A Show of Force by Fintan O’Toole

Donald Trump’s desire to militarize American politics and politicize the American military is unfinished business. Militarizing American politics means defining all those who do not conform to his version of normality as mortal enemies to be confronted as though they were hostile foreign nations. Politicizing the military means dismantling its self-image as an institution that transcends partisan divisions, is broadly representative of the US population, and owes its primary loyalty not to the president but to the Constitution. These aims are intertwined, but the first cannot be consummated until the second has been accomplished. Trump failed to do this in his first term, but he is determined not to be thwarted again.

In late May 2020, as hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of American cities to protest the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, Trump held a meeting of his advisers in the Oval Office. According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their book Peril (2021), Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s most extreme anti-immigrant policies, advised: “Mr. President, they are burning America down. Antifa, Black Lives Matter, they’re burning it down. You have an insurrection on your hands. Barbarians are at the gate.” The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, responded, “Shut the fuck up, Steve.”

Citing the daily Domestic Unrest National Overview produced for him by his staff, Milley told the commander-in-chief, “They used spray paint, Mr. President. That’s not insurrection.” He pointed to a portrait of Abraham Lincoln: “That guy up there, Lincoln, had an insurrection.” Milley insisted that the

BLM

 protests were “not an issue for the United States military to deploy forces on the streets of America, Mr. President.” Along with other real soldiers, Milley was able to resist Trump’s demand that the 82nd Airborne Division be sent to Washington. But that was then. Now there is no one in the Oval Office to tell Miller to shut the fuck up or to explain to Trump what an insurrection is.

On June 6 federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents targeted what US district judge Charles Breyer cited as “several locations in downtown LA and its immediate surroundings” that were “known to have significant migrant populations and labor-intensive industries.” They arrested forty-four working people, including some day laborers gathered outside two Home Depot stores, and employees of an Ambiance Apparel warehouse in the Fashion District.

On June 7, by which time only around a dozen arrests had been made at protests against these roundups, Trump issued a memorandum to the secretary of defense, attorney general, and secretary of homeland security declaring that these demonstrations “constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.” He authorized his secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, to take federal control of the California National Guard and to “employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary.” By June 9 around 1,700 National Guard soldiers and seven hundred US Marines had been deployed to Los Angeles, even though both the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had made clear that they did not require additional resources to manage the protests or suppress the outbreaks of looting and vandalism that occurred on their margins. As Breyer emphasized in his ruling that Trump’s federalization of the National Guard was “dangerous” and illegal, “There can be no debate that most protesters demonstrated peacefully.”

Trump’s deployment of troops in Los Angeles thus had no military purpose. It can best be thought of as a counterdemonstration. For Trump, those who protest against him are “paid troublemakers, agitators, and insurrectionists.” He cannot imagine large-scale dissent as anything other than a professionally organized conspiracy. The US Army, by this logic, is his own professionally organized crowd. It must be seen on the streets to demonstrate his personal power. That military presence in turn redefines peaceful protesters as enemies of the United States. They cease to be citizens exercising constitutionally protected rights to free speech and assembly and become outlaws and aliens.

Moreover, Trump’s lawyers pleaded in court that protesters need not engage in rebellion to be rebels. Breyer noted in his ruling (which was overturned on appeal) that “in a short paragraph, Defendants suggest that even if there was no rebellion that would justify federalizing the National Guard, there was still a ‘danger of a rebellion.’” The intent could hardly be clearer. So long as Trump has political opponents, their dissent alone makes the danger of rebellion timeless and ubiquitous. What Trump was trying to demonstrate in Los Angeles is that he can project his armed power into every American community at any time. This is a form of wish fulfillment that has deep roots in his psyche.

Everything in Trumpworld happens twice—the first time as performance and the second as reality. In The Art of the Deal (1987), the best seller that formed his personal creation myth, Trump, who dodged the draft for the Vietnam War because of “bone spurs,” included three photographs of himself in military uniform. The attire is that of a dashing officer in some Ruritanian operetta rather than of a soldier in the US Army. In the first two pictures, taken in 1964 to mark his high school graduation from the New York Military Academy, he is the Student Prince. We see him gloriously arrayed in a tall parade hat with a feather plume and a chin strap, a waist-length jacket with rows of brass buttons crossed by a white shoulder belt and adorned with elaborate epaulets and decals, white gloves, and a ceremonial saber. He is a toy soldier in a make-believe army.

