson’s monologue as a significant step in widening the “Overton Window” — a term for the range of acceptable mainstream political discussion — to include white supremacist beliefs. “Tucker’s Overton Window-Smashing Broadside: ‘The Truth About Demographic Change’” was the headline of an article Sailer published on VDARE.
Carlson ultimately promoted the Great Replacement concept in more than 400 episodes of his show, a wide-ranging New York Times analysis found. He has accused Mexico and other Latin American countries of “forcing demographic change” and “packing the electorate” in order to interfere in U.S. elections. The United States, Carlson has maintained for years, is not simply welcoming immigrants into its borders, but rather experiencing an “invasion” of enemies of the state that will lead to the country’s destruction.
Just as the Great Replacement theory got a thorough airing on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” it has also featured prominently in the genocidal screeds of various white mass shooters ― including those written by the Christchurch shooter, who killed 51 Muslims in two mosques in New Zealand, and the El Paso shooter, who killed 22 Hispanic people in a Texas Walmart.
Last year, another white supremacist, who’d written his own screed about the Great Replacement theory, opened fire at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, killing 10 Black people. Afterward, Carlson briefly attempted to distance himself from the concept he’d spent so much time promoting, saying that “we’re still not sure exactly what it is.”
But within a couple of months, an indignant Carlson was back to explicitly promoting the racist theory on air, declaring: “The great replacement? Yeah, it’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s [Democrats’] electoral strategy.”
On Monday, the same day news broke of Carlson’s ouster at Fox News, jury selection began in the trial of another Great Replacement enthusiast ― Robert Bowers, the white supremacist facing dozens of federal charges over the October 2018 killings of 11 Jewish people in a Pittsburgh synagogue.
Bowers allegedly carried out the massacre due to his belief in the conspiracy theory that Jews were helping fund a caravan of Latino migrants coming into the country. Fox News, and Carlson in particular, had spent weeks whipping up fear over the migrant caravan, repeatedly calling it an “invasion.”
“I have noticed a change in people saying ‘illegals’ that now say ’invaders,” Bowers wrote in a social media post shortly before the shooting. “I like this.”
Days earlier, Carlson had referred to the migrants as “invaders” on his program.
Tucker’s White Nationalist Writing Rooms
Carlson was never content just to receive praise from racists. He frequently hired them to write and produce his programs.
In 2020, Blake Neff, Carlson’s most senior writer — who once boasted that “anything [Carlson is] reading off the teleprompter, the first draft was written by me” — was fired after CNN received an anonymous tip that Neff had been posting virulently racist comments online under a pseudonym. “Black doods staying inside playing Call of Duty is probably one of the biggest factors keeping crime down,” Neff once wrote.
In 2021, Carlson tapped Scooter Downey as a writer for his Fox Nation “documentary” about the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Downey’s résumé included directing two films for well-known white nationalists. He directed “Crossfire,” starring Lauren Southern, the white nationalist best known for taking part in a mission to stop boats from saving desperate refugees stranded in the Mediterranean Sea.
Downey also directed a film based on a book written by Theodore Robert Beale, aka Vox Day, a white nationalist who once wrote that “Western civilization” is dependent upon “white tribalism, white separatism, and especially white Christian masculine rule.”
When Downey directed Carlson’s documentary about Jan. 6, “Patriot Purge,” he made two white nationalists into the film’s protagonists. Richard Barnett, a self-described white nationalist who was photographed sitting in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office during the attack on the Capitol, his feet propped up on a desk, was given a sympathetic platform. “I’m absolutely a political prisoner,” he told Carlson.
And conspiracy theorist Darren Beattie — a former speechwriter for Trump who was pushed out of the White House after speaking at a white supremacist event — was given plenty of air time to push baseless allegations that the insurrection was orchestrated by the FBI as a pretext for mass arrests of Trump supporters.
As The New York Times’ analysis of years of his show found, Carlson’s discussions of the “Deep State,” whose bidding was notionally carried out by the FBI and other armed agents and nongovernmental groups, usually came down to two words: “they” and “you.” Carlson shaped his racism as an indictment of America’s power-hungry liberal elite, who, he tried to convince his audience, were hellbent on policing speech and destroying the country.
“Shut up and obey!” Carlson often said, in a send-up of his audience’s supposedly tyrannical cultural and political leaders.
What could his viewers do in response? Aside from supporting Republicans, Carlson offered few answers. He focused instead on constantly reminding his audience of the impending civilizational struggle.
For that seemingly inevitable outcome, though, he did have an answer ― one he invoked after news broke last month of Trump’s indictment on criminal charges.
“Probably not the best time to give up your AR-15,” Carlson said then. “And I think most people know that.”
In the final exhibit we have my post of December 12 2023, Elon Musk, Alex Jones, and the Apologetics of Fascist Power; In the notorious fascist soapbox once known as Twitter, a primary instrument of Traitor Trump’s subversion of democracy in the Stolen Election of 2016, we have hate speech masquerading as free speech, as well as a Fourth Reich propaganda factory spinning endless lies, misdirects, and falsification designed to capture the idea of the truth as a pillar of democracy.
In this it is sadly far from alone, though we must recognize it as an enemy instrument of war and act accordingly in purging it from our nation and from all those who love liberty.
When its owner Elon Musk, in his mad quest to transform America into an image of the Apartheid State of South Africa, admitted the Russian agent, crime lord of a sex trafficking syndicate operating under the guise of a modeling and beauty pageant network and known Epstein associate, and figurehead of the Fourth Reich Donald Trump, I and many other loyal Americans and antifascists quit Twitter.
Recent actions by Musk, in collaboration with Tucker Carlsen, to reinstate the grotesque purveyor of cruelties Alex Jones, who tormented the families of victims of gun violence with unspeakable savagery, calls for more than this in reply.
But first, what has happened?
As written by Miles Klee in Rolling Stone, in an article entitled The Curious Alliance of Alex Jones and Elon Musk: The latest right-wing ideologue to have a ban lifted by X (formerly Twitter) spent months alternately flattering and needling its mercurial owner; “WHEN INFAMOUS CONSPIRACY theorist Alex Jones recorded a video last week saying he hoped Elon Musk would watch an interview he gave to Tucker Carlson, it was clear what he wanted most of all: a comeback.
“Elon Musk says he’s a free-speech absolutist, but still hasn’t let me back on Twitter with my own channel,” Jones said, putting the owner of the site now branded as X in something a bind. Either reinstate the account of a man whose name is practically synonymous with extremist misinformation, or accept the wrath of Jones’ many far-right allies, who bombarded Musk with demands that Jones be allowed on the platform again. It certainly didn’t help that Musk had, a year previously, vowed to maintain Jones’ 2018 permanent ban, saying the InfoWars host’s false claims about the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting being a hoax (which resulted in $1.5 billion in legal judgments against him for the victims’ families) were beyond the pale. (Jones was actually suspended for harassing CNN journalist Oliver Darcy on Capitol Hill in a live Periscope video.)
Musk took the path of least resistance and responsibility, outsourcing the matter to his followers — or, more accurately, to an increasingly far-right X user base almost certain to approve of Jones’ return. Nearly 2 million accounts voted, with more than 70 percent in favor of reinstatement. Musk dutifully complied, just as he had following a similar poll about reinstating Donald Trump last year. (Trump has only tweeted once since, in August, to share the mug shot from his booking at an Atlanta jail on felony charges related to attempts to overturn the 2020 election, instead opting to post on his own platform, Truth Social.)
But the lifting of Trump’s ban more than a year ago amid an early wave of “amnesty” for right-wing misinformation peddlers and extremists — including outright Nazis — came under very different circumstances than the move to unmuzzle Jones. In November 2022, Musk had only just begun his supposed free-speech crusade and wanted to persuade conservatives, who had long blasted Twitter as biased against them, that the site would become politically neutral. Giving Trump a pass, despite the former president’s violations of platform guidelines and attacks on Musk himself, seemed like an effort to simultaneously pander to MAGA world and reap the massive engagement that a singular figure like Trump had historically brought to his once-favorite app.
Meanwhile, the promise to keep Jones in exile made it look as if Musk were carefully considering each executive pardon. But the hard-right element he had started courting was never going to stop with Trump — who never resumed his unhinged tweeting anyway. In articles at the time, Jones’ InfoWars even seized on the reversal of Trump’s suspension to argue that it was hypocritical to deny the radio host’s reinstatement given the Trump decision; Jones himself grumbled a good deal about how Musk could “bring freedom back to the web” and kick off a “human renaissance” — though, of course, not if he continued to stubbornly refuse entreaties to reactivate Jones’ account.
This became the blueprint for a distant relationship between the two, all the way up through the message Jones delivered to Musk ahead of the Carlson interview: Jones continued to flatter Musk as a potential savior of free expression while insinuating that the billionaire was nothing more than a puppet of the globalist cabal if he didn’t hand Jones a powerful megaphone.
That Musk, in Jones’ view, might prove a kind of establishment coward did not appear to be a novel attitude. In a 2018 interview for the YouTube series Valuetainment, as Jones faced the removal of his content from several major tech platforms, he did a round of word association in which the host listed public figures, asking him to relay the first impression that popped into his head. Jones responded “patriot” to a mention of Sen. Ted Cruz, and used an ableist slur to describe LeBron James and Colin Kaepernick. When he heard the name “Elon Musk,” paused a second before answering, “scared man.”
Some of Jones’ ideas clearly clash with Musk’s — he has ranted, for example, that electric vehicles are “the biggest energy guzzlers.” Prior to Musk’s Twitter takeover, an InfoWars contributor went so far as to publish a 2021 video called “Elon Musk Exposed,” calling him a “fraud” and a “fake genius.” While subsequent coverage showed an appreciation for Musk’s increasing hostility toward liberals and leftists in his conservative conspiracism, the outlet nonetheless made room for columns that struck a more skeptical tone (like the May 2022 column “Elon Musk Is Not the Free Speech Superhero We’d Like Him To Be“) and tied him to moral panics. In November 2022, InfoWars questioned the possibly Satanic significance of Musk’s Halloween costume (he seemed to be dressed as a samurai, of sorts), also noting his role at the forefront of “transhumanist technology,” something Jones has condemned as a precursor to “humanity’s destruction.”
That same month, Jones himself took aim at Musk as mass layoffs led to speculation about Twitter’s demise. “He hit the panic button and basically came out and attacked me so that he can get the left off of his back,” Jones complained. “It’s fine to me that he did that, except he went too far and compared himself to Jesus” by using a Bible quote, he said. “If Elon loves to quote Christ so much, in between dressing up like Satan, he should quote Christ’s most famous quote: ‘Let he without sin cast the first stone.’”
The stage was set for the long game: Musk drew praise from Jones and InfoWars whenever he triggered the libs, but also the occasional reminder that he had not proven himself a committed ally to their movement. Over the course of 2023, as Musk’s erratic behavior, dabbling in harmful misinformation, and squabbles with anti-extremism watchdogs led to an advertiser exodus from Twitter, he began to sound more radicalized and in closer alignment with Jones’ brand of blustery defiance, telling departed brands at a conference event in November, “Go fuck yourself.”
In that context, Musk had less to lose by submitting to this latest pressure campaign to bring Jones back. Ad revenue had already cratered, so what’s the downside of platforming a dangerous radical known to call for violence? Following Jones’ return, in an X Spaces chat on Sunday (featuring reactionaries Andrew Tate, Vivek Ramaswamy, Jack Posobiec, Laura Loomer, Rep. Matt Gaetz, and Michael Flynn), Jones and Musk acted as if any past friction between them had all been a misunderstanding. Musk at one point asked Jones to clarify what had happened during “the Sandy Hook thing” (Musk said that “denying the murders of children” is “not cool”), with Jones referring to him in groveling tones as “sir” and falsely claiming that he had just covered the conspiracy theories about the shooting that other people had put forward. Musk evidently took the explanation at face value.
After digging himself into a hole with his constant proclamations of X as a no-holds-barred public square, he may not have had much of a choice. Musk actually admitted that Jones would be “bad for X financially” but stuck to the same rhetoric, piously tweeting that “principles matter more than money.” He can therefore bask in (momentary) adulation from the far right for abandoning his earlier-stated principles. Jones, a man given to railing against “elites,” is subverting his own to heap gratitude upon the richest man alive — this despite the fact that his online footprint remains much smaller than it was before the flurry of bans he received across all his channels in 2018.
Caught in this weird embrace, the duo may have yet stranger days ahead as both strain for influence over online discourse ahead of an election year. And while Musk could theoretically rein Jones in for bad behavior, any discipline would spark enormous backlash from his political cohort — and besides, he has proven susceptible to exactly the kind of outlandish propaganda Jones dishes out. Musk may believe he runs this circus, but when it comes to the command of spectacle, Jones often has the upper hand.”
Who is Elon Musk? Why is he trying to reproduce in America the Apartheid regime of South Africa where his fortune originates?
As I wrote in my post of December 16 2022, Hate Speech is Not Free Speech: the Case of Elon Musk’s Twitter; Mesmerized as by the blinkless predator stare of a cobra or its echo in the Kubrick gaze of Jenna Ortega’s character of Wednesday, we have witnessed the spectacle of violation and degradation of a beloved social media platform by an amoral plutocrat who purchased it to leverage Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, into the White House once more, for the purpose of the subversion of democracy and the Fall of America to a regime of tyranny, and has relentlessly and with feral viciousness promoted white supremacist and antisemitic terrorists and fascist propagandists and marginalized and silenced dissent, impartial investigative journalism, and voices from the center of traditional democracy and its values of liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
Hate speech is not free speech, and merits no quarter. To fascism we must give the only reply it merits; Never Again!
In all of the absurd madness of conspiracy theories, alternate realities, rewritten histories, lies and illusions, propaganda and thought control, and the commodification of humankind by big data and pervasive surveillance, and with the examples of monsters of depravity and paranoid fantasy such as Traitor Trump, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Rupert Murdoch, and Elon Musk, of fascist propaganda mills like Fox News and now sadly Twitter weaponized in service to power and the repression of dissent, let us study closely a great truth which now stands revealed on the stage of history; the Fifth Estate has now replaced the institutions of politics as the shaping force whereby we choose how to be human together.
Its been a long process, the fall of democracy; I’m tempted to say it began with Hearst and his 1898 false story of the bombing of an American ship in Cuba as the pretext for the Spanish-American War and our conquest of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines as we built our empire on the carcass of Imperial Spain’s; but the historical forces involved are ambiguous and complex. And the mighty have always sought to keep the slaves at their work creating the wealth they enjoy through lies as well as force; lies are cheaper than armies.
As the marvelous and prophetic film Wag the Dog tells us, he who tells the story shapes the response. And we must be very careful who we allow to write our history, and who makes the rules by which it is written, for journalism is a sacred calling to pursue the truth, and electoral democracy requires truths free from the influence of power.
As Lenin asked in the essay that began the Russian Revolution; “What is to be done?”
