It is indeed a good thing that New York City voters have chosen NY Assembly member Zohran Mamdani over former governor Andrew Cuomo to be their next mayor. And the left wing of the Democratic Party is pretty darned pleased with themselves, as perhaps they should be.
By all accounts Mamdani mounted an impressive ground offensive, with hundreds of canvassers, many from Mamdani’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), deployed to every Borough. His reciprocal endorsement of Brad Lander was also novel, sending the message that at the end of the day it was more important to try something new than to prioritize personal victory.
In the general election this Fall, Mamdani will face the winner of the Republican mayoral primary, Curtis Sliwa, the Trump-loving vigilante who founded the Guardian Angels, a rightwing talk show host, xenophobe, and a Rudi Giuliani crony who lost in the 2021 race to outgoing mayor Eric Adams. As for Adams — who went to the MAGA revival tent and was cleansed of Federal Sin by Jesus, or at least the lard-assed grotesquerie impersonating Him — he’s no longer running as a Democrat but will appear on the November ballot as an independent.
The choice before New York voters in November is fairly stark: a glimmer of hope from an essentially decent guy versus a double slice of deep-dish corruption. But never underestimate the abuse that the American voter is willing to inflict on himself. And never underestimate the treachery of the Democratic Party to its own left wing.
Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, was quick to dismiss Mamdani’s campaign as one of mere style: “I do think it’s worth separating out the style of politics from the policy,” Favreau said. “Because we could have a whole debate about what policy positions can win… but if there’s a center-left candidate who campaigns like Mamdani, that person could be president.”
The Lever’s David Sirota, a former speechwriter for Bernie Sanders, saw Mamdani’s win as an “earthquake” in Democratic politics, and pushed back at Favreau: “This is not a new trick. When liberal elites feel threatened by a winning candidate whose politics could actually challenge capital, they seek to depoliticize the victory and attribute it to vibes, marketing savvy, and brand. It’s a containment strategy: Treat the insurgent’s style as admirable while ignoring — or quietly discrediting — their policy platform. That way, the establishment gets to appropriate the energy without having to endorse the demands.”
But, sorry, Favreau has a point. Although both Mamdani and Lander campaigned openly as critics of Netanyahu, neither was willing to even question the ethno-supremacist Zionist state. This was crystal clear from an interview both gave on Steven Colbert’s talk show where the host made a beeline to a question about Israel of great interest to his liberal audience. His guests’ answers were neither progressive nor socialist. You certainly wouldn’t find any real socialist treading lightly when asked whether Americans have the right to establish a Christian Dominionist state. Nor did Mamdani even utter the word “capital” much less challenge it, as Sirota maintains. Mamdani’s a decent guy but he’s just barely a progressive.
Mamdani, who campaigned with the slogan “Afford to Live & Afford to Dream,” is primarily focused on economic reform, but his track record with such legislation in the state assembly has been consistently undermined by his own party: rent control (nope); free bus transportation (nope); taxing the rich (nope); subsidized childcare (nope); opposing nonprofits that support Israeli settlements (absolutely nope).
Glass-full optimists like Bhaskar Sunkara of the Guardian, who see Mamdani’s win as a new mandate for progressive politics within the Democratic Party, are just fooling themselves.
The truth is: just as the German party Die Linke — which has a platform almost identical to Mamdani’s — has stepped into a social-democratic void created by the right turn of the German SPD, and just as the NDP has stepped into a void created by the right turn of the Canadian Liberals, so too has the DSA similarly stepped into the social-democratic void created by their own party’s war-mongering turn to the right. They think they can steer this militaristic and austerity-loving warship in another direction.
But this is as futile and delusional as a small tugboat trying to turn around an aircraft carrier in high seas. The best the left wing of the Democratic Party can hope for is to fend off attacks on themselves from a growing right wing.
Nevertheless, the Democratic Socialists of America, to which Mamdani belongs and which supported his campaign, still won’t make a “clean break” from the Democrats. Regardless of Mamdani’s ties to a “DSA Caucus” of the Democratic Party, he will continue to face internal opposition from what is an unapologetically (and bare-knuckled) Capitalist party that values warmongers and hedge fund magnates far more than a relatively small minority of idealists who delusionally campaign for it.
So, aside from voters rejecting corruption, Mamdani’s victory was primarily a win for ranked choice voting. The Democratic primary offered an easy choice between an affable 33 year-old who campaigned on “unity” against a politically and personally corrupt machine Democrat who wears the same stinking cologne as the outgoing mayor.
Posted by David Ehrens
on 2025-06-24Comments Off on Trump’s and Israel’s tag team war on Iran
a B-2 getting ready to take off to bomb somebody, somewhere
In most American coverage of the US bombing of Iran, there is an implicit acceptance that Iran “had it coming,” that after all it is a fanatical regime everyone understands is building a bomb to destroy Israel. We can thank Israel and its fleet of lobbyists for this narrative. We can also thank institutions like the New York Times, which endlessly recycle Israel’s talking points. Last week the NYT’s editorial board published a weasel-worded op-ed which contained this:
“A nuclear-armed Iran would make the world less safe. It would destabilize the already volatile Middle East. It could imperil Israel’s existence. It would encourage other nations to acquire their own nuclear weapons, with far-reaching geopolitical consequences.”
Naturally Israel’s own nukes or it’s ongoing genocide of Gazans weren’t mentioned and the article went on to describe the main defect of Israel’s bombing Iran:
“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has acted to destroy Iran’s capacity to build nuclear weapons without first shoring up allies’ support.”
So according to the NYT editors, it’s not that bombing Iran is unwise or bad — they’ve already told you why they approve — it’s that Israel has thoughtlessly failed to get sufficient American support for its aggression. What the editors of the New York Times want is bloody war — but with an AUMF that specifically includes Iran:
“If Mr. Trump wants the United States to join the Israeli war against Iran, the next step is as clear: Congress must first authorize the use of military force.”
Where Liberals seem to part company from war hawks is solely in objecting to the current inhabitant of the White House doing bombing unilaterally; in their liberal world military savagery requires a war powers resolution — not even passing the Constitutional bar for Congress to actually declare war. In other words; it’s not bad for the United States to attack another country for no good reason; it’s simply how you go about doing it.
But in a post-nuclear world, does anyone think that any nation can responsibly build nuclear weapons without eventually using them?
Not really. Americans almost universally believe restrictions on nuclear weapons should be placed solely on Iran. Not on the U.S. itself, which actually used nuclear weapons on human beings — twice. Not on India, which has become an authoritarian, ethno-nationalist state like Israel or Hungary and frequently rattles sabres at Pakistan, another nuclear power. No restrictions on Russia, China or North Korea, who are serious nuclear rivals. Demanding “no nukes” of any of these three would only serve to highlight our own hypocrisy.
And of course Americans don’t fear the nukes any of the European nuclear powers — the UK or France — who are habitual partners in American and/or NATO-led colonial-imperialist adventures. Nor from Israel — the most reckless, bloodthirsty regime in the Middle East, possessing between 90 and 300 nukes, a nation that over the last 24 months has bombed pretty much every one of its neighbors.
No, somehow in the homogenous Western narrative only Iran must be prevented from having nukes.
