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
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 potentia 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 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, to use Freud’s delicious phrase; 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.
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 59th 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 carceral 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.
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 refuse 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.”
US attorney general tells Bloody Sunday service ‘the right to vote is under attack’
Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, by Raymond Arsenault, Mirron Willis (Narrator), Thurgood Marshall, John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr. (Contributors)
As I have often said since the October 7 terrorist attack which has upended the political landscape of America in our year of elections between tyranny and liberty, If you enable or enact genocide and crimes against humanity, I cannot vote for you, and I will fight you.
Yet this election may decide the survival of democracy and humankind across the coming several centuries, and I now calculate our chances to escape an Age of Tyranny and wars of unimaginable horrors at less than two percent; I say again, I believe that in less than two possible futures out of every one hundred, something resembling ourselves can look at the ruins of our civilization and our species a millennium from now with questioning and wonder. With all of our technology and our understanding, why did we choose to annihilate ourselves?
The dangers of ideological fracture and division cannot be overstated; the IWW global union movement self destructed over the issue of peace during World War One, as did the Social Democrats in Germany, removing our respective blocking forces for the rise of fascism and resulting in the Second World War; there are many other and more recent examples of movements for change and progress being shattered by forces of reaction and the state, but these two will serve to illustrate what will happen next if Trump once again captures the state.
We must unite in solidarity together to confront this threat and drive fascist tyranny from the stage of history.
Yet Biden’s massive and extralegal supply of Israel with war material while it is used to rain death of the people of Gaza, on the absurd pretext that the criminals who attacked Israel claim to act in their name as a strategy of subjugation of the Palestinians to their theocratic rule, such decisions by Biden personally have made all of us as Americans complicit in genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and other crimes against humanity.
To this I say; Never Again!
Our choice is now to abandon either democracy and all of our rights as citizens, or the idea of our universal human rights and our historic role as their guarantor throughout the world. I’d like to keep both democracy and human rights.
How can we do this and win a future for humankind as a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights as citizens and as human beings?
If this is our goal, and with the imposed conditions of struggle as they have resolved themselves on Super Tuesday wherein Trump and Biden will face off once again in the sudden death match of futures that is our Presidential election, only one course of action remains for us which bears any hope for the triumph of liberty over tyranny; change the rules of the game.
I’m sure we can all think of many possibilities for bringing change with such a mission, but tonight I find myself enchanted with the idea of liberating Biden from Biden as articulated by Michael Moore. Who better to trust as our moral compass than the author of V For Vendetta, who wrote the immortal words; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”
Here follows the great and visionary Michael Moore’s podcast regarding the crisis in Gaza and its meaning for America’s 2024 election:
“ Hi, it’s Michael Moore and this is my podcast Rumble with Michael Moore. I have to say, it’s not often I have good news, but, last Tuesday in the state of Michigan, the day of the Michigan Democratic primary, over 100,000 voters came out to send a message to Joe Biden that there must be a ceasefire to the massacre in Gaza immediately. Remember a week ago I was encouraging people to get out to vote. A group of us put together, this campaign called Listen to Michigan asking voters the Democratic Party on the Democratic primary ballot instead of voting for Biden. There’s a line on that ballot that says “Uncommitted”. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re against Biden. It certainly doesn’t mean you want Trump back in the white House, because nobody has signed up for that. But because Joe Biden, sadly, has made his reelection more difficult for not just himself, but for a lot of people, because his position on embracing Benjamin Netanyahu, endorsing the war, funding the war, sending more, armaments and battleships and whatever else — he jumped right to it when there was this horrific massacre on October 7th. People connected to Hamas stormed into Israel and killed over a thousand people and took a couple of hundred hostages. And I think everybody remembers that day. I remember waking up to it here in the U.S. and, you know, nobody likes to hear the news of the killings of any other humans. I would hope that’s everybody’s position. But, in this case, the Hamas attackers were surprised that there were no people in the Israeli army there to stop them. It was very weird. Still weird that they kind of just were able to waltz into Israel from Gaza. Gaza’s a penned-in, you know, 25mi² of land or… I mean, there’s not a lot there, but they’ve been trapped in there for over 15 years. It’s an outdoor prison. And, there are these guard towers and everything that surround the whole place. You can’t get in, can’t get out. And unless you have a special work visa to work in Israel — because the Israelis need workers there so some of them get to go there and work. But that’s it. And on October 7th, they found, essentially an undefended border between Gaza and Israel. And, the people, in the various villages — Israelis close to Gaza — found themselves being attacked and calling for help, and the army and the police just weren’t there. A few police were able to show up, but it really seemed like, well, and what we know from just reading the Israeli press, Prime Minister Netanyahu had already removed a lot of the security from the border and sent it up to the Lebanese border and sent it into the West Bank to help the settlers there steal more land and hurt more Palestinians and just left the people, the Israelis, who live on the border with Gaza, completely unprotected, not defended. And many, many, many of them died. Why? Well, you know, there’s already been some good investigative reports in I assume more will come because the Israeli people are asking the same thing, too, and are wondering why Netanyahu is even still in power considering his one main job to protect them, he completely failed at it.
[00:04:25] So, Netanyahu’s response, as we all know for the last nearly five months now, has been to slaughter as many Palestinians as possible, to push them from the north to the south and it seems like wanting to push them into the Sinai, and certainly not recognize them as human beings, and to get them out of the land that Israel wants for itself. And so we’ve been witness to this now. Joe Biden went over there the first week or so, gave a big hug to Netanyahu, and told him, “We’re here for you.” I don’t know who the “we are” is because the vast majority of Americans don’t support President Biden doing what he’s done here. And I hope people in Israel know that too. And I hope people in Palestine know that, that when I am saying these things, I am part of that majority. The vast majority of Americans do not support genocide. They do not support apartheid. They do not support giving Netanyahu more money, more leeway to do whatever the hell he wants.
[00:05:38] And so a group of people in Michigan — and I’m one of many, that’s all. I’m not the leader of this or anything, but I got involved, and we only had a few weeks. That’s not much time to plan a movement or a campaign so that people, when they went to vote in the primary last Tuesday, had a line on the ballot where if they don’t support what President Biden’s been doing with Palestine, they could mark a box called “Uncommitted”. Again, I don’t really mean to speak for anybody but myself, but I can tell you what a lot of us felt that this was a way for people to go to the polls and actually have a say, actually send a message: Stop this. Stop the slaughter. Get Netanyahu to do a ceasefire here, and then sit down at a peace table and work this out.
[00:06:31] Now I know there are some of you listening to this that hate all of those ideas, especially “working it out.” I get your mail, don’t worry. Like I said, I read all the emails I get. I have to say it’s pretty shocking to read actual letters from people talking about the Palestinians as if they’re animals, less than human, not worth the life that they have. And feeling very justified in committing this extreme act of revenge. “Well, these Hamas attacker terrorists, they killed a thousand of ours, we’re going to kill 30,000 of theirs” — with the thought that somehow this will put an end to all the fighting that’s been going on for all these years. And of course, if you have half a brain, you know that’s not going to happen. What has happened, though, of those 30,000 — two thirds of which, 20,000 of them, are children, babies, the elderly, and of course, the majority of the dead are women. I don’t think they were the terrorists we’re supposed to be afraid of, right? But it sure gave a good excuse to just start carpet bombing the Gaza Strip, cut off the food, cut off the lights, cut off the water, starve them to death, make them die of dehydration — all sorts of ways. It’s so brutal and so cruel, and I know I don’t have to convince the majority of you of that.
[00:08:16] And the people of Israel have spoken out against Netanyahu. They can’t wait to be able to vote him out of office. Every poll shows that. And of course, our Jewish sisters and brothers here in this country have been very vocal against what the Netanyahu government has done here in these last five months, murder is murder, and to have a policy of collective punishment — in other words, “if these few people who committed murder are Palestinian, therefore all Palestinians are murderers, and therefore we can kill all Palestinians.” That is basically the policy that’s in action right now and has been for the last five months. So, it’s something that a lot of us, a lot of you, just can’t tolerate.