If we do not seize and nationalize Twitter and any media platform of hate crime or fascist propaganda as a public good owned by us all, and purge our media and our society utterly of the speech, we must enact and enforce fair rules of play which ensure no one’s speech harms another, either as individuals or as a class of persons.
To create an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
As I wrote in my post of January 12 2025, Behold Der Erlkonig, The Troll King Elon Musk; Behold Der Erlkonig, the Troll King Elon Musk, apologist of fascist tyranny and terror and plutocrat who recently purchased the American state with the election of Traitor Trump to a second term, possibly the last free election in our history, who now intervenes in Europe to secure Nazi revivalism and the imperial Fourth Reich.
We have seen his kind before, in kingpins of propaganda like Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, William Randolph Hearst, and Goebbels, and in apologists of fascism like Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh, and Julius Streicher.
Such monsters wait their chance to steal our souls, spinning webs of deceits, lies and illusions, alternate realities of delusion and falsification, with siren songs of power and security, belonging and purpose, to subjugate and ensnare us in service to their own power. We wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors, grotesque and distorted images of ourselves as in a labyrinth of funhouse mirrors. And once we surrender ourselves to those who claim to speak and act in our name, it is very hard to reclaim our true image.
There is a simple prescription to free us from falsification and the effects of pervasive propaganda and thought control; Question Authority. Practice the arts of Disbelief and Disobedience, for the great secret of power is that it is hollow and brittle without legitimacy, and crumbles like a palace of illusions when met with Disbelief and Disobedience. Question and test all claims of fact, and demand proof from authorities who wish us to take them at their word, for there is no just authority.
Practice the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Lost in Trump’s Funhouse of Lies: Jacob’s Ladder (1990) – Official Trailer
Trump’s regime: Pan’s Labyrinth trailer
Trump Delivers Gloating, Grievance-Filled Speech Hours After Sending Economy Reeling
Our Supreme Court a year ago today ignored the question of Trump’s treason and insurrection, and instead ruled that states cannot bar him from the ballot in a federal election on the basis of being an insurrectionist. As they well know, this moved him a step closer to the Presidency.
Among the many flaws in our system which must be changed as Trump has demonstrated to us all include our method of choosing a President, in which we must abolish the electoral college and adopt one citizen one vote national elections without regard to state of residency, wherein all citizens are equal in the power of their vote, and term limits for the Supreme Court to the term of the appointing President, which would recognize its political nature. Aberrant and disgusting as Trump is, he has been useful in exposing weaknesses in our democracy.
The time is now past for disqualifying Traitor Trump from office on the basis of his treason and foreign espionage, for his deplorables have elected him once again as our President and the Age of Tyrants may have already begun. His regime of destruction of the American state and the subversion of democracy must be met on its own terms and ground of struggle, in the unknown places beyond all laws and all limits marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value. I have lived in such places, among the dragons of the unknown and the monsters which define the limits of the human, for forty three years now, and it can be done, if when confronted by those who play by no rules but their own we do the same. As my father taught me, never play someone else’s game or by someone else’s rules.
In Syria we proved that the enemy can be defeated, for the bogeyman of Russian invincibility is an illusion, and so is the inevitability of the Fall of America and our global civilization before the onslaught of the Fourth Reich and Russia’s star agent Traitor Trump. The darkness is not an unstoppable wave; we have defeated the Fourth Reich twice before, in the 2020 Biden election and Restoration of America and in the surrender of the Triumvirs Trump, Barr, and Wolf in declaring New York, Seattle, and Portland to be Autonomous Zones under control by the people and not the state; we Antifascists being the only force to have defeated the federal government of the United States in open battle on its own ground since Little Bighorn.
We can take America back exactly the same way, by coordinating electoral and legislative action for the Restoration of America with mass action as in the Black Lives Matter protests which seized over fifty American cities for several months and birthed the Autonomous Zones.
Now we must reimagine, transform, and bring meaningful change to our institutions, systems, and structures, and to the praxis of our values and ideals in a rapidly changing threat environment, to envision ourselves anew as a free society of equals and work together in solidarity to make it real.
As I wrote in my post of January 9 2022, How Shall We Answer Treason?; Disloyalty and the betrayal of trust are among the worst and most terrible of true crimes, for they signify and represent the failure and collapse of all other values and meaning. This is why Solidarity as Fraternity is among the three principles on which the Revolution is built, along with Liberty and Equality, for without them there can be no free society of equals.
A brilliant Meidas Touch video which indicts Trump as a domestic terrorist for the January 6 Insurrection provoked me to question, How shall we answer treason? So wrote the following in reply:
Actually, I would like to see Trump achieve his true nature by being fed to dogs and transformed into dog shit. Wouldn’t it be a lovely display in a glass case exhibited in a museum of holocausts, atrocities, and crimes against humanity? Let his monument read thus:
Here lies Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, in his true form, most terrible enemy democracy has faced since Alcibiades betrayed Athens, most dangerous foreign agent to ever attack America even including Pearl Harbor and the Twin Towers, who subverted our ideals and sabotaged our institutions, and nearly enacted the fall of civilization as the figurehead of the Fourth Reich and herald of an age of fascist tyranny and state terror.
Yet here he lies, nothing but a pile of dog shit. Look upon the rewards of tyranny, you who are mighty, and despair.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
We can but wish. Beyond such fantasies, exclusion is a just balance for crimes of treason, disloyalty, and betrayal, in the forms of loss of citizenship, the most terrible punishment any nation can inflict, seizure of assets, and exile and erasure.
To be clear, all participants in the January 6 Insurrection, and all who conspired in this crime, had knowledge aforehand but did not sound an alarm, or acted subsequently to conceal, abet, or deny and excuse its perpetrators and its nature including all legislators who voted not to investigate it, bear responsibility in its crimes and should be repaid with loss of citizenship, seizures of assets, exile, and erasure.
Exile as the natural consequence of treason was explored in the short story “The Man Without a Country” by Edward Everett Hale, first published in The Atlantic in December 1863. It is a story of a traitor who comes to understand the true meaning of his crime; the renunciation of his social contract, connection and interdependence with other human beings, and membership in a national identity.
As described in Wikipedia; “It is the story of American Army lieutenant Philip Nolan, who renounces his country during a trial for treason, and is consequently sentenced to spend the rest of his days at sea without so much as a word of news about the United States.
The protagonist is a young US Army lieutenant, Philip Nolan, who develops a friendship with the visiting Aaron Burr. When Burr is tried for treason (that historically occurred in 1807), Nolan is tried as an accomplice. During his testimony, he bitterly renounces his nation and, with a foul oath, angrily shouts, “I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” The judge is completely shocked at that announcement and, on convicting him, icily grants him his wish. Nolan is to spend the rest of his life aboard US Navy warships in exile with no right ever to set foot on US soil again and with explicit orders that no one shall ever again mention his country to him.
The sentence is carried out to the letter. For the rest of his life, Nolan is transported from ship to ship, lives out his life as a prisoner on the high seas, and is never allowed back in a home port.”
So for Exile; now also for Erasure. As I wrote in my post of January 7 2021, Treason and Terror: Trump’s Brownshirts Attack Congress; This leaves the ringleader and chief conspirator of treason, sedition, insurrection, and terror to be removed from power and denied a platform from which to spread madness and violence like a plague; our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump. I believe we must remove, impeach, deplatform, and prosecute him for his many crimes against America; Trump must be exiled from public life and isolated from his power to destroy us.
Roman law called this damnatio memoriae, the erasure of public forgetting, and coupled with the Amish practice of shunning provides a useful model of minimum use of social force in safeguarding ourselves from threats, without the brutality of torture and prison to which we have become addicted. A fascinating article by the classical scholar Alexander Meddings examines its use in the cases of Trump’s nearest Imperial parallels, Caligula and Nero.
Exile and Erasure; neither prison nor violence or the use of force and fear. Let us simply cast out those who would destroy us from among us, and forget them.
As I wrote in my post of December 28 2023, Can States Ban Trump From Our Next Election For the Crime of Insurrection Under the 14th Amendment?; As the wall of his immunity begins to crumble and states ban Trump from the ballot in the next elections, and the issue of whether or not states can do so is escalated to the Supreme Court that he rigged for just such a moment, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, struts in the lights of the circus he has made of our nation, howling with rage and cheerleading his adoring sycophants in barbarisms and fascist litanies of atrocities to come.
Our election year in 2024 will be like nothing in our history, a ground of struggle not only of fascist tyranny and democracy, but of hate and love, hope and despair, solidarity and division, madness and vision, the psychopathy of power and the mutualism of a free society of equals.
I hope what Shakespeare wrote in Henry the Fifth is still true; “When cruelty and lenity play for a kingdom, the gentler hand is the surest winner.”
As written by Cameron Joseph and agencies in The Guardian, in an article entitled Why did Maine and Colorado disqualify Trump from their ballots?
Decisions stem from the US constitution’s insurrection clause and could have major ramifications for 2024 election; “Officials in Colorado and Maine have ruled that Donald Trump is ineligible to run for the White House again, citing his role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
In Colorado, the state supreme court ruled 4-3 earlier this month to take the former president off the state’s Republican presidential primary ballot; on Thursday, Maine’s secretary of state kicked him off the ballot there too.
The decisions will probably have major legal and political ramifications for the 2024 election, and stem from a rarely used provision of the US constitution known as the insurrection clause.
Trump’s campaign promised to immediately appeal the decisions to the US supreme court, which could well strike them down. Similar lawsuits are working their way through the courts in other states.
Here’s what we know so far, and what it might mean for the former president and current Republican frontrunner.
What is the insurrection clause and why was it used?
The decision by the Colorado supreme court is the first time a candidate has been deemed ineligible for the White House under the US constitutional provision.
Section 3 of the 14th amendment, also referred to as the insurrection clause, bars anyone from Congress, the military, and federal and state offices who once took an oath to uphold the constitution but then “engaged” in “insurrection or rebellion” against it.
Could Trump be barred under the constitution’s ‘engaged in insurrection’ clause?
Ratified in 1868, the 14th amendment helped ensure civil rights for formerly enslaved people, but also was intended to prevent former Confederate officials from regaining power as members of Congress and taking over the government they had just rebelled against.
Some legal scholars say the post-civil war clause applies to Trump because of his role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election and obstruct the transfer of power to Joe Biden by encouraging his supporters to storm the US Capitol.
“The dangers of Trump ever being allowed back into public office are exactly those foreseen by the framers of section 3,” Ron Fein, the legal director for Free Speech for People, said in a recent interview. “Which is that they knew that if an oath-taking insurrectionist were allowed back into power, they would do the same if not worse.”
How did this happen?
In Colorado, the case was brought by a group of voters, aided by the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), who argued Trump should be disqualified from the ballot for his role in the 6 January 2021 riot at the US Capitol.
Noah Bookbinder, the group’s president, celebrated the decision as “not only historic and justified, but … necessary to protect the future of democracy in our country”.
Colorado’s highest court overturned an earlier ruling from a district court judge, who found that Trump’s actions on January 6 did amount to inciting an insurrection, but that he could not be barred from the ballot, because it was unclear that the clause was intended to cover the role of the presidency.
A majority of the state supreme court’s seven justices, all of whom were appointed by Democratic governors, disagreed.
In Maine, the secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, examined the case after a group of citizens challenged Trump’s eligibility and concluded that he should be disqualified for inciting an insurrection on 6 January 2021.
Has this happened before?
The provision has rarely been used, and never in such a high-profile case. In 1919, Congress refused to seat a socialist, contending he gave aid and comfort to the country’s enemies during the first world war.
Last year, in the clause’s first use since then, a New Mexico judge barred a rural county commissioner who had entered the Capitol on January 6 from office.
What does this mean for the election?
The Colorado ruling applies only to the state’s Republican primary, which will take place on 5 March, meaning Trump might not appear on the ballot for that vote. The same is true in Maine – if the decision takes effect, it would only apply to the state’s ballot.
The Colorado supreme court temporarily stayed its ruling until 4 January, however, which would allow the US supreme court until then to decide whether to take the case. That’s the day before the qualifying deadline for candidates.
Colorado is no longer a swing state – Biden won it by a double-digit margin in 2020, and the last time a Republican won it was 2004 – but the ruling could influence other cases across the US, where dozens of similar cases are percolating. Other state courts have ruled against the plaintiffs; in Michigan, a judge ruled that Congress, not the courts, should make the call.
Advocates hoped the case would boost a wider disqualification effort and potentially put the issue before the US supreme court. It’s unclear whether the court might rule on narrow procedural and technical grounds, or answer the underlying constitutional question of whether Trump can be banished from the ballot under the 14th amendment.
The case could have significant political fallout as well. Trump allies will paint it as an anti-democratic effort to thwart the will of the American people, lumping it in with the numerous legal cases he faces in state and federal court.
“Democrats are so afraid that President Trump will win on Nov 5th 2024 that they are illegally attempting to take him off the ballot,” the Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a close Trump ally, posted on social media.
Trump didn’t mention the decision during an evening rally on 19 December in Iowa but his campaign sent out a fundraising email calling it a “tyrannical ruling”, with the statement going on to say:
“Democrat Party leaders are in a state of paranoia over the growing, dominant lead President Trump has amassed in the polls. They have lost faith in the failed Biden presidency and are now doing everything they can to stop the American voters from throwing them out of office next November.”
Trump’s attorneys, meanwhile, have argued that the 14th amendment’s language does not apply to the presidency. A lawyer for Trump has also argued that the January 6 riot at the Capitol was not serious enough to qualify for insurrection, and that any remarks that Trump made to his supporters that day in Washington were protected under free speech.”
How if we fail to consequent treason and insurrection, and thereby make a rule that all things are permitted in service to theocratic patriarchy and white supremacist terror?
As written in The Guardian editorial, in an article entitled The Guardian view on a second Trump presidency: things could only get worse; Over the holidays, this column will explore next year’s urgent issues. Today we look at the danger posed by the former president’s bid for reelection; “The great spectre haunting 2024 is the threat of Donald Trump triumphing in November’s election. A second stint in the Oval Office would have grim repercussions for the US and the world. He dominates the Republican race for the presidential candidacy, while recent polls showed him beating Joe Biden in five of the six key battleground states, and besting the president on issues including the economy and national security. The Biden administration has overseen a striking economic recovery in tough global conditions, but voters don’t feel the improvement. The president’s handling of the war in Gaza is alienating core supporters. He inspires little enthusiasm.
Democrats point out that there’s a long way to go and that November’s off-year election results point to a brighter picture. Mr Trump faces a dizzying array of legal cases, though the most significant may not move to a trial before the election. While they boost the belief of diehard admirers that he is being persecuted, some supporters say he should not stand if convicted. It’s not impossible that he might run from a prison cell.
Mr Trump is already teeing voters up to declare a Biden victory fraudulent again. Election officials have been bombarded with death threats. Convictions for the January 6 storming of the Capitol were welcome and necessary, but his supporters remain armed and dangerous.