Let us recall, however, that China, France, Germany, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, the EU, the United States, and Iran all signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on July 14, 2015 in Vienna. It came into force on January 16, 2016. The agreement called for Iran’s peaceful use of nuclear technology, placed limits on enrichment, set milestones for verification of peaceful uses of the technology, and provided a path to removing sanctions from Iran. The agreement anticipated “that full implementation of this JCPOA will positively contribute to regional and international peace and security.” And Iran was sticking to it.
Netanyahu has been selling war on Iran for years. He finally closed the deal.
But true to American and Israeli contempt for international agreements and the rule-based order, both objected to the JCPOA so Trump abandoned the agreement in his first term, on May 8, 2018. Despite the U.S. withdrawal from JCPOA, it hypocritically insisted that Iran stick to the agreement even while slapping additional sanctions on Iran in violation of the JCPOA. When Biden became president, he went through the motions of re-joining the agreement. But, like Trump, his goal was to re-negotiate a more restrictive JCPOA than Iran had originally signed, appease Israel’s lobbyists, preserve Trump’s sanctions, and show that Democrats could be every bit the war-mongers as their MAGA brethren. For all his dithering and excuses, Biden could have simply re-committed to the original JCPOA.
There are 32 countries with nuclear programs, and only a handful of them have weapons programs. Despite the Israeli propaganda thrown at us for decades, each time ringing the alarm that Iran is mere weeks away from nuclear weapons, Iran has plenty of legitimate uses for nuclear technology that have nothing to do with weapons or even nuclear power. Especially because of Western sanctions.
Typical commercial uses of nuclear technology include: food irradiation; sterilization of medical instruments and equipment; radiation therapy for insect control and crop protection; inspecting welds and materials in manufacturing; gauging and measurement in various industries; and radioisotope-based analysis for analyzing materials and detecting impurities.
Medical uses include: radiation therapy to treat various types of cancer; nuclear medicine techniques such as PET scans to diagnose and monitor disease; radioisotope-based therapies for targeted cancer treatments, such as thyroid cancer; sterilization of medical instruments and equipment; radio-pharmaceuticals for diagnosing and treating cancers, cardiovascular disease, and neurological disorders; diagnosing and monitoring bone density and osteoporosis; and nuclear medicine research.
Specific radioisotopes often used for cancer treatment include: technetium-99m, for diagnostic imaging and cancer treatment; iodine-131, for thyroid cancer treatment and diagnostic imaging; molybdenum-99, for diagnostic imaging and cancer treatment; samarium-153, for pain relief and cancer treatment; and radium-223, for prostate cancer treatment.
After the US overthrew a secular, democratic Iranian government, it installed Shah Reza Pahlavi. Israel and the US both supported this monster. Iran’s nuclear program was just fine as long as it was in the hands of a US-approved tyrant.
The 32 countries with nuclear technology represent over half the world population. Within these 32 countries (Israel won’t admit to having a nuclear program), there are 440 power plants and all of them require some sort of enrichment or processing. Armenia with 2.1 million people has nuclear power. Other nations under 50 million people with nuclear power include: Argentina; Belgium; Bulgaria; Canada; the Czech Republic; Finland; Hungary; Netherlands; Romania; Slovakia; Slovenia; Spain; Sweden; Switzerland; Taiwan; Ukraine; and the United Arab Emirates.
Of the nuclear weapons states, France, with two-thirds the population of Iran, has 58 nuclear stations. The UK, also two-thirds the size of Iran, has 15.
All of these countries have programs much like the one the US just bombed at the behest of Israel. Miraculously, we have not bombed Switzerland or Canada. Yet.
In all of this is the inconvenient truth that Iran has never had a weapons program. If the Trump administration has any proof that Iran does, they won’t show us. The EU, the IAEA, various U.S. national security assessments, and even an opinion only weeks ago from National Security Advisor Tulsi Gabbard — before Mafia Don Trump leaned on her — was that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program.
Instead, Trump appears to be getting his “intelligence” from Israel and a small group of dubious “experts”, according to the Independent. These “advisors” include: Stephen Miller; Steve Witkoff, a luxury real estate developer; Steve Bannon; Marjorie Taylor Greene; Lindsay Graham; Tom Cotton; Candace Owens; John Ratliffe, a former CIA director with close ties to Israel; and a pro-Israel general, Michael Erik Kurilla.
When asked on Air Force One about Gabbard’s previous assessment, Trump shot back, “I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having it.” Similarly refusing to acknowledge the discrepancy between European and previous U.S. assessments that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons — and Trump’s “experts” — Marco Rubio was asked on “Face the Nation” where Trump’s “intelligence” came from. “It doesn’t matter!” he screamed at news anchor Margaret Brennon. “That’s irrelevant!”
TheIsraeli-American Council, a front for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, wants to restore the Iranian dictator’s son to power.
For over 30 years American foreign policy makers have been looking for an opportunity to bomb Iran. Recall Senator John McCain singing “Bomb, Bomb Iran” to a Beach Boys tune 18 years ago. In the intervening years there were two Gulf wars — fought on equally spurious intel. Civil liberties were a casualty, a huge surveillance and police state were built, and the power of the President to declare war was handed over to him on a platter by a cowardly Congress using “war powers resolutions” which bypass the Constitutional requirement that it is Congress that declares war.
Ultimately, war hawks and Israel’s lobbyists found a president who didn’t give a damn about war powers resolutions or even Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. Nor anything else in that wrinkly old document.
The “Art of the Deal” maker simply made a side deal with Israel, and in so doing blindsided the American Congress, lied about a two-week timetable during which Congress might have given him war powers anyway (so much for the New York Times argument), and then had his White Supremacist Crusader-tatted defense chief send B-2’s to bomb Iran.
Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have been deer in the headlights since the election, unable to get Democrats to fall into line. Some of them — for example, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, New Jersey Congressman Josh Gottheimer, former Clinton aide Jamie Metzl, and others — actually cheered the illegal bombings and sang Trump’s praises.
California Congressman Rohit Khanna penned a piece in the Nation arguing for support for his bipartisan war powers resolution, which so far has only a small number of cosponsors. In the Senate Tim Kaine of Virginia filed a similar resolution, which does nothing but attempt to claw back powers ceded to the president in previous AUMF agreements, and only in regard to Iran. Congress is neither bold enough nor smart enough to terminate all AUMFs and forcefully exercise its Constitutional rights.
Texas Congressman Al Green did actually file articles of impeachment citing Trump’s usurpation of Congressional powers. Not only is bombing a nation and killing hundreds of civilians without Congressional approval an unconstitutional act, doing so as an professional courtesy for [another] genocidal regime and lying to Congress about it ought to result in impeachment, prison, or the firing squad.
But neither resolutions nor articles of impeachment have accomplished anything more than to give Congress a platform for grand theatre. If we really want to hold criminal presidents accountable, the Department of Justice needs to stop treating them as emperors and to start prosecuting them. But because the Constitution unwisely placed the Department of Justice under the Presidential branch (which Washington felt was too similar to a King), prosecutions of a sitting president are virtually impossible. Any trials of past presidents must be held when a new regime comes to power. For that a simple DOJ memo would suffice.
But none of this alters the insanity and the depravity of bombing Iran in the first place.
A few nights ago I listened to Mehdi Hasan’s interview with Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute. Parsi knows more about Iran than Trump, his kooky Iran war panel, Hegseth, Rubio, Cruz, Schumer, Jeffries, and both Clintons put together. Parsi’s own father was jailed by the Shah and then again by the Ayatollah, so you don’t have to tell him about the sins of the Islamic Republic. Parsi also gave a shorter interview to CBS Mornings.