But in the third photo he is leading a detachment of armed and uniformed young men on the streets of an American city. Trump is at the head of his prep school’s contingent, marching up Fifth Avenue in New York’s Columbus Day Parade of 1963, a year in which there were already over 16,000 US troops in Vietnam. (Remarkably, his bone spurs do not seem to have inhibited his ability to march in step.) His own caption for the photo is bizarre: “This was my first real glimpse of prime Fifth Avenue property.” He seems at once to be occupying New York and eyeing opportunities in the conquered territory.

Yet Trump came to believe that this playacting made him a real soldier. Michael D’Antonio, in his biography Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success (2015), reported that Trump

insisted that he had actually known military life. In a separate conversation he said, “I always thought I was in the military.” He said that in prep school he received more military training than most actual soldiers did, and he had been required to live under the command of men…who had been real officers and soldiers. “I felt like I was in the military in a true sense.”

Here we may perhaps discern the origins of Trump’s extraordinary ability to eliminate the difference between performance and reality. The archetypal twentieth-century dictators—Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Augusto Pinochet—had been or remained soldiers. Trump was a soldier “in a true sense,” by which he means presumably that a simulacrum of military masculinity is purer than the dirty reality of combat—war without tears.

Until, that is, the spectacle becomes the reality. Trump’s jokes become deadly serious, his provocative rhetoric becomes violent provocation—and his Ruritanian fantasy becomes America’s nightmare. This is what happened on January 6, 2021. Trump’s speech to his supporters before the invasion of the Capitol was that of a general firing his troops up for battle: “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” But Trump did not then actually lead his storm troopers anywhere, and according to his apologists, “fight like hell” was not supposed to be taken literally. Trump’s fascistic militarism retained its performative quality and remained suspended between the playacting war games of his youth and the actual violence he frequently threatens, as commander-in-chief of the world’s most potent army, to unleash. It is thus entirely apt that his big moves toward military dictatorship in recent weeks have been a compound of show business and terror.

Trump’s grand triumphal-march-cum-birthday-party in Washington on June 14 was as much a pageant as a parade: a thousand of the participating troops were dressed in costumes rented from the Motion Picture Costume Company, which describes itself as “a leading supplier of civilian, military, and police wardrobe to the motion picture industry.” The versions of history being played out by the troops depended on the availability of suitable outfits. According to USA Today, “The Army eliminated the War of 1812 and Spanish-American War from the parade after running into trouble with the costuming process.”

The Washington jamboree was thus a show of force in which the show was at least as salient as the force. But the phrase had a parallel and much darker meaning on the streets of Los Angeles. That was a very different kind of costume drama: the dressing up of peaceful protest and some vandalism as a war so that, in Trump’s words, his soldiers could “liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion.” This too was make-believe, and it too was a performance. As California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, put it, “The federal government is taking over the California National Guard and deploying 2,000 soldiers in Los Angeles—not because there is a shortage of law enforcement, but because they want a spectacle.” This spectacle, though, was not meant to entertain. It was a war movie with real guns.

Trump’s militarism remains at the meta stage, which is to say it is still primarily about language and form. The word game he is playing is one in which “rebellion” and “insurrection” are stripped of all their past meanings so that they can be forced into any garb he chooses. This is a further aspect of the drive toward absolute power. As Humpty Dumpty replies when Alice objects to his claim that a word means “just what I choose it to mean,” “The question is, which is to be master—that’s all.” Milley’s rebuke of May 2020—pointing out that Lincoln was the president who faced a real insurrection—was a challenge to Trump’s position as master of meanings. In the second term, there is no place for such insolence.