What would Mr Trump’s return to the White House mean for America and the world? Nothing good. For all the volatility of his presidency, he delivered on key pledges for his followers: his supreme court appointments led to the overturning of Roe v Wade. Authoritarians don’t improve with power: quite the opposite. Mr Trump’s first term began with “alternative facts” about his inauguration and ended with the big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. His recent statements make 2016’s inflammatory rhetoric look almost mealy-mouthed. He declared that he would be a dictator, though only on “day one”, because “I want a wall and I want to drill, drill, drill”. His language is not merely racist but echoes the invective of Nazi Germany: immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”, while “communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs” are “vermin”.
Sycophantic state
What is truly alarming this time is not merely that he has declared his intentions loud and clear, it is that his backers have drawn up action plans to implement his talking points, and that he faces fewer political, institutional or legal constraints. “You cannot count on those institutions to restrain him,” said former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who fears that her country is “sleepwalking into dictatorship”. Ms Cheney is a rare exception to the rule that Republican politicians have ultimately fallen into line even when they briefly balked at his extremes. A re-elected President Trump would benefit from a more compliant Congress (though there’s speculation that Democrats might win back the House while the GOP takes the Senate). And having set out his stall, he could claim a mandate from the people.
He would not appoint those who might thwart his will this time. “The lesson he learned was to hire sycophants,” his former chief of staff John Kelly observed. He boasts that he would “dismantle the deep state”, clearing out career employees and replacing them with appointees he could fire at will. Intimidation – siccing his base on those who impede him – would always be an option. He has suggested that Gen Mark Milley, the outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, deserved to be put to death.
Legal challenges to his policies would face a harder path – the supreme court now has a conservative supermajority, with three Trump appointees, and he similarly stacked lower levels of the judiciary. He is preparing plans to turn the power of the state against opponents and critics, and boasting of “retribution” for those who hindered his attempt to steal the last election. He has warned that he would urge his attorney general to indict any political rival even without known grounds, saying: “I don’t know. Indict him on income tax evasion.” His associates have reportedly begun drafting plans to deploy the military against civil demonstrations – as he wanted to do against Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. One would hope that military leaders would oppose this. But it would be complacent to assume that.
Politics of hate
On the international front, the battle against global heating would be struck a catastrophic blow. A second Trump presidency would clearly be good for Vladimir Putin and bad for Ukraine and Nato, which the US could well leave. Mr Trump’s transactional approach to foreign policy puts himself first, and has only the most narrow and short-term conception of US interests. Allies such as South Korea are already contemplating their own nuclear deterrents. He would seek to hammer China on trade again, and Republicans would encourage him to go further on other fronts, but his admiration for autocrats might allow him to come to terms with Xi Jinping on some issues – notably, Taiwan’s future. Overall, his ignorance, arrogance and erratic nature could be as damaging as his pursuit of specific goals.
The far right around the world would be emboldened by his victory. Mr Trump is in large part a symptom of our times, but he has encouraged and enabled others in his mould at home and abroad. The social fabric has been damaged by a style of politics in which hatred is the organising principle. Anti-Asian hate crime surged following his racist rhetoric about the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu”. A defeat for Mr Trump would not in itself be sufficient to defeat Trumpism. But it is necessary.
The Democrats cannot campaign only on the threat that Mr Trump poses. They must speak to broader concerns too. But focusing on the likely consequences of his re-election is critical to ensuring that voters understand the choice they are making – including by not voting, or by backing a candidate other than Mr Biden. Think of the way that the voter backlash against the destruction of abortion rights was essential for Democrats in the 2022 midterms and has been evident in ballot measures more recently, with voters opting to preserve or expand access.
Of course, Mr Trump might not be able to fully implement his nightmarish boasts in office. But he would do more than enough. Drive off a cliff and you might live to tell the tale. But you can’t count on survival – and you can be certain of damage. The US, and the world, cannot afford a second term for Mr Trump.”
As written by David Smith in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘Sitting on a powder keg’: US braces for a year, and an election, like no other; “The 60th US presidential election, which will unfold in 2024, will be quite unlike any that has gone before as the US, and the rest of the world, braces for a contest amid fears of eroding democracy and the looming threat of authoritarianism.
It will be a fight marked by numerous unwanted firsts as the oldest president in the country’s history is likely to face the first former US president to stand trial on criminal charges. A once aspirational nation will continue its plunge into anxiety and divisions about crime, immigration, race, foreign wars and the cost of living.
Democrat Joe Biden, 81, is preparing for the kind of gruelling campaign he was able to avoid during coronavirus lockdowns in 2020. Republican Donald Trump will spend some of his campaign in a courtroom and has vowed authoritarian-style retribution if he wins. For voters it is a time of stark choices, unique spectacles and simmering danger.
“It feels to me as if America is sitting on a powder keg and the fuse has been lit,” said Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “The protective shield that all democracies and social orders rely on – legitimacy of the governing body, some level of elite responsibility, the willingness of citizens to view their neighbors in a civic way – is in an advanced stage of decline or collapse.
“It’s quite possible that the powder keg that America’s sitting on will explode over the course of 2024.”
US politics entered a new, turbulent era with Trump’s shocking victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. The businessman and reality TV star, tapping into populist rage against the establishment, was the first president with no prior political or military experience. His chaotic four-year presidency was scarred by the Covid-19 pandemic and ended with a bitter defeat by Biden in a 2020 election that was itself billed as an unprecedented stress test of democracy.
Trump never accepted the result and his attempts to overturn it culminated in a deadly riot at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, and his second impeachment. He has spent three years plotting revenge and describes the 5 November election as “the final battle”. But he is running for president under the shadow of 91 criminal charges in four jurisdictions, knowing that regaining the White House might be his best hope of avoiding prison – a calculus that could make him and his supporters more desperate and volatile than ever.
Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, said: “This is the most astounding election I have ever seen.
“We have never had an election where a likely major party nominee is indicted for major felony charges of the most serious nature; this is not shoplifting. He’s being charged with an attempt to destroy our democracy and subverting our national security. Both in terms of Trump’s personal morality and his incredibly serious crimes, we have never seen anything remotely like this.”
First Trump must win the Republican primary against Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, putting the electoral and legal calendars on a collision course. On 16 January, a day after the Iowa caucuses kick off the Republican nomination process, Trump faces a defamation trial brought by the writer E Jean Carroll, who has already won a $5m judgment against him after a jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation.
On 4 March, Trump is due in court in Washington in a federal case accusing him of plotting to overturn the 2020 election result. The following day is Super Tuesday, when more than 15 states are scheduled to hold Republican primaries, the biggest delegate haul of the campaign.
On 25 March, Trump also faces state charges in New York over hush-money payments to an adult film star, although the judge has acknowledged he may postpone that because of the federal trial. On 5 August, prosecutors have asked to start an election fraud trial in Georgia, less than three weeks after Trump is likely to have been nominated by the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Trump is hard at work to flip his legal troubles to his political advantage, contending that he is a victim of a Democratic deep state conspiracy. He frequently tells his supporters: “In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you – and I’m just standing in their way.” His Georgia mugshot has been slapped on T-shirts and other merchandise like a lucrative badge of honor.
It seems to be working, at least according to a series of opinion polls that show Trump leading Biden in a hypothetical matchup. A survey in early December for the Wall Street Journal newspaper showed Trump ahead by four points, 47% to 43%. When five potential third-party and independent candidates were included, Trump’s lead over Biden expanded to six points, 37% to 31%.
To Democrats, such figures are bewildering. Biden’s defenders point to his record, including the creation of 14m jobs, strong GDP growth and four major legislative victories on coronavirus relief, infrastructure, domestic production of computer chips and the biggest climate action in history. He has also led the western alliance against Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Lichtman added: “He gets credit for nothing. It’s just amazing: I’ve never seen a president do so much and get so little mileage on it. He has more domestic accomplishments than any American president since the 1960s. He’s presided over an amazing economic recovery, a far better economy than was under Donald Trump even before the pandemic in terms of jobs, wages, GDP. Inflation has gone down by two-thirds.
“It was Biden who single-handedly put together the coalition of the west that stopped [Vladimir] Putin from quickly overtaking Ukraine. He seems to get no credit for any of this whatsoever and that’s partly his own fault and the fault of the Democratic party. The Democratic party has been horrible for some time now – at least 15 years. Republicans are so much better at messaging.”
The president’s approval rating has been stubbornly low since around the time of the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. He is grappling with record numbers of migrants entering the country – an issue that increasingly aggravates states beyond the US-Mexico border. His refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza is costing him some support among progressives and young people.
The latest Democratic messaging salvo – “Bidenomics” – appears to have been a flop at a moment when many voters blame him for rising prices and a cost-of-living crisis. For all the barrage of positive economic data, Americans are lacking the feelgood factor.
Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, said: “People feel that Biden overpromised and underdelivered and ultimately what it came down to was he didn’t make me feel good while he did it and he didn’t make it look easy.”
Biden still holds a potential ace in the hole. Democrats plan to make abortion central to the 2024 campaign, with opinion polls showing most Americans do not favor strict limits on reproductive rights. The party is hoping threats to those rights will encourage millions of women and independents to vote their way next year. It is also seeking to put measures enshrining access to abortion in state constitutions on as many ballots as possible.
The issue has flummoxed Republicans, with some concerned the party has gone too far with state-level restrictions since the supreme court overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling last year, ending constitutional protection for abortion. Trump has taken notice and is conspicuously trying to be vague on the issue.
The Wall Street Journal poll found Biden leading Trump on abortion and democracy by double digits. But it gave Trump a double-digit lead on the economy, inflation, crime, border security, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and physical and mental fitness for office. Biden still has time to reshape perceptions but even close allies concede that he is not an inspirational speechmaker like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. How can he turn it around?
Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “My advice would be to be aggressive, go on offence and set the narrative. They must make the contrast between a Biden America and a Trump America and ask people which America do they want to live in.
“A year out, most people are not paying attention so the polls are meaningless in that they are not predictive of what will happen in a year. Where they do have value is what the trend line shows, which is that the American people are not getting the messaging clearly enough now, so it’s time to get up off their asses and activate the campaign at level 10 right now.”
Setmayer, a senior adviser to the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, added: “What Donald Trump is telegraphing, what he plans to do to this country, I don’t fully think most Americans understand.
“Use the power of incumbency, of the bully pulpit, of their record. Biden is surrounded by people who are experienced campaign veterans and so is he. Use it.”
Should Trump prevail, numerous critics have warned that his return would hollow out American democracy and presage a drift towards Hungarian-style authoritarianism. In a recent interview on Fox News, Trump was asked: “You are promising America tonight, you would never abuse this power as retribution against anybody?” He did not give an outright denial but replied airily: “Except for day one.”
Should Biden serve a second term, he will be 86 when he leaves office. Dean Phillips, 54, a congressman from Minnesota, mounting a Democratic primary challenge, is calling for a new generation of leadership. Some Democrats privately wish that Biden had declared mission accomplished after the 2022 midterm elections and stepped down to make way for younger contenders such as Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer. It now appears too late.
Frank Luntz, a prominent consultant and pollster, said: “Democrats should be apoplectic. Donald Trump has been indicted in felony after felony. The economy is relatively OK and yet Biden is sinking every week and it’s because of something that no soundbite and no messaging can fix: his age. If I were a Democratic strategist, I would have been arrested in front of the White House for begging him to accept four years and move on. You can’t fix age.”
Biden’s potential for gaffes was limited during the pandemic election; this time he will be expected to travel far and wide, his every misstep amplified by rightwing media. The social media platform X, formerly Twitter, is now owned by Elon Musk and populated by extremists such as Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones. This has also been dubbed the first “AI election”, with deepfakes threatening to accelerate the spread of disinformation – a tempting target for foreign interference.
It is unfolding in a febrile atmosphere of conspiracy theories, polarisation, gun violence and surging antisemitism and Islamophobia. Political opponents are increasingly framed as mortal enemies. Violence erupted on January 6 and again last year when a man broke into the home of the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and attacked her husband with a hammer.
Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “If you have something like the last couple of elections where it’s razor thin, and people who don’t understand the American electoral process see malfeasance and misfeasance where there is none, we have a very non-trivial chance of violence.
“I wouldn’t even presume that we wouldn’t have an outbreak of sporadic violence before that. The fact is when people see each other as the enemy, and talk about each other as the enemy, people who are mentally unbalanced and have access to firearms will do mentally unbalanced things.”
Luntz does not foresee violence.
But nor is he optimistic about the future of a nation torn between hope and fear. “What I do expect is a fraying no longer at the edges but at the heart of American democracy,” he said. “I’m afraid that we are reaching the point of no return. In my conversations with senators and congressmen every day I’m on the Hill – it doesn’t matter which party – we all agree that it’s not coming, it’s here, and no one knows what to do about it.”
As written by Rachel Leingang in The Guardian, in an article entitled US supreme court ruling on Trump ballot ban: five key takeaways: Donald Trump can remain on the presidential ballot but the question of whether he was guilty of insurrection unresolved; “The US supreme court ruled on Monday that former president Donald Trump cannot be kept off the ballot in Colorado, foreclosing a series of legal challenges the Republican frontrunner faced in multiple states as he seeks a return to the White House.
The 14th amendment’s third clause, enacted after the US civil war, seeks to prevent people who were elected officials who engaged in insurrection from then holding office again. It has been rarely used since, but was resurrected by advocacy groups and voters who claim it applies to Trump because of his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.
The court’s nine justices agreed that a state can’t remove a federal candidate from its ballot. Though the decision was unanimous, briefs filed separately indicate tension among the justices about how far the majority opinion went.
Because the case involved an obscure part of the constitution, the court had to parse questions of how the clause works and to whom it applies. And, perhaps most critically, the court’s decision held tremendous capacity for disruption during an election year with a leading candidate known to rile up his followers.
Here are some key takeaways from the decision and the broader context at play.
State v federal rights at heart of issue
The core of the decision rests simply on the interplay between state and federal rights.
Though states administer federal elections, the court decided states have no authority to remove a candidate from the running under Section 3. Instead, the majority opinion noted, the 14th amendment “expanded federal power at the expense of state autonomy”. Allowing states to do as Colorado did would “invert the Fourteenth Amendment’s rebalancing of federal and state power”.
The language of the clause doesn’t include any direction on how a state could enforce it, the majority said. Only Congress is mentioned as an enforcer, they argue.
States could, and did, use the section to disqualify state candidates from holding office if they violate the insurrectionist clause, the majority wrote.
This federalism argument was clearly agreed to by all nine justices – though the majority opinion goes on further to suggest how Congress might act to enforce the clause in the future.
Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson all wrote, in two separate opinions, that the majority opinion went too far.
The decision that states lack the authority here “provides a secure and sufficient basis to resolve this case”, the liberal justices (Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson) wrote. “The Court should have started and ended its opinion with this conclusion.”
Tension among the justices on how far the ruling goes
The justices’ unanimity in the belief that the Colorado court couldn’t remove Trump was fractured by two addendums that strike at the extension of the case beyond its scope.