In both interviews Parsi alluded to the JCPOA, which was doing its job and was something Trump should not have abrogated. And for all the contempt in which Parsi holds the Iranian regime, he nevertheless does not regard Iran as a bunch of fanatical lunatics. Iran’s responses have been measured, restrained, strategic, and its counter-attacks have been measured and proportionate. For example, Iran called the White House to warn the U.S. of the reprisal missiles to Qatar in order to minimize loss of life.
Parsi has a pretty good idea of what comes next. And it’s a completely rational response on Iran’s part. Parsi told CBS Mornings, “I frankly think that what has been done here [by Trump] more or less guarantees that Iran will be a nuclear weapons state five to ten years from now.”
Iran and every other target of American foreign policy and military “intervention” have surely noticed that the only country that the U.S. will not bomb is one with nuclear weapons.
So the bombing of Iran is the result of the conventional wisdom — of both the Dr. Strangeloves and also the liberals who mumble in their sleep that Iran is a “fanatical” state.
Because of ingrained, irrational, and institutionalized American hostility toward Iran, our Israel-influenced refusal to accord Iran’s non-defense nuclear program the same rights as dozens of other nations (especially Israel), or to honor an international agreement both nations signed, Iran has now been forced to start developing nuclear weapons in earnest.
And, now, as Israel and the U.S. contemplate even more bombings, there’s a quick solution for this too.
Once upon a time there was a sheriff’s son… let’s call him Jimmy Lee.
Jimmy Lee lived in an old plantation built by slaves on Indian land, on a lovely lane lined with trees covered in Spanish moss. Jimmy had been given every advantage in a world constructed expressly for people of his complexion. But still he was unsatisfied. There were few rules for a boy like Jimmy Lee. He graduated from killing cats as a tyke, to tipping over Black families’ outhouses as a teen, to beating Black folks up as an adult, even blinding a young man in a particularly violent incident, eventually joining the Klan — all while Daddy Lee groomed him to be the next sheriff.
Daddy Lee had no qualms about stealing from county taxpayers to finance extravagant toys for himself and young Jimmy. The pampered son naturally had a collection of hand guns and semiautomatics, quite the bachelor pad, and Daddy’s old Chevy 454 SS pickup. He was brash and hard-assed. He was the envy of even liberal townfolk.
Jimmy Lee’s Apocalypse 6×6
But now, with all the money Daddy had managed to siphon from the county, good ole Jimmy now also had an Apocalypse 6×6 Dodge Hellcat with 707 horses and a reworked chassis. The goddamn thing looked like a frigging armed personnel carrier and scared the shit out of all the neighbors — which of course was the whole point.
A youthful career of unpunished theft, assault, and arson eventually led Jimmy to home invasions and fraudulent home foreclosures, made possible only through the quasi-legal machinations of Daddy Lee, judicial cronies, and several banks. Within short order Jimmy and his friends had taken ownership of almost half the homes on the other side of the tracks that marked the town’s racial boundary.
Jimmy Lee
One day Jimmy simply broke into a Black doctor’s home, Glock in hand, his masked friends carrying bats, knives and AR-15’s. This time the home owner put up quite a fight but still ended up in the emergency room at his own underfunded Black clinic. The doctor’s friends and neighbors protested, of course, and launched a fruitless legal effort to reclaim the beloved physician’s home from the invaders. They even mounted a boycott of businesses that supported Jimmy Lee and his corrupt father, but legislators labelled them racists and terrorists, enacting dozens of laws to criminalize victims and shield the perpetrators.
The entire system was stacked against them. Even the small town papers always seemed to side with Jimmy Lee or Daddy Lee. Nevertheless, the case became so well-known outside the county and engendered such outrage that a deal was reached — Jimmy Lee would stay in the invaded home, but the doctor and his family got to stay in the basement while everyone but the actual owner decided what was fair. Town liberals heralded this new “two family” arrangement as the best and only viable resolution to such cases — which were quickly multiplying.
Daddy Lee
But the arrangement rankled Jimmy Lee, who believed he was entitled to the entire house. It rankled his pride. It rankled his sense of white superiority and entitlement that this… this clearly inferior doctor was treated with kid gloves and was allowed to stay in Jimmy Lee’s house, albeit in the basement.
As the anger welled up in Jimmy Lee’s veins, he’d periodically stomp down the old wood basement stairs to give the doctor a thrashing to remember. Or he’d kill one of the doctor’s cats, destroy some furniture, or traumatize his children. In his heart of hearts what Jimmy Lee really wanted was to murder them all in the most grotesque manner imaginable. But the time wasn’t quite right.
One day it was the doctor’s turn — long overdue, if you ask me — to erupt in rage. He left his basement and found some of Jimmy’s buddies in their stolen homes and killed them in their beds. Having made his point the doctor went home to his little house — the only home he knew — and waited.
Unfortunately for the doctor, whatever little public sympathy there was for his situation rapidly went up in smoke. Every county deputy, every sheriff and deputy and police officer from every surrounding county — even the state police — were called to the good doctor’s house to deal with him. And of course Jimmy’s Klan buddies showed up too, armed to the teeth.
By the end of the day, the doctor’s house was splinter and ash. The doctor was no more. His children were no more. Every one of his neighbors was no more. All of their houses lay in ruin. The level of destruction was unimaginable. It was like a hundred seasonal hurricanes had blown through the little Southern town.
Jimmy and his Klan buddies — even the forces of “law and order” who had joined in — were so convinced that no one would ever hold them accountable that they filmed the entire orgy of murder and destruction and posted it on social media. And it turned out that they were right — no one ever did hold any of them accountable.
And so, unpunished and undeterred, Jimmy Lee climbed back into his Apocalypse 6×6 modified Dodge Hellcat 707 and turned his gun sights on everyone who had tried to stop him.
June 2025, California National Guard deployed by America’s wannabe dictator
Written by slaveholders who never imagined that anyone but wealthy white plantation owners would ever be running the country, the United States has one of the most vague and dysfunctional Constitutions and system of government in the Western world.
Antidemocratic design choices like the US House of Lords (the Senate), our peculiar Electoral College, the inability to hold no-confidence votes to end a government, together with all the mood swings of voters and the periodic and arbitrary re-interpretations of law by a broken, partisan judicial system drive citizens of every political persuasion mad.
The level of corruption, criminality, cowardice, and hypocrisy within every branch of this system of government is astounding and only keeps growing.
Last month Supreme Court approval ratings dropped below 50% for the first time in five years. Since being elected, Donald Trump’s approval ratings have dropped 12 points and are now at 41%. Coming in dead last in being trusted by Americans, Congressional approval ratings are now at 37%.
We no longer have a government that governs by the consent of the governed.
Instead, our rulers are a lawless band of pardoned criminals and oligarchs who have set about to loot the country, destroy anything of use to working people, and are doing a bang-up job of reprising Germany of 1933. Not to mention participating in a genocide and threatening us all with World War III.
Naturally, would-be dictators are sensitive to criticism and don’t much appreciate hearing from the hoi polloi.