On June 10, just after he sent the troops into Los Angeles, Trump boasted of rehabilitating the official memory of leaders of that insurrection. Addressing what was in effect a political rally at Fort Bragg, he told uniformed soldiers not only that he had given the base back its original name (it once honored the Confederate general Braxton Bragg, then was renamed Fort Liberty, and under the new dispensation is named after the World War II paratrooper Roland Bragg) but that “we are also going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill, and Fort Robert E. Lee.” It is another word game: officially the military heroes being honored with the latest renamings just happen to have the same surnames as famous Confederate insurrectionists. The refurbished titles of these bases are thus elaborate puns. In this linguistic burlesque it is not only names that mean whatever Trump wants them to mean. It is also the actual history of rebellion against the United States. He has dropped it into a never-never land where it is both remembered as heroic and forgotten as unspeakable—much, of course, like January 6.

Meanwhile, restoring these Confederate designations obliterates the names that replaced them in 2023, the names of women and people of color: Charity Adams, Mary Edwards Walker, Richard Cavazos, William Henry Johnson. This too has purpose. For now at least, the primary goal of Trump’s deployment of troops on the streets of Los Angeles is not the violent suppression of dissent. It is the remaking of the army itself. Trump is instructing the troops on how they must think of themselves and of the nature of the country they are pledged to defend.

Hegseth writes in his best seller The War on Warriors (2024) that he “didn’t want this Army anymore.” This army is the one that actually exists: of its 1.3 million active-duty troops, 230,000 are women, and more than 350,000 are Black. Trump appointed Hegseth to make many of these soldiers invisible. The War on Warriors is subtitled Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. It offers “to recover a true vision of the value of strong men.” These are “red-blooded American men,” men who “respect other strong, skilled, dedicated men” and not “men who are pretending to be women, or vice versa.” It follows that women and Black men who have risen up the ranks of the army are the good soldier’s nemesis: “A black or female soldier who gets promoted, primarily because of the color of their skin or the genitalia between their legs—gets people killed.”

While Hegseth pays lip service to racial equality in the army (“There is no black and white in our ranks. We are all green”), elsewhere in his book he falsely implies that Joe Biden’s appointment of the air force general Charles Q. Brown Jr. to succeed Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs was a diversity hire: “Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt.” This hardly qualifies as racist dog-whistling—the pitch is too low and too brazenly loud. Trump duly fired Brown, an unmistakable overture to the much larger project.

The Trumpian reimagining of the US Army has nothing to do with fighting foreign wars. It is all about reasserting the innately white and male nature of America. According to Hegseth, the military’s “key constituency is normal men”: “Normal dudes have always fought, and won, our wars.” His vision, as he explains it, is to restore not just the value of strong men but also “the importance of normality.” The military is to be reborn as its true self: the embodiment of a nation of red-blooded American men. What that means for abnormal Americans of impure blood does not have to be spelled out.

In this regard, putting troops on the streets of Los Angeles is a training exercise for the army, a form of reorientation. Soldiers are being retrained or loyalty to the president rather than the Constitution. They are meanwhile becoming accustomed to confronting that deviant and anomalous America. In his Fort Bragg speech, Trump invited the troops to see protesters in Los Angeles as invaders: “We will not allow an American city to be invaded and conquered by a foreign enemy, and that’s what they are.” But what was happening in LA was, he claimed, even worse than an armed incursion:

Not only are these service members defending the honest citizens of California, they’re also defending our republic itself, and they are heroes, they’re in there, they’re heroes. They’re fighting for us, they’re stopping an invasion just like you’d stop an invasion. The big difference is most of the time when you stop an invasion, they’re wearing a uniform. In many ways, it’s tougher when they’re not wearing a uniform because you don’t know exactly who they are.

If the army doesn’t know exactly who “they” are, it has to be told. Trump reminded the troops that their purpose is to spread fear: “For our adversaries, there is no greater fear than the United States Army.” Its job now is to spread that fear to an ununiformed and thus unknowable mass of internal enemies. Just as Trump transforms actual rebellion into the vague but omnipresent “danger of a rebellion,” he makes the invading army invisible, amorphous, and fluid. Traditional military doctrine demands a clear understanding of the nature of the threat and the shape of the opposing forces. Contrariwise, in the Trump doctrine the threat must be as nebulous as possible, and the opposing forces must be formless. Thus only the commander-in-chief can say at any given time what they are. The enemy the army must learn to face is one that he, and he alone, can conjure.

