Donald Trump is determined to subvert the midterms. All that can save us, if he succeeds, is a national strike

Chris Hedges
Aug 31, 2026

The Trump White House has put into place a series of mechanisms to fix or invalidate the midterm elections. Congress will not save us. The courts will not save us. Our only hope — should the election be rigged or stolen — is nationwide strikes. Our only hope is to cripple the machinery of commerce and government, although this militancy will be met with savage state repression.

Otherwise, we are doomed. There will be no exit.

If the measures advocated by the Trump administration are implemented, emergency powers will be invoked to assert unprecedented federal control over voting. Federal agents will seize election materials. They have already seized ballots from previous elections.

The U.S. Postal Service will only send ballots to those included on federally approved eligibility lists drawn from state voter rolls. These rolls, subject to citizenship checks, will deny election-mail services entirely in states that refuse the administration’s demands for voter data.

Trump-backed mid-decade gerrymandering has already dismantled Democratic-held districts and created new ones for the Republican.

Federal ID and citizenship-document requirements will disenfranchise millions of eligible voters, including lower-income Americans who lack access to the required documents and married women whose current names do not match those on their citizenship records.

Federal troops and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — with $113.5 billion in additional funding allocated by Congress through September 2029 — will be deployed to or near polling stations which have a traditional Democratic Party majority. Those branded as “anti-capitalist” and “anti-Christian” or charged with belonging to antifa will be intimidated or blocked from voting.

The Republican majority in the House — regardless of the vote — will use its authority to certify election results to retain power, gaming the Electoral College and refusing to seat newly elected members of the opposition.

Overseeing the massive election fraud will be loyalists seeded by the Trump administration across state and federal election offices.

Trump — who attempted to overturn the 2020 election results and said he would refuse to accept the outcome of the 2024 election if he lost — ruminates about defying the Constitution in order to serve a third term. He has also floated the idea of canceling the upcoming election, telling Reuters “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

When Volodymyr Zelensky — whose presidential term ended in May 2024 — informed Trump that elections would not be held in Ukraine because of the war, Trumpresponded, “So you’re saying, during the war you can’t have elections…So, let me just say, three and a half years from now, so you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”

Trump told The New York Times in January he regretted not directing the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. Trump not only wants to abolish mail-in ballots – Democrats vote by mail in higher numbers than Republicans –  but also voting machines and tabulators which allow election boards to post results on election night.

Trump laid the groundwork for federal interference in his national address in July on election fraud, charging that the elections are dangerously exposed to “hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference.”

This assault has been decades in the making. It did not begin with Trump.

I warned about the Christian nationalist movement and its latent fascism in my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” These Christian fascists are enemies of the open society. They seek to disenfranchise huge segments of the public, demand the deregulation of industry and the elimination of all social services, including public education, public health programs and consumer protection. The only proper tasks for the federal government, they believe, are tax collection, war and domestic security.

These goals are laid out in numbing technical detail in Project 2025.

Power — as in all dictatorships — is to be permanent. It will be configured to enrich the inner circle of Trump and his family, who have made at least $2.3 billion from their crypto currency ventures during Trump’s first year since returning to the presidency. The billionaire class and corporations will continue to pay little or no income tax. They will have no external restraints or oversight as they exploit the citizenry and pollute and poison the earth.

The rest of us, under constant state surveillance and denied legal redress, will be reduced to the status of serfs.

Dissent will be criminalized. The media will be an echo chamber for the dictatorship. Education — from kindergarten to graduate school — will be indoctrination. Culture will be reduced to its lowest common denominator: sentimental kitsch. Christian tropes, iconography and symbols will be employed to sacralize white supremacy, capitalism, endless war and empire, while demonizing those on the margins of society.

Trump has already been handed absolute power. In 2024, the Supreme Court grantedTrump immunity from prosecution for acts within his “conclusive and preclusive” constitutional authority. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor chargedthat as a result of the court’s decision “[i]n every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

Trump and his supporters in Silicon Valley are acutely aware that the level of their corruption and disdain for democracy — unlike anything seen in U.S. history — makes them vulnerable if they lose power. They have no intention of allowing this to happen no matter how egregious the constitutional violations. They seek to extinguish the last vestiges of democracy. They believe, as PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel wrote in 2009, that “freedom and democracy” are not “compatible.”

Theil is sweeping up all our information gleaned from government tax, medical and law enforcement records. This information is being delivered to databases that can be exploited for state control and profit. Thiel and his coterie of technocratic billionaires are implementing the agenda he envisioned 16 years ago: to make technology an “alternative to politics.”

“The populists get the MAGA anti-woke hymn book,” write Mark Medish and Joel McCleary in their “Dancing in the Dark” series in The Spectator on the upcoming elections:

“The lords of the cloud get the contracts and the deregulation; the President gets the adulation, the money, tools to destroy his enemies, and dominance of all forms of media. Each of the partners believes it is cleverly using the others. All of them need the marriage to survive this November and to further consolidate power.”

FBI agents seized original 2020 ballots, ballot images and voter rolls in Georgia. The Justice Department seized 2024 ballots from Michigan. And Chad Bianco, the Sheriff in Riverside County, California, as Medish and McCleary point out, in March “seized some 650,000 ballots on a complaint from a local ‘election integrity’ group that is organizing to replicate the maneuver in a half-dozen more counties this cycle.”

This is a foretaste, I expect, of the widespread seizures of ballots in November.

Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs) which are “pre-drafted emergency orders in case of an attack on the homeland,” await “only a decision and a signature to become operative law by necessity,” Medish and McCleary note, giving Trump unilateral power to suspend civil liberties in a domestic crisis.

First created under President Dwight Eisenhower, the secret directives have since been periodically revised and expanded under successive administrations.

“At least fifty-six of these PEADs exist, by the last credible count,” Medish and McCleary continue. “None has ever been published, leaked, invoked, reviewed by Congress, or tested in any court. Their reported subject matter includes suspension of habeas corpus, martial law, censorship, the detention of citizens ‘considered dangerous,’ [and] the seizure of property.”

The feebleness of legislative and judicial branches of government, coupled with the transformation of federal agencies into appendages of the Trump White House — including the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security — make these institutions unreliable.

We can only save ourselves.

This means shutting the country down.

Millions of us must be prepared to take the streets or the iron doors of fascism will slam shut.

First published on The Chris Hedges Report.

Shared via Creative Commons.

HENRY GIROUX
JULY 10, 2026

The United States has always been divided against itself. From its founding, the promise of democracy has existed alongside the violence of settler colonialism, slavery, racial capitalism, and white supremacy. The nation’s greatest democratic advances have emerged not from the fulfillment of its founding ideals but from generations of struggle against racial domination, economic exploitation, and political exclusion. American history is therefore not a story of inevitable democratic progress. It is an ongoing struggle over whose histories are remembered, whose humanity is recognized, and whose freedom counts, a struggle measured against the gulf between the nation’s claims to freedom and justice and the reality of systemic cruelty and racialized terror. Today, that struggle has entered a new and dangerous phase. The assault on birthright citizenship is not simply another dispute over immigration or constitutional interpretation. It is an attempt to decide once again who counts, who qualifies as a citizen, and who possesses the right to have rights.  At stake is nothing less than whether the United States becomes a multiracial democratic socialist society or completes its transformation into a fascist white republic.

The attack on birthright citizenship forces the nation to confront a question every democracy must answer: Who belongs, and whose lives are valued? As Judith Butler argues, politics is organized around distinctions between lives regarded as grievable and those rendered ungrievable, between those recognized as fully human and those denied that status. Every authoritarian movement answers that question by transforming citizenship from a universal right into a racial, nationalist, and class privilege. Once citizenship becomes conditional, every other right becomes conditional as well. The Trump-Miller campaign against birthright citizenship is therefore not simply an attack on immigration policy. It is an attempt to transform the United States from an imperfect democracy into a racial state. In doing so, it revives a political tradition that never disappeared, one rooted in the racial nationalism of the Johnson–Reed Immigration Act of 1924, the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, and the recurring fantasy of preserving the United States as a white republic.

The assault on birthright citizenship is an attempt to steal one of Reconstruction’s greatest democratic achievements. As constitutional scholar Sherrilyn Ifill reminds us, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment undertook a “race-conscious project” designed to dismantle racial caste and establish birthright citizenship as the legal foundation of a multiracial democracy.  As Martha S. Jones demonstrates in Birthright Citizens, birthright citizenship was not bestowed from above. It was forged through generations of Black struggle against slavery, racial caste, and white supremacy. The Trump administration seeks to reverse that democratic achievement by redefining citizenship as a privilege of ancestry, bloodline, and racial hierarchy rather than a constitutional guarantee of democratic equality. As Eddie S. Glaude Jr. observes, “These people are the inheritors of that legacy. They believe the country should be white.”

Nor did this assault emerge suddenly. Trump’s “birther” campaign against Barack Obama was the opening act in a broader effort to reopen the very question Reconstruction sought to settle: Who can legitimately claim to be an American? The issue was never where Obama was born. It was whether a Black man could legitimately embody the nation itself. Birtherism transformed citizenship into a weapon of racial warfare, preparing the ideological ground for today’s assault on birthright citizenship. The current campaign extends that poisonous logic from one symbolic target to millions of others, rendering citizenship increasingly contingent, revocable, and politically expendable.

This is why the struggle over birthright citizenship is fundamentally a struggle over the legal foundations of democracy itself. Citizenship is the constitutional basis of every democratic right. Once that foundation is transformed from a universal guarantee into a privilege granted by political authority, democracy itself begins to disappear. Rights cease to belong equally to all; they become favors distributed by a state that defines belonging through race, nationalism, and ideological conformity.

John Ganz captures the magnitude of this transformation with unusual clarity:

“It’s long been my contention that the attack on citizenship is the most serious and frightful aspect of the Trump phenomenon and the one that makes it most deserving of the epithet fascist or totalitarian…. If they successfully destroy American citizenship as enshrined in the Constitution they will have destroyed the country. We will be, all of a sudden, somewhere else.”

The ideological stakes of this struggle become especially visible as the United States marks the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its founding. Official celebrations largely substitute patriotic spectacle for historical reckoning, presenting the nation’s past as an unbroken story of liberty, unity, and democratic progress. Such mythology erases the central role of Indigenous dispossession, slavery, racial capitalism, and generations of democratic struggle in shaping American history, obscuring the crucial truth that democracy has advanced not because the nation faithfully realized its founding ideals but because ordinary people repeatedly forced the nation to confront the violence, exclusions, and contradictions built into those ideals. The assault on birthright citizenship is simultaneously constitutional in its aims and pedagogical in its methods, seeking to reshape how Americans understand democracy, belonging, and political identity.

Ganz’s warning points beyond legal rights to the wider struggle over democratic identity, public values, civic consciousness, and the distribution of political and economic power. The attack on citizenship cannot be separated from the rise of gangster capitalism and the oligarchy that increasingly dominates American society. As wealth and power become concentrated in the hands of a tiny corporate and financial elite, democratic institutions are emptied of any substance, public goods are dismantled, and the media are increasingly captured by concentrated private interests. In addition, staggering class divisions, entrenched racial injustice, and a politics of disposability become normalized. The attack on citizenship is one mechanism through which this emerging social order redraws the boundaries of political membership, legitimates exclusion, and diverts public anger away from the structures of exploitation that produce widespread misery.

This is neoliberal fascism intensified by oligarchic power and racial capitalism. As Harvey J. Kaye reminds us, what often disappears in discussions of authoritarianism is the class war from above that has laid the groundwork for its emergence. For decades, corporate elites, their political allies, and neoliberal policymakers have waged a relentless assault on workers, public goods, democratic institutions, and the social state, producing staggering inequalities of wealth and power while intensifying racial and social injustice. This class war has not only deepened economic insecurity; it has generated the resentments, abandonment, and civic despair upon which authoritarian movements flourish. The attack on citizenship is inseparable from this broader class project.

What is unfolding today is not merely the return of fascist rhetoric but the deliberate construction of a political order in which democracy is hollowed out from within by the convergence of oligarchic power, white supremacy, and authoritarian rule. Constitutional protections are eroded, dissent is criminalized, cruelty is celebrated as civic virtue, and entire populations are rendered disposable.

Every fascist politics begins by deciding who is recognized as part of the political community. It ends by deciding whose rights, lives, and futures no longer matter. Its endpoint is the normalization of lawless abductions, state terror, militarized policing, detention camps, and a social order in which violence becomes the governing principle of politics. This is not simply the story of a democracy in decline. It is the story of a society devouring its own democratic foundations as imperial ambitions, white nationalism, militarized governance, and institutional decay converge in the service of authoritarian power.

Citizenship and the Pedagogy of Fascism.

Political struggles are never won by coercion alone. They are won in the institutions and cultural spaces where people learn to understand themselves, others, and the society they inhabit. Schools, journalism, digital platforms, religious institutions, entertainment, and state policy function as powerful pedagogical forces. They teach people whom to fear, whose lives matter, which histories deserve remembrance, and who belongs to the democratic polity. As Stuart Hall observed, “cultural change is constitutive of political change.” Every political order educates its citizens. The decisive question is what kind of citizens it produces.