[00:09:17] So we got busy and organized just a few weeks before this primary, telling people, you know, there’s a way to have your say here. If you’re worried about hurting Biden, it doesn’t necessarily mean that. Certainly, none of us want Trump back in the White House. And Joe Biden has brought about now, less and less people are planning to vote for him because of his actions. Especially in a place like Michigan. And as I shared with you last week, the op ed by Michelle Goldberg, who said that what Biden is doing is he is going to lose Michigan to Trump. And if he loses Michigan, he’s going to lose the election.
[00:10:01] So before we get into all that, let me just take a moment to thank our underwriter for this week’s episode, and that is Shopify. Shopify is, of course, the global commerce platform used by millions of businesses all across the globe. And as Rumble listeners know, they are also a long time supporter of my podcast. If you’re looking to start your own shop — maybe to raise money for your church or school or nonprofit, or maybe you want to sell your own art or merchandise for your band or whatever — or if you’re looking for ways to grow your existing business, to reach out to potential people that want to support your work, check out Shopify. Whether you’re selling online or in a brick and mortar store, whether you’re fulfilling your first order or your millionth, Shopify’s tools have got you covered. Plus, they have extensive help resources to support you and help you grow every step of the way. So sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/rumble — and that’s all lowercase, “rumble” is. Go to shopify.com/rumble right now to grow your business no matter what stage you’re in. Shopify.com/rumble. And again, thank you Shopify for supporting this podcast and for supporting my voice.
[00:11:26] All right, so let’s get back to this. So here we are essentially trying to save Biden from himself, trying to get him to understand that he’s got to put an end to the killing, he’s got to stop funding it, and he’s got to back away from people who believe in fascist ideology. And if he doesn’t do that, what’s going to happen is, again, people are not going to switch from voting from Biden to Trump, that’s not going to happen. Nobody I know that voted for Biden before, or who would vote for him again, would never have a thought in their head about voting for Trump. But what’s going to happen is, a lot of people who are very, sickened by what’s being done in their name, our name, my name, your name, can’t be tolerated. And let me tell you, for those of you who are hearing this and saying, “Well, no, Mike, you can’t just vote on one issue.” Oh yes you can. Especially if that issue is — oh, well go back to any time in our history and just pick an issue. What if the issue was slavery? “Well, now, Mike, you know, it’s 1860, right? Lincoln’s running. You can’t just vote for Lincoln on that one issue. I mean, there’s all these other issues.” No, actually, you could and maybe should vote for somebody because enslaving other human beings is one of the worst crimes against humanity that you can perform. No no, no. I mean, just, I’ll take it out of 1860 and bring it to right now. What if tomorrow Joe Biden announced that he’s thought it over, he went to Mass on Sunday — you know, he’s a good Catholic — and he’s talked to some bishops, and he realizes that abortion is a sin, and therefore he is no longer, a supporter of what was called Roe v Wade. He no longer believes that women should have the right to control their own bodies, to make their own decisions about their reproduction. And therefore he is now anti-abortion, against abortion, against a woman’s right to choose. If he uttered that tomorrow. Are you going to tell me that, “Well, you know, Mike, I… You know, I’m not a one issue voter. And, you know, we can’t let Trump back in the White House so we’re all just going to have to vote for Biden,” — even though he just said that you, especially if you’re a woman, you don’t have the right to decide what to do with your body, even though he just said that’s his new position, that’s his issue. And you’re still going to say, “Yeah. Well, it’s a weird time we live in and, you know, we got to still vote for Biden”? You wouldn’t say that. You are a single issue voter on a number of particular issues. I’m going to just take a wild guess that women’s rights might be one of those issues where you do not equivocate, you do not compromise, you do not negotiate who has the right to control a woman’s body. Right? Come on, I mean, don’t go, “Whoa, whoa. What’s Mike trying to get me to say here? That I would not vote for Biden?” Well, I know you’re not going to vote for Trump because Trump also is anti-women, anti women’s rights, anti-choice. So you’re not going to do that. Are you going to walk into the voting booth and in good conscience vote for someone — in this case, let’s say our hypothetical here is Joe Biden, has told you that he no longer supports women’s rights and no longer supports their right to choose whether or not they’re going to have a baby. Really? No, of course I know the answer to this. So there are some issues where we have to draw the line. How about the planet? How about that one? What if all of a sudden Biden tomorrow said that, “The environmental movement’s gone too far, and, you know, we’ve made it this far. The planet’s going to last at least a few thousand more years, so we got to stop picking on, you know, corporate America and industry and the people that need to make their money off of fossil fuels. And so therefore, I, as President, Joe Biden, we’re going to pull back a little bit on all this environmental stuff.” I mean, I know he’s not going to say that tomorrow, right? But then again, I never thought he’d be getting on a plane and hugging Benjamin Netanyahu while he was in the middle of massacring tens of thousands of Palestinians. So now I’ve learned that, yes, anything can happen. And I also know this about you listening to me right now, that if President Biden pulled back from trying to save the planet and it was no longer a priority with him, I’m not going to see you out on the street corner tomorrow singing, “It’s okay with me — it’s okay with me! I love Biden, I love Biden, it’s okay with me!” But he doesn’t like the planet. “He’s Joe Biden. I’m going to vote for Biden!” No you’re not.
[00:17:08] So you do have single issues that you would actually base a decision on. And of course, you’re not going to vote for Trump, but maybe you’ll vote third party maybe you’ll write somebody in, maybe something else will happen, or maybe you’ll just stay home. I think that’s probably the Biden campaign’s worst fear. And a lot of people, I’m sure, working on the campaign know now that what they’ve done is what’s called in political science “depressing the vote”. And what that means is that you take certain actions where enough voters go, well, kind of what it says, “I’m so depressed that Biden has supported Netanyahu in murdering 30,000 people, two thirds of them women, children and the elderly, that I just, I don’t know, I don’t know what to do.” And that means some of them aren’t going to vote — no matter how many times I tell them, “You got to vote. We got to prevent Trump from getting back in there.” “I’m sorry, Mike, my conscience…” What am I going to say to them? You know, “Fuck your conscience, we gotta stop Trump at all costs, even if it means 30,000 dead Palestinians”? I’m not going to say that to you. And even when I’ve tried to talk to younger people about this, teenagers who are adults, people in their early 20s. You know, “We don’t want Trump to come back here now. We don’t want him back in the White House.” And their answer to that is, “Yeah, I don’t want 30,000 people being murdered in my name, Mike. So you know what? When Trump was president, I was in my early to mid teens. We got through four years of that. Not the best, obviously, but you older people are trying to get us all worked up about, ‘oh, this is the end!’ It’s not the end — it’s the beginning for us. We’re 20.” “This is the end.” Yeah, that sounds like more of the older generations. Gloom and doom and the end is near. And then sort of, the end is near. We’re in the final… I don’t know, let’s call it the third of our lives. But to a 20-year-old who’s still here, the country’s still here. A lot of crap went down with Trump but to them they’re like, “So okay, we failed to run the right Democrat. And that may happen, and we may have to put up with four more years of this. But there’s a thing in the Constitution that says you only get two terms. So we’ll start working right now on who’s going to run in 2028.” I mean, young people very sincerely and very intelligently explain to me how AOC… AOC would actually be eligible to run this year because by the time of the inauguration next year, she will have met the requirement in the Constitution that she be 35 years old. So they’ll start working on that right now to get the right person. Oh, did I say person? I mean woman. They’re going to work on getting the right woman in the White House in 2028.