Last week we experienced Trump’s unusual mobilization of the National Guard in California and an illegal deployment of U.S. Marines on the streets of Los Angeles in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. I guess we had it coming. We find nothing wrong with sending in the Marines on other people’s streets to intimidate and/or murder them — or as we like to say, to “keep peace” — so it was just a matter of time before it happened to American citizens too.
June 2025, U.S. Marines with 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, attached to Task Force 51, police Los Angeles in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act
Watching Angelinos stand up for their undocumented friends and neighbors must have been a shocking, unwelcome sight to MAGA Americans whose ideological roots trace back to the aptly-named No Nothing Party, which had a platform remarkably like their Führer’s.
One of MAGA world’s many conspiracy theories is that of the paid “crisis actor.”
Magnified by social media and the rightwing press, a narrative emerged that the Los Angeles ICE protests and the “No Kings” demonstrations were funded by George Soros, always the go-to Jew that MAGA antisemites accuse of “bankrolling” any protest or progressive effort they don’t like.
The Washingon Examiner dismissed community outrage at masked men in unmarked cars operating like Stasi agents with no warrants. Instead they figured it had to be a “well-funded” effort by Democratic operatives to “make them appear spontaneous and grassroots.” If only Democrats would fight like that — or at all.
The New York Post ran out of fingers coming up with new culprits — immigration rights groups, the Chinese Communist Party, Code Pink, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), various terrorist groups and individuals — not to mention your grandmother in Pasadena.
Others imagined they recognized the fingerprints of lefty tech mogul Neville Singam and the service employees international union SEIU on the protests. Naturally, ICE, which has now become Trump’s Republican (or perhaps Praetorian) Guard, assaulted the SEIU president and arrested him on Trumped-up charges. Several Democratic elected officials shared similar manhandling. Thuggish beat-downs of the loyal opposition were a prominent feature of the Sturmabteilung.
It was inconceivable to any of these racist morons that people might come out into the streets to show solidarity with their friends, coworkers, and neighbors. After all, people like this can’t imagine solidarity with anyone except perhaps other white Christian nationalists.
One of the biggest racist morons of them all is Senator Josh Hawley. You’ll remember him as the puffed-up provocateur who stood behind a protective police shield egging on January 6th seditionists, but who ran like a jackrabbit when his neo-nazi buddies actually breached the Senate.
Hawley — a hypocrite with clearly selective outrage for protest — is now playing the well-greased part of Joseph McCarthy by launching a witch hunt against the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights and at least one socialist group, the PSL.
Without a shred of proof or bothering to enumerate any specific cases of lawbreaking other than the Constitutionally-protected right to protest and (yes) disrupt, Hawley accuses both of “financing and materially supporting the coordinated protests and riots” and providing “logistical support and financial resources to individuals engaged in these disruptive actions.”
Threatening each with “referral for criminal investigation,” Hawley’s fishing expedition is asking for each to provide:
All internal communications, including emails, text messages, chat logs, and messaging applications, relating to protest planning, coordination, or funding.
All financial documents related to protests, demonstrations, or mobilization efforts in Los Angeles or elsewhere relating to immigration enforcement.
All third-party contracts or vendor agreements, including any arrangements with event organizers, transportation providers, security personnel, or communications consultants relating to immigration enforcement or the Los Angeles protests, or similar protests elsewhere.
Grant applications and funding proposals that relate to or reference immigration enforcement.
Travel and lodging records for individuals or groups supported or reimbursed in connection with protest activities.
Media or public relations strategies, including talking points, press releases, and coordination with journalists or influencers relating to immigration protests.
Donor lists.
That’s quite the shopping list.
* * *
Treating dissent as terrorism is precisely how the Nazis began hounding the German Left in 1933. And we all know how that turned out.
Daniela Melo and Timothy Walker are editors of Wilfred Burchett’s book, The Captains’ Coup, an account of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution. The couple are Massachusetts professors both well-steeped in Portuguese politics and history. While bookstore browsing in Lisbon they came across Wilfred Burchett’s book in Portuguese translation, then attempted to locate the original English edition. The hunt for Burchett’s original manuscript plays a small but intriguing part in the introduction to the book, and Melo and Walker’s scholarly notes (and the occasional correction of Burchett’s errors) serve readers very well.
Burchett’s “you are there” reporting is exciting and very readable, while at the same time he provides much-needed background into the dismal conditions in both the industrial centers of Portugal and in the Alentejo and other agricultural areas.
In 1974 Burchett dropped everything to travel to Portugal to observe the Carnation Revolution (still in progress) and to interview many of the major protagonists, the minor characters, and everyday people who participated in shutting down the world’s longest-running empire (at that point) together with a brutal fascist regime.
Burchett’s accounts give you a sense of how desperate the Portuguese people were. He paints a detailed picture of the brutality, senselessness, and economic recklessness of conducting multiple simultaneous colonial wars in Africa. At one point 57% of the Portuguese economy was devoted to wars in Africa, with horrendous casualties of the young men of the bourgoisie and a growing number of working class army and naval officers.
Even as the Portuguese dictatorship was playing colonizer, Portuguese workers were themselves colonized by European and American corporations which treated them as disposable equipment and relied on PIDE, the Portuguese secret police, to crush any labor disturbances. Absentee landlords created many levels of misery for those from whom they stole traditionally communal land. The peasantry was overwhelmingly illiterate and the Church, particularly in the North of Portugal, played an exceptionally reactionary role in mis-informing parishioners and in collaborating with the fascists.
The Portuguese “revolution” was, true to the book’s title, more a coup. The Portuguese working class did not rise up in any Marxist sense of revolution. Although different elements of a disgruntled and worn-out military competed for the loyalty of the people, and though the “revolution” at first had some of the characteristics of peasant and worker revolts, particularly against the latifundia, rebellion was quickly quashed by the Socialist Party with a certain amount of acquiescence of the Portuguese Communist Party, which feared not only widespread strikes but that what the “captains” had unleashed could not be put back on a leash.
An Afterword by New Left scholar Tariq Ali attempts to draw lessons from the failure of the Carnation Revolution, fixing blame on the Communists, “ultra-leftists,” the Socialists, the CIA, and the Portuguese military itself. Ali quotes Lenin: “without the independent activity of the masses, there can be no revolution,” and he goes on to slam the various factions for suppressing the independent activity of the masses.
But at the end of the day, the Carnation Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, fomented by the sons of the privileged classes. To quote Lenin again, “without the independent activity of the masses, there can be no revolution.” As Ali points out, the Captains and the young bourgeois officer corps which spawned the revolution had also considered a Plan B – becoming executives in Capitalist enterprises in a modernized European social democratic state.
We absolutely need more mass mobilizations and protests as the country goes down in flames — especially as America’s own “Il Douchey” makes even more Mussolini moves, criminalizes anti-ICE and anti-genocide protests, violates the Posse Cometatus Act, stages self-congratulatory military parades like a North Korean despot, and as Congressional lackeys like Josh Hawley launch McCarthyite hearings of immigrant groups and the American Left.
I’m just not sure what to make of the “No Kings” events scheduled for June 14th.
No Kings is a project of Indivisible, which in turn is a project of Democratic operatives and former Democratic Congressional aides who decided (in typical Democrat fashion) that the Tea Party movement’s successes could be mimicked. Only thing is, they do it half-heartedly, sporadically and unconvincingly, and they completely lack any program to truly fight back.