Trumpism answers that question by cultivating a new authoritarian subject. Through media spectacles, digital platforms, and state power, it normalizes white supremacy, Christian nationalism, militarism, and the language of exclusion. Figures such as Stephen Miller, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Tom Homan, Russell Vought, and others function as the principal anti-public pedagogues of this emerging fascist culture. Their rhetoric legitimates policies whose consequences are inscribed in broken lives, shattered families, public spectacles of humiliation and terror, the destruction of due process, the erosion of democratic freedoms, the killing of children, and, increasingly, blood. They teach that compassion is weakness, violence is virtue, unquestioning loyalty is patriotism, hypermasculinity is the measure of manhood, and domination, cloaked in the language of God, nation, and destiny, is the defining virtue of public life. For Trump and his acolytes, courage no longer signifies moral conviction or civic responsibility. It has been stripped of its ethical content and absorbed into the language of militarized nationalism, where cruelty masquerades as strength, intimidation becomes a badge of honor, and public life is reduced to a theater of aggression. Such a culture thrives on spectacles of violence, celebrates humiliation as entertainment, glorifies brutality as a public virtue, and normalizes the historical amnesia, racial hatred, militarism, and organized abandonment upon which fascist politics flourishes.

The assault on birthright citizenship is a pedagogical project aimed at remaking public consciousness. Its purpose is to persuade Americans that racial exclusion is common sense, hierarchy is natural, and white nationalism is compatible with democracy. The objective is not simply to change immigration law but to redefine citizenship itself, replacing equal membership with a racialized conception of national identity rooted in blood, ancestry, and cultural purity. As Antonio Gramsci argued, political transformation is inseparable from cultural transformation because power secures its deepest victories by shaping how people think, remember, identify, and imagine the world.

Authoritarianism depends upon organized ignorance as much as organized repression. It flourishes when historical memory is replaced by myth produced by powerful disimagination machines, when fear overwhelms reason, and when civic responsibility gives way to tribal loyalty. In such circumstances, citizenship ceases to be a shared democratic practice and becomes a badge of racial and ideological identity, a transformation embodied in the politics of Stephen Miller and the architects of Trump’s white nationalist project. Democracy no longer rests upon constitutional principles but upon exclusionary myths about who constitutes the “real” nation.

The attack on citizenship cannot be removed from the wider war against the institutions that make democracy possible. Under Trumpism, journalists are vilified as enemies of the people and increasingly subjected to intimidation and violence; universities are threatened with political retaliation; schools are subjected to ideological censorship; books are removed from libraries; scientific expertise is dismissed as propaganda; and historical memory is rewritten to erase the histories of slavery, colonialism, racism, and democratic resistance. These are not isolated attacks. Together they constitute a coordinated war on the institutions that cultivate critical judgment, historical consciousness, and the civic capacities upon which democratic self-government depends.

These attacks are directed at education in its broadest sense. Public schools are stripped of their democratic mission and reduced to workforce training or ideological indoctrination. Universities are portrayed as centers of national betrayal. Independent journalism is recast as a political enemy rather than a public good. Culture itself becomes a battlefield in which cruelty is rewarded, ignorance celebrated, and critical thought equated with disloyalty. The objective is not simply to silence dissent but to destroy the moral, intellectual, and civic capacities that make democratic dissent, and democracy itself, possible.

This is why fascism should be understood both as a political regime and as a pedagogical one. It seeks to govern not only through laws, police powers, and executive authority but also through the production of consciousness itself. It wages war over memory, language, identity, and civic imagination because it understands that lasting domination depends upon shaping how people think before it controls how they act. Birthright citizenship is therefore one expression of a larger struggle over education, culture, memory, and civic imagination. Ultimately, the conflict is over what kind of people democracy requires and what kind of subjects fascism seeks to produce.

Manufacturing the Authoritarian Citizen.

Once democratic institutions have been weakened, authoritarian politics can turn to its central task: manufacturing the authoritarian citizen. The assault on birthright citizenship is only one front in this broader project. By dismantling the institutions that sustain democratic memory, critical judgment, and civic responsibility, Trumpism seeks to produce subjects who no longer question power, distinguish truth from propaganda, or imagine democracy as a shared public good. The goal is not simply to govern differently but to reshape the habits, identities, and desires upon which political life itself depends.

Trumpism has embraced this strategy with remarkable consistency. Under Trump’s second administration, the federal government has been weaponized against journalists who expose corruption and abuses of power. As The Guardian reported, federal agents raided the home of Washington Postreporter Hannah Natanson, confiscating her electronic devices in an extraordinary act of intimidation directed at investigative journalism. At the same time, the administration has dismantled longstanding protections for the press while deploying lawsuits and other legal mechanisms against major news organizations and investigative reporters whose work challenges executive power. The message is unmistakable: journalism that holds power accountable is no longer treated as a public service but as a political crime.

Trumpism has extended its assault on democratic culture into a systematic campaign against education. Public schools are increasingly prohibited from teaching the histories of slavery, colonialism, racial violence, and democratic struggle. Universities face political coercion, financial retaliation, and ideological surveillance if they refuse to conform to authoritarian demands. Faculty members are monitored, curricula rewritten, books removed from classrooms and libraries, and critical inquiry dismissed as indoctrination. Even leading universities such as Columbia, Northwestern, Harvard, and the University of California have too often capitulated to political intimidation. By yielding to threats from the Trump administration, they compromise their autonomy, erode academic freedom, and abandon their role as democratic public institutions. Such capitulations normalize authoritarian coercion while further weakening institutions that, despite their limits and exclusions, have historically cultivated critical thought, civic responsibility, and democratic agency.

These attacks are routinely justified as efforts to eliminate bias, restore patriotism, or protect children from ideas that challenge authoritarian myths, including honest accounts of Black freedom struggles, systemic racism, settler colonialism, and Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. But such claims conceal a deeper political objective. Authoritarian regimes fear historical knowledge because history reveals that every system of domination has been challenged, resisted, and transformed. As Robin D. G. Kelley reminds us, history is not the unfolding of national myths but the record of unfinished struggles over freedom, equality, and belonging. Historical memory reminds us that democracy has always been won through collective struggle rather than bestowed from above. Rights are neither gifts nor privileges but political achievements that must continually be defended and expanded.

Culture itself has become one of the principal battlegrounds in this struggle. The digital platforms through which millions now encounter politics have become immense pedagogical machines. They do more than transmit information. They organize attention, shape emotional life, reward outrage, circulate conspiracy theories, amplify racial resentment, and normalize political  violence. As the Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Reportdemonstrates, social media and video platforms have now surpassed television and traditional news organizations as the principal sources through which many people receive news. In these spaces, the struggle over democracy increasingly unfolds through algorithms that privilege spectacle over evidence, emotional manipulation over reasoned debate, and disinformation over informed judgment.

Taken together, these developments reveal a coherent political project aimed at remaking political common sense itself. It teaches people to admire cruelty as strength, celebrate ignorance as authenticity, dismiss historical memory as subversion, and accept constitutional rights as contingent upon race, loyalty, and political conformity. Before authoritarianism governs through repression, it educates people to desire the very forms of domination that will ultimately govern them.

The Constitutional Blueprint of the Fascist State.

History offers a sobering lesson. Fascist movements rarely begin by abolishing constitutions, suspending elections, or relying immediately on militarized repression. They often begin by redefining who belongs to the civic community and who does not. Before they eliminate rights, they first determine whose rights count. Citizenship becomes the decisive political threshold separating those entitled to legal protection from those who can be excluded, surveilled, detained, deported, or abandoned without moral consequence.

This is why the attack on birthright citizenship occupies such a central place in Trump’s political strategy. It establishes the governing principle upon which a new authoritarian order can be built. If citizenship is no longer guaranteed by the Constitution but becomes contingent upon ancestry, race, bloodline, or executive interpretation, then every democratic protection becomes vulnerable to political power. Rights no longer belong to citizens because they are constitutionally guaranteed; they belong only so long as the state decides that they do. In such a regime, rights cease to be universal constitutional protections and become political privileges dispensed by white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and ideological zealots who wield state power in the service of exclusion and domination.

Hannah Arendt argued that citizenship rests upon belonging to a political community—the indispensable condition for possessing rights at all. She famously described this as “the right to have rights” and “the right to belong to some kind of organized community.”  Reflecting on the catastrophe of European fascism, she warned that once individuals are stripped of political membership, they lose not merely legal protections but the public standing and institutional guarantees that make those protections meaningful. For Arendt, statelessness was more than the loss of nationality. It marked expulsion from the political community itself, reducing human beings to lives that could be managed, displaced, detained, or discarded with impunity.

Trumpism repackages this racist project in the language of legal restoration and border security. Its objective extends beyond border enforcement to the reconstruction of citizenship itself, transforming the Constitution from a guarantor of democratic equality into the machinery of racial domination. What is at stake is the replacement of democratic citizenship with an exclusionary conception of who counts as an American rooted in white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and an idealized myth of the nation’s past. Citizenship no longer embodies democratic equality; it becomes a weapon for sorting populations into those entitled to rights and those who can be surveilled, detained, deported, and abandoned. In Giorgio Agamben’s terms, this is the political logic that reduces human beings “to bare life,”  persons stripped of meaningful political standing and exposed to arbitrary state power. The historical record is unambiguous: such logic culminates in the camp, where law no longer restrains power but becomes the administrative machinery of exclusion, abandonment, and state terror.

This project cannot be separated from a broader politics of disposability. Once governments succeed in persuading citizens that some people do not truly belong, it becomes easier to normalize policies that would otherwise appear morally unthinkable. Families are separated. Refugees are labeled as enemies. Immigrants become invaders. Protesters become traitors. Journalists become enemies of the people. Political opponents become internal threats. Every expansion of exclusion widens the circle of those who can be denied protection while narrowing the meaning of democratic community itself.

History repeatedly demonstrates that authoritarian regimes consolidate power by transforming legal protections into political privileges. Equality before the law gives way to selective enforcement. Universal rights yield to arbitrary exceptions. Independent courts become instruments of executive power. Citizenship itself becomes contingent upon ideological loyalty and national conformity. The law no longer restrains power; it legitimates power by clothing repression in the language of legality. This is one of fascism’s enduring achievements: it seeks not simply to destroy law but to convert law into an apparatus of domination while preserving the appearance of constitutional order.

The constitutional stakes could not be higher. Every attack on birthright citizenship erodes the principle that all persons born under the Constitution possess equal standing before the law. Once that principle is abandoned, the Constitution no longer limits state power; it becomes a weapon through which authoritarian rule selectively distributes rights, recognition, and community. That is the constitutional logic of the fascist state.

Socialist Democracy or the Fascist State.

The assault on birthright citizenship reveals a truth that many defenders of democracy have been reluctant to confront. Trumpism is more than another conservative movement or an illiberal or authoritarian political formation. It is a fascist project that seeks to reconstruct the legal, cultural, and moral foundations of American society by redefining who counts as fully human, who counts as an American, and who possesses the full protections of democratic citizenship. The far-right offensive on citizenship is not peripheral to that project. It is its constitutional center.

Every fascist movement seeks to replace universal rights with selective privilege. It strips democracy of its egalitarian foundations while preserving the outward appearance of legality. Constitutions remain in place, elections continue to be held, courts still issue opinions, and legislatures still convene. Yet the substance of democracy disappears as executive power expands, dissent is criminalized, historical memory is erased, and citizenship itself becomes dependent upon race, nationalism, and political conformity. Democracy survives as political theater while authoritarian power increasingly governs everyday life through a mix of repression and a spectacularized culture of state violence.

This transformation does not occur through repression alone. It also depends upon a profound educational project. Authoritarianism must teach people to accept exclusion as virtue, cruelty as strength, inequality as natural, and obedience as patriotism. It wages war against history because history reminds us that no system of domination has ever been permanent. It wages war against education because critical thought threatens every regime that depends upon ignorance. And it wages war against citizenship because democratic citizenship embodies the radical principle that rights belong to persons by virtue of their humanity and constitutional equality rather than the whims of political rulers.

The struggle over birthright citizenship therefore reaches far beyond immigration policy or constitutional interpretation. It raises the defining political question of our time: Will democracy continue to rest upon the constitutional principle of universal citizenship, or will citizenship become a racial privilege administered by an authoritarian state? The answer to that question will determine not only who belongs to the nation but also whether the United States is becoming, or has already become, a neo-fascist society.

What is emerging under Trumpism is an authoritarian government that consolidates a fascist social order rooted in what I have elsewhere called gangster capitalism. It is a system in which unprecedented concentrations of wealth and power coexist with racialized disposability, patriarchal domination, ecological devastation, and the criminalization of democratic dissent. It is a machinery of organized misery built upon widening class divisions, racial and gender exclusions, permanent insecurity, and the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a financial and corporate elite. State terrorism, unchecked executive power, the militarization of everyday life, endless wars abroad, and expanding forms of domestic repression are not accidental excesses of this system. They are among its governing principles.

The attack on birthright citizenship is one of the clearest expressions of this logic. It redraws the boundaries of belonging to determine who can be excluded, dispossessed, imprisoned, deported, silenced, or abandoned. Fascism has always understood that before it can govern through terror it must first educate people to accept terror as common sense, cruelty as civic virtue, and domination as the natural order of things. It wages war not only against democratic institutions but also against the ethical imagination, historical memory, and social solidarities that make resistance possible.