In this Trump is offering soldiers what fascist leaders have always offered their followers: a peculiar amalgam of the thrill of transgression and the submissive surrender to absolute obedience. New lieutenants and sergeants are (for now at least) issued a document called The Army: A Primer to Our Profession of Arms. Its prohibition on any appearance of partisanship is emphatic:

The Army as an institution must be nonpartisan and appear so too. Being nonpartisan means not favoring any specific political party or group. Nonpartisanship assures the public that our Army will always serve the Constitution and our people loyally and responsively. When representing the Army or wearing the uniform, you must behave in a nonpartisan way too.

At Fort Bragg, Trump incited the uniformed soldiers arrayed behind him to boo the press and laugh at his political opponents, thus disobeying those prohibitions, while a pop-up shop on the base sold

MAGA-branded clothing and jewelry and faux credit cards labeled “

WHITE PRIVILEGE CARD: TRUMPS EVERYTHING

.” This organized insubordination had an obvious point: soldiers must transfer their obedience from the army and the Constitution to Trump himself.

The manual makes clear to soldiers that they should not obey illegal orders:

When you believe you are being given an illegal order, you should take further action—do your homework, seek counsel, and approach your leaders for clarification. If this fails or you know that what you are being asked to do is unlawful, then it becomes your duty to disobey and to follow the law, no matter how resolute your superiors’ stance.

In this light, it actually suits Trump’s purposes if his federalization of the National Guard is understood to be illegal. His deployment of troops in Los Angeles is intended to dissolve boundaries—between domestic disputes and foreign wars, between reality and performance, and above all between a law-bound democracy and arbitrary rule. Getting soldiers used to following illegal orders and to disregarding their “duty to disobey” is a big step toward autocracy.

As his dithering over whether to bomb Iran showed, Trump has a problem: fascism bends inexorably toward war, but much of his appeal lies in his promise to end America’s foreign conflicts. Part of the solution is to mount one-off spectaculars: B-2 stealth bombers dropping 30,000-pound bunker busters. The other part is to repatriate the idea of boots on the ground. Like iPhones and pharmaceuticals, that kind of war will no longer be made abroad. It will be manufactured all over America.

Resisting the Deadly Language of American Fascism by Henry Giroux

Source: Democratic Underground

Introduction: Language in the Age of Fascist Politics

In the age of expanding fascism, the power of language is not only fragile but increasingly threatened. As Toni Morrison has noted, “language is not only an instrument through which power is exercised,” it also shapes agency and functions as an act with consequences. These consequences ripple through the very fabric of our existence. For in the words we speak, meaning, truth, and our collective future are at risk. Each syllable, phrase, and sentence becomes a battleground where truth and power collide, where silence breeds complicity, and where justice hangs in the balance.

In response, we find ourselves in desperate need of a new vocabulary, one capable of naming the fascist tide and militarized language now engulfing the United States. This is not a matter of style or rhetorical flourish; it is a matter of survival. The language required to confront and resist this unfolding catastrophe will not come from the legacy press, which remains tethered to the very institutions it ought to expose. Nor can we turn to the right-wing media machines, led by Fox News, where fascist ideals are not just defended but paraded as patriotism. In the face of this crisis, Toni Morrison’s insight drawn from her Nobel Lecture becomes all the more urgent and makes clear that the language of tyrants, embodied in the rhetoric, images, and modes of communication characteristic of the Trump regime, is a dead language.