There is nothing inherently wrong with attending one of these feel-good events. I’m sure the mainstream press will report that X number of people showed up to protest Trump. But they won’t be able to report on exactly what the organizers had planned – because there is no real plan.
How are Democrats going to challenge and thwart Trump and a MAGA Congress enjoying a temporary and only razor-thin majority? Where is the opposition?
Are any of “No King’s” Democratic organizers about to challenge Chuck Schumer’s increasingly out-of-touch and impotent sputtering and posturing or his go-along-to-get-along collaborationist “strategy”?
Do “No Kings” organizers want to replace the 95 fellow Democrats who sided with Republicans to “express gratitude” to ICE for “protecting” us from those evil gardeners, housekeepers, meat packers, textile workers, and roofers who pay into a system they will never benefit from yet lack the ability to switch borders on whim like Big Business routinely does?
Are “No Kings” organizers calling for a shakeup in their party’s leadership or condemning party members who voted for the Laken Riley Act which actually authorized the crackdown that now these organizers and their duplicitous party claim to be protesting?
No, not for one damned millisecond. The Democratic Party they shill for demonstrates each time their representatives in Congress vote that its values are not substantially different from the Republicans’. At the end of the day, street theater like “No Kings” is nothing but a safety valve, a way to let off a little steam, a cynical mechanism to defuse the righteous anger of working people betrayed by both parties.
We’d all be better-served by not putting all of our eggs in the electoral basket. Neither party represents us in elections and a healthy amount of hell-raising must be done outside the electoral arena.
Join an organization with a real program, dare I say a socialist one. Consider working with the kind of organization that autocrats fear enough to launch witch hunts against. One that grasps better than the toothless, Janus-faced, war-mongering Democrats what the true objectives of America’s lords and masters really are in dismantling every shred of democracy and governance, demonizing our “illegal” friends, coworkers, and neighbors, while rushing us headlong into war after war of aggression and genocide.
In short, if you really want change, friends, start looking beyond the Democratic Party.
The Weimar Republic was every bit as militarized as the United States and it revered its military and its veterans in much the same excessive manner. Particularly in Prussia, there were numerous militias, the Freikorps, some dating back centuries, which served as veterans associations, recruitment pools, and as reserves for the imperial army.
One of these was the Reichsbanner, literally the flag of the republic. While the Reichsbanner was officially a multiparty militia, it was closely tied to the German Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, the SPD.
In 1919 a different Freikorps militia, the Garde-Kavallerie-Schützen-Division, reporting to the newly-elected SPD government and its Defense Minister, together with elements of the German army, planned and carried out the assassinations of German communists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The killers, who ranged from the German Defense Minister himself to enlisted men, were all acquitted by a military court and the disposition of the case was approved by the SPD. The two victims, after all, were despised communists.
By 1933, hostile to both Kommunisten and Nationalsozialisten alike, the remaining SPD-oriented militias calculated that navigating a timid middle course would save not only the republic but themselves from metastasizing fascism. The story of how this strategy failed spectacularly, and how the Reichsbanner was systematically erased by Nazis, is told in William Sheridan Allen’s book, The Nazi Seizure of Power (1973).
So when the Trump administration begins demanding personal loyalty oaths from individual military units and purging elements displaying any independence or concern for the Constitution, think back on the following passage from Allen’s book (p. 180):
The Reichsbanner, with all its plans for instant mobilization, had its members struck down one by one, its leaders imprisoned, beaten, hounded from their jobs and their homes without any resistance from the organization as a whole.
Perhaps the basic reason for this was that there was no Nazi coup d’état. Instead, there was a series of quasi-legal actions over a period of at least six months, no one of which by itself constituted a revolution, but the sum of which transformed Germany from a republic to a dictatorship.
The problem was where to draw the line. But by the time the line could be clearly drawn, the revolution was a fait accompli, the potential organs of resistance had been individually smashed, and organized resistance was no longer possible. In short, the splendid organization was to no avail; in the actual course of events it was every man for himself.
The Thalburger Reichsbanner itself was ready to fight in 1933. All it needed was the order from Berlin. Had it been given, Thalburg’s Reichsbanner members would have carried out the tested plan they had worked on so long — to obtain and distribute weapons and to crush the Nazis. But Thalburg’s Reichsbanner would not act on its own. The leaders felt that single acts would come to grief, would possibly compromise the chance when it finally did come, and would, in any event, be a betrayal of discipline. They felt that their only hope was in common action, all together, all over the Reich. Hadn’t the former SPD governor of Hannover, Gustav Noske, said that only a counterattack should be made? So they waited and prayed for the order to come, but it never did.
And while they waited the Nazis began tracking them down, one by one. Finally it was clear that there would never be an order…
On August 6th, 1945 the United States was the first, and to-date the only, state to ever use nuclear weapons on human beings. At roughly 9:15 that morning a B-29 bomber dubbed Enola Gay dropped a bomb named Little Boy which, for maximum carnage, was detonated roughly 2,000 feet over Hiroshima, killing 10,000 Japanese troops, 12 Allied prisoners of war and 156,000 civilians in an unprecedented display of such a weapon of mass destruction. An exultant Harry Truman called it “the greatest thing in history.”
Three days later the U.S. repeated the atrocity in Nagasaki. On August 9th, another B-29 named Bockscar took off carrying a bomb nicknamed Fat Man intended for the city of Kokura. But because of poor visibility the bombing run was switched to Nagasaki and, once it had arrived, the secondary target was not visible either. But the show had to go on, so at almost precisely noon the crew of the B-29 dumped Fat Man anyway, several miles from the intended target, detonating it 1,650 feet above Nagasaki, obliterating half the city and killing 150 Japanese soldiers, 13 Allied prisoners, and 80,000 civilians.
Even today, many liberals mouth the line that Truman’s bomb saved American lives by ending the war. In the middle of a discussion with this writer about Hiroshima, the friend waved his hands in dismissal: “Hard things have to be done in circumstances not of our own making.”
But when you’re a superpower, as the United States has been since at least August 6th, 1945, almost every circumstance is of its making.
It is a presidential prerogative to be able to send hellfire missiles into someone’s bathroom window without consequence — a perk extended to Israeli prime ministers under U.S. protection. When Donald Trump fantasized about murdering someone with impunity in Times Square he was not only anticipating his own future impunity but describing that of every US sitting president. Trump is just the latest monster we have elected many times before.
“Hard things” and “hard choices” are hollow phrases used to defend the indefensible. They imply that only a select few, unencumbered by normal human, moral qualms or trifling legalities, are capable of making the tough decisions that “keep us safe.” An example from popular culture is the monologue delivered by a fictional Colonel Nathan Jessep in Aaron Sorkin’s “A Few Good Men.”
“You can’t handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? … You have the luxury of not knowing what I know, that Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives! You don’t want the truth, because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.”
Naturally, no perversion of ethics or morality can be accomplished without the falsification of history to cast these “grotesque and incomprehensible” choices in the most favorable light.
If we are to believe such creatures, the Israel-Palestine conflict began on October 7th, 2023. A century of Israeli colonization, ethnic cleansing and land theft is completely irrelevant and instead substituted with vehement declarations that “Israel has every right to defend itself” — at least to the extent that any home invader has the “right” to defend himself from someone whose home he has invaded at gunpoint and tied to a chair.