The greatest ideological triumph of neoliberalism has been persuading people that capitalism and democracy are synonymous. That fiction has become one of the principal obstacles to confronting contemporary fascism. A social order that celebrates billionaires while consigning millions to poverty, debt, racial violence, ecological catastrophe, permanent war, and the slow death of the social state cannot sustain democracy because it destroys the very conditions upon which democratic life depends.

Gangster capitalism does more than generate staggering concentrations of wealth and power. It produces the authoritarian desires, organized fears, racial resentments, and cultures of disposability upon which fascist politics thrives. We inhabit an increasingly delusional social order shaped by the pedagogical force of greed, dehumanization, precarity, corruption, and what the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “the black hole of cruelty.” Cruelty is no longer an aberration or moral failure. It has become a governing principle of gangster capitalism—a political and economic system that turns human beings into disposable objects, rewards domination over solidarity, and transforms violence into spectacle and public policy. The assault on citizenship is one expression of this logic, carrying forward imperial fantasies and a long history of racial terror that remain embedded in the structures of American capitalism.

As Nguyen observes:

“…this is a legacy that extends ‘from the slaughter of Indians to the exploitation, murder, torture, and rape of Black African enslaved peoples… to the demonization of immigrants, the sickening rituals of hunting them down in the streets with masked government enforcers, the lurid punishments of inhuman detention that spur cheers and glee from a significant part of the American people, encouraged by the would-be American Nero and his fawning minions who take pleasure in their taunts and insults.”

The struggle over citizenship cannot be separated from this legacy or from the economic and cultural order that profits from it. To confront fascism, therefore, requires more than defending existing democratic institutions. It demands dismantling the gangster capitalism that breeds state coercion, legitimates disposability, and reduces democracy to a hollow spectacle. The struggle before us is to refuse a system that equates freedom with markets, citizenship with exclusion, and profit with the highest expression of human value. It means building a democratic socialist future rooted in equality, shared responsibility, public goods, ecological justice, and the radical conviction that every life matters.

Against the machinery of gangster capitalism, fascist terror, permanent war, and state violence, democracy must be reclaimed as a way of life grounded in justice, solidarity, and shared power. The choice before us could not be clearer: either we organize collectively to build a society founded on equality, freedom, and democratic responsibility, or we surrender to a social order defined by permanent war, organized abandonment, state terror, and oligarchic rule. Under such conditions, democracy survives only as spectacle while fascism becomes the organizing logic of everyday life. History remains unfinished. Whether it moves toward justice or descends further into barbarism depends upon our willingness to imagine otherwise, organize collectively, overthrow gangster capitalism, and build a democratic socialist society in which freedom, equality, justice, and human dignity become the measure of politics itself.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

First published on CounterPunch.org.

Shared via Creative Commons.

We face a choice. Tyranny or revolution.

CHRIS HEDGES
JUN 01, 2026

MEXICO CITY — There are two ways to confront global capitalism. There are mass movements, especially strikes, which disrupt commerce and government to force the ruling class to create systems of justice and equality — albeit ones where capitalists retain significant power.

The National Coordinator of Education Workers in Mexico (CNTE) — a grassroots union created in 1979 by dissident teachers — is currently attempting this in Mexico. It announced that if its demands for salary increases and job security are not met it will occupy public spaces and shut down the World Cup soccer matches scheduled to take place later this month in Mexico City.

When the teachers went on strike in the Mexican city of Oaxaca in 2006, following the incarceration and disappearances of union leaders, police fired on the protesters. The community rose up and drove the police out of the city. Oaxaca established an autonomous anarchist commune for several months. Although the commune was ultimately crushed by the Mexican government, the uprising spawned popular assemblies, independent media and empowered indigenous communities.

The second way to destroy capitalism is through the nationalization of industries and banks and the seizure of capitalist assets, although this can give rise to an equally pernicious form of state capitalism. This radical route entails, as in the Russian or Cuban revolutions, violence. Capitalists do not part with their monopolies on wealth and power peacefully. They orchestrate severe state and vigilante violence. They install dictators and fascists who abolish civil liberties, carry out mass arrests and criminalize even the most tepid forms of dissent.

Accommodating capitalists and their institutions, even with high taxation, regulation, strong labor laws and a prohibition of monopolies, means living amid a hostile force. It is a matter of time before this hostile force organizes to dismantle the social democratic state as happened in Sweden, Britain and Salvador Allende’s Chile.

Liberalism, which Rosa Luxemburg called by its more appropriate name — “opportunism” — is an integral component of capitalism. Liberalism ameliorates capitalism’s excesses. But capitalism, Luxemburg argued, is an enemy that can never be appeased. Liberal reforms blunt resistance, but later, when things grow quiet, are revoked. The last century of labor struggles in the United States provides a case study of Luxemburg’s observation.

Luxemburg also knew that socialism and imperialism were incompatible. Imperialism, which empowers a war machine designed to enrich arms merchants and global capitalists, is accompanied by a poisonous ideology — what social critic Dwight Macdonald in his 1946 essay “The Root Is Man” calls the “psychosis of permanent war” — which makes socialism impossible.

The psychosis of permanent war results, as it has in the U.S., in the curtailing of civil liberties and punishing economic austerity. Dissent is equated with treason. State power serves the dictates of empire rather than democracy, which devolves into farce, or in our case, a tawdry reality show.

The rollback of the New Deal, the closest we came to a social democracy, began in the mid-1940s. Cold War anti-communism and corporate opposition converged to make war on organized labor and the New Deal left. This assault culminated in the Second Red Scare.

In 1947, President Harry Truman’s Executive Order 9835 launched loyalty investigations that purged the left, including public-sector workers and union allies. That same year, the Taft–Hartley Act directly targeted organized labor by restricting strikes, secondary boycotts and union security agreements and by requiring union officers to sign anti-communist affidavits.

The left fell victim to what the historian Ellen Schrecker, in “Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America,” calls “the most widespread and longest lasting wave of political repression in American history.”

Schrecker writes:

“In order to eliminate the alleged threat of domestic Communism, a broad coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, and other anticommunist activists hounded an entire generation of radicals and their associates, destroying lives, careers, and all the institutions that offered a left-wing alternative to mainstream politics and culture.”

This crusade, she goes on, “used all the power of the state to turn dissent into disloyalty and, in the process, drastically narrowed the spectrum of acceptable political debate.”

The witch hunts silenced communists, socialists, anarchists, pacifists and all those who denounced the abuses of empire and capitalism. The “anti-red” actions dealt devastating blows to the political health of the country. The radicals spoke the language of class war. They understood that Wall Street and the billionaire class are the enemy. They offered a broad social vision that allowed even the non-communist left to make sense of the predatory nature of capitalism. But once the radicals were purged, once the liberal class took government-imposed loyalty oaths and collaborated in the witch hunts for phantom communist agents, we were robbed of the ability to make sense of our struggle. We lost our voice. We were integrated into the corporate structures we should have been dismantling.

The ruling class justifies its pillage with the ideology of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, as David Harvey points out, “had limited effectiveness as an engine for economic growth” but is successful as “a project to restore class dominance.” It transfers wealth upwards. It consolidates power in the hands of the billionaire class. It is an updated version of the divine right of kings.

Wages under neoliberalism stagnate. If the minimum wage kept pace with productivity, it would be at least $25 an hour.

Deindustrialization, turbocharged under Bill Clinton, sent industries overseas, where workers are paid slave wages and lack benefits. Some thirty million mass layoffs in the U.S. between 1996 and 2023, according to analysis by the Labor Institute, thrust the working class into economic misery. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair carried out the same assaults in Britain.

Ominously, accompanying this deterioration is the blocking of peaceful avenues for social change, including the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which effectively turned elections over to the billionaire class.

As social inequality has grown, so has state repression. We stand on the cusp of full-blown authoritarianism and fascism. If the Trump administration succeeds in rigging or invalidating the midterm elections, the last possible exit door within the political system will be slammed shut.

The evisceration of the rule of law at home is accompanied by the evisceration of the rule of law abroad. The U.S. Empire is a rogue state. It issues bellicose threats to all who defy it, braying like a wild animal. It carries out “preemptive” wars and imposes sanctions on nations that are defiant. It assassinates and kidnaps foreign leaders. It abducts foreign nationals and transports them to black sites where they are tortured and sometimes murdered. It uses its navy to seize merchant vessels and resell their cargo. It bombs nations in open violation of international law. It funds and arms Israel to carry out genocide. It ignores and humiliates its allies and alienates and enrages most of the global community.

This mounting oppression, advanced but not begun by Trump, means we face two stark choices. Tyranny or revolution.

I loathe violence, even when it is exercised in the service of what is seen as a just cause. No one escapes its poison. But it is the oppressor, not the oppressed, who determines the mechanisms of resistance.

The numerous revolutions and insurgencies I covered, including in El Salvador, Guatemala, Algeria, Bosnia, Kosovo and Palestine, saw nonviolent protests met with brutal state violence. Resistance movements had no option but to pick up arms.

The nonviolent revolutions I covered in Eastern and Central Europe succeeded not because they were nonviolent, but because the capitalist class benefited from them. The capitalists and oligarchs bought up state industries and assets, as they did after the collapse of the Soviet Union, at prices far below their actual value.

The global capitalists permitted the transition to power by the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa if the ANC abandoned its Freedom Charter, which called for the nationalization of state industries and land redistribution. South Africatoday has the highest income inequality in the world.

Revolutions that enhance the wealth and power of the capitalist class thrive. Revolutions that do not see blood run in the streets.

We also face a dilemma earlier generations did not — the climate crisis.

The global ruling elites are determined to keep us chained to fossil fuels. They are determined to commodify and exploit the natural world, as well as human beings, to expand profit. They are determined to reconfigure our societies so workers are immiserated and shorn of all power while our masters live in unparalleled luxury and opulence.

The inevitable breakdown of the climate will make larger and larger zones, especially in the Global South, uninhabitable. The waves of climate refugees will become a flood. There will, in response, be no limit to the industrial violence used by the ruling global elites to protect their interests.

The genocide in Gaza is an unequivocal message sent from the industrialized nations of the north, which spent billions to sustain Israel’s mass slaughter, to a global population that subsists on a few dollars a day:

“We don’t care about humanitarian law. We don’t care about human rights. Your lives mean nothing to us. We will use any tool, including genocide, to protect our monopoly on wealth and power.”

What do we do? How do we resist? Can we halt this descent into madness and mass death?

I am not optimistic.

Those who live in the climate fortresses in the Global North have a material interest in this project, although we are all headed for extinction. Those in the Global North will, I fear, accept a species of totalitarian capitalism in exchange for a degree of security and stability, however temporary.

But this will not be true in the Global South where the ecological crisis and the rule of the global capitalist class pose an existential threat. The Global South will mount insurgencies and revolutions. It will replicate its rebellions of the past, some of which were successful, and some of which, including the insurgencies I covered in Guatemala, El Salvador and Algeria, were crushed.

Revolution, and the possibility of a world freed from the iron grip of global capitalism, will come from these acts of resistance. Let us hope they prevail.

First published on The Chris Hedges Report.

Shared via Creative Commons.

HENRY GIROUX
MAY 29, 2026

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes. It is the preservation of fire.”

…Gustav Mahler

Corruption as Authoritarian Spectacle.

Corruption has never been far from the center of American politics. Some of the most notorious scandals stretch from the cronyism of Warren G. Harding to the abuses of power exposed during the Watergate scandal under Richard Nixon. Yet many historians argue that what distinguishes Donald Trump from earlier corrupt presidencies is that corruption no longer operates behind closed doors, shielded by the liberal rituals of institutional legitimacy and the euphemisms of political decorum. Under Trump, corruption is performed openly as spectacle, celebrated as a sign of strength, wealth, vengeance, and personal loyalty.

Trump’s ever-expanding regime of corruption is no longer simply hidden financial misconduct but a public display of sociopathic avarice designed to normalize greed, lawlessness, unconstrained power, and the collapse of civic accountability. It reflects a politics of moral nihilism in which fascism no longer appears as a distant threat, but as the future already taking shape.

As a badge of honor, Trump embraces corruption not simply as a mode of governance, but as a spectacle designed to legitimate greed, cruelty, and unchecked power. It functions as what Dominic Wetzel has called the “pornification of the American dream,” a culture in which excess, lawlessness, and predation are celebrated as signs of success and strength. In Trump’s America, corruption metastasizes into a theater of cruelty and violence, saturating political life with the values of fear, spectacle, and disposability. It feeds a broader architecture of domination rooted in toxic hierarchies of race, class, misogyny, and white Christian nationalism, while turning lawlessness and untethered aggression into forms of political entertainment.

Corruption, in this sense, is more than a symptom of institutional decay, moral depravity, or political vulgarity. It becomes one of the central pedagogical and political mechanisms through which fascist politics takes hold, eroding democratic values while legitimating a culture organized around brutality, humiliation, and civic abandonment. In this formulation, corruption functions as a kind of fascist staging ground, creating the conditions that nourish what Jonathan Crary calls in Scorched Earth an “implacable engine of addiction, loneliness, false hopes, cruelty, psychosis, indebtedness, squandered life, the corrosion of memory, and social disintegration.”