The court’s majority – conservative justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch – specified how the insurrectionist clause would need to be enforced. It would require an act of Congress to determine who would be ineligible to hold office because of insurrection, they wrote, relying on another section of the 14th amendment to make the case.
The liberal justices, in one separate opinion, and the conservative Barrett, in her own, said the majority went too far by prescribing what kind of process would be needed.
The case did not require the justices to “address the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which Section 3 can be enforced”, Barrett wrote. Because of the sensitivity of the issue and its context, the justices should have left it with the federalism justification alone. “In my judgment, this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency,” she wrote.
The liberal justices took this disagreement further, saying the majority opinion moved into constitutional questions it didn’t need to as a way to “insulate this court and petitioner from future controversy”.
The case did not involve federal action; it was a state court in Colorado that decided Trump could not be on the ballot there. The majority did not need to move into contested federal issues, the liberals said. “These musings are as inadequately supported as they are gratuitous.”
No decision on whether Trump engaged in insurrection
What’s left entirely unsaid in the court’s opinions issued on Monday: whether Trump engaged in insurrection.
A finding that Trump had himself engaged in insurrection would have been required for keeping the former president off the ballot. The clause says that a person could be disqualified from holding office again if they had “engaged in insurrection or rebellion”.
Trump and his team fought against this claim, saying his actions after the 2020 election did not constitute an insurrection. Instead, he argued, 6 January was more akin to a “riot” and his comments to his followers, which some have contended amounted to incitement, were protected by the first amendment. In Colorado, the state supreme court had concluded that he incited his followers to engage in insurrection, which met the definition for engaging in insurrection.
The legal cases against Trump over his election subversion will continue unabated by any opining by the high court about whether he is an insurrectionist.
The potential for mayhem/violence was high because of this case
The 2024 election was already marked by tension because of the presence of Trump; his ability to direct his followers is unparalleled in American politics.
The cases against Trump in several states – for election subversion, hush-money claims, keeping classified documents and business fraud – have not injured his standing with his followers, but instead seemingly solidified or even amplified their support.
The 14th amendment cases entered into this fraught dynamic, throwing yet another legal bomb, albeit an obscure one, that gave Trump’s followers further belief that there is a conspiracy against Trump’s ability to run for re-election.
On the campaign trail, Trump has used these legal liabilities to his benefit, claiming they are evidence of election interference and a sign that President Joe Biden, not he, is a threat to democracy.
A survey focused on political violence conducted by the University of Chicago’s Chicago Project on Security & Threats in January showed that the court’s decision on the 14th amendment held the potential for further support of political violence, regardless of how the court decided, because of the extreme partisan divide on the issue.
Trump called the decision “very well-crafted” and said he thought it would bring the country together. Most states were “thrilled” to have Trump on the ballot, he said, but others didn’t want him on there for “political reasons” and because of “poll numbers”.
The court clearly considered the political implications
While courts often claim to avoid wading in on political questions, politics clearly played into how the court decided on this case. The implications of how removing Trump could play out electorally are contemplated throughout the opinions.
The potential that a candidate could be ineligible in some states, leading to a “patchwork” effect, would disrupt voters, the majority wrote in their opinion.
“An evolving electoral map could dramatically change the behavior of voters, parties, and States across the country, in different ways and at different times,” the majority wrote. “The disruption would be all the more acute – and could nullify the votes of millions and change the election result – if Section 3 enforcement were attempted after the Nation has voted. Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos – arriving at any time or different times, up to and perhaps beyond the Inauguration.”
It wasn’t just politics with the election itself or the public at large that came into view; the political dynamics between the justices showed through as well.
The liberal justices jabbed at the majority opinion for its extension of the case into how Congress would need to act, claiming that was an attempt to “insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office”.
Barrett, in her separate opinion, tried to strike a conciliatory note. She called attention to the fact that the court unanimously decided on a “politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election”. The court’s goal, she said, should be to turn down the national temperature instead of inflame it.
“For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case,” she wrote. “That is the message Americans should take home.”
As written by Rachel Leingang in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s supreme court case hinged on the 14th amendment – what it actually means: The supreme court determined if section 3 of the 14th amendment – which bars insurrectionists from holding office – applied to Trump; “ A former US president could have been kicked off the ballot in his quest to return to the White House because of a rarely used provision in an amendment created in the aftermath of the civil war.
A lawsuit out of Colorado that sought to oust Donald Trump in his re-election bid went before the US supreme court, which decided Trump could not be removed from seeking office there over the 14th amendment’s third clause.
The clause was intended to ensure that people who participated in the civil war and other acts against the US weren’t allowed to keep or resume holding positions of power in government. In essence, it says that people could not again hold office if they had participated in insurrection or rebellion against the country while they were in office.
Trump’s team argued the clause doesn’t apply to him for a handful of reasons, based on both esoteric readings of the clause itself and on larger questions like what constitutes an insurrection.
The justices sided with Trump, saying states could not try to keep a federal candidate off the ballot because it was beyond their power. The case involved several issues of legal reasoning the justices had to weigh.
Here are the clause’s big questions.
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State …”
The first part of the clause essentially says that a person can’t hold office again if they were an officer of the US when they participated in an insurrection. It specifies that it applies broadly – to the presidency, Congress and “any office … under the United States”.
Trump’s team argued, though, that this means he couldn’t hold office again, not that he can’t run for office again, so he can’t be disqualified from appearing on the ballot. The legal question would then be raised anew if he won and therefore “held office” again. The case is therefore premature, they said.
In Colorado, the court concluded that because Trump is disqualified from holding the office of president, it would be a “wrongful act” for the secretary of state there to list him as a candidate in the presidential primary.
“… who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States …”
Trump’s arguments related to this part of the clause involve twists of plain language to conclude the president is not an “officer of the United States” and therefore the clause doesn’t apply because anything Trump did happened when he was president.
His attorneys argued that because the presidency isn’t explicitly listed in the clause, it wasn’t intended to include the presidency. They’ve also said that the presidency is not “under” the United States because it is the government, and because the president is an officer of the constitution, not of the United States.
These arguments go hand in hand with the earlier provision in the clause, about whether someone could hold office. Trump’s team argued that because the presidency isn’t specifically mentioned, like “member of Congress” is, it doesn’t apply to him.
The Colorado supreme court essentially said the plain language of the amendment and how the presidency is viewed overall show that the presidency is an office of the US, and the president would be considered an “officer” of the US.
“President Trump asks us to hold that Section Three disqualifies every oath-breaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath-breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land,” Colorado’s ruling says.
“… shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
The insurrection part of the clause involves perhaps the more political questions of the case: whether the associated events of 6 January 2021 to overturn Trump’s loss would constitute an “insurrection” and, if so, if Trump himself “engaged” in it.
In Colorado, the case went before a jury for a trial, with evidence submitted that backed up the claims both that the events of 6 January 2021 were an insurrection and that Trump engaged in it. Among the evidence were many months of claims made by Trump that the election was stolen and specific callouts to his supporters to protest the results.
Using definitions of what was considered an insurrection when the clause was written, the Colorado court said basically that it would entail a public use or threat of force by a group of people to hinder some execution of the constitution – in this case, the awarding of electors and the peaceful transfer of power. By that definition, the events of 6 January constituted an insurrection.
Trump’s team argued both that the events of 6 January were not an insurrection and that the former president didn’t engage in it anyway. His attorneys instead described the events as a “riot” and said the president’s speech was protected by the first amendment. They also pointed to comments he made telling the mob to go home eventually on 6 January, in which he said they should “go peacefully and patriotically”.
Colorado’s justices concluded that free speech rights don’t allow for incitement and that his intent was to call for his supporters to fight his loss, which they responded to.
“President Trump’s direct and express efforts, over several months, exhorting his supporters to march to the Capitol to prevent what he falsely characterized as an alleged fraud on the people of this country were indisputably overt and voluntary,” the ruling said. “Moreover, the evidence amply showed that President Trump undertook all these actions to aid and further a common unlawful purpose that he himself conceived and set in motion: prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election and stop the peaceful transfer of power.”
But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Finally, there’s the matter of what role states play in assessing eligibility for federal offices and whether a state can decide not to put a candidate on the ballot because they haven’t met federal constitutional requirements for running, which include factors like age and citizenship as well as the broader insurrection question.
Even for federal elections, states manage the electoral process of who can vote, how they vote and how results are counted.
Trump argued that eligibility in this case is a political question that Congress should decide, not one for state courts – and not one for courts in general, which tend to stay away from purely political questions.
His team tried to make the case that Congress would need to put the process in motion to keep him off the ballot, saying that the clause is not “self-executing”, or something that goes into effect upon its creation.
The clause itself doesn’t say anything about whether Congress would initiate such a proceeding. Instead, it says Congress could remove a finding that kept an insurrectionist off the ballot with a two-thirds vote, thus allowing that person to hold office again.
The Colorado court rejected the idea that the clause needs congressional action to be implemented, relying on other Reconstruction-era amendments that went into effect without congressional action. If those other amendments needed Congress to go into effect, it “would lead to absurd results”.
“The result of such inaction would mean that slavery remains legal; Black citizens would be counted as less than full citizens for reapportionment; nonwhite male voters could be disenfranchised; and any individual who engaged in insurrection against the government would nonetheless be able to serve in the government, regardless of whether two-thirds of Congress had lifted the disqualification,” the court wrote. “Surely that was not the drafters’ intent.”
As written by Robert Reich in his newsletter, entitled The most troubling aspect of today’s Supreme Court decision: It doesn’t just allow Trump back on the ballot, but potentially disables enforcement of other provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment; “Friends, Even though Trump clearly engaged in an insurrection and even though the Constitution clearly bars insurrections from holding elected office, the Supreme Court today ruled that Trump will remain on the ballot anyway.
With the Super Tuesday primaries looming tomorrow, all nine justices agreed that states (in this case, Colorado) cannot decide to keep Trump off the ballot under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment – which bars anyone who has sworn an oath to the Constitution and yet participated in an insurrection against the United States from holding office. They agreed that allowing states to make such decisions would lead to a patchwork of ballots, undercutting federal authority.
But this may not be the most troubling aspect of their decision over the long term. The five justices in the majority went further, ruling that Section 3 could only be enforced by Congress. They rested their argument on Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides that Congress shall pass “appropriate legislation” to enforce the Amendment — such as, for example, procedures to identify which individuals should be disqualified under Section 3. And Congress has not done so.
But requiring that Congress first pass such legislation would prevent the Justice Department from bringing a suit alleging that someone should not be allowed on a ballot because they participated in an insurrection.
It would in effect shield any future insurrectionist candidate, whose party controls at least one chamber of commerce and therefore would not enact such legislation.
Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson were also rightfully concerned that the majority’s decision could be used to prevent the Justice Department from enforcing other provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment – such as Section 1, which prohibits states from making or enforcing laws that “abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” or deprive “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” or deny them “equal protection of the laws.”
Under the majority’s view of how the Fourteenth Amendment should be enforced, Section 5 might first require Congress to pass “appropriate legislation” to identify which defendants should be prosecuted under Section 1, before the Justice Department could act.
States charged with violating the privileges and immunities clause, or denying people due process of law, or denying their citizens the equal protection of the law will almost certainly use today’s ruling in attempts to shield themselves from federal prosecution.
By the way, Clarence Thomas should never have participated in this case, given his obvious conflicts of interest. His participation makes the Supreme Court’s recently adopted “ethics” guidelines look like the sham they are.”
Arrest Trump Now/ MeidasTouch
US supreme court ruling on Trump ballot ban: five key takeaways
Celebrate with me the historic 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade, which on this day 112 years ago brought thousands to women to Washington D.C. to call for the right to vote, the first such event on a massive national scale after 60 years of the fight for women’s suffrage.
It was a public declaration of freedom from fear, and of solidarity in the face of horrific repression. One hundred women were hospitalized this day, attacked by mobs unrestrained by the police, merely one incident in a decades long struggle against violence and control, and against the deniable forces of a government wholly vested in the Patriarchy. And before that, millennia of enslavement, dehumanization, marginalization, and the silencing of women’s voices.
But after that day, the world has never been the same. Women had stood up to the brutal tyranny of force and control in defiance and refusal to submit, and that is a genie which can never be put back in its bottle. This is the secret of power; it is hollow and brittle, for it fails at the point of disobedience. In the words of the great Sylvia Plath; “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”
Women will be silent no more, and as we rejoice together in the refusal to submit to authority, remember the victories of our history which brought us to what liberation we now enjoy.
In this time of darkness when atavistic forces of Patriarchy and Gideonite fundamentalism scuttle from beneath their stones to attempt once again the re-enslavement of women through control of reproductive rights and denial of bodily autonomy without which there is no freedom, and which also infringes on our universal right to health care as a precondition of the right to life, which together threaten dehumanization, theft of citizenship, and render democracy meaningless, let us claim and raise again the suffragette banner bearing the catchphrase of liberation which Alice Paul appropriated from Woodrow Wilson, “The time has come to conquer or submit.”
On this anniversary of the historic 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade led by Alice Paul, let us frighten the horses, and through our public performance of identities of sex and gender seize ownership of ourselves, reclaim the narratives of liberation from the marginalization and silences of historical authorization of identity, and shift the boundaries of the Forbidden through transgression of normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas.
Freaking the normies, we called it in the San Francisco of my youth; enactments of difference and uniqueness as revolutionary struggle and guerilla theatre, in which we seized public spaces as our stage. As in the spectacle of human possibilities of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade, strategies of confrontation which valorize totemic figures of transgression act as rituals of liberation, seizures of power, and the transformation and reimagination of authorized identities and of humankind.
Go ahead, frighten the horses; for none of us need stand alone, and if they come for one of us, they must be met with all of us.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
the Women’s Suffrage Movement in America, a reading list
Votes for Women!: American Suffragists and the Battle for the Ballot, by Winifred Conkling
A conversation of last year raised questions of moral equivalency in liberation struggle under dissimilar conditions of unequal power as historical and systemic imposed conditions of struggle, and of the conflicted and ambiguous nature of humans including iconic leaders
Rhonda:
A well written and intelligent piece which applies queer theory to the struggle for womens suffrage. The two questions I would pose; is the nonconformist cultural norms busting behavior in San Francisco that equivalent to the suffrage movement? To me there is a big difference.
Second, while it is completely proper to praise the suffragette movement, especially now, there were also serious issues of racism and strategic differences between the street activists and the establishment ones who pressured the government.
Me:
We all bear the flaws of our humanity and the legacies of our history; and we must all become human by emergence from the imposed conditions of struggle. I am aware of the ambivalent nature of liberation struggle and its heroes and iconic champions; for such processes are successive, much like Gould’s punctuated equilibrium theory of evolution, and the system of unequal power itself must change, not merely its manifestations.
We rebel against unjust control of reproduction by a sectarian captured state; in the future, who will rebel against us? The history of womens liberation as successive revolutions of expanding equality, from Abolition to Suffrage to three and counting reinterpretations of Feminism, remains to be written.