Gaza, 2025
The American use of nuclear weapons on Japan was an uncanny precursor to Israel’s carpet-bombing of Gaza. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki a combined 36 kilotons of TNT were used to level both cities. The kilotonnage dropped by Israel in its latest war dwarfs that dropped by the Allies on Dresden — and even the 25 kilotons dropped on Baghdad in 2003. By July 2024, provided unlimited munitions by the Biden administration, Israel had dropped 36 kilotons of munitions on Gaza. The past year, with Trump’s complicity, that number has only increased.
Israel has now surpassed all previous records for the number of kilotons of weapons used to snuff out human life in a relatively small area.
Truman’s mendacious justifications for dropping the Bomb were very much like Netanyahu’s excuses for the total destruction of Gaza and the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians. Of the 226,000 Japanese killed, only 20,000 were military casualties. Virtually every justification for dropping the Bomb recited by Truman, Oppenheimer, Department of Defense officials, or echoed by a compliant, cheerleading media until they became “true” was spun from a tissue of exaggeration and lies.
But not everyone bought it. General and future President Dwight D. Eisenhower dismissed the human costs of slaughtering so many civilians: “Japan was at the moment seeking some way to surrender with minimum loss of ‘face’. It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
J. Samuel Walker, Chief Historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote, “The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it.”
Katie McKinney, Scott D. Sagan, and Allen S. Weiner argue in Lawfare and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that today the 1945 bombings would be considered a war crime and that
“The archival record makes clear that killing large numbers of civilians was the primary purpose of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima; destruction of military targets and war industry was a secondary goal and one that “legitimized” the intentional destruction of a city in the minds of some participants. The atomic bomb was detonated over the center of Hiroshima. More than 70,000 men, women, and children were killed immediately; the munitions factories on the periphery of the city were left largely unscathed. Such a nuclear attack would be illegal today. It would violate three major requirements of the law of armed conflict codified in Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions: the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution. There could be great pressure to use nuclear weapons in future scenarios in which many American soldiers’ lives are at risk and there is no guarantee that a future US president would follow the law of armed conflict. That is why the United States needs senior military officers who fully understand the law and demand compliance and presidents who care about law and justice in war.”
“In his first radio address after the bombing of Hiroshima, President Harry S. Truman claimed that “[t]he world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”Footnote1This statement was misleading in two important ways. First, although Hiroshima contained some military-related industrial facilities, an army headquarters, and troop loading docks, the vibrant city of over a quarter of a million men, women, and children was hardly “a military base” (Stone Citation1945, 1). Indeed, less than 10 percent of the individuals killed on August 6, 1945 were Japanese military personnel (Bernstein Citation2003, 904–905). Second, the US planners of the attack did not attempt to “avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.” On the contrary, both the Target Committee (which included Robert Oppenheimer and Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves of the Manhattan Project) and the higher-level Interim Committee (led by Secretary of War Henry Stimson) sought to kill large numbers of Japanese civilians in the attack. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was deliberately detonated above the residential and commercial center of the city, and not directly on legitimate military targets, to magnify the shock effect on the Japanese public and leadership in Tokyo.”
Sun Tzu wrote of the “selective, instant beheading of military or societal targets to achieve shock and awe.” The Nazis called it Blitzkrieg. The U.S. doctrine of “Shock and Awe” was codified in 2005, two years after the “Battle of Baghdad.”
“Shock and awe” — or whatever you call the use of massive force for terror — always expresses itself in genocidal rage and is fed by domestic racism. During World War II Japanese American citizens were rounded up (euphemism: “interned”) and placed in concentration camps.
“internment” orders
White Americans were even given instructions on how to differentiate a “Jap” from other Asians:
how to spot a “Jap”
In 1942 Fortune Magazine managed to roll up every Japanese stereotype together with a call for the destruction of “medieval” Japanese society and its false gods:
Fortune Magazine calls for civilizational destruction
Today the aims of Israeli generals and Israel’s far-right government are no different — vent racist genocidal rage on a despised population through the disproportionate use of military power, ostensibly to demoralize the enemy but in fact designed to scrape him off the face of the earth.
A recent Haaretz poll showed that a shocking 82% of all Israelis approve of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Last year a couple of podcasters broadcast an episode (since removed) of a podcast called “Two Nice Jewish Boys,” expressing not only their approval of ethnic cleansing but of genocide.
“If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow, I would press it in a second,” Eytan Weinstein, co-host of the Israeli English-language podcast Two Nice Jewish Boys, said in an Aug. 9, 2024 episode. His co-host Naor Meningher went on to reiterate several times that he would press that extermination button “right now,” adding that “most Israelis would.”
And if you think these two psychopaths represent Israel’s fringe, both genocide enthusiasts hosted Deborah Lipstadt, Joe Biden’s “antisemitism” advisor, on one of their episodes.
Add to this the thousands of social media posts by Israeli troops in Gaza self-documenting war crimes and looting. All this is in line with incitement so frequent and numerous that Law for Palestine has documented incitement by more than 500 Israeli legislators, journalists, and the military calling for the annihilation of Palestinians.
While the disproportionate use of weaponry is based on hate, not strictly self-protection, the very nature of such wars always betrays the true aims of the colonial powers that use them.
When an imperialist power has virtually unlimited armaments for “Shock and Awe,” every day is an opportunity to terrorize smaller nations — or share its munitions with geopolitical allies.
When an imperialist power chooses warfare designed to cripple and demoralize “societal targets” through the massive destruction of civilian infrastructure, it is always and predictably accompanied by an enormous loss of civilian life. And that is by design when you are not fighting an enemy as much as subduing a nation.
The generals have long ceased worrying about how many women and children they will slaughter. But, more importantly, the imperialist powers deliberately choose these tactics in order to reinforce hegemony and destroy global (or local) rivals.
As we peel away the lies and propaganda that America’s many wars and military adventures are built on — lies that also permeate the teaching of history, particularly around race — we need to question the propaganda we are continuously fed. A lazy, tractable media is always more than happy to repeat the conventional wisdom or reprint an official story, even verbatim, but sometimes they reveal (as the Washington Post did not that long ago in a story about the Bomb) some new finding based on diving into archives to see how history was really made.
This is what happened with contemporary scholarship on Palestine. Until Ilan Pappe, Tom Segev, Rashid Khalidi and others began poking around Israeli archives, the “official story” went something like this:
“In 1947 the Zionist leaders accepted the UN partition plan, which was rejected by the Arabs, who united to launch a war to expel the Jews from Palestine, a war during which Israel narrowly escaped destruction. In the course of the war, the Palestinians fled at the behest of Arab leaders. Later, Israel sought a peace which has always been refused by every Arab state.”
What the “new historians,” many Israeli, actually discovered was that Israel had long planned to completely depopulate Palestine of Arabs, and in 1948 they came close to finishing the job. 80% of Palestine — over 500 cities, towns and villages — were emptied of Palestinians through murder and terror.
References to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by one of the planners can be found in the diary of Yosef Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency’s Transfer Committee and Chief of land confiscation operations. On December 20, 1940, Weitz referred to a plan later referred to as Plan Dalet in his diary: “The only solution is a Land of Israel devoid of Arabs. There is no room here for compromise. They must all be moved. Not one village, not one tribe, can remain. Only through this *transfer* of the Arabs living in the Land of Israel will redemption come,” he wrote.