[00:20:38] I know people, my generation, older people, you know, you’re up in your 70s and 80s and you’re like, “What do you mean we have the time?” No, I know, I know, you don’t have the time because, you know, we’re all heading toward, you know, a beautiful sunset. But not when you’re young — you were young, you were 20, come on. The old plan, the nonviolent revolution that will need to take place so that 2028 looks nothing like 2024. And you can talk to them to you’re blue in the face right now, but you’re not going to convince them that they should support somebody who to them is a warmonger. Who to them is funding this war with billions of our dollars. You’re not going to convince a 20-year-old, a 25-year-old, a 30-year-old. And I’ll tell you why that is. In case you have forgotten my fellow protesters against the Vietnam War, young people don’t like war. They hate it. They do not support Biden, no matter how much they might have loved him last year, how much they were grateful to him forgiving student debt, how much they have appreciated his support of unions — I mean you can go down a long list of great things, actually, that Biden has done. And we all are okay, we can admit that, and you should admit it. But when somebody does ten right things, but the 11th thing they do involves the murder of 30,000 people? No. I mean, come on. Come on, old people. Come on everybody over 50, 55. Come on. This is why you remember how great it was to be young. Because what did you love? You loved life, not death. You loved being in love. You loved all the possibilities that were in front of you. The future. The future might be a little scary because of what’s happening to our planet, but it’s still the future and you own it. You’re not in charge of it at 20, but you know it’s yours. The future is yours. Not a cliché. And you’re going to have your opportunity to right the wrongs that the older people have committed. That’s where their heads are at. That’s why 2028 does not seem that far off to them. To you and I, it seems like, “Oh, will I even be here?” I’m not laughing here at our eventual end, somewhat not so far in the distant future doom. I am laughing at the fact that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to be 20 or 25 years old, or 30 or 35. They hate war. They hate people who start wars, and most of all, I think — and you all remember this — they hate people who send them off to war to die. And certainly in my lifetime, and it probably is going to go for everybody else listening to this who’s under the age of World War II. If you were born after World War II, there was never a war that had anything to do in these last — what is it now? Almost 80 years? Not a single American war that had anything to do with protecting you, me, our families, our neighbors, our survival. Not a single damn war. Not Korea. Not Vietnam. Not invading the Dominican Republic. Just keep going down the list, my friends. Not Panama. You remember Panama? Not Grenada. Not Iraq the first time. Not Iraq the second time. None of it. None of it had anything to do with protecting the United States of America. Or I should say, it’s people. Protecting American interests, oh, yeah, a lot of those wars. Yeah. But actually putting your life on the line so that others here in this country can live? No. One lie after another to us. Just like the Israeli people have been lied to, have not been served well, have not been protected. Same thing. That’s why we recognize Netanyahu so well. Because he’s our Nixon. He’s our Johnson. He’s our Reagan. He’s our Bush. Maybe mix all of those together and you’ve got Netanyahu.
[00:26:36] So, yeah, young people are against Biden now. It wasn’t that way before. You know young people — I love this great statistic, I keep quoting it — the only reason Obama won, is that he won the white young demographic vote. In other words, white people between the ages of 18 and I think 35 —35 or 39 —voted for Barack Obama in 2008. No other age demographic that was white voted for Obama. In other words, the majority of them did not vote for Barack Obama. And yet he won the election because of a massive number of young people that showed up, and of course, women of all races and age groups came out for him. I mean, and I’ll say it again, the white male vote has only been won twice, I believe, since World War II, since Truman, by Democrats. Once in the Lyndon Johnson landslide over Barry Goldwater less than a year after President Kennedy was assassinated. Everybody came out to vote for Kennedy’s vice president. And then the second time Clinton ran, against Dole. Every other time in all those elections, the majority of white men in America voted for the Republican. And that means both Obama elections. That means Jimmy Carter. That means the first time Clinton ran. That’s just the truth. You can look it up. And so now to lose young people? I mean, the modern Democratic successes have been built with young people’s votes. And now every poll shows that young people are against Biden. The majority. And some of them will vote for Trump just because. Most will choose not to vote, or they’ll vote, but they won’t vote for president. Or they’ll write somebody in, or they’ll get suckered into Robert Kennedy Jr. or, you know, whoever else might be on the ballot.
[00:29:14] And I think people in the Biden campaign know this, and they’ve got a huge problem. And I would really suggest that they convince joe Biden right now to do what young people want. To do with the majority of people of color want this. And again, again, I’ll say it again, the majority of Americans do not want a war here. They don’t want this killing of Palestinians. And the vast number — I think it’s somewhere around 75% of Democrats across the country — are opposed to this. So this is not a radical position to take. But Joe Biden, you are going to bring back Donald Trump and you’re going to install him in the white House because of your actions, because you’ve not listened to the people and you’ve not listened to young people. You’ve not listened to Arab Americans and Muslims. And you can say to yourself, “Well, they’re just like 1% of the vote.” You realize how many of our elections in recent years have been won or lost by one percentage point? Hillary lost Michigan by 11,000 votes. Trump got 11,000 more votes in Michigan in 2016 than Hillary Clinton. 11,000. 102,000 this past Tuesday voted a no-confidence vote in Joe Biden because of this war. 102,000, in just Michigan. If just 11,000 of those people stay home, or votes for some third party or whatever, and you lose Michigan — I mean, again, Michelle Goldberg, New York Times, “Mr. Biden, if you lose Michigan, you’re going to lose the November election.” Talk about risking. People say, “Michael, why were you involved in this “Uncommitted” thing last Tuesday? You’re going to risk Trump coming back.” No, we’re not risking it. We’re trying to prevent it. We’re trying to save Biden from himself. He has turned off so many people now that he risks losing states like Michigan — maybe by just a few thousand votes, but that’s all it’s going to take. Hillary lost Michigan by two votes per precinct on average throughout the state. Two votes for precinct. Had the two people just voted the other way, Hillary would have won Michigan. She lost the election because she lost Michigan, Wisconsin, in Pennsylvania.
[00:31:50] And it was so frightening to see Biden do what she did back in 2016 when her advisors — certain advisers of hers — told her, “Don’t go to Michigan, don’t campaign in Michigan, don’t campaign in Wisconsin. It’ll just upset the Trump voters more and remind them they have to get out there and vote against you.” So she didn’t come. She didn’t come. And she lost Michigan by two votes for precinct. And last week and the week before, in the days leading up to the Michigan primary, where was Joe Biden? Not in Michigan. Not trying to get votes. In fact, he was advised that it may be counterproductive, “If you show up to campaign in Michigan, there’s going to be protests. Large, loud protests of people who don’t like murdering 30,000 people and using their tax dollars to do it.” And so they convinced him not to go to Michigan. Instead, he was out at some rich person’s fundraiser in San Francisco, someone who’s a key person in supporting AIPAC, which is the lobby to help Israel get passed through the U.S. Congress whatever it wants to get passed. So he went to that, and then he was at a number of fundraisers, and one day he was at three fundraisers, in New York City, raising more millions of dollars. Which, you know, it’s his right to do, and he probably should do it… Uh… I was going to say [laughs] because he’s running against a “billionaire” who now owes at least over a half billion dollars in various judgments against him and lawyers fees and whatever. So I don’t I don’t know how to exactly add that up for Trump. But my point is, please hear what I’m saying, our president, the person that I and I think most of you voted for in 2020, chose to do what Hillary did in 2016 and not come to Michigan. Write us off because he was afraid he’d have to listen to young people protesting. He’d have to listen to Arab and Muslim Americans protesting. And that would be for bad TV. And a reminder to Americans all over the country, millions and millions, tens of millions of Americans who are opposed to this war, who are opposed to us funding the war and who are opposed to any sort of fascism that is now running the state of Israel. That’s not the Israel people signed up for. It almost makes you have to ask a whole lot of other questions, doesn’t it?