These share the problem so horribly evident with anticolonial revolutions which become tyrannies; the imposed conditions of struggle shape successor states in their image due to the requirements of victory in charismatic leaders who become authoritarian, nationalism and identitarian politics, and the valorization of violence and militarism.
Yes, the suffragettes were themselves not free of divisions of class, race, gender, faith; but once they moved the horizon of the known and of belonging, as with the Spear of Archytus, the ground of struggle for the next revolution was redefined. Humanity is a tidal force, which moves beneath our surfaces as circles propagating outwards toward infinity and the unknown.
Thank you, Rhonda, for asking such interesting questions.
As to your first observation, you are of course right that the stakes were much higher for the Suffragettes in a world where women had equality nowhere. I intended to compare them only as guerilla theatre, but as with all things human they also share our moral ambiguity.
On the first of March 1692 the Salem Witch Trials began; and in some ways have never stopped, but expanded to become a pervasive and endemic harm which characterizes our society and the carceral state America has become. Patriarchy is unequal power as sexual terror, and it is a systemic mechanism of control spun of lies, illusions, false histories, and alternate realities, a wilderness of mirrors which distort and capture our images, and a nightmare from which humankind must awaken.
Mass hysteria has assaulted truth with the sophisticated propaganda of social media and become a horrific new religion with QAnon, racism and patriarchal religious authoritarianism and intolerance has become Christian Identity fascism, conformism and the use of social force as show trials, torture, and terror have become state tyranny and terror on a vast institutional scale.
Othering those whom we vilify through divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite membership and belonging remains a primary instrument of repression of dissent and the subjugation, dehumanization, and enslavement of labor to centralize wealth, power, and privilege. Just as with the historical witch trials, during which my family was driven out of Bavaria in 1586 for the crime of being werewolves, berserkergangr or shapechanging warriors who were figures of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, and witches, Drachenbräute or ‘the brides of the dragon’ as the witch hunting mass murderer Martin Luther described them, independent women free from the authority of any man, at the beginning of a forty-four year period of witchcraft persecutions and the start of the savage Cologne War between Catholics and Protestants, a prelude to the Thirty Years War which killed a third of German peoples.
There is no terror like religious terror, and no tyranny like authority which speaks for the unquestionable divine and whose armies and police are authorized as enforcers of divine law.
This is not an issue confined to the remote past as a vestigial legacy of patriarchal sexual terror, but the warning sign of an iceberg of hidden structural and systemic injustices and inequalities which surround us as a pervasive and endemic harm in our daily lives.
I witnessed what was possibly the last witch burning in America as a child in the 1960’s, growing up in a Reformed Church community an hour’s drive from San Francisco. There is no forgetting the smell of a burning human being; sweet and charcoal like barbecue pork ribs, which is why I do not eat meat, and am uneasy around others who are doing so; there is no difference between ourselves and other animals, not to me.
Religious terror and authoritarian tyranny are pervasive throughout the world; sectarian violence and faith weaponized as identity politics are responsible for the horrific massacres and ethnic cleansing of Islamic minorities in the twin Buddhist states of Sri Lanka and Burma and in India’s conquest of Kashmir, as well as the sectarian war in Yemen between Iran and the Arab-American Alliance, and combined horrifically with other forces in the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the genocidal Gaza War. Faith as submission to authority has always been a lever of subjugation by tyrants over their slaves, regardless of the form it takes.
There is always someone in a gold robe who claims to speak for God and anoints kings, armies, and police to enforce their dominion, authorizes elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and has fooled others into doing the hard and dirty work. This was called the Great Chain of Being in medieval Europe, and considered the natural order of things wherein some of us are better than others as chosen by God, and no one is created equal.
This is the world the American and French Revolutions were intended to overthrow, and our democracies designed to replace.
Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible, which calls out the injustices of the McCarthy anticommunist era in the context of the Massachusetts Bay Colony witch hysteria of 1692–93, remains among the finest interrogations of state tyranny and terror ever written. I make an annual ritual of watching the beautiful 1996 film with the magnificent Winona Ryder as Abigail Williams.
As I wrote in my post of July 29 2020 Weaponized Religion, the Subversion of Democracy, Lunatic Anti-Science Propaganda, and the Legacy of American Imperialism; In the now enormous category of lies and disinformation campaigns against objective truth and scientific rationality, Trump’s recent endorsement of the lunatic claims of a Nigerian doctor now practicing medicine in Texas who is a member of a Pentecostal Church which promulgates religious and medical nonsense that has resulted in an epidemic of children murdered as witches by their parents and a violent pogrom against LGBT people in Nigeria stands near the pinnacle of our Clown of Terror’s crimes against humanity, one which would be hilarious if it were not real and so very dangerous.
As you may be aware, the years-long wave of children murdered by their parents as witches in Africa was perpetrated by American religious fanatics in a coordinated campaign of colonialist and imperialist destabilization. In Nigeria this has the full collaboration of the government, with the persecution and orchestrated violence against LGBT persons being a dual campaign of mass hysteria and state terror.
It parallels the seizure of Guatemala and El Salvador by Pat Robertson and other Gideonite fundamentalists through his front man Rios Montt and the subsequent Mayan Genocide. The masses of refugees at our border are a direct result of the latter, part of American sponsored political subversion and economic warfare responsible for the collapse of Venezuela, Columbia, Mexico, and Central America.
America has weaponized religion as an instrument of dominion, and it is this same network of Pentecostal and Charismatic organizations which have achieved the capture of the Republican Party and the subversion of democracy here at home. Their brutal campaign against the equality, freedom of bodily autonomy, and reproductive rights of women is the wedge issue the Republicans use to goad the poor into voting against their own interest, but it is only the home front of a global programme of patriarchal cultural, political, and economic warfare intended to seize and maintain an American hegemony of power and privilege.
God With Us; it is an old motto from the Crusades, and it has a complex and nefarious history. It has been used by the Inquisition against the Jews and Muslims, in the medieval witch hunts to transfer and consolidate patriarchal power as described by Silvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch and Witch-Hunting and Women. Gott Mitt Uns was the battle cry of the magnificent King Gustav Adolf of Sweden in his epochal victory over the Catholic forces of Imperial Austria at the Battle of Breitenfeld in 1631 which liberated Protestant Germany during the horrific Thirty Years War, the monument of which reads ”Freedom of Religion for All Mankind” and is the origin of the doctrine of separation of church and state in America; Gott Mitt Uns was also appropriated by Hitler, who sought to recall the glorious legacy of his namesake.
There is no more dangerous person than one who believes God is on his side, for that belief can justify anything and conceal evil behind a mask of good.
As Agence France-Presse writes in scmp; “A Houston doctor who praised hydroxychloroquine as a miracle coronavirus cure in a viral video retweeted by President Donald Trump blames gynaecological problems on sex with evil spirits and believes the US government is run by “reptilians”.
Stella Immanuel’s viral speech has drawn attention to a little-known group calling themselves “America’s Frontline Doctors” who appear to exist to promote the common antimalarial drug in the fight against Covid-19.”
“Immanuel was born in 1965, received her medical degree at the University of Calabar in Nigeria.”
“Nobody needs to get sick. This virus has a cure – it is called hydroxychloroquine,” Immanuel exclaimed Monday as she stood on the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington at a so-called “White Coat Summit” of like-minded doctors.”
“Early on in the pandemic, scientists were eager to find out whether hydroxychloroquine’s antiviral properties would make it effective in real-world patients with SARS-CoV-2.
So far though, all the major clinical trials that have reported their findings on this question have found no benefit, and leading national health authorities have moved to restrict its use because of potential cardiac harm.”
“The clip was shared by Trump and described as a “must watch” by his son Donald Trump Jnr, but has since been deleted by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for promoting misinformation.
“Trump also complained about his plummeting approval ratings as compared to those of Dr Anthony Fauci, the top medical adviser on the White House coronavirus task force.”
“And the curious case of Immanuel and colleagues – first reported in depth by The Daily Beast – underscores just how far the drug’s advocates are willing to go.
The website for “America’s Frontline Doctors” was registered just 11 days ago, a web domain age checker revealed – and the site was taken down by Tuesday afternoon.
“Tea Party Patriots”, a right-wing political group backed by wealthy Republicans, said on its website it was responsible for organising the Washington summit.
Further research on Immanuel’s web page, now accessible only via an archived website viewer, as well as her YouTube account, reveal a long list of bizarre and unscientific beliefs.
These include that “tormenting spirits” routinely have “astral sex” with women, which in turn causes “gynaecological problems, marital distress, miscarriages” and more.
In a 2015 video, Immanuel, who leads a religious group called Fire Power Ministries, said: “There are people ruling this nation that are not even human,” describing them as “reptilian spirits” who are “half human, half ET.”
In the same video she rails against the use of “alien DNA” to treat sick people, which she said had resulted in human beings mixing with demons.
Other targets of her anger include gay marriage, which she said would result in adults marrying children.”
As written by Sady Dolye in her essay for In These Times, How Capitalism Turned Women Into Witches; “Sylvia Federici’s new book explains how violence against women was a necessary precondition for capitalism. Federici traces how capitalism affects and infects the “private,” feminine sphere of unwaged domestic and reproductive work.
The Italian socialist feminist Silvia Federici is mandatory reading to understand gender politics (today). The opening sentences of her 1975 pamphlet “Wages Against Housework”—“They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work”—will stick in your head and change your whole concept of family. Caliban and the Witch, her titanic 1998 work on witch trials as a tool of early capitalism, will take your head apart and put it back together.
Federici is not just relevant but getting more so every second. Throughout her work, she traces how capitalism affects and infects the “private,” feminine sphere of unwaged domestic and reproductive work; she excavates intimacy, uncovering all its toxic layers of lead paint and asbestos, until its exploitative foundations are clear. Her work is essential to decoding the present moment, as capitalism and patriarchy entwine to produce increasingly grotesque offspring: predatory adoption agencies coercing women into giving up their babies; the exorbitant cost of childcare causing single working mothers to go bankrupt; entire industries where the opportunity to abuse women with impunity is a perk for the powerful men up top. And, thank goodness, we seem to know it; half the young leftist women writing today are riffing on Federici’s work.
Federici’s latest, Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women, updates and expands the core thesis of Caliban, in which she argued that “witch hunts” were a way to alienate women from the means of reproduction. In the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Federici argues, there was an intervening revolutionary push toward communalism. Communalist groups often embraced “free love” and sexual egalitarianism—unmarried men and women lived together, and some communes were all-women—and even the Catholic church only punished abortion with a few years’ penance.
For serfs, who tilled the land in exchange for a share of its crops, home was work, and vice versa; men and women grew the potatoes together. But in capitalism, waged laborers have to work outside the home all the time, which means someone else needs to be at home all the time, doing the domestic work. Gender roles, and the subjugation of women, became newly necessary.
Early feudal elites in rural Europe enclosed public land, rendering it private and controllable, and patriarchy enclosed women in “private” marriages, imposing on them the reproductive servitude of bearing men’s children and the emotional labor of caring for men’s every need. Pregnancy and childbirth, once a natural function, became a job that women did for their male husband-bosses—that is to say, childbirth became alienated labor. “Witches,” according to witch-hunting texts like the Malleus Maleficarum, were women who kept childbirth and pregnancy in female hands: midwives, abortionists, herbalists who provided contraception. They were killed to cement patriarchal power and create the subjugated, domestic labor class necessary for capitalism.
“The body has been for women in capitalist society what the factory has been for male waged workers,” Federici writes in Caliban, “the primary ground of their exploitation and resistance.”
The elegance of this argument, the neat way it knots together public and private, is thrilling. There are moments when Federici makes sense like no one else. In this passage, she explains how sexuality—once demonized “to protect the cohesiveness of the Church as a patriarchal, masculine clan”—became subjugated within capitalism: “Once exorcised, denied its subversive potential through the witch hunt, female sexuality could be recuperated in a matrimonial context and for procreative ends. …In capitalism, sex can exist but only as a productive force at the service of procreation and the regeneration of the waged/male worker and as a means of social appeasement and compensation for the misery of everyday existence.”
The pleasures of Witches occur in quick little bursts of illumination. Federici dips in and out of her famous argument, expanding it, updating it and finding new angles on it. Some essays work better than others. Her exploration of gossip and its criminalization is a stand-out; she traces a concise and damning history of how “a term commonly indicating a close female friend turned into one signifying idle, backbiting talk,” and how that act of women speaking to each other—often about men, and in a way those men might not like—became punishable by torture and public humiliation, as in the case of the “scold’s bridle.” This torture device, which was used until the early 1800s, was a mask with a bit (sometimes lined with spikes) that kept a woman from moving her tongue. Gossips, like witches, were criminalized for being women. Federici is always timely: Today’s “whisper networks,” in which women share the identities of abusers and harassers to keep each other safe, are gossip too. And, as accused rapist Stephen Elliott’s lawsuit against Moira Donegan and the Shitty Media Men list proves, plenty of men still want gossips hauled into court.
The point of reading Federici is not to agree with her at all times—it’s to let her knock the dust and cobwebs out of your mind, to open up new roads of thought and spark new curiosities. Opening this book at random will always bring you to a sentence that does that, as when Federici explains why witches are commonly old: “Older women [can] no longer provide children or sexual services and, therefore, appear to be a drain on the creation of wealth”; or ties witches to other historical insurrections: “the portrayal of women’s earthly challenges to the power structures as a demonic conspiracy is a phenomenon that has played out over and over in history down to our times” (Witches was published a few weeks before a Catholic exorcist held a special mass to protect accused sexual predator Brett Kavanaugh from … witches). Each sentence will also open doors into her other work.”
Excerpted from Caliban and the Witch; “The witch hunt rarely appears in the history of the proletariat. To this day, it remains one the most understudied phenomena in European history, or rather, world history, if we consider that the charge of devil worshipping was carried by missionaries and conquistadors to the “New World” as a tool for the subjugation of the local populations.
That the victims, in Europe, were mostly peasant women may account for the historians’ past indifference towards this genocide, an indifference that has bordered on complicity, since the elimination of the witches from the pages of history has contributed to trivializing their physical elimination at the stake, suggesting that it was a phenomenon of minor significance, if not a matter of folklore.
Even those who have studied the witch hunt (in the past almost exclusively men) were often worthy heirs of the sixteenth-century demonologists. While deploring the extermination of the witches, many have insisted on portraying them as wretched fools afflicted by hallucinations, so that their persecution could be explained as a process of “social therapy,” serving to reinforce neighborly cohesion, or could be described in medical terms as a “panic,” a “craze,” an “epidemic,” all characterizations that exculpate the witch hunters and depoliticize their crimes.
Feminists were quick to recognize that hundreds of thousands of women could not have been massacred and subjected to the cruelest tortures unless they posed a challenge to the power structure. They also realized that such a war against women, carried out over a period of at least two centuries, was a turning point in the history of women in Europe, the “original sin” in the process of social degradation that women suffered with the advent of capitalism, and a phenomenon, therefore, to which we must continually return if we are to understand the misogyny that still characterizes institutional practice and male-female relations.