For her “a dead language is not simply one that is no longer spoken or written,” it is unyielding language “content to admire its own paralysis.” It is repressive language infused with power,  censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties and dehumanizing language, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. “Though moribund, it is not without effect” for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, and “suppresses human potential.” Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, or fill baffling silences. This is the language of official power whose purpose is to sanction ignorance and preserve it. Beneath its glittering spectacle and vulgar performance, lies a language that is “dumb, predatory, sentimental.” It offers mass spectacles, a moral sleepwalking state of mind, and a psychotic infatuation for those who seek refuge in unchecked power. It forges a community built on greed, corruption, and hate, steeped in a scandal of hollow fulfillment. It is a language unadorned in its cruelty and addiction to creating an architecture of violence. It is evident in Trump’s discourse of occupation, his militarizing of American politics, and in his use of an army of trolls to turn hatred into a social media spectacle of swagger and cruelty.

 Despite differing tones and political effects, the discourses of the far right and the liberal mainstream converge in their complicity: both traffic in mindless spectacle, absorb lies as currency, and elevate illusion over insight. The liberal mainstream drapes the machinery of cruelty in the language of civility, masking the brutality of the Trump regime and the predatory logic of gangster capitalism, while the far right revels in it, parading its violence as virtue and its hatred as patriotism. Language, once a powerful instrument against enforced silence and institutional cruelty, now too often serves power, undermining reason, normalizing violence, and replacing justice with vengeance. In Trump’s oligarchic culture of authoritarianism, language becomes a spectacle of power, a theater of fear crafted, televised, and performed as a civic lesson in mass indoctrination. If language is the vessel of consciousness, then we must forge a new one– fierce, unflinching, and unafraid to rupture the fabric of falsehood that sustains domination, disposability, and terror. The late famed novelist, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, was right in stating that “language was a site of colonial control,” inducting people into what he called “colonies of the mind.”

The utopian visions that support the promise of a radical democracy and prevent the dystopian nightmare of a fascist politics are under siege in the United States. Increasingly produced, amplified and legitimated in a toxic language of hate, exclusion, and punishment, all aspects of the social and the democratic values central to a politics of solidarity are being targeted by right-wing extremists. In addition, the institutions that produce the formative cultures that nourishes the social imagination and democracy itself are now under attack. The signposts are on full display in a politics of racial and social cleansing that is being fed by a white nationalist and white supremacist ideology that is at the centre of power in the US, marked by fantasies of exclusion and accompanied by a full-scale attack on morality, reason, and collective resistance rooted in democratic struggle. As more people revolt against this dystopian project, neoliberal ideology and elements of a fascist politics merge to contain, distract and misdirect the anger that has materialised out of legitimate grievances against the government, controlling privileged elites and the hardships caused by neoliberal capitalism. The current crisis of agency, representation, values and  language demands a discursive shift that can call into question and defeat the formative culture and ideological scaffolding through which a savage neoliberal capitalism reproduces itself. This warped use of language directly feeds into the policies of disposability that define Trump’s regime.

State Terror and Trump’s Politics of Disposability

As Trump’s regime concentrates power, he invokes a chilling convergence of law, order, and violence, a cornerstone of his politics of disposability. His acts of cruelty and lawlessness, abducting and deporting innocent people, branding immigrants as “vermin,” claiming they are “poisoning the blood” of Americans, and even proposing the legalization of murder for twelve hours, make clear that his violent metaphors are not just rhetorical flourishes. They are policy blueprints. In Trump’s hands, rhetoric becomes a weaponized prelude to atrocity, a tool of statecraft. Threats, hatred, and cruelty are transformed into instruments of governance. 

This is not careless talk, it is a brutal and calculated expression of power. Trump’s threats to arrest and deport critics such as Zohran Mamdani reveal his willingness to use the machinery of the state for political extermination. His targets are predictable: immigrants, Black people, educators, journalists, LGBTQ+ individuals, and anyone who dares to challenge his white Christian nationalist, neoliberal, and white supremacist vision. His language does not merely offend, it incites harm, enacts repression, and opens the gates to state-sanctioned violence. It extends the reign of terror across the United States by labeling protesters as terrorists and deploying the military to American cities, treating them as if they were “occupied territories.”