[00:35:00] And so, President Biden, if you’re listening to this, it’s you who has funded the deaths of 30,000 people, two thirds of them women, children and the elderly. You. It’s you who has embraced Benjamin Netanyahu. And it’s you who is risking losing this election and helping Trump to win. Because so many young people, progressives, Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, people of color are not going to show up on Election Day, or if they show up, again, another definition of the word “depressing the vote” is you show up to vote — I mean I’m not staying home and I’m sure a lot of you aren’t staying home, we’re going to have to double and triple our efforts to make sure Trump doesn’t get back in there but we’re going to show up — but here’s what happens when somebody like Biden depresses his own vote… He gets the people who are committed to voting for him to come vote, but they don’t bring three people with them. They don’t go out and knock on doors the two weekends before the election. They don’t make phone calls for the two months leading up to the election. They’re not happy about the decisions he’s made in our name. And so therefore their vote is depressed. They’ll vote, but usually those people, especially the more activist types, they are the ones who bring three, five, ten people to the polls. They’re the ones who convince people at work who weren’t going to vote, “Come on, you got to go vote. We’ll go get some brewskis afterwards. Let’s go vote.” People who are in college, they make it a thing. When they’re excited about voting, they vote in droves. That is not going to happen when you embrace Benjamin Netanyahu and give him all the money he wants to conduct a vicious, brutal war — not an act of self-defense. I don’t think anybody from Hamas is going to be on a hang glider flying over the fence any time soon. I think the point got made very early on. That’s not what’s going on now. Now they’re trying to starve millions of people to death. They’ve turned the water off. The electricity is usually not on. No fuel is allowed in. No humanitarian aid. Occasional truck or 2 or 5. No. No. You’re paying for this, my friends. And I’m paying for it. Every single day that blood is on our hands.
[00:38:26] And I beg President Biden to stop working as hard as he is to put Trump back in the White House. There’s still time to correct your mistake. There’s still time to do the right thing. There’s still time to reach out to young people. There’s still time. Just think of all the hundreds, actually, thousands of people I’ve met in Jewish Voice for Peace, the Jewish group here in the U.S. and they’re also in Israel, too, who have led so many demonstrations protesting Biden’s support of Netanyahu. I’m not Jewish, but I joined the group. In fact, anybody listening to me, you can join Jewish Voice for Peace. Go online, sign up. Give them what you can. “Not In Our Name” is one of their banners. “You, Netanyahu, are not to kill Palestinians to ‘save Israel.’ You’re not to do it in the Jewish name. It’s an abomination.” So many, brave I think, brave Jewish American citizens standing up right now. Boy, you have my respect. And we all honor you for it, and we’ll do whatever we can to make sure whatever help you need, we’re there for you. Because you stand for peace. Because you’re not bigots. Haters? No.
[00:40:24] So, my friends, I just wanted to share with you my gratitude for those of you in Michigan who voted last week, 102,000 of you. Honest to God, do you remember us saying publicly, “We hope we can get 10 to 15,000 votes.” And over 100,000 of you came out. Wow. We know what a hole that tore right through the White House. And they still haven’t figured out a week later what to do about it. What they should have done is, “Okay, we got the message. Ceasefire now. No more money for armaments. No more supporting any apartheid type actions. None of that. That’s over. It’s over. Not in our name.” We’re waiting, President Biden. Please listen to us. Not just Michigan. Listen to the rest of the country. For those of you still in primary states that have an “Uncommitted” line on the ballot, use it and let the local press know why. Let people know that there are people in your town that are not committed to anyone running for office that supports this war. It’s the only chance we have. Don’t worry. We’ll do the work we need to do to stop Trump. I’m not worried about that part of it, actually. I know a lot of you are frightened, but you’re easily frightened by people. But you are the original people that wouldn’t listen to me when I told you in 2016 that he was going to win. “No way could that happen” over and over. I had to suffer listening through all this and me trying to convince you that, “Oh, no, this is really going to happen.” And I remind you once again on Election Day, November 2016, front page of The New York Times — remember they used to have that little meter, that needle or whatever it was saying ‘What are the chances of Hillary winning today? What are the chances of Trump winning today?’ — and on the front page on Election day it said that morning, that Trump had only a 15% chance of winning the election today, November 2016. And everybody was so stunned. Shocked, shocked. Well, that’s because a lot of people on our side didn’t listen, didn’t see what was going on. I’m telling you, we’re setting ourselves up for another situation like this. And I wouldn’t have said this a year ago. A year ago, I would say, “Look, I know what the polls are saying, and whatever, Trump is not going to win.” I felt that way the first really the bulk of the first three years of the Biden administration, that the American people are not going to put Trump back in the White House, you know, they’re going to realize the good that Biden has done. So I can’t even believe a year later here I am saying this to you. But you and I haven’t done anything to make this happen. Biden himself has done it to himself, and I’m pleading with you, Mr. President. Save yourself. For the good of the country, save yourself. We’ll do our job. We’ll make sure Trump does not enter the Oval Office ever again — but you need to understand that the dye has been cast and you’ve played a very risky game here. And I’ll never understand it, frankly. History won’t understand it. You’d better leave a note behind explaining your actions.
[00:44:47] That’s it for today. Thanks, everybody. Keep having your voice be heard, and perhaps the president will hear it. And perhaps we’ll get our ceasefire. And we’ll do everything we can to save the Palestinian people. I’m Michael Moore, and this is Rumble. Thanks to my executive producer and editor, Angela Vargos. We’ll talk to you next week. “
Here are my thoughts on our elections in a less hopeful moment, in my post of January 4 2023, On America’s Complicity In Ethnic Cleansing and War Crimes In Gaza; Biden has made us all complicit in ethnic cleansing in Gaza, war crimes our taxes pay for. America has abandoned the idea of our universal human rights. Our nation has fallen, and with it global civilization based on humanist values and democracy.
Nothing remains to be saved; maybe the Rights of Man and America as a free society of equals was always a performance, lies and illusions designed to distract us from the fact that we are all slaves of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and the state merely institutions of force and control.
Joe Biden has betrayed us, failed to place his life and ours in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and instead enabled and conspired in crimes against humanity with Netanyahu and the theocratic fascist settler regime and imperial conquest and dominion of the state of Israel, which learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis.
And this we must resist, beyond hope of victory or survival, in solidarity as guarantors of each others humanity. To fascism of blood, faith, and soil and to state tyranny and terror regardless of where it surfaces or in whose interest it is perpetrated, we must give the only reply it merits; Never Again!
To this my unfiltered reaction to a Joe Biden campaign fundraising post timed to leverage the despair and torment of others in service to power, a comment has articulated one of the primary arguments in the apologetics of power; that we cannot control our proxy state, and secondarily that the crimes against humanity of Israel have the mandate of popular support here in America which place us all with Biden in the fork of a dilemma.
Here is the comment in question; “oh, come on. Dramatic much? Netanyahu is the criminal, Biden doesn’t control him, and cannot abandon our strongest ally in the region. Half the country wants to see Hamas wiped out, so what should Biden do? Listen just to this side? Get real.”
To this I replied; Yes, Netanyahu is a war criminal, but Biden has not only refused to stop funding ethnic cleansing, but has sent military aid to Israel and made us all complicit. We have abandoned the idea of universal human rights in funding the random mass murders of civilians with our taxes, voting to block the UN from bringing Netanyahu to trial for war crimes, and refusal to use our powers of Boycott, Divest, and Sanction to stop the Gaza War and bring democracy to Israel with regime change and the reimagination and transformation of systems of unequal power and state tyranny and terror.
Our nation has chosen to send warships to the perpetrator, and not humanitarian aid the victims, when we could easily have broken the Israeli blockade of food, water, and medical relief with our immense Navy, and silenced the bombs. It is not only the humanity of the Palestinians which has been abrogated here, but of our own as well.
In fact America does control Israel as a client state through our taxes and military support, but to what ends? Do we advance the cause of secular democracy or theocratic tyranny, of peace or war, liberty or submission to force and control, of our universal human rights or hierarchies of elite membership and exclusionary otherness based on divisions of race and faith?
In a region of one people divided by history and in our own nation, are we building bridges or walls?
Biden was elected to lead the Restoration of America after the loathsome regime of Traitor Trump, and has betrayed us. There is nothing left of us to save.
America has fallen, both as a democracy due to the capture of the Republican Party by a fascist-theocratic Fourth Reich and the subversions of our institutions and ideals by the Trump regime of patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror, and because of the Democratic Party’s refusal to confront evil and purge our destroyers from among us, both in our client state of Israel and here in America in the wake of the January 6 Insurrection. All of this generates from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; fear weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us as divisions of belonging and exclusionary otherness, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
In Gaza we see the inevitable results of this process of dehumanization, for to make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence, and no matter where one begins with othering we always end up at the gates of Auschwitz. And this we must Resist.