Marxist historians, by contrast, even when studying the “transition to capitalism,” with very few exceptions, have consigned the witch hunt to oblivion, as if it were irrelevant to the history of the class struggle. Yet, the dimensions of the massacre should have raised some suspicions. as hundreds of thousands of women were burned, hanged, and tortured in less than two centuries.
It should also have seemed significant that the witch hunt occurred simultaneously with the colonization and extermination of the populations of the New World, the English enclosures, the beginning of the slave trade, the enactment of “bloody laws” against vagabonds and beggars and it climaxed in the interregnum between the end of feudalism and the capitalist “take off” when the peasantry in Europe reached the peak of its power but, in time, also consummated its historic defeat. So far, however, this aspect of primitive accumulation has truly remained a secret.
Witch-Burning Times and the State Initiative
What has not been recognized is that the witch hunt was one of the most important events in the development of capitalist society and the formation of the modern proletariat. For the unleashing of a campaign of terror against women, unmatched by any other persecution, weakened the resistance of the European peasantry to the assault launched against it by the gentry and the state, at a time when the peasant community was already disintegrating under the combined impact of land privatization, increased taxation, and the extension of state control over every aspect of social life.
The witch hunt deepened the divisions between women and men, teaching men to fear the power of women, and destroyed a universe of practices, beliefs, and social subjects whose existence was incompatible with the capitalist work discipline, thus redefining the main elements of social reproduction. Contrary to the view propagated by the Enlightenment, the witch hunt was not the last spark of a dying feudal world. Witch-hunting reached its peak between 1580 and 1630, in a period, that is, when feudal relations were already giving way to the economic and political institutions typical of mercantile capitalism. It was in this long “Iron Century” that, almost by a tacit agreement, in countries often at war against each other, the stakes multiplied, and the state started denouncing the existence of witches and taking the initiative of the persecution.
Before neighbor accused neighbor, or entire communities were seized by a “panic,” a steady indoctrination took place, with the authorities publicly expressing anxiety about the spreading of witches, and travelling from village to village in order to teach people how to recognize them, in some cases carrying with them lists with the names of suspected witches and threatening to punish those who hid them or came to their assistance.
But it was the jurists, the magistrates, and the demonologists, often embodied by the same person, who most contributed to the persecution. They were the ones who systematized the arguments, answered the critics, and perfected a legal machine that, by the end of the sixteenth century, gave a standardized, almost bureaucratic format to the trials, accounting for the similarities of the confessions across national boundaries. In their work, the men of the law could count on the cooperation of the most reputed intellectuals of the time, including philosophers and scientists who are still praised as the fathers of modern rationalism.
There can be no doubt, then, that the witch hunt was a major political initiative. The political nature of the witch hunt is further demonstrated by the fact that both Catholic and Protestant nations, at war against each other in every other respect, joined arms and shared arguments to persecute witches. Thus, it is no exaggeration to claim that the witch hunt was the first unifying terrain in the politics of the new European nation-states, the first example, after the schism brought about by the Reformation, of a European unification.
Devil Beliefs and Changes in the Mode of Production
A first insight into the meaning of the European witch hunt can be found in the thesis proposed by Michael Taussig in his classic work The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980), where the author maintains that devil-beliefs arise in those historical periods when one mode of production is being supplanted by another. In such periods not only are the material conditions of life radically transformed, but so are the metaphysical underpinnings of the social order — for instance, the conception of how value is created, what generates life and growth, what is “natural” and what is antagonistic to the established customs and social relations.
Taussig developed his theory by studying the beliefs of Colombian agricultural laborers and Bolivian tin miners at a time when, in both countries, monetary relations were taking root that in peoples’ eyes seemed deadly and even diabolical, compared with the older and still-surviving forms of subsistence-oriented production. Thus, in the cases Taussig studied, it was the poor who suspected the better-off of devil worship. Still, his association between the devil and the commodity form reminds us that also in the background of the witch hunt there was the expansion of rural capitalism, which involved the abolition of customary rights, and the first inflationary wave in modern Europe.
These phenomena only led to the growth of poverty, hunger, and social dislocation, they also transferred power into the hands of a new class of “modernizers” who looked with fear and repulsion at the communal forms of life that had been typical of pre-capitalist Europe. It was by the initiative of this proto-capitalist class that the witch hunt took off, as a weapon by which resistance to social and economic restructuring could be defeated.
That the spread of rural capitalism, with all its consequences (land expropriation, the deepening of social distances, the breakdown of collective relations) was a decisive factor in the background of the witch hunt is also proven by the fact that the majority of those accused were poor peasant women — cottars, wage laborers — while those who accused them were wealthy and prestigious members of the community, often their employers or landlords, that is, individuals who were part of the local power structures and often had close ties with the central state.
In England, the witches were usually old women on public assistance or women who survived by going from house to house begging for bits of food or a pot of wine or milk; if they were married, their husbands were day laborers, but more often they were widows and lived alone. Their poverty stands out in the confessions. It was in times of need that the Devil appeared to them, to assure them that from now on they “should never want,” although the money he would give them on such occasions would soon turn to ashes, a detail perhaps related to the experience of superinflation common at the time.
As for the diabolical crimes of the witches, they appear to us as nothing more than the class struggle played out at the village level: the “evil eye,” the curse of the beggar to whom an aim has been refused, the default on the payment of rent, the demand for public assistance.
Witch-Hunting and Class Revolt
As we can see from these cases, the witch hunt grew in a social environment where the “better sorts” were living in constant fear of the “lower classes,” who could certainly be expected to harbor evil thoughts because in this period they were losing everything they had.
That this fear expressed itself as an attack on popular magic is not surprising. The battle against magic has always accompanied the development of capitalism, to this very day. Magic is premised on the belief that the world is animated, unpredictable, and that there is a force in all things so that every event is interpreted as the expression of an occult power that must be deciphered and bent to one’s will.
Magic was also an obstacle to the rationalization of the work process, and a threat to the establishment of the principle of individual responsibility. Above all, magic seemed a form of refusal of work, of insubordination, and an instrument of grassroots resistance to power. The world had to be “disenchanted” in order to be dominated.
By the sixteenth century, the attack against magic was well under way and women were its most likely targets. Even when they were not expert sorcerers/magicians, they were the ones who were called to mark animals when they fell sick, heal their neighbors, help them find lost or stolen objects, give them amulets or love potions, help them forecast the future. Though the witch hunt targeted a broad variety of female practices, it was above all in this capacity — as sorcerers, healers, performers of incantations and divinations — that women were persecuted. For their claim to magical power undermined the power of the authorities and the state, giving confidence to the poor in their ability to manipulate the natural and social environment and possibly subvert the constituted order.
It is doubtful, on the other hand, that the magical arts that women had practiced for generations would have been magnified into a demonic conspiracy had they not occurred against a background of an intense social crisis and struggle. These were the “peasant wars” against land privatization, including the uprisings against the “enclosures” in England (in 1549, 1607, 1628, 1631), when hundreds of men, women and children, armed with pitchforks and spades, set about destroying the fences erected around the commons, proclaiming that “from now on we needn’t work any more.” During these revolts, it was often women who initiated and led the action.
The persecution of witches grew on this terrain. It was class war carried out by other means.
Witch-Hunting, Woman-Hunting, and the Accumulation of Labor
It seems plausible that the witch hunt was, at least in part, an attempt to criminalize birth control and place the female body, the uterus, at the service of population increase and the production and accumulation of labor-power. We can, in fact, imagine what effect it had on women to see their neighbors, friends, and relatives being burned at the stake, and realize that any contraceptive initiative on their side might be construed as the product of a demonic perversion.
From this point of view, there can be no doubt that the witch hunt destroyed the methods that women had used to control procreation, by indicting them as diabolical devices, and institutionalized the state’s control over the female body, the precondition for its subordination to the reproduction of labor-power. The witch hunt, then, was a war against women; it was a concerted attempt to degrade them, dehumanize them, and destroy their social power.
When this task was accomplished — when social discipline was restored, and the ruling class saw its hegemony consolidated — witch trials came to an end. The belief in witchcraft could even become an object of ridicule, decried as a superstition, and soon put out of memory. Just as the state had started the witch hunt, so too, one by one, various governments took the initiative in ending it.
Once the subversive potential of witchcraft was destroyed, the practice of magic could even be allowed to continue. After the witch hunt came to an end, many women continued to support themselves by foretelling the future, selling charms, and practicing other forms of magic. But now the authorities were no longer interested in prosecuting these practices, being inclined, instead, to view witchcraft as a product of ignorance or a disorder of the imagination.
Yet the specter of the witches continued to haunt the imagination of the ruling class. In 1871, the Parisian bourgeoisie instinctively returned to it to demonize the female Communards, accusing them of wanting to set Paris aflame. There can be little doubt, in fact, that the models for the lurid tales and images used by the bourgeois press to create the myth of the petroleuses were drawn from the repertoire of the witch hunt.”
And for reimagined faith as feminine centered seizure of power from the Patriarchy, and as a reconstructed Celtic fairy faith of pre Christian Europe, there are no finer sources than those written by Starhawk, who had the wisdom to honor both the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves:
The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess,
On this day of One 1446 Hijri, Ramadan begins; a month of peace, fasting, prayers, celebrations of family and community, and acts of charity and kindness throughout the Islamic diaspora. Among humankind’s most universal global rituals of interdependence and the redemptive and transformative power of love, it retains its ancient origins as a time of truce and a festival of peace, in which war and the social use of force and violence are abandoned and solidarity, compassion, and mercy celebrated.
I think of these things as meanings of Ramadan in the context in which I first participated in it, in solidarity with a community under siege and foreign invasion in Kashmir over thirty years ago, and of all the peoples throughout the world who are not free to live and believe as they choose, the Uighur of Xinjiang and the Rohingya of Myanmar among them, of places where sectarian divisions have been exploited by imperial powers in conflicts of dominion like Yemen and Syria, and of the tragedy of Occupied Palestine and Israel’s genocidal Gaza War.
Humankind needs love, and its forms as mercy, compassion, empathy, community, solidarity, and trust, and all the hope we can salvage from the jaws of our destruction and the shadows of our fear and grief.
Like all things which bear the legacies of our history Ramadan has many other meanings, but this above all; the design of our humanity is such that we are stewards of each other, bearers of wounds which open us to the pain of others, but bearers also of the redemptive and transformative power of love which can heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As written by Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī; “Let the beauty we love be what we do.”
Peace be upon us all.
Saudi Arabia, other Muslim countries welcome start of Ramadan
1 آذار (مارس) 2025 طقوس التكافل واللطف ورموز قوة الحب التعويضية والتحويلية في مداواة جراح إنسانيتنا وانكسار العالم
رمضان مبارك يا أصدقاء.
في مثل هذا اليوم من 1446 هـ يبدأ شهر رمضان. شهر من السلام والصوم والصلاة واحتفالات الأسرة والمجتمع والأعمال الخيرية والعطف في جميع أنحاء الشتات الإسلامي. من بين الطقوس العالمية الأكثر عالمية للترابط والقوة التعويضية والتحويلية للحب ، فإنه يحتفظ بأصوله القديمة كوقت للهدنة ومهرجان للسلام ، حيث يتم التخلي عن الحرب والاستخدام الاجتماعي للقوة والعنف والتضامن والرحمة واحتفل بالرحمة.
أفكر في هذه الأشياء على أنها معاني رمضان في السياق الذي شاركت فيه لأول مرة ، تضامنيًا مع مجتمع محاصر وغزو أجنبي في كشمير منذ أكثر من ثلاثين عامًا ، وجميع شعوب العالم الذين ليسوا أحرارًا في يعيشون ويؤمنون كما يختارون ، من بينهم الأويغور في شينجيانغ والروهينجا في ميانمار ، بالأماكن التي تم فيها استغلال الانقسامات الطائفية من قبل القوى الإمبريالية في صراعات الهيمنة مثل اليمن وسوريا ، ومأساة فلسطين المحتلة.
يحتاج الجنس البشري إلى الحب ، وأشكاله كرحمة ورحمة وتعاطف ومجتمع وتضامن وثقة ، وكل أمل يمكننا إنقاذه من فكي دمارنا وظلال خوفنا وحزننا.
مثل كل الأشياء التي تحمل موروثات تاريخنا ، فإن رمضان له معاني أخرى كثيرة ، ولكن هذا قبل كل شيء ؛ إن تصميم إنسانيتنا يجعلنا وكلاء لبعضنا البعض ، وحاملين للجروح التي تفتحنا على آلام الآخرين ، ولكننا أيضًا حاملون لقوة الحب التعويضية والتغييرية التي يمكن أن تشفي عيوب إنسانيتنا وانكسار العالم.
كما كتبه جلال الدين محمد الرومي. “دع الجمال الذي نحبه يكون ما نفعله”.
السلام علينا جميعا.
هنا مرة أخرى جزء من قصيدتي الحب ينتصر على مر الزمن ؛
لم يتم تصميم البشر ليكونوا بمفردهم
لاننا ابواب تفتح بعضنا بعضا
ونعيد بعضنا البعض لأنفسنا في عالم غير مبال
عندما نكون متوحشين ومكسورين وضائعين ؛
الحب هو أعظم قوة لجميع القوى
التي تشكل وتحفز وتعلم الكائنات الحية
الحب يخلق ، الحب يعوض ، الحب يتحول ،
ينتصر الحب على علم أمراض انفصالنا
من الجمال ، من اللامتناهي ، ومن المجتمع البشري ؛
ينتصر الحب بمرور الوقت.
Persian:
1 مارس 2025 آیینهای وابستگی متقابل و مهربانی و تمثیلهای قدرت رستگاری و دگرگونکننده عشق در التیام زخمهای انسانیت ما و شکستگیهای جهان
مبارک رمضان دوستان.
در این روز 1446 هجری قمری، ماه رمضان آغاز می شود. ماه صلح، روزه، نماز، جشن خانواده و اجتماع و احسان و احسان در سراسر غربت اسلامی. در میان جهانی ترین آیین های جهانی بشر برای وابستگی متقابل و قدرت رستگاری و دگرگون کننده عشق، خاستگاه باستانی خود را به عنوان زمان آتش بس و جشنواره صلح حفظ می کند که در آن جنگ و استفاده اجتماعی از زور و خشونت کنار گذاشته می شود و همبستگی، شفقت. ، و رحمت جشن گرفت.
من این موارد را به معنای معنای ماه رمضان در زمینه ای که برای اولین بار در آن شرکت کردم ، در همبستگی با جامعه تحت محاصره و حمله خارجی بیش از سی سال پیش در کشمیر ، و همه مردم در سراسر جهان که آزاد نیستند ، در آن شرکت کنم. همانطور که انتخاب می کنند ، اویغور سین کیانگ و روهینگیای میانمار در میان آنها زندگی کنند و باور کنند ، مکانهایی که در آن اختلافات فرقه ای توسط نیروهای امپراتوری در درگیری های سلطه مانند یمن و سوریه مورد بهره برداری قرار گرفته است و فاجعه فلسطین اشغالی.