The Criminalization of Governance.

What defines the Trump regime, then, is not merely corruption in the conventional sense of bribery or financial misconduct. Rather, it is the systemic fusion of authoritarian power, organized greed, spectacle, state-sponsored cruelty, and impunity, a fusion that transforms corruption into a governing principle and a cultural ideal. The display  of greed and the ensuing scandals are staggering in scope: the use of Trump hotels and resorts as political cash machines for lobbyists, foreign governments, and Republican operatives seeking influence; the funneling of taxpayer money into Trump-owned properties through Secret Service and government expenditures; the diversion of inauguration funds into private enrichment schemes; the use of cryptocurrency ventures and opaque political action committees as modern slush funds; the acceptance of lavish gifts, luxury travel, and aircraft linked to billionaire benefactors and foreign interests;and the open monetization of political access itself.

Added to this are Jared Kushner’s multibillion-dollar Saudi investment connections following his White House role, Ivanka Trump’s trademark deals and business expansions during the administration, and the nepotistic appointment of family members to positions of immense political influence. What emerges is a scale of self-dealing and lawlessness unprecedented in modern American politics. But these scandals are not isolated abuses of office. They point to a deeper transformation in which corruption becomes institutionalized as a governing logic, a mode of public pedagogy, and a defining feature of authoritarian power.

Trump’s corruption reaches beyond the traditional language of political scandal and increasingly resembles the operational logic of a criminal enterprise. The proposed $1.786 billion slush fund, tied to settlements for insurrectionists, corrupt opportunists, and other Trump allies, signals more than financial gangsterism; it reveals a governing structure in which enormous pools of money function as instruments of loyalty, reward, intimidation, and political protection. Walter Olson quoting Nick Catoggio is right in stating that “It’s simple theft packaged in the argle-bargle of “weaponization” and “compensation.” … The president behaves with impunity because he believes most of his party will unthinkingly defend anything he does, and he’s correct.”

Taken together, these actions reveal a regime that increasingly resembles a criminal enterprise. Such practices build upon Trump’s decision to pardon more than 1,600 individuals convicted in connection with the January 6 attack on the Capitol, including participants involved in violent assaults on police officers defending the democratic process. The pardons transformed political violence into a badge of allegiance, signaling that acts committed in defense of the leader would not only be excused but sanctified as patriotic service.

At the same time, Trump has repeatedly used the pardon power to shield political allies, wealthy donors, and figures associated with spectacular forms of criminality. Among the most notorious was the pardon of Ross Ulbricht, associated with one of the largest online drug trafficking operations in American history. Added to this were pardons and commutations granted to numerous allies and supporters convicted of fraud, corruption, and financial crimes. For example the pardon of  Philip Esformes, who was convicted in one of the largest Medicare fraud schemes in U.S. history involving roughly $1.3 billion in fraudulent claims. Esformes became emblematic of a politics in which white-collar criminality is treated not as a threat to the public good but as negotiable currency within a system of transactional loyalty.

As journalist David D. Kirkpatrick reported in The New Yorker the Trump family has pocketed roughly $4 billion through a vast network of business dealings, political branding operations, cryptocurrency ventures, and influence-based transactions linked directly or indirectly to Trump’s political power. What emerges from these revelations is not merely a pattern of isolated ethical violations but the consolidation of a political culture in which corruption becomes normalized as both spectacle and governance. Wealth extraction, patronage, legal immunity, and political violence converge into a single authoritarian machinery fueled by fear, manufactured grievance, and ritualized loyalty to the leader.

Corruption, Fascist Culture, and the Death of Civic Conscience.

If one face of fascist politics appears in the transformation of the state into an instrument of domestic terrorism, the other emerges in the fusion of political power and systemic corruption. Here, gangster capitalism reveals itself in its most predatory form as public institutions are hollowed out to enrich ruling elites, reward loyalists, punish dissenters, and normalize lawlessness as a mode of governance. Yet corruption under fascist politics does not operate only through institutions and economic arrangements; it also works through culture, emotion, spectacle, and the shaping of everyday consciousness.

In this sense, corruption cannot be reduced to isolated scandals or individual acts of criminality. It becomes a cultural force and pedagogical weapon that assaults civic consciousness, erodes the social bonds essential to democratic life, and legitimates the mobilizing passions of fascism through spectacles of degradation, disposability, cruelty, and manufactured hatred.  It functions as part of a broader neoliberal pedagogy in which civic life is reorganized around the values of self-interest, commodification, hyper-individualism, and ruthless competition. Decades of market-driven propaganda, celebrity culture, anti-intellectualism, and disimagination machines have normalized a moral language in which greed becomes aspiration, cruelty becomes entertainment, and public goods become objects of contempt. Under such conditions, corruption becomes woven into everyday consciousness as common sense rather than recognized as an assault on the ideal and promise of a strong democracy.

Under fascist politics, corruption performs an even deeper and more insidious function. It not only rots institutions but destroys the ethical and civic sensibilities necessary for democratic life itself. By collapsing the distinction between public service and private plunder, between social responsibility and criminality, it deadens conscience, normalizes dishonesty and cruelty, and strips politics of any moral obligation to the common good.

What emerges is a culture in which greed becomes a civic virtue, lawlessness a measure of power, and the suffering of others merely collateral damage in the pursuit of domination. It is precisely this collapse of conscience into moral numbness and thoughtlessness that, as Hannah Arendt argued in Eichmann in Jerusalem and later in Responsibility and Judgment, creates the conditions in which authoritarianism flourishes.

In Trump’s political universe, corruption becomes an authoritarian performance of raw domination, flaunted openly because the point is not to hide criminality but to normalize it. The endless grifts, payoffs, family profiteering, intimidation campaigns, pardons, and transactional loyalties send a clear message to the public: democracy is no longer a shared ethical project but a marketplace of cruelty, patronage, and gangster capitalism.

As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has argued, these payoffs and pardons should not be viewed merely as rewards for past loyalty. They function as retainers for future acts of political violence and authoritarian allegiance. Like organized crime syndicates and autocratic regimes across the globe (particularly Hungary before recent Orban’s defeat in recent elections), such systems bind followers to the leader by making their legal troubles disappear while preparing them for future service to the movement. Pardons, financial settlements, political favors, and selective protections become mechanisms for constructing what amounts to a state-funded loyalty network, one designed to secure obedience not through democratic consent but through fear, dependency, corruption, and shared complicity.

Corruption as Public Pedagogy.

Under such conditions, corruption takes on a pedagogical force. It teaches that democracy is for sale, that injustice is more important than justice, and that power belongs to those wealthy and ruthless enough to place themselves above accountability. The danger lies not only in the criminal practices involved, but in the broader cultural lessons they impart: that gangsterism can function as statecraft, that loyalty to the leader overrides loyalty to the law, and that democracy can be hollowed out through a fusion of choreographed outrage, corruption, and organized forgetting—fostered by an endless array of disimagination machines. To understand how such corruption secures mass consent, it is necessary to examine the cultural and media apparatuses that circulate its values and transform authoritarianism into a form of everyday pedagogy  and language that colonizes consciousness.

Digital Authoritarianism and the Culture of Spectacle.

Corruption in the Trump regime does not operate in isolation from culture, media, and everyday life. It is enabled and amplified through a vast network of cultural apparatuses, digital platforms, and billionaire-owned media systems that normalize greed, celebrate ruthless self-interest, and elevate the values of neoliberal capitalism into a governing common sense. The tech oligarchs who dominate social media and digital communications do more than control information; they shape the emotional and pedagogical landscapes through which people learn how to see themselves, others, and the very meaning of politics. In this environment, corruption is no longer viewed primarily as a violation of public trust. In this environment, algorithmic domination and digital feudalism are presented as entrepreneurial cunning, personal branding, and competitive success, and the unapologetic pursuit of power in a winner-take-all culture. In reality, it represents a hyper charged form of instrumentalized evil.

The contemporary pedagogical terrain of gangster capitalism overwhelmingly favors the rich, the reactionary, and the politically powerful. Increasingly, large segments of the public, especially swing voters and younger audiences, no longer receive political information through traditional journalism or democratic public spheres, but through social media platforms, YouTube channels, influencer networks, and podcasts dominated by right-wing personalities such as Tucker Carlson, while algorithm-driven systems controlled by tech oligarchs such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg amplify outrage, misinformation, and authoritarian resentment. Some of the most listened-to political podcasts are hosted by reactionary figures who traffic in conspiracy theories, manufactured grievance, white nationalism, misogyny, and anti-democratic rhetoric.

At the same time, conservative political forces exercise enormous influence across YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and X, where outrage, fear, resentment, and spectacle circulate with extraordinary speed and emotional intensity. These platforms reward sensationalism, aggression, and emotional manipulation because outrage generates clicks, attention, and profit. They foster social fragmentation, alienation, atomization and, as Jonathan Crary notes, increasingly represent a “comprehensive global apparatus for the dissolution of society.”

In doing so, they create a cultural and pedagogical environment in which authoritarian values acquire enormous legitimating force while critical thought, historical memory, and civic literacy are increasingly erased, punished, or rendered suspect. At the same time, they reproduce and normalize the poisonous grammar of fascist politics: lawlessness elevated to a governing principle, racial hatred and fantasies of racial cleansing shamelessly defined as matters of security and national purity, critical ideas banned or criminalized, genocidal violence in Gaza rationalized as policy, and the killing of journalists in war zones normalized as collateral damage in an age of organized barbarism. Under these conditions, digital culture no longer merely communicates politics; it becomes one of the primary pedagogical forces through which authoritarian identities, desires, and emotional investments are produced.

MAGA Aesthetics and the Pedagogy of Cruelty.

What emerges under Trumpism is not simply a politics of corruption but a broader pedagogical cultural regime of criminality and state terrorism. Unlike older forms of authoritarian propaganda that demanded ideological belief and disciplined obedience, contemporary authoritarian culture demands shallow participation, emotional surrender, anti-intellectual performance, and compulsive circulation through the endless flows of digital media and the dangerous use of AI. Politics is transformed into political theater, meme warfare, and performative outrage. Participation no longer requires informed judgment or critical literacy; it requires emotional investment in spectacles of humiliation, cruelty, resentment, and tribal loyalty. Corruption becomes part of the ritualized displays of domination, flaunted openly as a sign of power, unchecked control, and immunity from accountability.

The endless circulation of memes, AI-generated fantasies, conspiracy theories, staged outrage, and celebrity-driven political performances creates a culture in which authoritarian values are absorbed affectively before they are ever examined critically. In this mediated universe, the language of democracy dissolves into branding exercises and algorithmically engineered emotional reactions. Here Guy Debord’s notion of the spectaclebecomes indispensable because politics no longer functions primarily through reasoned argument but through a theater of commodified images, manufactured emotions, and endless distraction. Equally important, Jean Baudrillard’s work helps explain how AI-generated fantasies and hyperreal political imagery circulate not because they are believable in any conventional sense, but because they produce emotional gratification untethered from truth, evidence, or historical memory. At the same time, Neil Postman foresaw a culture in which public life would dissolve into amusement and spectacle, eroding the very capacities necessary for democratic judgment and critical thought.

Increasingly, the corruption of politics is mirrored in the corruption of civic culture, public conscience, and moral judgment. The grotesque AI-generated videos and staged spectacles circulated endlessly by Trump and amplified through right-wing media ecosystems do more than entertain. They function as forms of authoritarian public pedagogy that normalize humiliation, cruelty, racism, hypermasculinity, and civic illiteracy as public virtues. In these digitally manufactured fantasies, Trump appears as a divinely ordained savior embraced by Jesus, critics are reduced to targets of ridicule and fantasies of degradation, and aggression against dissenters is staged as a source of popular amusement and emotional gratification. In one egregious AI-generated racist video, Trump portrays former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes. Such spectacles matter because they erode the ethical foundations of democratic life, replacing civic responsibility, compassion, historical memory, and critical judgment with a politics of mockery, resentment, manufactured rage, and authoritarian pleasure. Politics no longer appeals to informed consent, ethical responsibility, or reasoned debate. Instead, it trains audiences to take pleasure in humiliation, celebrate unchecked power, and embrace cruelty as entertainment.

Disimagination Machines and Neo-Fascist Culture.

Under this pedagogical regime, neoliberal values of toxic competition, unchecked self-interest, disposability, a commodified culture of immediacy, and market-driven survival merge seamlessly with authoritarian politics. Celebrity culture, algorithmic media systems, Christian nationalism, anti-intellectualism, and fascist theatricality fuse into what I have elsewhere called a disimagination machine, a powerful apparatus of public pedagogy that educates people emotionally before it persuades them intellectually. Its deepest power lies not merely in disseminating lies, but in shaping desires, identities, and emotional dispositions that render corruption, cruelty, and gangster capitalism commonplace features of everyday life. Authoritarianism becomes pleasurable, white nationalist movements and cult-like loyalties replace democratic solidarity, and public life is reduced to a brutal game organized around humiliation, extraction, and the thrill of domination.