Why must we be each other’s jailors, and not each other’s liberators?
Who do we want to become, we humans; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
Get real, ends the apologetics of power, referencing the Realpolitik of Henry Kissinger used so infamously to authorize our imperial wars in Vietnam and Central America including the Mayan Genocide in Guatemala, the assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile, and the massacres of the Suharto regime of Indonesia. A foreign policy modeled on Hitler’s dictum; “Who now remembers the extermination of the Armenians? The world respects only power” does not lead to a more humane future, nor to a United Humankind and a free society of equals.
In this injunction to get real and its legacies of history bearing horrors, atrocities, and crimes against humanity as state policy and fear become an engine of destruction, there are embedded issues and forces central to the questions of our humanity and how we choose to be human together; what is truth, who is authorized to question it, and how can we engage in the sacred calling to pursue the truth without falsification by the lies and illusions of propaganda?
We wander in a Wilderness of Mirrors, wherein all claims must be questioned, especially those of authorities who claim to speak and act for us as a strategy of subjugation and the manufacture of consent. To this I can but say, democracy requires an electorate able to perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
Get real, we are exhorted by those who wish to steal our power. In Gaza, real people are dying because we are willing to sacrifice their lives to our power.
V For Vendetta film trailer
Trump’s Super Tuesday victory speech: grim visions of an American apocalypse
All Resistance is war to the knife, and much Revolution as well; here in Haiti its true meaning as a special form of total war is written in fire and blood for all to see and bear witness to the rebirth of a nation and our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Our news media are unanimous in reporting this Revolution as a seizure of power by criminal gangs, and though this may be true in a limited sense it also obscures the nature of what is happening here; an anticolonial revolution against American imperial dominion much like the original Haitian Revolution against the Napoleonic Empire, and one which is winning.
Our idea of America and her Enlightenment ideals encoded into our institutions was shaped, informed, and motivated by the Haitian Revolution of over two centuries ago, and again in our Civil War as a sacred crusade to abolish slavery against a human trafficking syndicate which declared itself a nation in the Confederacy, and in recursion the historical Haitian and American Revolutions have come round again to confront us with images of ourselves and what we could become, if we can free ourselves from the legacies of our histories and the falsification, lies, and illusions of those who would enslave us.
O my brothers, sisters, and others, I wish you Liberty, Equality, and Solidarity, victory in seizures of power and reclaiming our humanity, and love to make it worth fighting for.
As written by Sam Jones in The Guardian, in an article entitled Haiti declares state of emergency after thousands of dangerous inmates escape: Attack on two prisons comes amid outbreak of violence as PM in Kenya trying to salvage UN-backed security force; “Haiti has declared a three-day state of emergency and a night-time curfew after armed gangs stormed the country’s two biggest jails, allowing more than 3,000 dangerous criminals, including murderers and kidnappers, to escape back on to the streets of the poor and violence-racked Caribbean nation.
The finance minister, Patrick Boisvert – who is in charge while the embattled prime minister, Ariel Henry, is abroad trying to salvage support for a UN-backed security force to stabilise Haiti – said police would use “all legal means at their disposal” to recapture the prisoners and enforce the curfew.
Jimmy Chérizier, a former elite police officer known as Barbecue who now runs a gang federation, has claimed responsibility for the surge in attacks. He said the goal was to capture Haiti’s police chief and government ministers and prevent Henry’s return.
The emergency decree was issued after a deadly weekend that marked a new low in Haiti’s spiral of violence, and which has led the US to advise its citizens to leave “as soon as possible” and Canada to temporarily close its embassy.
At least nine people have been killed since Thursday, among them four police officers. Targets have included police stations, the country’s international airport and the national football stadium, where one employee was held hostage for hours.
The UN estimates that about 15,000 people were forced to flee the violence between Thursday and Saturday, including those already in makeshift camps for displaced people set up in schools, hospitals and squares around the capital, Port-au-Prince.
But even in a country accustomed to the constant threat of violence, Saturday’s attack on the national penitentiary in Port-au-Prince came as a huge shock.
Almost all of the estimated 4,000 inmates escaped, leaving the normally overcrowded prison eerily empty on Sunday with no guards in sight and plastic sandals, clothing and furniture strewn across the concrete patio. Three bodies with gunshot wounds lay at the prison entrance.
In another neighbourhood, the bloodied corpses of two men with their hands tied behind the backs lay face down as residents walked past roadblocks set up with burning tires.
It was unclear how many inmates were on the run but Arnel Remy, a human rights lawyer whose non-profit organisation works inside the national penitentiary, said on X that fewer than 100 of the nearly 4,000 inmates remained behind bars.
“I’m the only one left in my cell,” one unidentified inmate told Reuters.
Sources close to the institution said it was likely an “overwhelming” majority of inmates had escaped. The penitentiary, built to hold 700 prisoners, held 3,687 as of February last year, according to rights group RNDDH.
The BBC cited a local journalist who said the vast majority of about 4,000 men held there had escaped.
Those choosing to stay included 18 former Colombian soldiers accused of working as mercenaries in the July 2021 assassination of the then Haitian president, Jovenel Moïse. On Saturday night, several of the Colombians shared a video pleading for their lives.
“Please, please help us,” one of the men, Francisco Uribe, said in the message widely shared on social media. “They are massacring people indiscriminately inside the cells.”
A second Port-au-Prince prison containing about 1,400 inmates was also overrun.
The violence on Saturday night appeared to be widespread, with several neighbourhoods reporting gunfire.
Internet service for many residents was also down as Haiti’s top mobile network said a fibre optic cable connection was slashed during the rampage. Field teams managed to fully restore the connection on Sunday afternoon.
In the space of less than two weeks, several state institutions have been attacked by the gangs, who are increasingly coordinating their actions and choosing once unthinkable targets such as the central bank.
Henry took over as prime minister after Moise’s assassination and has repeatedly postponed plans to hold parliamentary and presidential elections, which have not taken place in almost a decade.
The prime minister, a neurosurgeon, signed reciprocal agreements last week with Kenya’s president, William Ruto, in an effort to salvage the plan to deploy Kenyan police to Haiti.
In January, Kenya’s high court ruled that the deployment was unconstitutional, in part because the original deal lacked reciprocal agreements between the two countries. Henry has shrugged off calls for his resignation and did not comment when asked if he felt it was safe to come home.
Haiti’s national police have roughly 9,000 officers to provide security for more than 11 million people, according to the UN. They are routinely overwhelmed and outgunned by gangs, which are estimated to control up to 80% of the capital.
After gangs opened fire at Haiti’s international airport last week, the US embassy said it was halting all official travel to the country. On Sunday night, it urged all American citizens to depart as soon as possible.
The Biden administration – which has offered Haiti money and logistical support but steadfastly refused to commit troops to any multinational force – said it was monitoring the rapidly deteriorating security situation with grave concern.
Stéphane Dujarric, a UN spokesperson, said the latest upsurge in violence underlined the need for member nations to work quickly to support and deploy the multinational security force.
“We have been talking for months now about how civilians in Haiti and in Port-au-Prince are basically trapped by gang violence,” he told reporters at UN headquarters in New York. “Schools are closed, hospitals are not functioning, people are suffering on a daily basis.”
Earlier this year, the UN said that more than 300,000 people had fled their homes due to the worsening gang conflict, which claimed almost 5,000 lives last year.”
As Tom Phillips and Harold Isaac wrote in The Guardian in September of 2023 when Jimmy Chérizier called Barbecue, the de facto leader of the Revolution, made his historic declaration of total war to overthrow the American puppet regime of the assassinated Prime Minister, in an article entitled Haiti’s most powerful gang boss calls for uprising to overthrow prime minister; “The most severe humanitarian crisis in the Americas has taken yet another dramatic turn after Haiti’s most powerful gang boss took to the streets to call for an armed uprising to overthrow the country’s unpopular prime minister.