The Zionist “solution” to the Palestinian Problem was formulated more than a year before the Nazis came up with a similar “solution” to the Jewish Problem.
But this is all Zionism 101. “Transfer” was the 1940’s Zionist term to describe ethnic cleansing. Israelis still use it and mean it in its original sense. Theodor Herzl had written in 1896 in his own diary, “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country.” In the 1950’s another plan, Operation Yohanan, was conceived to ship to South America any remaining Arab Christians who had not been “transferred” in the 1948 Nakba.
75 years after the Nakba, Israel is still trying to eliminate Palestinians. And in 2025 it even revived the “South American” plan — this time the end of the line for “transferred” Palestinians was to be Africa.
To the average liberal Zionist American or Israeli, such narratives are unimaginable cognitive dissonance and are rejected out of hand as blatant antisemitism. Nevertheless, they are unpleasant historical facts that must be reckoned with honestly — just as the truth behind bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki is unimaginable to a liberal American because he simply cannot bring himself to believe that his country could ever commit a crime so heinous.
140+ days into the Trump administration many Democrats fondly remember the last president a bit too wistfully. For the average liberal, Joe Biden is credited with making “hard choices,” even as the enthusiastic self-described “Zionist” signed on to assist Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
But Biden’s choices were never that difficult to make because every president surrounds himself with national security advisors, generals, admirals, lobbyists, donors, a handpicked defense secretary, relies on the assistance of Congressional and Senate Foreign Affairs Committee members from his own party (people like Bill Keating), or has been delegated war powers that actually belong to Congress, by men exactly like himself.
Foreign affairs experts call this assemblage of homogenous and self-reinforcing decision-making “The Blob” — institutional group-think by a revolving door of business and foreign policy interests and lobbies, some foreign. Within the “Blob” there are no principled positions, no out-of-the-box solutions, only pre-approved policy based on the expectations of interests that have paid to bring the president to power and keep him there.
All of this fosters legal and moral isolation as well. Who in the Blob is going to remind the President that genocide is wrong? At the end of the day, such creatures don’t make hard choices at all; they play the parts they were hired, or appointed, to play. This is, after all, how Capitalism works. Only after they leave government (men like Matthew Miller) do they occasionally screw up the courage to tell the world that the boss was wrong or that they themselves were lying to the public.
Of all the dismal aspects of American foreign policy madness, the worst may be the almost messianic belief that America has a divinely ordained “exceptional” mission in the world, that it must maintain a military edge at all cost, must be allowed to operate freely on foreign soil or interfere in the affairs of other nations at any whim or minor provocation — that only the United States has valid national interests. There is only one other nation that shares such a messianic view — Israel.
Unburdened by conventional morality or ethics, swatting away trivial Constitutional and legal barriers to illegal acts, surrounded by ideological clones, and armed with an almost fundamentalist religious belief about the nation, a president’s “tough” decisions are actually quite easy, fairly rote. He simply does what he is paid to do. All the rest is public relations.
As for the rest of us, the lies we tell ourselves about the abilities and decency of these “exceptional” men to make “hard choices” to “keep us safe” — this just keeps us electing sociopaths and genocidal maniacs, always voting against our own interests.
There is no precise date, in our long history of the ethnic cleansing of indigenous people, creating the institution of slavery and slave patrols, maintaining racist immigration laws, perverting justice to maintain Jim Crow, or cracking down on dissidents, when we finally became the police state that we are today. But here we are.
Today’s proliferation of cameras and license plate readers, the near-constant surveillance of citizens, the policing of speech and thought, warrant-less searches, ballooning police budgets, a now trillion dollar military budget, increasing police militarization, the metastasis of an already vast “Homeland Security” apparatus, the transformation of “La Migra” into a Republican Guard, razor wire on border walls and even rivers, and exemptions to accountability for killer cops, federal “law enforcement” officials, or for sitting presidents — all of this is the logical consequence of creeping American institutionalization of authoritarian control and a contempt for real justice, if not democracy itself.
“If you want an emergency,” so goes the street expression, “call the cops.” Well, we’re in the middle of a five-alarm emergency that our police state has made possible.
We have lived with this police state so long now, that when ICE stops someone without a warrant and without identifying themselves, or grabs someone off the street, stuffs them into an unmarked van and whisks them away to a black site or a foreign prison, so conditioned are we to these screaming violations of the Constitution that we somehow regard the gestapo tactics as completely “normal.”
This week in Los Angeles some of us decided that none of this is normal.
In a further demonstration of unchecked neofascism, der liebe Führer deployed the California National Guard to quell demonstrations against massive, simultaneous ICE raids in LA. The demonstrations were nothing that the LAPD itself could not handle but Trump needed to make the point that he was in control — not only of the country, but of every state and every city.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, despite a brief post-election effort to make nice with MAGA World, accused Trump of “inciting and provoking violence, […] creating mass chaos,” [… and] “militarizing cities,” adding “These are the acts of a dictator, not a President.”
Newsom was certainly right about Trump’s dictator moves, but the Führer’s white supremacy and his desire to ethnically cleanse the United States of Muslims and Hispanics are an ugly side that most presidents have had the decency to keep under wraps, at least for the last few generations.
Jason L. Riley is a Wall Street Journal opinion columnist, a Conservative, and an enemy of DEI and affirmative action. Riley’s book “Let Them In: the Case of Open Borders” is all the more remarkable for this background and his affiliation with the Capitalist journal of record.
In his 2009 book, which still stands up today, Riley offers numerous arguments for welcoming America’s immigrants, legal and otherwise, rather than demonizing them as an undigestible lump in the belly of the beast. He reminds readers that even the late, practically sainted Republican president Ronald Reagan thought we ought to have open borders, free trade, and diversity. Yes, you read that correctly. Here’s Riley:
“In 1952, when the United States was still under the thumb of highly restrictive immigration quotas enacted in the 1920s, Reagan gave a speech endorsing open borders. In his view, America was ‘the promised land’ for people from ‘any place in the world.’ Reagan said ‘any person with the courage, with the desire to tear up their roots, to strive for freedom, to attempt and dare to live in a strange land and foreign place, to travel halfway across the world was welcome here.’
In a 1977 radio address, Reagan discussed what he called ‘the illegal alien fuss. Are great numbers of our unemployed really victims of the illegal alien invasion, or are those illegal tourists actually doing work our own people won’t do? One thing is certain in this hungry world: No regulation or law should be allowed if it results in crops rotting in the fields for lack of harvesters.’
The next time you tune into Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Hugh Hewitt, and Dennis Prager [recall Riley wrote this in 2009], contrast their take on immigration with Reagan’s. Reagan understood that immigrants are coming here to work, not live on the dole. He also grasped that natives and immigrants don’t compete with one another for jobs in a zero-sum labor market and that our policy makers would do better to focus less on protecting U.S. workers from immigrant competition and more on expanding the economic pie.
In his November 1979 speech announcing his candidacy for president, Reagan called for free labor flows throughout North America. Reagan knew that immigration, like free trade, which he also supported, benefits everyone in the long run.