What emerges from this machinery is a form of neo-fascist politics in which corruption is no longer a deviation from governance but one of its central organizing principles. Yet mainstream media often treats corruption as little more than scandal and spectacle, obscuring its role within a broader politics of disposability, extraction, and authoritarian control. What is at stake is a predatory system that hollows out democratic institutions while concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a financial and political oligarchy bound together by fear, loyalty, and organized greed. But corruption alone is not the deepest threat. The greater danger lies in the cultural and pedagogical conditions that normalize it. In an age dominated by neoliberal disimagination machines, spectacle-driven politics, and manufactured ignorance, gangsterism is recast as strength, cruelty as authenticity, and lawlessness as freedom.

In an age dominated by neoliberal disimagination machines, media-driven politics, and manufactured ignorance, fascist values and passions are no longer hidden; they are marketed, performed, and celebrated. In this scenario, corruption functions as political theater, a site where politics dissolves into the visual grammar of fascism.

Militarism, Hypermasculinity, and White Christian Nationalism.

At its extreme, this culture of corruption and authoritarian spectacle converges with a politics that glorifies militarism, violence, and hypermasculine domination. One of the driving forces behind the systemic corruption that defines the Trump regime is the fusion of toxic militarism, white Christian nationalism, and a hypermasculine politics that glorifies violence, domination, and war. This deadly convergence is visible in Trump’s appeals to divine authority, biblical rhetoric, and crusader imagery used to justify military aggression and war-crime-level violence in Iran. It also appears in the militarized language of Pete Hegseth, Trump’s self-styled “Secretary of War,” for whom war becomes a theater of masculine redemption in which cruelty is defined as a badge of strength. Hegseth’s swaggering militarism might appear absurd were it not tied to the power of the state and its capacity to unleash violence at home and abroad. As Jasper Craven observes, his rhetoric is steeped in “Islamophobia, misogyny, and a distinctly toxic version of masculinity,” a poisonous language that turns militarism into a spectacle of aggression while elevating authoritarian brutality into a model of national identity and civic virtue.

Toward a Politics of Resistance and Struggle for Democratic Socialism.

It is worth repeating that the crisis we face is not simply one of corruption, but of the accelerating destruction of democracy, as justice, historical memory, civic agency, and public conscience are hollowed out by the forces of predatory neoliberalism and authoritarian rule. Trumpism reveals how gangster capitalism, fused with authoritarian politics, transforms the state into an instrument of domestic terrorism, economic predation, and moral nihilism. It colonizes consciousness, erases historical memory, and rewrites history. Under such conditions, resistance cannot be reduced to legal reforms, ethics commissions, or appeals to civic decorum. History has shown where such forces culminate: in torture chambers, mass incarceration, concentration camps, and the institutionalization of cruelty as a governing principle.

What is needed is a fundamental rupture with a political and economic order that concentrates wealth and power in the hands of financial oligarchs while dismantling public goods, social protections, and democratic institutions in the service of organized greed. This is a struggle that must make education central to politics in order to change public consciousness as part of a wider struggle to dismantle the economic and political institutions of gangster capitalism.

In the end, the corruption at the heart of the Trump regime cannot be separated from the broader authoritarian and neo-fascist culture that both nourishes and legitimates it, a culture in which militarism, apocalyptic nationalism, toxic masculinity, gangster capitalism, and a politics of disposability fuse into a machinery of domination. This is a politics that wages war not only on democratic institutions, critical ideas, and public values, but also on the very conditions that make justice, solidarity, compassion, and collective freedom possible.

The struggle against authoritarian corruption must therefore become part of a broader struggle to reclaim politics as a moral, social, and collective project rooted in historical memory, economic justice, shared responsibility, and the radical promise of democracy life. Yet, this struggle must heed Frederick Douglass’s admonition that “power concedes nothing without a demand.” For Douglass, oppressive power never retreats on its own. It yields only when confronted by a collective force capable of disrupting its authority, exposing its injustices, and making domination increasingly difficult to sustain. In this instance, resistance becomes dangerous to authoritarian power not simply because it opposes domination, but because it embodies a collective moral and political energy capable of unsettling the very foundations upon which that power rests.

What is at stake is not merely the defense of liberal democratic norms, but the creation of a fundamentally different future. The challenges before us are to dismantle gangster capitalism and the fascist politics it breeds. In its place, there is the task of building a democratic socialist vision rooted in human dignity, solidarity, compassion, justice, equality, and the common good. As Douglass famously noted, “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.” This is the power of critical thought, mass resistance, and militant hope.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

First published on CounterPunch.org.

Shared via Creative Commons.

KATHLEEN WALLACE
FEBRUARY 11, 2026

I’m not sure what else will be required as evidence that our government and society is being run by men who view the rest of us as poor quality commodities. They say as much in their “Dark Enlightenment” nonsense, in the Project 2025 Temu Ayn Rand papers, and of course, by their own actions. That is the best indicator of all. The use of children as pawns to abuse in order to compromise individuals of wealth and power is clear to anyone not firmly with scales on their eyes. There is no need at this point for a point of “disclosure”. It is grossly evident and to continue to ignore it will most certainly lead to more deaths and misery for the vast majority of people.

We have a group of men who are actively preparing themselves for a societal collapse. In fact, by their own writings, they invite it. They build bunkers to hurriedly protect themselves from the fallout of their own actions. They seem to only want enough humans around to serve them in ways that AI cannot and even that looks to be an infinitesimally small number. Perhaps they need enough to breed children to abuse? There are no plans coming forth to replace income with a UBI when jobs are lost to AI, and of course that is already occurring. In a nation flush with cash, but not for you, millions are cast off on Medicaid, in what can only be considered a premeditated murder of the masses.

But you see, they don’t care. It’s not an unfortunate side effect or a required austerity measure in a time of crisis. It is a class of individuals who do not see themselves as one of us. The concept of empathy, solidarity and working for a beautiful future is not a consideration for individuals wounded so profoundly at the core. If anything, this is why Empire comes down so hard on those who do show empathy, think of Alex Pretti helping the woman who was shoved to the ground by the enabler goon squad. They don’t have it in themselves to feel that profound warmth that comes from belonging and having others care for them in anything but a transactional manner. And for this, they want to eradicate others who show this concern for the well-being of their own neighbors.

The propaganda is relentless, but of course it must be. If these derangements of society came easily, then of course such a firm hold on the narrative would not be necessary. I once saw it mentioned that if women were truly to be subservient and this was indeed the natural order of things, it wouldn’t be so imperative to keep reminding them of it via religious dogmatism. These hierarchies are unnatural and to keep them from toppling, massive amounts of glue, tape and violence are needed. Every step of the way, whether it was taking away the commons or strong-arming labor into factories, it’s always been the same. It takes violence and unnatural coercion to plunge the vast majority of the populace into lives that don’t make sense, to lives less free than animals in nature.

There is no reason for technology to have been used to further subjugate us. In a just society, these advances would be used for things like mitigating natural disasters and allowing the lives of citizens to be meaningful and connected. Can you even imagine what would be possible if most of the populace weren’t scared of ruin via one misstep? What grand inventions have we missed? What works of art? They say the average medieval peasant had more days off than current workers. Think of the inherent cruelty in a society taking away the right to choose to be a mother and then not even giving said mother one single required paid day off before needing to return to work. That’s not allowing meaningful lives. It’s the factory farming of humans. In such a setting, there is little time for anything but base existence. Is it any wonder there might be a need for massive anti-depressants, stimulants and whatever else can numb the pain? None of this is necessary; it’s simply to prop up a class of individuals who got there via a profound ability to step on others in a manner most of us would find repellent and impossible.

These tech bro nightmare freaks also have sickening fantasies of AI immortality. They see a future without biological humans at all, save their own uploaded consciousness. They have aligned with simple, sick, malignant narcissists of the political class who serve as their accomplices on this dystopian road.

Until they can hack immortality, they seem to be holding something of a breeder fetish like we have seen with Elon Musk. Father to what……14 or so kids that he doesn’t see or care for? I wonder if he can even remember their names. And this is the ketamine riddled man given the DOGE keys? In what universe is this anything but an attempt to destroy?

We’ve gotten a taste from the disgusting Epstein files that that guy had a breeder fetish as well. So many DNA tests were ordered that the manufacturing company said WTF? These men are so profoundly disturbed and with the dangerous mix of certainty that they are a completely different species than the 99.99999%, it seems to be a bit dangerous to give them such power over us. Again, they view the populace as mere commodities and most of us have aged out of what they deem useful.

The pedophilia is so telling about not just their sick enjoyment of torturing the innocent, but also how they view our entire world. They voraciously take in the most destructive manner, and they leave the damage in their rear-view mirror. You don’t have to feel for the victims or for the earth if you see yourself as some kind of demi-god. The fact that so many don’t realize the endgame of the oligarchs is troubling. It’s quite terrifying to realize that you are surrounded by monsters, but keeping your eyes closed really won’t do anything but allow them to take you without a fight.

Many are placing their hopes on Democrats standing up and staunching the bleed. If you are looking to a tool like Chuck Schumer to do anything beyond his role of keeping Israel in the manner she is accustomed to, you will be sorely disappointed.

The Epstein files and their bizarre release/not release have opened up a bit of the tawdry world that the middle-level accomplices occupied. They were enamored to be in that world and open to any level of class traitorship in order to be near power and lack of accountability. Looking at you, Chomsky et al.

We have had dozens of women come forward to say what had been done to them as children by these men. Some even went to the FBI— it looks like as far back as what…the 90s? I’m sure nasty men like Michael Cohen have threatened many of them. I’m guessing some have even likely died, whether by their own hands or not.

It’s ridiculous that we seem to need a corrupt government to hand us the files in a package with a bow to take this seriously. We have goddamn Donald Trump saying pedophile/incest adjacent crap out loud over and over through the years. Red MAGA hat after Red MAGA hat (I’m replacing red flag with that). You know, maybe when people tell you who they are, believe it, as they say.

I believed the women who came forward then, and I believe them now. Instead of playing Bondi’s game with file drippings and wondering who is under the black lines, I think we should believe the critical mass of victims.

One important aspect of this is to realize that in the same manner as the Palestinians have been treated, you and yours will be treated likewise. This is the case with the “disposable” girls in the Epstein class. Our lives mean nothing to them. It is intersectional in all the terrible ways. An older man without a job any longer due to AI will not be treated with any more deference than the Palestinian woman, the trafficked child. This is our great difficulty, because most Americans certainly do not realize this, but they are getting a hint at it when they see white moms shot in the face after saying “I’m not mad at you”.

You don’t need to wait for a government that lives by lies to tell you your truth. Does it feel correct that a man like Epstein would fade away into that good night? On a night that the cameras weren’t working and the guards were sleeping? When a mortician of regard says…hmmm, those photos of “dead Epstein” don’t look all that dead? You don’t have to feel you are a Q-Anon Wayfair box nut to ask some questions about what the wealthy will do for each other and what they will do against you.

But the strongest takeaway is to know that none of this depravity is accidental, be it the Medicaid cancellations or the pedophilia. It’s an ethos these powerful men share and there is nothing for the rest of us but misery, subjugation and death if we allow it to continue.

Kathleen Wallace writes out of the US Midwest. Her writing is collected on her Substack page.

First published on CounterPunch.org.

Shared via Creatie Commons.

A (Shouted) Word to and from the Wise

BY BEVERLY GOLOGORSKY

Aging, like time, ticks on, day by hour by day. Then, suddenly, it’s there, mocking our inability to sweep aside, should we even want to, this iron curtain. For seniors, the concept of time itself differs from that of younger people, because the future is in the everyday.

But aging in a Trumpian world brings fear and destruction as strand by strand of the safety net is plucked away until it’s shredded. And Donald Trump doesn’t care.

Seniors make up an ever larger American demographic that’s being made ever more unsafe in the richest country in the world. Social Security, healthcare, even access to food, not to speak of general well-being are all under threat. Trump doesn’t care.

The President’s Heavy Hand

Social Security is a return on what workers have paid into the federal government over many years. The recent fright about Social Security offices closing or seniors having to prove they’re eligible (or that they even exist) in order to continue receiving what workers 62 and over are owed is not only demeaning and insulting but also saps confidence, threatens wellbeing, and challenges life in America as we’ve known it. And count on one thing: Trump doesn’t care.

The Social Security Department is run extremely efficiently and had no need for Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and crew remaking it. Less than one penny of every dollar it gets is spent on its administration, while the other 99 cents come back in benefits.

Social Security has been called a crucial guardrail against government change, a rail that, unfortunately, seems to be weakening, month by month, in the second era of Donald Trump amid changes so thoughtless that they take one’s breath away. For example, some Social Security offices are now being closed, ensuring that many elderly or infirm people who are housebound will no longer be able to reach them by phone to register to receive their checks. Yes, cruelty before our very eyes.  Congressional representative Rashida Tlaib has insisted that we must defend this lifesaving program, which lifts 27 million Americans out of poverty each year.

In recent weeks, President Trump has announced an end to the issuing of the paper Social Security checks that now arrive by mail, rather than being deposited directly into a bank account. Doesn’t he know that it’s the oldest, sickest, and poorest among us who may not have a bank account, or be able to get to a bank, or make the change via computer, or who — yes! — may not even have a computer? Of course, Trump doesn’t care.

Health Care in Danger

Worse yet, Americans face drastic cuts to an entire healthcare system: Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare).