Jimmy Chérizier, a police officer turned gang lord nicknamed “Barbecue”, issued his call to arms on Tuesday, as reports suggested the US was preparing to ask the UN security council to approve a Kenya-led intervention designed to address the Caribbean country’s escalating security crisis.
“We are launching the fight to overturn Ariel Henry’s government in any way,” Chérizier said of Haiti’s prime minister, who took power after president Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in 2021. “Our fight will be with weapons,” the gang leader told Reuters.
Haiti has been spiraling deeper into turmoil since Moïse was murdered at his Port-au-Prince residence. Since then, rifle-toting gangs have commandeered up to 90% of Haiti’s capital and there has been an explosion of killings, kidnappings and sexual violence, turning much of the city into a no-go zone.
Millions are struggling to eat, partly as a result of gang checkpoints blocking food supply routes.
From comparatively safer hillside neighbourhoods, “you can see the city [below] burning … You see houses burning. You see all the gunshots – even during the day,” said Diego Da Rin, a Haiti specialist from the International Crisis Group who recently visited the country.
“It’s really difficult to be there – and it’s really difficult to leave as well, when you’re in the plane just [thinking]: ‘I can leave – but most people who live here don’t have a choice,’” Da Rin added. “[The police] are completely outgunned by the gangs right now.”
The government’s failure to halt the bloodshed has spawned a vigilante movement called “Bwa Kale” that has seen citizens rise up against the gangs with machetes, rocks and guns.
This week the Episcopal Conference of Haiti lamented what it called “one of the longest and most lethal sociopolitical and security crises in [Haitian] history”. “A low-intensity war against peaceful and unarmed people is raging across the country,” the bishops’ group warned.
Since last October there have been calls – from both Henry’s beleaguered government and foreign leaders – for some kind of foreign intervention to help Haiti’s overwhelmed police force regain control of the increasingly lawless capital. One senior US diplomat recently told the Miami Herald that US officials had been “circling the globe” in search of countries willing to take part in that effort, although most are reluctant because of the dangers involved.
The intervention appeared to move a step closer this week when Kenya’s president, William Ruto, announced his country would be “the leading nation in the UN-backed security mission in Haiti”
“We are committed to deploying a specialized team to comprehensively assess the situation and formulate actionable strategies that will lead to long-term solutions,” Ruto said during a meeting with Ariel Henry on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, the US president, Joe Biden, told the UN general assembly: “The people of Haiti cannot wait much longer.” Citing anonymous sources, Bloomberg said the US could ask the UN security council to greenlight the mission as early as next week.
Da Rin anticipated members of the security force could touch down in Haiti in November or December if the resolution passes. “We expect a force of around 2,000 police officers, maybe with some military backup units,” he said, predicting: “It won’t be as huge as previous armed interventions.”
The prospect of the force’s arrival is a highly sensitive issue in a nation which has experienced a succession of disastrous foreign interventions, stemming back to the 19th century. The most recent – a 2004-2017 UN peacekeeping mission called Minustah – is widely remembered for causing a cholera outbreak that killed thousands, sexual abuse allegations and an alleged massacre in Port-au-Prince’s largest shantytown, Cité Soleil.
On the streets of Haiti’s capital there is skepticism over whether another intervention will work. Many members of civil society fear the force will simply help prop up Henry, whom critics accuse of scuppering attempts to resolve Haiti’s political crisis and arrange fresh elections crucial to a country with no elected officials.
“The 1,000 Kenyans that are coming aren’t going to resolve our security issues because the US came here at least three times [and] security got worse,” said Sonthonax Jules, a 64-year-old security agent.
“There are no forces who can resolve Haiti’s problems. Haiti’s problems can only be solved by Haitians,” Jules added.
Clerina Confie, a 60-year-old saleswoman, voiced cautious optimism that the intervention might improve security and permit her to return to her home in the violence-stricken district of Carrefour-Feuilles.
But for now, Confie planned to remain in an abandoned theatre in downtown Port-au-Prince where refugees fleeing gang violence are sheltering. “Even if I have to sleep in the middle of the street with the kids, I won’t go back to that area,” she said. “If I’m destitute, it’s because of [the gangs].”
Pierre Espérance, a prominent human rights activist, said there was no way of addressing Haiti’s security crisis without addressing its crisis in governance.
“One of the reasons the gangs are powerful today is because the state authorities at the highest echelons and the police hierarchy are colluding with bandits,” he said. “In order to improve the security situation, the country has to be led.”
As I wrote in my post of July 7 2021, Chaos and Hope in Haiti; With the head of a kleptocratic tyrant and puppet of American imperialism mounted on the wall of the Revolution, in the wake of years of protests centered on our government’s assassination of the heroic socialist Aristide and newly energized by the desperation of a precariat in which sixty percent of the nation can not survive without aid while oligarchic elites become obscenely wealthy as proxies of foreign interests, as central authority has collapsed and Haiti becomes a nation of war lords and criminal gangs, the sudden power vacuum of a paper state with no one in command or able to speak in its name presents the people with a historic opportunity to seize power for themselves.
Our journalists describe this situation as one of chaos and anarchy, but they say this as if it were a bad thing. Dangerous, yes, especially to hegemonic elites and systemic hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege, and to divisions of exclusionary otherness including that of race, always a primary issue on an island shared between the Dominican Republic, a Spanish speaking Catholic nation of what are locally called mulattoes with aristocratic pride and a class privilege encoded in the color of one’s skin along with a colonial European tinged identity, and Haiti, a French speaking revolutionary nation of black Africans wherein Voodoo, the means of liberation and solidarity with which slaves freed themselves in the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804 against France, and was institutionalized by Duvalier as an instrument of state power and national identity much as Santeria was by Castro in Cuba, continues to inspire hope as a faith of anticolonial revolutionaries.
We cannot escape the historical legacies of the flags of our skins; but we can seize ownership of the messages they bear, and of ourselves from those who would enslave us.
As written by Joshua Goodman in MSN; “The last time Haiti was thrust into turmoil by assassination was 1915, when an angry group of rebels raided the French Embassy and beat to death President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, ushering in weeks of chaos that triggered a nearly two-decade U.S. military intervention.
An ambulance carrying the body of Haiti’s President Jovenel Moise drives past a mural featuring him near the leader’s residence where he was killed by gunmen in the early morning in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Wednesday, July 7, 2021.
Moïse’s allies say the president’s recent decision to go after Haitian “oligarchs” who grew rich on state contracts in the electricity and other sectors earned him enemies who have the means to carry out such a well-organized attack, one that authorities say involved Spanish and English-speaking mercenaries posing as U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents.
The U.S. has influenced political events in Haiti throughout its history — deploying troops, funding development projects and boosting would-be leaders.
Its intervention following Sam’s assassination in 1915 kicked off a ruinous, nearly two-decade U.S. occupation that saw the introduction of Jim Crow racial segregation laws in what was the first country in the world to ban slavery. The U.S. stood by anti-communist ally Francois Duvalier during his reign of terror during the Cold War.”
What this means is that our proxy of American imperialism and the Haitian oligarchic and nepotistic elites created and maintained in partnership with our government were about to be betrayed by their puppet ruler in the face of mass starvation and horrific poverty of a slave population no longer able to act as a labor force on their behalf, and becoming increasingly unwilling to die in service to a wealth and power in which they had no share. Thus the assassination of President Moise, in which the interests of elite power have been maneuvered into action which offers equal chances of their hegemony and their destruction.
With the casting down of a tyrant from his throne the elites of capitalist predation and colonial empire are left without a figurehead; the strings of the marionette are severed, and he falls an empty and lifeless thing from the stage upon which he danced for our amusement and the power and wealth of his puppetmasters.
An empty stage now beckons to those who serve its illusions of grandeur, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, those whom the visionary Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.”
In this liminal moment of precarious balance, wherein there is no one left to unleash state terror and tyranny in the brutal repression of dissent, we have a free space of play in which the people of Haiti can seize their power and claim as their inheritance the liberty and equality of the glorious Revolution of 1791.