Later in the campaign, in December 1979, Reagan responded to criticism from conservative columnist Holmes Alexander. ‘Please believe me when I tell you the idea of a North American accord has been mine for many, many years,’ said the future president. And conservatives calling today for a wall along the entire United States-Mexico border should know that Reagan was not a big fan of that prospect. ‘Some months before I declared,’ he continued in his response to Alexander, ‘I asked for a meeting and crossed the border to meet with the president of Mexico…… I went, as I said in my announcement address, to ask him his ideas how we could make the border something other than a locale for a nine-foot fence.’
At the end of his presidency, Reagan was still invoking Winthrop. ‘I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it,’ he remarked in his 1989 farewell address to the nation. ‘But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.’”
Riley gives us a quick tour of the sordid history of xenophobia in the United States. He makes special mention of the Tanton network, which spawned a number of hate groups including the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which influenced many now working in the Trump Administration and also local law enforcement officials now tripping over themselves to sign up to help the Führer Make America White Again.
One of Riley’s points — made in 2009 but even more valid today — is that today’s Republicans are racist zealots with a white supremacist agenda. And under Trump they have jumped from zealotry to criminality, sedition, and are well on their way to fascism.
* * *
If the current president has such unchecked power that his State Department can rule that a person about to take a citizenship exam is now a criminal, or effectively criminalize eleven million people by diktat, or enlist a vast army of racist sheriffs and police chiefs in his ethnic cleansing project, the next president (assuming we have elections again) can and must use similar powers to reverse this damage and ensure it can never happen again.
The next president must begin by dismantling the vast federal Police State, starting with ICE, and issue amnesties for everyone in the country, preparing a path to citizenship for people already here. All offshore prisons and black sites, including Guantanamo, must be shut down.
Only by changing the status of undocumented people will we eliminate the constant exploitation of their status as a political wedge. Take away the ability of the Far Right to declare them “illegals” or characterize them as “criminals and rapists” and you take much of the air out of the xenophobic grievances that animate these racists.
Without such a distraction, maybe we could finally get back to the job of making America a place for everyone, not merely a playground for billionaires and white supremacists.
This week we were treated to an object lesson in why corporations ought to be nationalized and our economy managed democratically. Last year we were taught an object lesson in how little human rights and “democracy” mean to either party, with only a few Democrats opposing a genocide enthusiastically supported by a senile president and his last-minute replacement.
We have likewise been treated to repeated examples of bipartisan budget balancing and imposed austerity for anything that benefits people — but near-universal approval of annual $150 billion increases in the war budget. For anyone paying attention, these object lessons come to us every day in the pages of ordinary newspapers, not in broadsides distributed by wooly-headed Marxists.
You just have to be paying attention.
At some level each of us knows what this stinking, collapsing system is really here for — exploitation — and the Trump presidency demonstrates it in spades. What we are witnessing in what feels like End Times for the American Dream is what Capitalism is and always has been. We have come face-to-face with a system so insane and base and vicious and transparently evil and perverse and predatory and embarrassing in all its ugly nakedness.
And now, as Capitalists in each country begin toying with the fascism they think is going to save their individual nation’s economy from global competition, erecting trade barriers, arming themselves for eventual war, slapping sanctions on each other, scrambling for resources and territory wherever possible, all these tin-pot emperors have discarded the garments which previously covered their nakedness and corruption.
In fact, the extent of corruption and exploitation is now so apparent, you don’t even have to pay attention any longer. You just have to obey.
* * *
It seems only days ago that Donald Trump was hawking Teslas in the driveway of the White House and Elon Musk was hopped up on something, bouncing around in Trump’s thrall, alternating between Hitler salutes and delivering embarrassing sycophantic praises to the Emperor.
It was weird, but Musk obviously got something out of it — and, as for Trump, what dictator could sniff at all the billions Musk was throwing at him?
In return, the RougedCaudillo gave Musk carte blanche to create a pretend government agency that took a chainsaw to federal civil service union jobs, even as it failed to deliver trillions in promised savings, instead creating damage that will take years and all that “saved” money (and then some) to repair.
In a typical Trumpian quid pro quo for his most generous benefactor, Trump restructured federal bandwidth initiative requirements to make Musk’s Starlink the more attractive option for rural internet access. Musk’s SpaceX, too, seemed poised to profit handsomely from the Space Force and NASA budgets.
So far, so good for a system that long ago shredded the Emoluments Clause.
Until last week everything was looking roses for this marriage of an increasingly mentally-disturbed fascist and a ketamine-soaked Nazi-saluting tech bro. What could possibly go wrong in such a relationship?
But then Trump created a Big Beautiful Budget giving his first love, Fossil Fuel, the lion’s share of energy subsidies and bupkes for electric vehicle manufacturers like Musk’s Tesla. Only then did a ballistic Musk decide that the Big Beautiful Budget was a “disgusting abomination.” The Führer then had no choice but to strike back.
What transpired was like the shlocky horror film, Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah in which a couple of oversized enraged monsters clash and manage to destroy Japan in the process.
Boys will be boys
In a meeting last week with German chancellor Friedrich Merz, Trump slammed Musk as “disappointing.” Musk fired back on his private social media platform X that “without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate.” Musk then called for Trump’s impeachment and hinted that the President could be found in the [late sex offender Jeffrey] Epstein files.
Whereupon Trump threatened to cancel billions of Musk’s contracts with the federal government. Whereupon Musk promised to suspend future shuttles to NASA’s space station by decommissioning his SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. Whereupon Trump’s jealous ex, Steve Bannon, told Politico that White House trade adviser Peter Navarro ought to be “drafting executive orders [to] implement the Defense Production Act to seize both SpaceX and Starlink and put them under government management […]”
Godzilla. Ghidora. Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.
But let’s go back to Steve Bannon’s comment. There’s already a tool the government can use to seize corporations for the public “good” (if any of Trump’s plans can be said to fall into that category). At least for “defense” purposes.
All of which begs the question: can anybody use tools like this?
Insanity and ketamine may be juicy gossip but they’re irrelevant. Week after week we observe how the same handful of parasitic über-Capitalists use corruption and authoritarian control, openly deal in self-enrichment, violate the Constitution, circumvent Congress — and trifle with the fates of hundreds of millions of working people. It’s less Godzilla and more like class war.
But it’s only class war if the other side really fights back.
Why should we not use all means available to shut down this perpetual cycle of self-enrichment, the endless tinkering with budgets that harm millions and the tax breaks that benefit only a handful of the super-rich?
if SpaceX is so essential to the American space program, and Starlink is so essential to public broadband, let’s just nationalize them.
If a government of billionaires can appoint a Fedex executive to privatize the Postal Service, maybe we should simply start nationalizing corporate assets — as none other than Steve Bannon has suggested (albeit for less noble reasons).
If a government of the billionaires, for the billionaires, and by the billionaires, can arbitrarily take a chainsaw to every social, medical, health, and environmental benefit that we have already paid for, perhaps we ought to return the favor by reviving the 91% tax rate of the Fifties — and no deductions.
Beyond Elon Musk’s businesses, every segment of our economy is too important to be left to the whims of petulant, insane, or drugged-out billionaires indulging their penchant for dick swinging and destructive public displays of power.
Every one of our essential economic sectors, including insurance, construction, housing, manufacturing, transportation, energy, technology, basic science and medical research, healthcare, education, and every step of every major supply chain — not to mention hotels and casinos, too — ought to be nationalized.
The sooner we jettison these greedy lunatics and the corrupt system that benefits only them, the better off everyone will be.