Congress is now shut down thanks to the opposition of the Democrats to a bill that contains huge cuts to Medicaid and doesn’t extend subsidies for Obamacare. Such cuts, if carried out, will affect millions of seniors and result in the closing of nursing homes and clinics, especially in rural areas and inner cities. If that bill were to pass into law, millions of people would lose a substantial part of their health care, with the most damaging and profound effects felt by an aging population.

It’s no secret that seniors have more healthcare problems than younger people.  In an aging population, health and wellness are spiraling situations filled with sudden problems like falls, or slowly developing problems like arthritis and osteoarthritis, or simply the endless strain on worn-out joints and ligaments. Cancer, too, is more prevalent in people over 65.

Women, in particular, would feel the pain of such cuts, were they to happen.

Women use the healthcare system more than men do. Recently, Ms Magazine pointed out that women make up the majority of Medicaid recipients, both because they’re more likely to be caregivers and because they’re more likely to need long-term care as they age.

Veterans who fought in the Vietnam War of the last century and the Gulf wars of this century are also in that aging demographic. And like all aging bodies, theirs will register more health needs as the Trump administration cuts the Department of Veteran Affairs and VA hospital staff whose numbers have fallen every month since Trump was inaugurated a second time.

How all of this will affect or damage individual mental health is still being discovered. As a start, however, sickness, hunger, and the lack of enough money for emergencies can result in depression, fear, and far worse. And right now, sadly enough, the heavy hand of the Trump administration continues to press down on the general well-being of seniors (especially those on disability).

Unprotecting Seniors

Clearly, the Trump administration is more interested in self-care than senior care. Why else enact a bill to remove earned healthcare protections that have long been the expected staples of an aging life? When before has a president been so personally and negatively intrusive in the lives of seniors?

Food insecurity is now a fact of life in an aging demographic where nutrition is synonymous with health and longevity, in short with life or death. Though nutrition is necessary for young and old alike, it’s a must for the aging body. Yet food insecurity is now being experienced by millions of seniors, a future threat that has become a present reality.

I’ve written of hunger before, what it feels like to be a poor child growing up. Now, the question must be asked again in a different context: What does it feel like to be old and hungry? Trump doesn’t care.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as SNAP (think food stamps), is having its funds cut drastically. Until recently, SNAP provided significant amounts of food for poor families, though it was never quite enough. Supplies of food from farms and elsewhere that help stock rural as well as inner-city food banks have also decreased due to cuts in funds, including for food banks run by state, city, and church organizations.

Presently 4.8 million seniors 60 and older receive food via SNAP. However, it’s estimated that many more eligible seniors are not receiving food help. Attention must be paid: seniors do not have enough to eat and — dare I repeat this in the richest country in the world? — Trump doesn’t care, but we must.

Past administrations have opted for less government but without tearing away as much of the safety net as the Trump administration continues to do. His cuts are careless, dangerous, and done without either significant thought or understanding. An aging society now under siege should be everyone’s problem since (if we’re lucky) we all get old.

Recently in Great Britain huge numbers of the elderly turned out en masse to shout ENOUGH, give us what we need, what we’ve earned, so that we can live with food, shelter, and our earned rest after years of work. Isn’t it time for elderly Americans, too, to turn out en masse to shout out our anger, dismay, and refusal to be placed in such a dangerous situation?

Project 2025, Russell Vought’s project to reshape the government in a second Trump presidency (about which Trump swore, during the election campaign, that he knew nothing) chronicled well ahead of time all that he and his administration are now doing to the detriment of us all, but especially to seniors. The Trumpian version of the invocation that we should all pull ourselves up by our bootstraps in no way takes into account the millions of people who have no boots with straps to pull up.

It’s also important to emphasize that all of this is happening in the richest country in the world, one that spends tens of millions of dollars to build a single jet fighter plane, and yet is now cutting funds to programs that help people get enough to eat.  Our fury needs to be demonstrated.

The destruction being visited on an aging demographic doesn’t discriminate. It includes many seniors who wear MAGA caps, too. (Perhaps Trump doesn’t care about them either.) We can only hope that their support for a president determined to offer them so little and take away so much will diminish.

At a time when the cost of living for essentials — food, rent, and healthcare — continues to rise, the dependence of seniors on the government’s care for the safety net is being whittled away. Trying to keep the heat and electricity going, the water running, and food on the table is hard enough on a fixed income without having to worry about what President Trump and his Project 2025 cronies plan to take away from us next.

So many of today’s seniors have been workers, activists, parents, and more, all of which has contributed to the well-being of this country, and they have earned care and rest, as well as access to enough food, healthcare, and shelter to get by in a reasonably comfortable fashion. Trump doesn’t care.

Yes, people of all ages feel the heavy hand of the Trump administration in their lives, but the elderly, the sick, and the poor feel it the most, especially those living on fixed incomes.

Our Rights, Our Dignity

Seniors must insist on their rights and respect for their dignity — and not only to each other but out on the streets of this country, supported by Americans of all ages. After all, seniors are someone’s grandparent, parent, sibling, aunt, uncle, cousin, neighbor, or friend.

Because anger at having needs refused, especially as you get older, eats away at your body and soul, expressing it is not only healthy but allows us to feel less alone and more empowered. The millions of us who went onto the streets on No Kings Day to say no to what this administration is doing demonstrated the power of numbers, which is not a small thing. In that context, taking senior fury to the streets, with the participation of younger people, couldn’t be more significant when it comes to publicizing the importance of our needs being met. To remain quiet, to “take it” (so to speak) will only help the Trump administration hide the devastation now being visited upon us.

Here are some of the worries being expressed daily by seniors:

If my Social Security check doesn’t arrive on time or the funds are mysteriously cut, how will I survive?

If Medicaid is cut, how will I be able to get cataract surgery, or hernia surgery, or steroid injections for my pain?

Without Medicaid, how will I afford an ambulance to get to a hospital in an emergency?

Will lack of funds close my food bank?

And those are just a sampling of the daily worries impeding the earned rest of us seniors.

Statistics: cold numbers can tell a truth but still do not accurately represent the stress that cutting funds will cause. Follow the dots from those cuts to a small house in the rural south, a cold apartment in an urban high rise, or the “gray wave” of homeless seniors sleeping on the streets, and it’s there you can see such statistics in action, taking the form of worry, illness, hunger, and insecurity. And all of that is happening as Trump permits millions of dollars to be spent on upgrading and furnishing a gift plane from Qatar.  Again: in the richest country on earth, how can we allow such treatment to go on without raising our voices? We can’t. We mustn’t.

At 79 years old, Donald Trump has all his health, wellness, and food needs taken care of. His life is the assured good life, with hours of rest at his golf clubs. We seniors need to disturb that rest, become the thorn in his side. We must loudly proclaim our right to feel safe, to be free from hunger and assured of our healthcare and shelter.

Trump rules by fear, the use of which keeps many of us from demonstrating our outrage publicly. Hopefully, seniors who have already lived long and experienced so much won’t be silenced by such fear. We have a collective voice. Numbers matter on the streets and at the ballot box, at town halls and in the hallways of Congress. Along with younger generations who will one day be seniors themselves, it’s time for us to shout NO to all the ways senior needs are now being undermined and ignored. How dare Trump tarnish our golden years!

Unfortunately, an entire society, both young and old, is today experiencing an authoritarian threat to our lives. The insecurity it produces has shaken the very foundations of our American world and so makes it difficult for an aging population to hold on, to remain steady. Yet seniors are the very people who have helped to build this country in ways too numerous to list.

The present leadership protects its power instead of its people. In particular, the Trump administration threatens Black and Brown seniors in shameful, racist ways. History has shown that what’s now called DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) has long been part of the backbone of a thriving society. Among other things, Trump’s indiscriminate actions against immigrants are beyond immoral and reach into the homes of seniors, too. (Where does he think his grandparents, his mother, and two of his wives came from?)

As long as voices are raised, anger shared, and street corners filled with demonstrators, hope remains. Throughout history wrongs have been righted by significant numbers of people of all ages refusing to comply. Now is the time to do what history has taught us or, like a dropped ball of yarn, this society will spool too far away to retrieve.

Copyright 2025 Beverly Gologorsky

First published on TomDispatch.com.

Shared via Creative Commons.

The Democratic Party and its liberal allies refuse to call for mass mobilization and strikes — the only tools that can thwart Trump’s emergent authoritarianism — fearing they too will be swept aside.

The liberal class in a capitalist democracy is designed to function as a safety valve. It makes possible incremental reform. But, at the same time, it does not challenge or question the foundations of power. The quid-pro-quo sees the liberal class serve as an attack dog to discredit radical social movements. The liberal class, for this reason, is a useful tool. It gives the system legitimacy. It keeps alive the belief that reform is possible.

The oligarchs and corporations, terrified by the mobilization of the left in the 1960s and 1970s — what political scientist Samuel P. Huntington called America’s “excess of democracy” — set out to build counter-institutions to delegitimize and marginalize critics of capitalism and imperialism. They bought the allegiances of the two ruling political parties. They imposed obedience to neoliberalism within academia, government agencies and the press. They neutered the liberal class and crushed popular movements. They unleashed the FBI on anti-war protestors, the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Young Lords and other groups that empowered the disempowered. They broke labor unions, leaving 90 percent of the American workforce without union protections. Critics of capitalism and imperialism, such as Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader, were blacklisted. The campaign, laid out by Lewis F. Powell Jr. in his 1971 memorandum titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” set into motion the creeping corporate coup d’etat, which five decades later, is complete.

The differences between the two ruling parties on substantive issues — such as war, tax cuts, trade deals and austerity — became indistinguishable. Politics was reduced to burlesque, popularity contests between manufactured personalities and acrimonious battles over culture wars. Workers lost protections. Wages stagnated. Debt peonage soared. Constitutional rights were revoked by judicial fiat. The Pentagon consumed half of all discretionary spending.

The liberal class, rather than stand up against the onslaught, retreated into the boutique activism of political correctness. It ignored the vicious class war that would see, under the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton, around one million workers lose their jobs in mass layoffs linked to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), on top of the estimated 32 million jobs lost due to deindustrialization during the 1970s and 1980s. It ignored blanket government surveillance set up in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment. It ignored the kidnapping and torture — “extraordinary rendition” — and imprisoning of terrorism suspects into black sites, along with assassinations, even of U.S. citizens. It ignored the austerity programs that saw social services slashed. It ignored the social inequality that has reached its most extreme levels of disparity in over 200 years, surpassing the rapacious greed of the robber barons.

Clinton’s welfare reform bill, which was signed on Aug. 22, 1996, threw six million people, many of them single mothers, off the welfare rolls within four years. It dumped them onto the streets without child care, rent subsidies and Medicaid coverage. Families were plunged into crisis, struggling to survive on multiple jobs that paid $6 or $7 an hour, or less than $15,000 a year. But they were the lucky ones. In some states, half of those dropped from welfare rolls could not find work. Clinton also slashedMedicare by $115 billion over a five-year period and cut $14 billion in Medicaid funding. The overcrowded prison system handled the influx of the poor, as well as the abandoned mentally ill.

The media, owned by corporations and oligarchs, assured the public it was prudent to entrust life savings to a financial system run by speculators and thieves. In the meltdown of 2008, life savings were gutted. And then these media organizations, catering to corporate advertisers and sponsors, rendered invisible those whose misery, poverty, and grievances should be the principal focus of journalism.

Barack Obama, who raised more than $745 million — much of it corporate money — to run for president, facilitated the looting of the U.S. Treasury by corporations and big banks following the 2008 crash. He turned his back on millions of Americans who lost their homes because of bank repossessions or foreclosures. He expanded the wars begun by his predecessor George W. Bush. He killed the public option — universal health care — and forced the public to buy his defective for-profit ObamaCare — the Affordable Care Act — a bonanza for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.

If the Democratic Party was fighting to defend universal health care during the government shutdown, rather than the half measure of preventing premiums from rising for ObamaCare, millions would take to the streets.

The Democratic Party throws scraps to the serfs. It congratulates itself for allowing unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on for-profit health care policies. It passes a jobs bill that gives tax credits to corporations as a response to an unemployment rate that — if one includes all those who are stuck in part-time or lower skilled jobs but are capable and want to do more — is arguably, closer to 20 percent. It forces taxpayers, one in eight of whom depend on food stamps to eat, to fork over trillions to pay for the crimes of Wall Street and endless war, including the genocide in Gaza.

The defenestration of the liberal class reduced it to courtiers mouthing empty platitudes. The safety valve shut down. The assault on the working class and working poor accelerated. So too did very legitimate rage.

This rage gave us Trump.

The historian Fritz Stern, a refugee from Nazi Germany, wrote that fascism is the bastard child of a bankrupt liberalism. He saw in our spiritual and political alienation — given expression through cultural hatreds, racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, a demonization of immigrants, misogyny and despair — the seeds of an American fascism.

“They attacked liberalism,” Stern wrote of the supporters of German fascists in his book “The Politics of Cultural Despair,” “because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it; the bourgeois life, Manchesterism [laissez-faire capitalism], materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sensed in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from their imaginary past, and from their faith.”

Richard Rorty in his last book in 1999, “Achieving Our Country”, also knew where we were headed. He writes:

“[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words nigger and kike will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”

The democratic tools for change — running for office, campaigning, voting, lobbying and petitions — no longer work. Corporate forces and oligarchs have seized control of our political, educational, media and economic systems. They cannot be removed from within.