We now live in a country where class and racial warfare both at home and abroad is on steroids, exposing the killing machine of gangster capitalism in its rawest, most punitive form. Trump supports the genocidal war waged by a state led by a war criminal. Children are being slaughtered in Gaza. Millions of Americans, including poor children, teeter on the edge of losing their healthcare. Funds for feeding hungry children are being slashed, sacrificed to feed the pockets of the ultra-rich. Thousands will die, not by accident, but by design. Terror, fear, and punishment have replaced the ideals of equality, freedom, and justice. Childcide is now normalized as the law of the land.  The lights are dimming in America, and all that remains are the smug, ignorant smirks of fascist incompetence and bodies drained of empathy and solidarity.

Gangster Capitalism and the Death of Empathy

Gangster capitalism lays the foundation for Trump’s racist and fascist politics. As I have noted elsewhere, the United States has descended into a state of political, economic, cultural, and social psychosis, where cruel, neoliberal, democracy-hating policies have prevailed since the 1970s. At the core of this authoritarian shift lies a systemic war on workers, youth, Blacks, and immigrants, increasingly marked by mass violence and a punishing state both domestically and internationally. The U.S. has transformed into an empire dominated by a callous, greedy billionaire class that has dismantled any remnants of democracy, while embracing the fascistic ideology of white Christian nationalism and white supremacy. Fascism now parades not only beneath the flag but also under the Christian cross. America has shifted from celebrating unchecked individualism, as depicted in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, to the glorification of greed championed by Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, and the psychotic avarice of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. This descent into barbarity and psychotic infatuation with violence is further demonstrated by Justin Zhong, a right-wing preacher at Sure Foundation Baptist Church in Indianapolis, who called for the deaths of LGBTQ+ individuals during a sermon. Zhong defended his comments by citing biblical justifications and labeling LGBTQ+ people as “domestic terrorists.” It gets worse. During a Men’s Preaching Night at Sure Foundation Baptist Church, Zhong’s associate, Stephen Falco, suggested that LGBTQ+ people should “blow yourself in the back of the head,” and that Christians should “pray for their deaths.” Another member, Wade Rawley, advocated for violence, stating LGBTQ+ individuals should be “beaten and stomped in the mud” before being shot in the head. Fascism in America, nourished by the toxic roots of homophobia, now cloaks itself not just in the poisonous banner of the Confederate flag, but also in the sacred guise of the Christian cross.

Welcome to Trump’s America, where empathy is now viewed as a weakness and the cold rule of the market is the template for judging all social relations. One noted example can be found in the words of Trump’s on-and-off billionaire ally, Elon Musk, who dismisses empathy as a naive and detrimental force that undermines the competitive, individualistic ethos he champions. Speaking to Joe Rogan on his podcast, Musk specifically stated that “The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy.”  As Julia Carrie Wong observes in The Guardian, the stakes extend far beyond casting empathy as a “parasitic plague.” Empathy’s true danger lies in its role as an enabler—granting permission to dehumanize others and constricting the very “definition of who should be included in a democratic state.” This is a recipe for barbarism, one that allows both states and individuals to turn a blind eye to the genocidal violence unfolding in Gaza and beyond.

Naming the  Deep Roots of the Police State

Ruth Ben-Ghiat has warned that “America has been set on a trajectory to become a police state,” pointing to the passage of the Brutal and Bellicose Bill (BBB), which handed ICE a budget larger than the militaries of Brazil, Israel, and Italy combined. But the roots of this state violence go deeper. The foundation was laid under Bush and Cheney, whose war on terror birthed Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, mass surveillance, and extraordinary rendition. What Trump has done is strip these earlier authoritarian practices of all pretenses, elevating them to the status of governing principles. 

The police state did not begin with Trump; it evolved through him. Now, we see its terrifying maturity: racial cleansing disguised as immigration policy, hatred normalized as political speech, dissent criminalized, birthright citizenship threatened, and everyday life militarized. This is not politics as usual, it is fascism in real time. 