بشریت به عشق ، و اشکال آن مانند رحمت ، شفقت ، همدلی ، اجتماع ، همبستگی و اعتماد ، و همه امیدهایی که می توانیم از آرواره های نابودی و سایه های ترس و غم خود نجات دهیم ، نیاز دارد.
مانند همه چیزهایی که میراث تاریخ ما را به همراه دارند ، ماه رمضان معانی بسیاری دیگری نیز دارد ، اما این بیش از هر چیز دیگری است. طراحی انسانیت ما به گونه ای است که ما مهماندار یکدیگر هستیم ، حامل زخمهایی هستیم که ما را به درد دیگران باز می کند ، اما همچنین حامل قدرت رستگاری و تحول گرایانه عشق است که می تواند نقایص انسانیت ما و شکسته شدن جهان.
همانطور که جلال الدین محمد رامی نوشته است؛ “بگذارید زیبایی که دوست داریم همان کاری باشد که انجام می دهیم.”
درود بر همه ما
در اینجا دوباره قطعه ای از شعر من عشق با گذشت زمان پیروز می شود.
انسان ها به گونه ای طراحی نشده اند که تنها باشند
زیرا ما درهایی هستیم که یکدیگر را باز می کنیم
و در جهانی بی تفاوت یکدیگر را به خودمان برگردانیم
وقتی وحشی و شکسته و گم شویم
عشق بزرگترین قدرت همه نیروهاست
که موجودات زنده را شکل می دهد ، ایجاد انگیزه می کند و آنها را آگاه می کند
عشق ایجاد می کند ، عشق بازخرید می شود ، عشق تغییر شکل می دهد ،
عشق بر آسیب شناسی قطع ارتباط ما پیروز می شود
از زیبایی ، از بینهایت و از جامعه بشریت ؛
عشق با گذشت زمان پیروز می شود.
Turkish:
1 Mart 2025 Karşılıklı Bağımlılık ve Nezaket Ritüelleri ve İnsanlığımızın Yaralarını ve Dünyanın Kırıklığını İyileştirmede Sevginin Kurtarıcı ve Dönüştürücü Gücünün Alegorileri
Arkadaşlar Mübarek Ramazan.
Hicri 1446 yılının bu gününde Ramazan başlar; İslam diasporası boyunca barış, oruç, dualar, aile ve topluluk kutlamaları ve hayırseverlik ve nezaket eylemlerinin olduğu bir aydır. İnsanoğlunun en evrensel küresel karşılıklı bağımlılık ritüelleri ve sevginin kurtarıcı ve dönüştürücü gücü arasında, savaşın ve güç ve şiddetin toplumsal kullanımının terk edildiği, dayanışmanın, merhametin ve merhametin olduğu bir ateşkes zamanı ve bir barış festivali olarak kadim kökenlerini koruyor. ve merhamet kutlandı.
Bunları, ilk katıldığım bağlamda, otuz yılı aşkın bir süre önce Keşmir’de kuşatma altında olan ve yabancı işgali altındaki bir toplulukla ve özgür olmayan dünyadaki tüm halklarla dayanışma içinde Ramazan’ın anlamları olarak düşünüyorum. Yemen ve Suriye gibi egemenlik çatışmalarında ve İşgal Altındaki Filistin trajedisinde, emperyal güçler tarafından mezhepsel bölünmelerin sömürüldüğü yerlerde, Sincan Uygurları ve Myanmarlı Rohingyalar, seçtikleri gibi yaşıyor ve inanıyorlar.
İnsanlığın sevgiye ve merhamet, şefkat, empati, topluluk, dayanışma ve güven biçimlerine ve yıkımımızın çenelerinden ve korku ve kederimizin gölgelerinden kurtarabileceğimiz tüm umutlara ihtiyacı vardır.
Tarihimizin mirasını taşıyan her şey gibi Ramazan’ın da pek çok anlamı vardır ama her şeyden önce; insanlığımızın tasarımı öyledir ki, birbirimizin hizmetkarları, bizi başkalarının acısına açan yaraların taşıyıcılarıyız, aynı zamanda insanlığımızın kusurlarını ve kırılganlığı iyileştirebilen sevginin kurtarıcı ve dönüştürücü gücünün taşıyıcılarıyız. Dünya.
Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rmī’nin yazdığı gibi; “Sevdiğimiz güzellik yaptığımız şey olsun.”
Hepimizin selamı olsun.
Urdu
1 مارچ 2025 باہمی انحصار اور مہربانی کی رسومات اور ہماری انسانیت اور دنیا کے ٹوٹنے کے زخموں کو مندمل کرنے میں محبت کی مخلصی اور تبدیلی کی طاقت کی علامتیں
رمضان مبارک، دوستو۔
اس دن 1446 ہجری کو رمضان المبارک شروع ہوتا ہے۔ امن کا مہینہ، روزے، دعائیں، خاندان اور برادری کی تقریبات، اور اسلامی ڈاسپورا میں خیرات اور احسان کے اعمال۔ بنی نوع انسان کی باہمی انحصار کی سب سے عالمگیر عالمی رسومات اور محبت کی چھٹکارا اور تبدیلی کی طاقت کے درمیان، یہ اپنی قدیم ابتدا کو جنگ بندی کے وقت اور امن کے تہوار کے طور پر برقرار رکھتا ہے، جس میں جنگ اور طاقت اور تشدد کے سماجی استعمال کو ترک کر دیا جاتا ہے اور یکجہتی، ہمدردی ، اور رحمت منائی گئی۔
میں ان چیزوں کو رمضان کے اس تناظر میں سمجھتا ہوں جس میں میں نے پہلی بار اس میں شرکت کی تھی، تیس سال قبل کشمیر میں محاصرے اور غیر ملکی حملے کی زد میں رہنے والی کمیونٹی کے ساتھ اظہار یکجہتی کے لیے، اور دنیا بھر کے تمام لوگوں کے ساتھ جو آزاد نہیں ہیں۔ اپنی مرضی کے مطابق جیو اور یقین کرو، سنکیانگ کے ایغور اور ان میں سے میانمار کے روہنگیا، ان جگہوں پر جہاں یمن اور شام جیسے تسلط کے تنازعات اور مقبوضہ فلسطین کے المیے میں سامراجی طاقتوں کے ذریعہ فرقہ وارانہ تقسیم کا استحصال کیا گیا ہے۔
بنی نوع انسان کو محبت کی ضرورت ہے، اور اس کی شکلیں رحم، ہمدردی، ہمدردی، برادری، یکجہتی، اور اعتماد، اور وہ تمام امیدیں جن سے ہم اپنی تباہی کے جبڑوں اور اپنے خوف اور غم کے سائے سے نجات حاصل کر سکتے ہیں۔
ہماری تاریخ کی وراثت رکھنے والی تمام چیزوں کی طرح رمضان المبارک کے اور بھی بہت سے معنی ہیں لیکن یہ سب سے بڑھ کر۔ ہماری انسانیت کا ڈیزائن ایسا ہے کہ ہم ایک دوسرے کے محافظ ہیں، زخموں کے علمبردار ہیں جو ہمیں دوسروں کے درد کے لیے کھولتے ہیں، لیکن محبت کی نجات اور تبدیلی کی طاقت کے علمبردار بھی ہیں جو ہماری انسانیت کی خامیوں اور ٹوٹ پھوٹ کو دور کر سکتی ہے۔ دنیا.
جیسا کہ جلال الدین محمد رومی نے لکھا ہے۔ “جس خوبصورتی کو ہم پسند کرتے ہیں وہی ہونے دیں جو ہم کرتے ہیں۔”
ہم سب پر سلامتی ہو۔
April 3 2022 Reply To An Accusation of Preaching
My essay on Ramadan as an institution of universal peace yesterday found an unforeseen question from an angle I never imagined, always an event to be cherished, savored, and given reign to provoke thought;
“Is preaching allowed in this group?”
To this I replied; I hope not. Herein I speak of a time of truce and peace, from a place of great horror in Mariupol. We humans must affirm our interdependence and universality if we are ever to abandon the social use of force and violence.
For myself, Ramadan is an example for us all from a culture which is reviled and demonized as otherness by our own, an example of fear weaponized in service to authority, the carceral state, and wars of imperial conquest and dominion.
All I ask us to believe is that love is better than hate, mercy better than revenge, solidarity better than division.
To this I received a reply; “So you answer with more preaching. Personally I find religion repugnant and your woo woo unrealistic.”
Here is my answer; I too generally mislike religion as authority and institutional power. Gott Mitt Uns; it is humankinds oldest terror, for it permits anything, as Voltaire teaches us in his famous principle “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”. Certainly this is true of America’s new religion, QAnon, and its uses in the fascist subversion of democracy.
As to woo woo, my life work and field of study is the origin of evil, a legacy of working through early trauma and near-death experiences, which I attribute to the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; and as his great operatic myth allegorizes, power over others requires the renunciation of love. This suggests a correlate; love can redeem the flaws of our humanity and answer division with solidarity.
Can we not celebrate a time of renunciation of war and violence, and universal brotherhood and love as transcendence of the flags of our skin?
In reflection I am surprised to have never before known my writing to be called preaching or religious in character or intent; I grew up with ten years of formal study in Taoism and Zen Buddhism from the age of nine, and among other things I am a former monk of the Kagyu Vajrayana order of Tibetan Buddhism and a scholar of the Naqshbandi order of Sufism within Sunni Islam, legacies of my time of revolutionary struggle in Nepal and resistance to conquest and occupation in Kashmir respectively. I was once similarly taken aback and startled by being addressed as General, being nonviolent except in revolutionary struggle, seizures of power from tyrants, and the hunting of fascists. Now as then, it provoked my rethinking and interrogation of my own motives, values, and ideals, and their praxis as action.
What do I believe?
I practice the art of believing “six impossible things before breakfast”; this is my faith, though if asked directly I normally quote either Keats; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty”, or Rumi; “Let the beauty you love be what you do”, depending on who is asking, and in what language and nation.
If we are speaking of belief as obedience to authority and institutions of temporal power, I am with Nikos Kazantzakis; ”I believe nothing, I hope for nothing, I am free.”
If however we are speaking of belief as Ideals and value systems, that is something entirely different. My test of disambiguation here is submission to organizations or figures of power and elite hierarchies of belonging and membership, for no matter where you begin along that path, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
Democracy as a free society of equals embodies ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, and requires a nonsectarian state and a free press as what Foucault called truth telling. I regard journalism, and Islam, as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth; for the Faithful are commanded to learn throughout their entire lives, regardless of the source or where it leads. This is surely the most radical position on testing claims, exploring unknowns, and scholarship of knowledge without limits of any faith, philosophy, or ideology of any kind in the history of the world, especially in an age when Christians were burning books, and I cherish it greatly.
Underlying our values and ideals at a greater level of abstraction are those which are also innate capacities of human being, truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh; including hope as freedom, love as equality and our universal human rights which are parallel and interdependent with those of a citizen, and fraternity or faith in each other as solidarity and our duty of care for others.
And the first principle of our civilization as founded in the Forum of Athens and the Trial of Socrates is that we must always question ourselves, a crucial dimension of truth telling. This value has as its action the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
All of this is a ground of struggle between liberty and tyranny, enslavement, falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
To tyranny and fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
We may also speak of poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization as a kind of faith, and of poetic and metaphorical truth as belief, as I have in reference to ibn Arabi, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, and Lewis Carroll’s principle of action in Alice in Wonderland, as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky.
On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”
To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”
“Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”
“That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”
Just so.
In reference to my philosophy and ideology, here is a poem which I wrote in French for a Swiss publisher; here the original is after the English version. This may be the most coherent articulation of what may be called my belief system, though I believe nothing on the basis of any authority other than the test of my own questioning, and regard the pursuit of truth as a sacred calling, truths which are ambiguous, relative, ephemeral, and shifting as consequences of the Rashomon Gate of time and our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
The Flag of My Skin
Time, memory, history, identity, and the revolution of becoming ourselves;
the skin I have escaped in serpentine transformation has become a flag,
but of what nation?
Who owns this kingdom of flesh that we share?
This realm of the senses is both a boundary we must transgress
to discover ourselves and seize ownership of our freedom and being,
and an interface by which we shape each other, a propulsive and generative force of the human sublime, of truths written in our skin.
We are interdependent, vast and oceanic beings, exalted by our passion beyond the limits of our form but also autonomous individuals who create ourselves and one another over enormous gulfs of time, limitless in our possibilities of becoming human but also forms described as negative spaces of each other.
Being is a dance of myriad partnerships, transforms of messages and principles of organization and growth which are recursive, chaotic, a beauty of strangeness and the bizarre, a realm of Medusa, goddess and monster.
There is but one rule in nature; anything goes.
Who authorizes and validates the possibilities and performances of our identity?
Shall we not dethrone, mock, and challenge such tyrannies of normality?
Let us forge an art of fire by which to liberate us from the shells of our history, a poetics of revolution by which to incite, provoke, and disturb.
There are no maps of the unknown; only of the history written in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation, assigned values, interpreted meanings, and created ourselves through our anchorages of civilization, a prochronism whose purpose is to buffer the shock of change and shield identity from loss.
Yet it is this history and memory we must escape to create ourselves anew as we wander this wilderness of mirrors and of echoes, a labyrinth of shifting paths which leads both inward to our true selves and outward to other peoples and to their different truths and possibilities of becoming human.
Our senses are transducers through which we change energy into messages and topologies of reality; it is this logosphere within which we live and from which we arise and recreate ourselves continually, transcendent and surreal.
Humans are a system for transforming things into ideas.
So also do we transform our world and each other by our ideas, the real and the ideal reflecting and shaping each other in recursion. And this revolutionary and ongoing coevolution and process of becoming human is the central creative force of existence and of humankind.
The struggle for ownership of identity between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight. And what of the flag of our skin, of our history which we have unwound from ourselves as an endless scroll of signs, as a shroud, a chrysalis?
This I leave to you, to those we claim and who in turn claim us, to others who are different as well as those alike, and to us all.
We may belong to our past, but the future belongs to us.
It is yours and ours, the undiscovered country; use it wisely.
Le drapeau de ma peau
Le temps, la mémoire, l’histoire, l’identité et la révolution de devenir nous-mêmes;
la peau que j’ai échappée dans la transformation serpentine est devenue un drapeau,
mais de quelle nation?
À qui appartient ce royaume de chair que nous partageons?
Ce royaume des sens est à la fois une frontière que nous devons transgresser
de se découvrir et de s’approprier notre liberté et notre être,
et une interface par laquelle nous nous façonnons, force propulsive et génératrice du sublime humain, de vérités écrites dans notre peau.
Nous sommes des êtres interdépendants, vastes et océaniques, exaltés par notre passion au-delà des limites de notre forme mais aussi des individus autonomes qui se créent et se créent au-dessus d’énormes gouffres de temps, sans limites dans nos possibilités de devenir humain mais aussi des formes décrites comme des espaces négatifs de L’une et l’autre.