The Democratic Party is a hollow appendage.

Our captured institutions, subservient to the rich and the powerful, are capitulating to Trump’s authoritarianism. All we have left is sustained non-violent, disruptive civil disobedience. Mass movements. Radical politics. Rebellion. A socialist vision that counters the poison of unfettered capitalism. This alone can thwart Trump’s police state and rid us of the feckless liberal class that sustains it.

First published on The Chris Hedges Report.

Shared via Creative Commons.

How Corporate Democrats Led to the Trump Era

The human condition includes a vast array of unavoidable misfortunes. But what about the preventable ones? Shouldn’t the United States provide for the basic needs of its people?

Such questions get distinctly short shrift in the dominant political narratives. When someone can’t make ends meet and suffers dire consequences, the mainstream default is to see a failing individual rather than a failing system. Even when elected leaders decry inequity, they typically do more to mystify than clarify what has caused it.

While “income inequality” is now a familiar phrase, media coverage and political rhetoric routinely disconnect victims from their victimizers. Human-interest stories and speechifying might lament or deplore common predicaments, but their storylines rarely connect the destructive effects of economic insecurity with how corporate power plunders social resources and fleeces the working class. Yet the results are extremely far-reaching.

“We have the highest rate of childhood poverty and senior poverty of any major country on earth”, Senator Bernie Sanders has pointed out. “You got half of older workers have nothing in the bank as they face retirement. You got a quarter of our seniors trying to get by on $15,000 a year or less.”

Such hardship exists in tandem with ever-greater opulence for the few, including this country’s 800 billionaires. But standard white noise mostly drowns out how government policies and the overall economic system keep enriching the already richat the expense of people with scant resources.

This year, while Donald Trump and Republican legislators have been boosting oligarchy and slashing enormous holes in the social safety net, Democratic leaders have seemed remarkably uninterested in breaking away from the policy approaches that ended up losing their party the allegiance of so many working-class voters. Those corporate-friendly approaches set the stage for Trump’s faux “populism” as an imagined solution to the discontent that the corporatism of the Democrats had helped usher in.

While offering a rollback to pre-Trump-2.0 policies, the current Democratic leadership hardly conveys any orientation that could credibly relieve the economic distress of so many Americans. The party remains in a debilitating rut, refusing to truly challenge the runaway power of corporate capitalism that has caused ever-widening income inequality.

“Opportunity” as a Killer Ideology

The Democratic Party establishment now denounces President Trump’s vicious assaults on vital departments and social programs. Unfortunately, three decades ago it cleared a path that led toward the likes of the DOGE wrecking crew. A clarion call in that direction came from President Bill Clinton when, in his 1996 State of the Union address, he exulted that “the era of big government is over”.

Clinton followed those instantly iconic words by adding, “We cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.” Like the horse he rode into Washington — the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which he cofounded — Clinton advocated a “third way,” distinct from both liberal Democrats and Republican conservatives. But when his speech called for “self-reliance and teamwork” — and when, on countless occasions throughout the 1990s he invoked the buzzwords “opportunity” and “responsibility” — he was firing from a New Democrat arsenal that all too sadly targeted “handouts” and “special interests” as obsolete relics of the 1930s New Deal and the 1960s Great Society.

The seminal Clintonian theme of “opportunity” — with little regard for outcome — aimed at a wide political audience. In the actual United States, however, touting opportunity as central to solving the problems of inequity obscured the huge disparities in real-life options. In theory, everyone was to have a reasonable chance; in practice, opportunity was then (and remains) badly skewed by economic status and race, beginning as early as the womb. In a society so stratified by class, “opportunity” as the holy grail of social policy ultimately leaves outcomes to the untender mercies of the market.

Two weeks before Clinton won the presidency, the newsweekly Time reported that his “economic vision” was “perhaps best described as a call for a We decade; not the old I-am-my-brother’s-keeper brand of traditional Democratic liberalism”. Four weeks later, the magazine showered the president-elect with praise:

“Clinton’s willingness to move beyond some of the old-time Democratic religion is auspicious. He has spoken eloquently of the need to redefine liberalism: the language of entitlements and rights and special-interest demands, he says, must give way to talk of responsibilities and duties.”

Clinton and the DLC insisted that government should smooth the way for maximum participation in the business of business. While venerating the market, the New Democrats were openly antagonistic toward labor unions and those they dubbed “special interests”, such as feminists, civil-rights activists, environmentalists, and others who needed to be shunted aside to fulfill the New Democrat agenda, which included innovations like “public-private partnerships”, “empowerment zones”, and charter schools.

Taking the Government to Market

While disparaging advocates for the marginalized as impediments to winning the votes of white “moderates”, the New Democrats tightly embraced corporate America. I still have a page I tore out of Time magazine in December 1996, weeks after Clinton won reelection. The headline said: “Ex-Investment Bankers and Lawyers Form Clinton’s Economic Team. Surprise! It’s Pro-Wall Street”.

That was the year when Clinton and his allies achieved a longtime goal — strict time limits for poor women to receive government assistance. “From welfare to work” became a mantra. Aid to Families with Dependent Children was out and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families was in. As occurred three years earlier when he was able to push NAFTA through Congress only because of overwhelming Republican support, Democratic lawmakers were divided and Clinton came to rely on overwhelming GOP support to make “welfare reform” possible.

The welfare bill that he gleefully signed in August 1996 was the flip side of his elite economic team’s priorities. The victims of “welfare reform” would soon become all too obvious, while their victimizers would remain obscured in the smoke blown by cheerleading government officials, corporate-backed think tanks, and mainstream journalists. When Clinton proclaimed that such landmark legislation marked the end of “welfare as we know it”, he was hailing the triumph of a messaging siege that had raged for decades.

Across much of the country’s media spectrum, prominent pundits had long been hammering away at “entitlements”, indignantly claiming that welfare recipients, disproportionately people of color, were sponging off government largesse. The theme was a specialty of conservative columnists like Charles Krauthammer, John Leo, and George Will (who warned in November 1993 that the nation’s “rising illegitimacy rate… may make America unrecognizable”). But some commentators who weren’t right-wing made similar arguments, while ardently defaming the poor.

Newsweek star writer Joe Klein often accused inner-city Black people of such defects as “dependency” and “pathology.” Three months after Clinton became president, Klein wrote that “out-of-wedlock births to teenagers are at the heart of the nexus of pathologies that define the underclass”. The next year, he intensified his barrage. In August 1994, under the headline “The Problem Isn’t the Absence of Jobs, But the Culture of Poverty”, he peppered his piece with phrases like “welfare dependency”, while condemning “irresponsible, antisocial behavior that has its roots in the perverse incentives of the welfare system”.

Such punditry was unconcerned with the reality that, even if they could find and retain employment while struggling to raise families, what awaited the large majority of the women being kicked off welfare were dead-end jobs at very low wages.

A Small Business Shell Game

During the 1990s, Bill and Hillary Clinton fervently mapped out paths for poor women that would ostensibly make private enterprise the central solution to poverty. A favorite theme was the enticing (and facile) notion that people could rise above poverty by becoming entrepreneurs.

Along with many speeches by the Clintons, some federal funds were devoted to programs to help lenders offer microcredit so that low-income people could start small enterprises. Theoretically, the result would be both well-earning livelihoods and self-respect for people who had pulled themselves out of poverty. Of course, some individual success stories became grist for upbeat media features. But as the years went by, the overall picture would distinctly be one of failure.

In 2025, politicians continue to laud small business ventures as if they could somehow remedy economic ills. But such endeavors aren’t likely to bring long-term financial stability, especially for people with little start-up money to begin with. Current figuresindicate that one-fifth of all new small businesses fail within the first year and the closure rate only continues to climb after that. Fifty percent of small businesses fail within five years and 65 percent within 10 years.

Promoting the private sector as the solution to social inequities inevitably depletes the public sector and its capacity to effectively serve the public good. Three decades after the Clinton presidency succeeded in blinkering the Democratic vision of what economic justice might look like, the party’s leaders are still restrained by assumptions that guarantee vast economic injustice — to the benefit of those with vast wealth.

“Structural problems require structural solutions”, Bernie Sanders wrote in a 2019 op-ed piece“, and promises of mere ‘access’ have never guaranteed black Americans equality in this country… ‘Access’ to health care is an empty promise when you can’t afford high premiums, co-pays or deductibles. And an ‘opportunity’ for an equal education is an opportunity in name only when you can’t afford to live in a good school district or to pay college tuition. Jobs, health care, criminal justice and education are linked, and progress will not be made unless we address the economic systems that oppress Americans at their root”.

But addressing the root of economic systems that oppress Americans is exactly what the Democratic Party leadership, dependent on big corporate donors, has rigorously refused to do. Looking ahead, unless Democrats can really put up a fight against the pseudo-populism of the rapacious and fascistic Trump regime, they are unlikely to regain the support of the working-class voters who deserted them in last year’s election.

During this month’s federal government shutdown, Republicans were ruthlessly insistent on worsening inequalities in the name of breaking or shaking up the system. Democrats fought tenaciously to defend Obamacare and a health-care status quo that still leaves tens of millions uninsured or underinsured, while medical bills remain a common worry and many people go without the care they need.

“We must start by challenging the faith that public policy, private philanthropy, and the culture at large has placed in the market to accomplish humanitarian goals”, historian Lily Geismer has written in her insightful and deeply researched book Left Behind.

“We cannot begin to seek suitable and sustainable alternatives until we understand how deep that belief runs and how detrimental its consequences are.”

The admonitions in Geismer’s book, published three years ago, cogently apply to the present and future. “The best way to solve the vexing problems of poverty, racism, and disinvestment is not by providing market-based microsolutions”, she pointed out.

“Macroproblems need macrosolutions. It is time to stop trying to make the market do good. It is time to stop trying to fuse the functions of the federal government with the private sector… It is the government that should be providing well-paying jobs, quality schools, universal childcare and health care, affordable housing, and protections against surveillance and brutality from law enforcement.”

Although such policies now seem a long way off, clearly articulating the goals is a crucial part of the struggle to achieve them. Those who suffer from the economic power structure are victims of a massively cruel system, being made steadily crueler by the presidency of Donald Trump. But progress is possible with clarity about how the system truly works and the victimizers who benefit from it.

Copyright 2025 Norman Solomon

First published on TomDispatch.com.

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The Role of Veterans in Movements for Peace and Justice

BY WILLIAM D. HARTUNG

Ex-Warriors for Peace

Thankfully, Hegseth’s vision is not shared by many of the veterans of America’s disastrous post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. The eye-opening documentary What I Want You to Know presents the views of just such veterans about their service and about the meaning of the conflicts they fought in. Almost to a person (no, not “a man”!), they said the following four things:

• They don’t know why they were sent to the places where they fought
• They did not believe the U.S. could win the war they were sent to fight
• Their government lied to them
• They were forced to do things that will haunt them for the rest of their lives

It took courage for such veterans to go on camera and offer the unvarnished truth about the disastrous wars they helped to fight. They are, of course, far from alone, but as one of the producers of the film told me, many veterans are reluctant to discuss such feelings and insights publicly. Some don’t want to reflect on the idea that the wars they fought in were disastrously misguided and didn’t end in anything resembling an American victory. Others fear political retribution. Still others prefer to keep such conversations among their fellow vets, in large part because they feel that people who haven’t served can’t fully understand what they went through.

It’s little wonder that many vets keep their feelings about their long years in service within a close circle of friends and other veterans. But whether they choose to speak out publicly or not, a striking number of them are now either antiwar or “war skeptical,” questioning whether some of our recent conflicts were faintly worth fighting in the first place.

Don’t misunderstand me on this. There are indeed veterans speaking out against such unnecessary, unjust wars (past or future). Fifteen of them, for instance, contributed chapters to Paths of Dissent, a volume edited by Quincy Institute co-founder Andrew Bacevich and U.S. Army veteran Daniel Sjursen. A description of a 2023 webinar marking the release of the book caught its main theme perfectly:

“[T]hese soldiers vividly describe both their motivations for serving and the disillusionment that made them speak out against the system. Their testimony is crucial for understanding just how the world’s self-proclaimed greatest military power went so badly astray.”

There are also entire organizations, including Veterans for Peace (VFP), Common Defense, and About Face: Veterans Against the War, devoted to ensuring that such endless wars remain over and crafting an American foreign policy grounded in diplomacy and defense rather than in a quest for global military dominance. (And, of course, they are distinctly not dedicated, like President Donald J. Trump, to ever more regularly blowing boats out of the water in the Caribbean.)

Common Defense, in fact, goes beyond an antiwar stance to address the underlying ills that make such wars so much more likely. Its members describe themselves this way:

“We are the largest grassroots membership organization of progressive veterans standing up for our communities against the rising tide of racism, hate and violence.  We vow to organize together against those who seek to divide us so they cannot rig our systems and economy for their own gain.”

As for VFP, one of its members, Chris Overfelt, offered a succinct summary of the group’s stance in a 2019 House Budget Committee hearing organized by the Poor People’s Campaign: A Call for Moral Revival. He noted that he had “indirectly participated in the destruction of… Iraq and Afghanistan.” He then reflected on the consequences of those all-American wars, adding, “Neither of these countries will likely recover from that devastation in my lifetime. Nothing I can do… will make up for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan men, women, and children killed in these useless wars.”