Chaos and anarchy, as so many have described Haiti today with its decapitated state; but what is Chaos? Chaos is a measure of the adaptive range of a system, both a destructive and a creative force, which destabilizes order and frees our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes. As I wrote of the January 6 Insurrection in my post of January 31 2021, In Praise of Chaos and Disorder; In this our time of tumult and despair, loss and grief, disruption and fear, when the mould of our humanity has been broken, our values and ideals violated and our institutions captured and shaken in the jaws of fascist tyranny and white supremacist terror, and all that we have known has been called into question, we have but one path forward through the darkness; seize the moment of a universe empty of authorized being, meaning, and value as the moment of our total freedom and liberation from the tyranny of other people’s ideas and from the legacies of our historical injustices and inequalities, and reimagine and transform our possibilities of becoming human.
Freedom means the end of limits, of boundaries of the Forbidden, of the authorization of identities and the use of social force; there remains but one question, Who would you like to become?
Guillermo del Toro, in his magnificent epic of migration and racial equality Carnival Row, has a scene in which two young successors to leadership of traditionally rival factions find themselves in love and in need of allies in a subplot which reimages Romeo and Juliet; the rebellious hellion Jonah Breakspear asks his Machiavellian lover Sophie Longerbane, “Who is chaos good for?” To which she replies, “Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”
Let us be Bringers of Chaos.
Haiti declares state of emergency after double jailbreak allows thousands of inmates to escape
Our Supreme Court has 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 moves him a step closer to the Presidency.
Among the many flaws in our system which must be changed which 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 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.
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 111 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.
As we begin our annual celebration of Women’s History Month, I am struck once more with the vast and awesome task which the ancestresses and warrior matriarchs of our modern world set for themselves under the banner of Feminism; no less than the total reimagination of humankind and our historical civilization.
This subsumes cultural and ideological fields of Philosophy and its subset Political Science, of Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Literary Theory, and Alternate Histories of patriarchal sexual terror, enslavement, dehumanization, commodification, falsification, and of resistance and liberation, as revolutionary struggle.
Here are some reading recommendations on the subject of Feminist thought and Women’s History:
Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, by bell hooks is wonderful and engaging, and the first book I would recommend to a high school student or anyone new to the subject. Thereafter read her other works; Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Black Looks: Race and Representation, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representation
For the best general America history of the movement, read The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America by Ruth Rosen.
Sex and Subterfuge: women writers to 1850, by Eva Figes is an excellent critical history of literature.
Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant, erudite, and savagely satirical trilogy is by turns delightful and disturbingly horrific, and a must-read for everyone; Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters.
Women & Power: A Manifesto, by Mary Beard has the finest writing on the subject of power and gender relations ever, by anyone.
Camille Paglia’s notorious and incendiary Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson remains a glorious and strange theoretical work on the origins of culture in gender inequalities, authorized identities of sex and gender, interrogations of ontological gendered being in literature, and idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty as a negotiated ground of struggle.
From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, and No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock by Marina Warner together comprise a riveting and brilliant interrogation of the iconography of femininity and masculinity in our civilization.
Women, Race & Class, by Angela Y. Davis is an excellent guide to the idea of intersectionality by an iconic figure of revolutionary struggle.
Of course everyone should read the work that originated Feminism as a Humanist philosophy and a development of Existentialism in the new translation, The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, H.M. Parshley (Translator & Editor), Deirdre Bair (Introduction).
The Deepening Darkness: Loss, Patriarchy, and Democracy’s Future, and its sequel Darkness Now Visible: Patriarchy’s Resurgence and Feminist Resistance
by Carol Gilligan, David A.J. Richards, together comprise the most relevant ideological framework for understanding and resisting patriarchal oppression yet written.
I enjoyed Imagining Characters: Six Conversations About Women Writers: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Willa Cather, Iris Murdoch, and Toni Morrison, by A.S. Byatt, Ignes Sodre.
We may discover and explore the diverse literature and developmental and Hegelian epochs of Feminism through the great books which were its fulcrums of change; Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions by Gloria Steinem, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer, Sexual Politics by Kate Millett, and The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution by Shulamith Firestone.
And then we have my two favorite authors on the subject, Judith Butler and Anne Fausto-Sterling.
Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, and Myths Of Gender: Biological Theories About Women And Men, Anne Fausto-Sterling
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, Undoing Gender, Senses of the Subject, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Precarious Life, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political, Judith Butler
Beyond the subjects of Feminism as a philosophy, ideology, and alternate history, there is the subject of Women’s Literature in all its luminous and transformational diversity. As written by Judith Butler, “We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.”
Here is a short reading list of indisputable classics and masterpieces of world literature, and some newer discoveries:
Orlando, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
The Bell Jar, Ariel, Sylvia Plath
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson
Tender Buttons, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Paris France, Picasso, How to Write, Gertrude Stein
Collages, Henry and June, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, Anais Nin
La Bâtarde, Mad in Pursuit, The Lady and the Little Fox Fur, Violette Leduc
Cat’s Eye, Life Before Man, Interlunar, The Edible Woman, The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, Stories of Eva Luna, Isabel Allende
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Nights At The Circus, The Magic Toyshop, Wise Children, The Sadeian Woman, Angela Carter
Sexing the Cherry, Art & Lies, The Passion, Written on the Body, The Poetics of Sex, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson
Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery O’Connor
Blood and Guts in High School, In Memoriam to Identity, Great Expectations, Empire of the Senseless, Don Quixote, Body of Work, Kathy Acker
Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, Under the Sign of Saturn, Where The Stress Falls, On Photography, Susan Sontag
The Faraway Nearby, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Call Them By Their True Names, Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebeca Solnit
Collected Stories of Collette
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Frankenstein, Mary Shelly
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, Daphne du Maurier
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
The Black Prince, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, A Word Child, The Sea, the Sea, Nuns and Soldiers, The Philosopher’s Pupil, The Good Apprentice, The Green Knight, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Mudoch
Possession, Babel Tower, Angels and Insects, The Children’s Book, On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays, A.S. Byatt
Light, Nelly’s Version, Eva Figues
Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
The Gray House, Mariam Petrosyan
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk
The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington, Leonora Carrington
The Hélène Cixous Reader, Cixous, Sellers ed, foreword Jacques Derrida
You Don’t Love Yourself, Portrait of a Man Unknown, The Planetarium, The Golden Fruits, Here, Use of Speech, Nathalie Sarraute
Memiors of Hadrian, The Abyss, Fires, That Mighty Sculptor Time, The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays, Dreams and Destinies, Marguerite Yourcenar
The Fountains of Neptune, The Monstrous and the Marvelous, The Deep Zoo, The Cult of Seizure, Phosphor in Dreamland, Gazelle, The One Marvelous Thing, Netsuke, The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition : A Novel of the Marquis de Sade, Brightfellow, Rikki Ducornet
The Malady of Death, The War, The North China Lover, Marguerite Duras
Serowe, Maru, A Question of Power, Bessie Head
Dust, The Dragonfly Sea, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
The Memory of Love, Ancestor Stones, Aminatta Forna