L’être est une danse de myriades de partenariats, de transformations de messages et de principes d’organisation et de croissance qui sont récursifs, chaotiques, une beauté d’étrangeté et de bizarre, un royaume de Méduse, déesse et monstre.
Il n’y a qu’une seule règle dans la nature; tout va.
Qui autorise et valide les possibilités et les performances de notre identité?
Ne détrônerons-nous pas, ne nous moquerons-nous pas de ces tyrannies de la normalité?
Forgeons un art du feu pour nous libérer des coquilles de notre histoire, une poétique de la révolution pour inciter, provoquer et troubler.
Il n’y a pas de cartes de l’inconnu; seulement de l’histoire écrite sous notre forme de la façon dont nous avons résolu les problèmes d’adaptation, assigné des valeurs, interprété des significations, et nous nous sommes créés à travers nos ancrages de civilisation, un prochronisme dont le but est d’amortir le choc du changement et de protéger l’identité de la perte.
Pourtant, c’est à cette histoire et à cette mémoire que nous devons échapper pour nous recréer en nous promenant dans ce désert de miroirs et d’échos, un labyrinthe de chemins changeants qui mène à la fois vers nous-mêmes et vers d’autres peuples et vers leurs différentes vérités et possibilités. de devenir humain.
Nos sens sont des transducteurs par lesquels nous transformons l’énergie en messages et en topologies de réalité; c’est cette logosphère à l’intérieur de laquelle nous vivons et dont nous surgissons et nous recréons continuellement, transcendante et surréaliste.
Les humains sont un système pour transformer les choses en idées.
De même, nous transformons notre monde et les uns les autres par nos idées, le réel et l’idéal se reflétant et se façonnant mutuellement en récursivité. Et cette coévolution et ce processus révolutionnaires et continus de devenir humain sont la force créatrice centrale de l’existence et de l’humanité.
La lutte pour la propriété de l’identité entre les masques que les autres fabriquent pour nous et ceux que nous fabriquons pour nous-mêmes est la première révolution dans laquelle nous devons tous lutter. Et qu’en est-il du drapeau de notre peau, de notre histoire que nous avons déroulée de nous-mêmes comme un rouleau de signes sans fin, comme un linceul, une chrysalide?
Je vous laisse ceci, à ceux que nous revendiquons et qui à notre tour nous réclament, à ceux qui sont différents ainsi qu’à ceux qui nous ressemblent, et à nous tous.
Nous pouvons appartenir à notre passé, mais l’avenir nous appartient.
C’est le vôtre et le nôtre, le pays inconnu; fais-en bon usage.
What is to be done? Alice Slays the Jabberwocky:
Arabic
3 أبريل 2022 رد على اتهامه بالوعظ
وجدت مقالتي عن رمضان كمؤسسة للسلام العالمي بالأمس سؤالاً غير متوقع من زاوية لم أتخيلها أبدًا ، ودائمًا ما يكون حدثًا يستحق الاعتزاز به ويستمتع به ويمنحه السيادة لإثارة الفكر ؛
“هل الوعظ مسموح به في هذه المجموعة؟”
أجبته على هذا. لا اتمنى. هنا أتحدث عن زمن الهدنة والسلام ، من مكان مرعب في ماريوبول. يجب علينا نحن البشر أن نؤكد ترابطنا وعالميتنا إذا أردنا في أي وقت التخلي عن الاستخدام الاجتماعي للقوة والعنف.
بالنسبة لي ، يعتبر رمضان مثالاً لنا جميعًا من ثقافة يتم شيطنها وتشويهها كآخر من قبل ثقافتنا ، ومثال على الخوف الذي تم تسليحه في خدمة السلطة ، والدولة الجثثية ، وحروب الغزو والسيطرة الإمبرياليين.
كل ما أطلبه هو أن الحب أفضل من الكراهية ، والرحمة أفضل من الانتقام ، والتضامن أفضل من الانقسام.
تلقيت ردا على هذا. “لذلك تجيب بمزيد من الوعظ. أنا شخصياً أجد الدين بغيضاً وخطرك غير واقعي “.
هنا جوابي. أنا أيضًا لا أحب الدين بشكل عام باعتباره سلطة وقوة مؤسسية. جوت ميت Uns إنه أقدم إرهاب للبشرية ، لأنه يسمح بأي شيء ، كما يعلمنا فولتير في مبدأه الشهير “أولئك الذين يستطيعون جعلك تؤمن بالسخافات يمكن أن يجعلوك ترتكب الفظائع”. من المؤكد أن هذا ينطبق على دين أمريكا الجديد ، QAnon ، واستخداماته في التخريب الفاشي للديمقراطية.
بالنسبة إلى woo woo ، فإن عملي في حياتي ومجال دراستي هو أصل الشر ، وهو إرث من العمل من خلال الصدمات المبكرة وتجارب الاقتراب من الموت ، والتي أنسبها إلى حلقة Wagnerian من الخوف والقوة والقوة ؛ وكما تقول أسطورة الأوبرا العظيمة ، فإن القوة على الآخرين تتطلب نبذ الحب. هذا يشير إلى وجود علاقة. يمكن للحب أن يصحح عيوب إنسانيتنا ويجيب على الانقسام بالتضامن.
ألا نستطيع أن نحتفل بوقت نبذ الحرب والعنف والأخوة والحب الكونيين كتعالي لأعلام بشرتنا؟
في التفكير ، أنا مندهش لأنني لم أعرف من قبل أن كتاباتي تُدعى وعظًا أو دينية في طبيعتها أو نواياها ؛ لقد نشأت مع عشر سنوات من الدراسة الرسمية في الطاوية والبوذية الزينية منذ أن كنت في التاسعة من عمري ، ومن بين أمور أخرى أنا راهب سابق من طائفة كاجيو فاجرايانا للبوذية التبتية وعالم في الطريقة النقشبندية للصوفية داخل الإسلام السني ، إرث من زمن النضال الثوري في نيبال ومقاومة الفتح والاحتلال في كشمير على التوالي. لقد شعرت بالدهشة والذهول ذات مرة من خلال مخاطبتي بصفتي جنرالًا ، وبكوني لاعنفًا إلا في النضال الثوري ، والاستيلاء على السلطة من الطغاة ، وصيد الفاشيين. الآن كما في ذلك الوقت ، أثار ذلك إعادة تفكيري واستجوابي في دوافعي وقيمي ومُثُلي وتطبيقاتها العملية كإجراء.
ماذا اعتقد؟
أمارس فن الإيمان بـ “ستة أشياء مستحيلة قبل الإفطار”. هذا هو إيماني ، على الرغم من أنني إذا سئلت مباشرة فأنا أقتبس عادةً من كيتس ؛ “لست متأكدًا من شيء سوى قداسة عواطف القلب وحقيقة الخيال – ما تعتبره المخيلة جمالًا يجب أن يكون حقًا – سواء كان موجودًا من قبل أم لا – لأن لدي نفس فكرة كل عواطفنا مثل الحب كلهم في جلالهم ، مبدعون من الجمال الأساسي “، أو الرومي ؛ “دع الجمال الذي تحبه هو ما تفعله” ، اعتمادًا على من يسأل ، وفي أي لغة وأمة.
إذا كنا نتحدث عن الإيمان كطاعة للسلطة ومؤسسات السلطة الزمنية ، فأنا مع نيكوس كازانتزاكيس ؛ “أنا لا أصدق أي شيء ، وآمل في لا شيء ، أنا حر.”
ومع ذلك ، إذا كنا نتحدث عن الإيمان كمثل وأنظمة قيم ، فهذا شيء مختلف تمامًا. اختباري في توضيح الغموض هنا هو الخضوع لمنظمات أو شخصيات ذات سلطة وتسلسل هرمي للنخبة من الانتماء والعضوية ، بغض النظر عن المكان الذي تبدأ فيه على هذا الطريق ، ينتهي بك الأمر دائمًا عند أبواب أوشفيتز.
من يقف بيننا وبين اللانهائي لا يخدم أيًا منهما.
تجسد الديمقراطية كمجتمع حر من أنداد مُثل الحرية والمساواة والحقيقة والعدالة ، وتتطلب دولة غير طائفية وصحافة حرة كما أطلق عليها فوكو قول الحقيقة.
الكامنة وراء قيمنا ومثلنا العليا على مستوى أعلى من التجريد هي تلك التي هي أيضًا قدرات فطرية للإنسان ، وحقائق متأصلة في الطبيعة ومكتوبة في جسدنا ؛ بما في ذلك الأمل كحرية ، والحب كمساواة ، وحقوق الإنسان العالمية الموازية والمترابطة مع حقوق المواطن ، والأخوة أو الإيمان ببعضنا البعض كتضامن وواجبنا في رعاية الآخرين.
والمبدأ الأول لحضارتنا على النحو الذي تأسس في منتدى أثينا ومحاكمة سقراط هو أننا يجب أن نسأل أنفسنا دائمًا ، وهو بُعد حاسم في قول الحقيقة. هذه القيمة لها من عملها الواجبات الأساسية الأربعة للمواطن ؛ سلطة السؤال ، وفضح السلطة ، والسلطة الصورية ، وسلطة التحدي.
كل هذا هو أرضية صراع بين الحرية والاستبداد
الغسل والتزييف والتسليع ونزع الصفة الإنسانية.
لا يمكن أن يكون هناك سوى رد واحد على الاستبداد والفاشية. لن يحدث مطلقا مرة اخري!
قد نتحدث أيضًا عن الرؤية الشعرية في إعادة تصور وتحويل أنفسنا وحضارتنا كنوع من الإيمان ، وعن الحقيقة الشعرية والمجازية كإيمان ، كما قلت في إشارة إلى مبدأ عمل كولريدج ، وبليك ، وكيتس ، ولويس كارول. في Alice in Wonderland ، كما تعلمنا أليس عند سرد الأشياء الستة المستحيلة في معركتها مع Jabberwocky.
في طريقها لمحاربة تنين ، ورؤيته لأول مرة مروعة ، تشير أليس إلى ماد هاتر في فيلم تيم بيرتون الجميل ؛ “هذا مستحيل.”
الذي يقول له حتر ، “فقط إذا كنت تؤمن بذلك”.
“في بعض الأحيان ، أؤمن بستة أشياء مستحيلة قبل الإفطار.”
“هذه ممارسة ممتازة ، ولكن الآن فقط ، قد ترغب حقًا في التركيز على Jabberwocky.”
هكذا فقط.
بالإشارة إلى فلسفتي وأيديولوجيتي ، إليكم قصيدة كتبتها بالفرنسية لناشر سويسري. هنا الأصل بعد النسخة الإنجليزية. قد يكون هذا هو التعبير الأكثر تماسكًا لما يمكن أن يسمى نظام إيماني ، على الرغم من أنني لا أصدق أي شيء على أساس أي سلطة بخلاف اختبار استجوابي ، وأعتبر السعي وراء الحقيقة بمثابة دعوة مقدسة ، وحقائق غامضة ، نسبي ، سريع الزوال ، ومتحول كنتيجة لبوابة راشومون الزمنية وإمكانياتنا اللامحدودة في أن نصبح بشرًا.
علم بشرتي
الوقت والذاكرة والتاريخ والهوية وثورة أن نصبح أنفسنا ؛
الجلد الذي هربت منه في تحول اعوج أصبح علمًا ،
لكن من أي أمة؟
من يملك مملكة الجسد هذه التي نتشاركها؟
عالم الحواس هذا هو حد يجب علينا تجاوزه
لاكتشاف أنفسنا والاستيلاء على ملكية حريتنا ووجودنا ،
وواجهة نشكل بها بعضنا البعض ، قوة دافعة ومولدة لسامية الإنسان ، للحقائق المكتوبة في جلدنا.
نحن كائنات مترابطة وواسعة ومحيطية ، يعلوها شغفنا الذي يتجاوز حدود شكلنا ولكن أيضًا الأفراد المستقلون الذين يخلقون أنفسنا وبعضنا البعض عبر فجوات زمنية هائلة ، لا حدود لإمكانياتنا في أن نصبح بشرًا ولكن أيضًا أشكال توصف بأنها مساحات سلبية من بعضها البعض.
إن الوجود عبارة عن رقصة من الشراكات التي لا تعد ولا تحصى ، وتحولات الرسائل ومبادئ التنظيم والنمو التي هي متكررة ، وفوضوية ، وجمال الغرابة والغرابة ، عالم ميدوسا ، إلهة ووحش.
لا توجد إلا قاعدة واحدة في الطبيعة. كل شيء مباح.
من يصرح ويتحقق من إمكانيات وأداء هويتنا؟
ألا يجب أن نخلع عن عرشنا ونستهزئ به ونتحدى هذه الاستبداد الطبيعي؟
لنصنع فنًا من النار نحررنا به من قذائف تاريخنا ، شاعرية للثورة يمكن بواسطتها التحريض والاستفزاز والتشويش.
لا توجد خرائط للمجهول. فقط للتاريخ المكتوب في شكلنا الخاص بكيفية حلنا لمشاكل التكيف ، والقيم المخصصة ، والمعاني المفسرة ، وخلق أنفسنا من خلال مراسي الحضارة ، وهي عملية استباقية تهدف إلى حماية صدمة التغيير وحماية الهوية من الضياع.
ومع ذلك ، يجب أن نهرب من هذا التاريخ والذاكرة لنخلق أنفسنا من جديد بينما نتجول في هذه البرية من المرايا والصدى ، وهي متاهة من المسارات المتغيرة التي تقودنا إلى الداخل إلى أنفسنا الحقيقية وإلى الخارج إلى الشعوب الأخرى وإلى حقائقهم وإمكانياتهم المختلفة. من أن يصبح إنسانًا.
حواسنا هي محولات طاقة نغير من خلالها الطاقة إلى رسائل وطوبولوجيا للواقع ؛ هذا هو عالم اللوغوسفير الذي نعيش فيه وننشأ منه ونعيد تكوين أنفسنا باستمرار ، متعال وسريالي.
البشر نظام لتحويل الأشياء إلى أفكار.
لذلك نحن أيضًا نحول عالمنا وبعضنا البعض من خلال أفكارنا ، الحقيقية والمثالية التي تعكس وتشكل بعضنا البعض في التكرار. وهذا التطور المشترك الثوري والمستمر وعملية التحول إلى إنسان هي القوة الخلاقة المركزية للوجود والبشرية.
الصراع من أجل ملكية الهوية بين الأقنعة التي يصنعها الآخرون لنا والأقنعة التي نصنعها لأنفسنا هي الثورة الأولى التي يجب علينا جميعًا النضال فيها. وماذا عن علم بشرتنا ، عن تاريخنا الذي فكناه عن أنفسنا بصفته لفيفة لا نهاية لها من العلامات ، ككفن ، شرنقة؟
أترك هذا لكم ، لأولئك الذين ندعيهم والذين بدورهم يطالبون بنا ، للآخرين المختلفين وكذلك لأولئك على حد سواء ، ولنا جميعًا.
Torch of Liberty 