About Face’s current campaign, “Keep the Military Off Our Streets”, reaches out to the 35,000 or more National Guard and military personnel that President Trump has already deployed to U.S. cities and the Mexican border area, offering assistance in “exploring your options”. As that outfit puts it, “If you are a National Guardsperson or active-duty member and you’re concerned about the moral, ethical, or legal implications of your situation, you’re not alone”.

Nor is opposition to such fruitless, devastating conflicts limited to progressives. Trump himself used his 2016 election campaign to hammer Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton for supporting the disastrous 2003 U.S. intervention in Iraq. And then there were statements like the one that he made at a September 2024 campaign stop in Mosinee, Wisconsin, in which he said, “I will expel the warmonger from our national security state and carry out a much needed clean-up of the military-industrial complex to stop the war profiteering and to put always America First”.

The president has, of course, not faintly fulfilled that pledge, but he said it for a reason — to appeal to those in his base who are sick of war and no longer trust corporations or traditional politicians to rein in the war machine.

One of the most interesting political collaborations of the past few years was when the conservative group Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) teamed up with VoteVets, which describes itself as “a home for progressive veterans and their supporters.” The two groups worked together to repeal the authorization of military force, or AUMF, passed by Congress after the 9/11 attacks, a document that has been used ever since as a public rationale for numerous wars all over the globe. Dan Caldwell, the head of CVA at the time, explained how the two groups had come to work together in an interview on C-SPAN that included Will Fischer, then the director of government relations for VoteVets:

“I honestly did go into the interview expecting a combative conversation… but when we started talking about foreign policy, it was clear there were some areas of alignment especially on war powers. The wheels started turning in my head, and we came together and decided to pursue some of these shared goals.”

Perhaps most important right now, Major General Paul Eaton, who (among his many other assignments) served as commanding general in charge of reestablishing the Iraqi Security Forces in 2003-2004, has joined with other veterans to roundly criticize Trump’s deployment of troops to U.S. cities. As he put it, “This [deployment of troops to U.S. cities] is the politicization of the armed forces. It casts the military in a terrible light”.

Of course, there are also what might be thought of as warriors for war in this country, veterans who believe the U.S. isn’t spending enough on its military or relying on force (or the threat of force) often enough. For example, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Alabama), a prominent voice on national security in the Republican Party, is all in on pushing for yet more Pentagon spending, the development of ever more and different kinds of nuclear weapons, and a quicker trigger for using force (including a possible war with Iran). Then there’s General Mike Minihan who, in January 2023, wrote a memo predicting that the U.S. would be at war with China within two years. That was hardly an official U.S. position. He was, in fact, publicly contradicting the stance of his commander-in-chief and yet he was never held accountable for that rogue statement of his.

Military Invalidators.

Many liberals and progressives feel that the only way to generate sustained public pressure against overspending on the Pentagon budget (now heading for the trillion-dollar mark) is to get military validators, ideally high-ranking officers, to weigh in. This was possible in the past, as in the Vietnam War years, when Admirals Gene Larocque and Eugene Carroll founded the Center for Defense Information, an indispensable resource for opponents of massive Pentagon budgets and misguided wars.

It’s important to remember, however, that the use of military validators can go terribly wrong. This was certainly the case in 1983 when President George W. Bush sentGeneral Colin Powell, whose approval rating was then 20 points higher than his, to the United Nations in February 2003 to make a case for Iraq’s alleged (but, in fact, nonexistent) arsenal of nuclear weapons, a month before the U.S. invaded that country. It was certainly good theater, but many of his points would prove to be sheer fantasy.

There were also prominent retired generals like Lee Butler and James Cartwright who called for sharp reductions in, or the total elimination of, all nuclear weapons globally, including the American arsenal. Butler, a former head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, signed a 1998 statement, organized by the group Global Zero, that called for the elimination of nuclear weapons globally. And Cartwright, a retired vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former commander of United States nuclear forces, endorsed a 2012 report by Global Zero arguing that nuclear deterrence could be maintained with a far smaller U.S. nuclear arsenal of 900 total warheads, versus the current stockpile of thousands of them, either deployed or in reserve.

But high-level military officers able and willing to criticize Donald Trump’s current global strategy and this country’s still rising military spending levels are an ever-shrinking cohort. Little wonder, given that, as a Quincy Institute report found, 80% of all three- and four- star generals who retired in a recent five-year period went to work for — yes, of course! — the arms industry in one capacity or another.

And although mid-level officers and those below them in the ranks are the likely backbone of a growing movement for peace and racial, gender, and economic justice, they simply can’t do it alone, even if their voices are crucial for reaching certain key audiences.

And here’s a reality of this moment: Given the torrent of threats to basic rights now emanating from Washington, movements of resistance need all the help they can get. In that grim context, antiwar veterans will certainly be crucial allies in the struggle for peace and justice, but there will also have to be a cultural and psychological shift, weaning many Americans from their attraction to war as a way to solve problems and their sense of themselves as citizens of “the most powerful country in the world”.

America’s “increasingly dysfunctional relationship to war” is analyzed in detail in 26-year Army veteran Gregory Daddis’s new book, Fear and Faith: America’s Relationship with War Since 1945. He believes that this country’s “martial bonds… have been informed by deep-seated frictions between faith in and fear of war and its consequences”. In his concluding chapter, “War for War’s Sake”,  Daddis underscores the stubborn commitment to war that prevails among many Americans, despite the costly and disastrous wars of this century. “War” he writes, “remains with us because we have inherited Cold War tendencies toward viewing the world in black-and-white terms, where every threat seems existential to the global American project… America’s faith never truly wavered, even after the debacle in Vietnam. Calls for military crusades against evil still resonate”.

Daddis believes that “a twisted relation with faith and fear, if left unbroken, can only preordain the nation to a militarized way of life bounded by the grimness of war”.

In light of the devastating impact of America’s post-9/11 wars, as documented by the Costs of War Project at Brown University — the loss of $8 trillion, hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, millions of people driven from their homes, and hundreds of thousands of U.S. veterans suffering physical wounds or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) — calls for “peace through strength” and ever higher Pentagon budgets should ring increasingly hollow.

Isn’t it finally time for a respectful national dialogue about what constitutes an adequate defense and how to balance military preparations with other urgent national needs? Of course, having any such conversation, given the present deep divisions in American society, will be a challenge in its own right. But the alternative is a continuation of some variation of the devastating wars of the post-9/11 period, and such new and perilous conflicts will involve boots on the ground, air strikes, or the endless arming of repressive regimes.

Copyright 2025 William D. Hartung.

Featured image: Protest against Donald Trump by Fibonacci Blue is licensed under CC BY 2.0 / Flickr

First published on TomDispatch.com.

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Trump’s newest presidential memoranda criminalizes critics of empire, capitalism, Christian nationalism, abuses by the state and those who fight racism and gender discrimination.

Fascists, historically, are surprisingly candid about the world they intend to create. Those they target, despite this transparency, are surprisingly obtuse about what is coming.

The most ominous warning to date from our homegrown fascists is the latest Presidential memo, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” It accuses any critic of law enforcement, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the American empire, capitalism, the Christian right, the persecution of immigrants and those that decry discrimination based on race and gender, as well as those who question white, male patriarchy, described as “traditional American views on family, religion, and morality,” of fomenting “violent revolution.”

It is a declaration of war on the so-called “radical left,” those the Trump administration blames for “heinous assassinations and other acts of political violence” from the murder of the right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk to “the 2024 assassination of a senior healthcare executive and the 2022 assassination attempt against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.” The memo goes on to list the two assassination attempts against Trump.

The memo, typical of the self-serving narratives favored by Trump, ignores the murder by a Christian nationalist of Democratic Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the attempted murder of state senator John Hoffman and his wife.

These “anti-fascists”,  the White House memo warns ominously, “have created a movement that embraces and elevates violence to achieve policy outcomes, including justifying additional assassinations”.

The memo’s definition of state enemies is by design amorphous, grounded in the fiction of phantom organizations bent on murder and sedition. The accusations are absurd. They are not based on evidence or verifiable fact. But, as in all totalitarian regimes, truth is whatever those in power declare it to be. This “truth” justifies the crusade.

The memo brazenly inverts the rule of law. It turns the law into an instrument of injustice. It uses the decorum of federal agencies, the courts and trials to legalize state crimes. It is grounded in magical thinking, bizarre conspiracy theories and a paranoia that sees the most tepid acts of dissent or criticism as treason.

Those who defy the state will, I expect, be decapitated one by one. The forlorn hope that the state will tolerate those who obey will silence many who have already been condemned.

“Universal innocence”, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes in The Gulag Archipelago, “also gave rise to the universal failure to act. Maybe they won’t take you? Maybe it will all blow over”.

“The majority sit quietly and dare to hope”. he writes. “Since you aren’t guilty, then how can they arrest you? It’s a mistake!”

“Does hope lend strength or does it weaken a man?” Solzhenitsyn asks.

“If the condemned man in every cell had ganged up on the executioners as they came in and choked them, wouldn’t this have ended the executions sooner than appeals to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee? When one is already on the edge of the grave, why not resist?”

“But wasn’t everything foredoomed anyway, from the moment of arrest?” he asks. “Yet all the arrested crawled along the path of hope on their knees, as if their legs had been amputated.”

Totalitarian regimes promulgate broad security decrees, from Stalin’s Article 70 to the Nazis’ Malicious Practices Act, to give themselves the sweeping powers to indiscriminately target anyone.

The memo lays out in chilling detail what I assumed in my column “We Are All antifa Now” was behind the Trump administration’s designation of antifa as a terrorist group. The designation allows the state to brand all dissidents as supporters of antifa and prosecute them as terrorists.

The memo says that state and federal agencies, adopting “a new law enforcement strategy” will “investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts”. These “organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources” will, the memo promises, be disbanded and uprooted.

This is to be a preemptive war. It will be waged against those individuals – James Comey, John Bolton, George Soros and Reid Hoffman – and institutions, including the Democratic Party – which Stephen Miller has labeled a “terrorist organization” – universities and the media, which threaten Trump’s absolute grip on power.

This is not simply a war on the left, which is a marginal and ineffective force in American society, but a war on the remnants of our liberal institutions and those that support them. Once these establishment institutions and their representatives are neutered those of us on the left will be next.

The memo instructs Federal law enforcement agencies to detain “question and interrogate” individuals suspected or accused of “political violence or lawlessness”. It demands the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) strip organizations of their tax-exempt status if they are seen by the state as “directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism” and report them to “the Department of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution”.

I spent two years with the architects of our emergent fascism when I wrote my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America”.  They do not hide their vision for America. They plan to make the legal system subservient to dogma. They hate the “secular humanist” society based on science and reason. They dream of making the Ten Commandments the basis of the legal system. They plan to teach Creationism or “Intelligent Design” in public schools and make education overtly “Christian”. They brand the LGBTQ community, immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims, criminals, and those dismissed as “nominal Christians” — meaning Christians who do not embrace the fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible — as deviants. These deviants are worthy only of being silenced, imprisoned or killed.

They condemn government assistance programs, especially for the poor. The climate crisis is a hoax. They call for the federal government to be reduced to protecting property rights, “homeland” security and waging war. They want church organizations to run social-welfare agencies and schools. They demand the expansion of the death penalty to include “moral crimes”, including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy, and witchcraft, as well as abortion, which will be treated as murder. They call for a return to white, male patriarchy by mythologizing the past. They demand women be denied contraception, access to abortion and equality under the law. The only legitimate voices in public discourse and the media, to them, are “Christian”. America is sacralized as an agent of God. Those who defy the “Christian” authorities, at home and abroad, are agents of Satan.

These Christian fascists are incapable of dealing in the world of ideas, nuance and complexity. Stunted by emotional numbness and an inchoate rage, they are unable to communicate in any language other than threats and coercion. Diplomacy, scholarship, culture and journalism are an anathema. One’s duty is to obey.

These are the ideological underpinnings of this memo and the society those who authored it plan to create.

Power in the age of Trump is based on blind personal loyalty. Rights are privileges that can be instantly revoked. Lies replace truth. Opinions replace facts. History is erased and rewritten. The cult of leadership replaces politics.

Paranoia grips the ruling elite, composed of narcissists, buffoons and gangsters, who feed off conspiracy theories. They see mortal enemies everywhere and live in a hermetically sealed non-reality-based universe. They are creating a pseudo-democracy populated with pseudo-legislators, pseudo-courts, pseudo-journalists, pseudo-intellectuals, pseudo-Christians and pseudo-citizens.

Fascists mean what they say. The rhetoric condemning the rest of us is not hyperbolic. They cannot be reasoned with. We cannot open channels of dialogue and communication. Our anemic and calcified democracy, including our bankrupt liberal institutions, cannot defeat them. Fascists are the swamp creatures that rise up out of all failed democracies.

Our enemies intend to implement this dystopia. The question is not if, but when. How long before the iron bars slam shut and America as we know it disappears? How long before the state rounds us up and hauls us away?

I can’t say. But it won’t be long.

First published on The Chris Hedges Report.

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