Half of a Yellow Sun, Purple Hibiscus, We Should All Be Feminists, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not, This Mournable Body, Tsitsi Dangarembga
Pet, Freshwater, The Death of Vivek Oji, Dear Senthuran, Akwaeke Emezi
The Secret River, Kate Grenville
The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow, Drylands, Thea Astley
The Octopus and I, Erin Hortle
Prizes: the Selected Stories, Owls Do Cry, Faces in the Water, The Edge of the Alphabet, Scented Gardens for the Blind, Intensive Care, Daughter Buffalo, The Carpathians, Janet Frame
The Piano, Jane Campion
Selected Stories, Katherine Mansfield
Te Kaihau: the Windeater, The Bone People, Stonefish, Keri Hulme
Monkey Beach, Son of a Trickster, Trickster Drift, Eden Robinson
The Smaller Infinity, Patricia Monk
Autobiography of Red, Eros the Bittersweet, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, Glass Irony and God, Antigonick, An Oresteia, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, Men in the Off Hours, Decreation, Float, Elliott Hundley: The Bacchae (contributor), Anne Carson
Malina, Darkness Spoken: collected poems of Ingeborg Bachman
The Piano Teacher, Wonderful Wonderful Times, Elfriede Jelinek
Visitation, The End of Days, Jenny Erpenbeck
Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays, Medea, The Quest for Christa T., Accident: A Day’s News, Christa Wolf
Conjurations: poems of Sarah Kirsch
Empress and the Cake, Linda Stift
Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Persuasion, Jane Austen
Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer, Ali Smith
Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
The Liar’s Dictionary, Eley Williams
Bina, Anakana Schofield
The Mercies, Kiran Millwood Hargrave
Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell
The Mermaids in the Basement, The Leto Bundle, Indigo, Murderers I have Known and other short stories, Fly Away Home, Marina Warner
Dreaming in Cuban, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba, Christina Garcia
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
Love Anger Madness: a Haitian Trilogy, Marie Vieux-Chauvet
The Autobiography of My Mother, Jamaica Kincaid
Crossing the Mangrove, Windward Heights, Celine, Segu, Children of Segu, Tree of Life, The Last of the African Kings, What is Africa to Me?, Maryse Conde
Prospero’s Daughter, Even in Paradise, Bruised Hibiscus, Elizabeth Nunez
The Joy Luck Club, Hundred Secret Senses, Amy Tan
The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, Maxine Hong Kingston
Legacies: a Chinese Mosaic, The Middle Heart, Bette Bao Lord
The Island of Sea Women, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, China Dolls, Peony in Love, Shanghai Girls, Dreams of Joy, Lisa See
Red Azalea, Pearl of China, Becoming Madame Mao, Anchee Min
Love in a Fallen CIty, Lust Caution: the story, the screenplay, and the making of the film, The Rouge of the North, The Book of Change, Eileen Chang
Three Souls, Dragon Springs Road, The Library of Legends, Janie Chang
The Night Tiger, The Ghost Bride, Yangsze Choo
The God of Small Things, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction, The Shape of the Beast: Conversations with Arundhati Roy, Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations (with John Cusack, Daniel Ellsberg, and Edward Snowden), Azadi, India: A Mosaic, Arundhati Roy
Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
Jasmine, The Holder of the Word, The Tree Bride, Desireable Daughters, Miss New India, Darkness, Bharati Mukherjee
The Mistress of Spices, The Palace of Illusions, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
The Widows of Malabar Hill, The Sleeping Dictionary, Sujata Massey
Fatma: a novel of Arabia, The Doves Necklace, Raja Alem
The Fall of the Imam, God Dies By The Nile and other stories, The Innocence of the Devil, Walking Through Fire, Nawal El Saadawi
Equal of the Sun, The Blood of Flowers, Anita Amirrezvani
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, Things I’ve Been Silent About, The Republic of Imagination, Azar Nafisi
The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon
Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto
Kabuki Dancer, The River Ki, Sawako Arioshi
Masks, Fumiko Enchi
The Adventures Of Sumiyakist Q, The Woman with the Flying Head and Other Stories, Yumiko Kurahashi
Where the Wild Ladies Are, Matsuda Aoko
Killing Kanoko, Wild Grass on the Riverbank, Itō Hiromi
The Memory Police, Yōko Ogawa
The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Between Past and Future, The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt
36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics, The Dark Sister, Strange Attractors: Stories, Rebecca Goldstein
Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch
City of Many Days, The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East, Shulamith Hareven
The Complete Stories, Near to the Wild Heart, The Apple in the Dark, The Passion According to G.H., The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector
Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor
Texas: The Great Theft, Carmen Boullosa
Leopoldina’s Dream, Thus Were Their Faces, The Promise, Silvina Ocampo
Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand: A Novel of Adam and Eve, Gioconda Belli
Clara: Thirteen Short Stories and a Novel, The Lizard’s Tail, He Who Searches, The Censors: A Bilingual Selection of Stories, Symmetries, Bedside Manners, Luisa Valenzuela
Things We Lost in the Fire, Mariana Enríquez
The Dark Bride, Laura Restrepo
Mouthful of Birds, Fever Dream, Samanta Schweblin
The Obscene Madame D, Letters From a Seducer, With my Dog Eyes, Hilda Hist
Gods of Jade and Shadow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Tender Is the Flesh, Agustina Bazterrica
Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 – 1972, Alejandra Pizarnik
The Storm, The Virtuoso, The Kreutzer Sonata, Margriet de Moor
Threshold of Fire, In the Dark Wood Wandering, The Scarlet City, The Tea Lords, Hella S. Haase
Sleepwalker in a Fog, Tatyana Tolstaya
Girls Against God, Jenny Hval
Complete Poems, Kallocain, Karin Boye
Krane’s Cafe: An Interior With Figures, The Leech, Cora Sandel
Kristin Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset
The Lowenskold Ring, Charlotte Lowenskold, Anna Svard, Selma Lagerlof
The Third Hotel, Laura van den Berg
The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, The Fresco, The Visitor, The Companions, The Margarets, Sherri S. Tepper
Oblique Prayers, Denise Levertov
The Dead and the Living, Arias, Sharon Olds
Collected Poems: 1950-2012, Adrienne Rich
Fried Green Tomatoes, Fannie Flagg
Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
Ballad of the Sad Cafe and other stories, Carson McCullers
I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, and Then Again: a Zora Neal Hurston Reader, Alice Walker ed, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Dust Tracks On A Road, Collected Plays, Zora Neal Hurston
The Women of Brewster Place, Gloria Naylor
Kindred, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, Bloodchild and Other Stories, Octavia E. Butler
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now, Complete Stories, Maya Angelou
The Color Purple, Living by the Word, The Temple of My Familiar, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems, The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, Alice Walker
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, The Collected Poems, The Collected Plays, Audre Lorde
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: an American Lyric, Citizen: an American Lyric, Just Us, Claudia Rankine
Night Flying Woman, Ignatia Broker
Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead, Storyteller, Turquoise Ledger, Leslie Silko
Firesticks, Primer of the Obsolete, Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea, The Reason for Crows: A Story of Kateri Tekakwitha, Uprising of Goats, Designs of the Night Sky, The Mask Maker, Stories of the Driven World, American Gypsy: Six Native American Plays, The Dance Partner, The Dream of a Broken Field, Diane Glancy
Two Old Women, Bird Girl & the Man Who Followed the Sun, Velma Wallis
Postcolonial Love Poem, Natalie Diaz
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Yo!, In the Time of the Butterflies, In the Name of Salome, The Woman I Kept to Myself, Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the USA, Something to Declare, Julia Alvarez
The Moths and other stories, Under the Feet of Jesus, Their Dogs Came with Them, Helena Viramontes
So Far From God, Peel My Love Like an Onion, The Guardians, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma, Watercolor Women / Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me, I Ask the Impossible, Ana Castillo
The House on Mango Street, Woman Hollaring Creek and other stories, Caramelo, My Wicked Wicked Ways: Poems, A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, Sandra Cisneros
Dreaming in Cuban, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba, Christina Garcia
I Hotel, Tropic of Orange, Through the Ark of the Rain Forest, Karen Yamashita
Mona in the Promised Land, The Love Wife, Tiger Writing , The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap, Gish Jen
Divakaruni : The Mistress of Spices, The Palace of Illusions, Chitra Banerjee
The Ghost Bride, Yangsze Choo
Miracle Fruit, At the Drive In Volcano, Lucky Fish, Oceanic, Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Dance Dance Revolution: Poems, Cathy Park Hong
Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng
Inferno, Catherine Cho
The Awakening and Selected Stories, Kate Chopin
Man Walks into a Room, The History of Love, Great House, Forest Dark, Nicole Krauss
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova
Averno, The Triumph of Achilles, Faithful and Virtuous Night, Proofs and Theories, American Originality, Louise Gluck
On this day in 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,
Torch of Liberty 