Trump’s fascist politics grows even more dangerous when we recognize that his language of colonization and domination has helped transform American society into what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o chillingly describes as a “war zone.” This war zone now spans the digital terrain—through the internet, podcasts, social media, and educational platforms—becoming a fertile breeding ground for fascist symbols, reactionary values, manufactured identities, and the toxic resurrection of colonial logics. In this battleground of meaning, the language of colonization does more than obscure the truth—it erodes critical thinking, silences historical memory, and disarms the very possibility of empowered agency. What remains in its wake is a nation scarred by suffering, haunted by loneliness, bound by shared fears, and anesthetized by the numbing rituals of a punishing state.

The transformation of America into a war zone finds its most visible expression in the rise of Trump’s omnipresent police state. This authoritarian machinery reveals itself through the mechanisms of state-sponsored terror, a heavily militarized ICE force operating like masked enforcers, and the rapid expansion of detention centers that will increasingly resemble a network of potential forced labor camps. As Fintan O’Toole warns, Trump’s deployment of troops onto the streets of Los Angeles is not merely symbolic—it is “a training exercise for the army, a form of reorientation.” In this reorientation, soldiers are no longer defenders of the Constitution but are being retrained as instruments of authoritarian power, bound not by democratic ideals but by obedience to a singular will. 

Nevertheless, we resist or refuse to name the fascist threat and the ideological and economic architecture of its politics. Still, we recoil from calling the Trump regime what it is: a fascist state engaged in domestic terrorism. Still, we remain blind to the fact that economic inequality, global militarism, and the genocidal logics of empire are not peripheral issues, they are the center. Why is it so difficult to admit that we are living in an age of American fascism? Why do the crimes of the powerful, at home and abroad, so often pass without scrutiny, while the victims are blamed or erased? 

The Collapse of Moral Imagination

What we face is not only a political crisis, partly in the collapse of conscience and civic courage– a profound moral collapse. The war being waged at home by the Trump regime is not just against immigrants or the poor, it is a war on critical thought, on historical memory, on the courage to dissent. It is a war on every institution that upholds critical thinking, informed knowledge, and civic literacy. This is a genocidal war against the very possibility of a just future—a war not merely against, but for stupidity, for the death of morality, and for the annihilation of any robust notion of democracy. Viktor Klemperer, in his seminal work The Language of the Third Reich, offers a crucial lesson from history: “With great insistence and a high degree of precision right down to the last detail, Hitler’s Mein Kampf teaches not only that the masses are stupid, but that they need to be kept that way, intimidated into not thinking.” Klemperer’s analysis reveals that Nazi politics did not arise in a vacuum; it was cultivated in a culture where language itself was the breeding ground of cruelty and control.

Trump’s rhetoric of fear, racial hatred does not emerge in a vacuum. It resonates because it taps into a long and violent history, a history soaked in blood, built on genocide, slavery, colonialism, and exclusion. His language recalls the genocidal campaigns against Indigenous peoples, Black Americans, Jews, and others deemed disposable by authoritarian regimes. It is a necrotic lexicon, resurrected in service of tyranny. It gives birth to politicians with blood in their mouths, who weaponize nostalgia and bigotry, cloaking brutality in the false promises of patriotism and “law and order.”

Language as War and the Return of Americanized Fascism

This is not merely a rhetoric of cruelty, it is a call to arms. Trump’s words do not simply shelter fascists; they summon them. They silence dissent, normalize torture, and echo the logic of death camps, internment camps, and mass incarceration. His discourse, laden with hatred and lies, is designed to turn neighbors into enemies, civic life into war, and politics into a death cult and zone of terminal exclusion. Undocumented immigrants, or those seeking to register for green cards or citizenship, are torn from their families and children, cast into prisons such as Alligator Alcatraz, a grotesque manifestation of the punishing state. As Melissa Gira Grant writes in The New Republic, it is “an American concentration camp…built to cage thousands of people rounded up by ICE,” constructed in a chilling display of colonial disregard, and erected on traditional Miccosukee land without so much as consulting the Tribe. 

This is the face of modern cruelty: language wielded as a tool to orchestrate a spectacle of violence, designed to degrade, divide, and erase. Culture is no longer a peripheral force in politics; it has become the central weapon in the rise of state terrorism. The language of war and complicity normalizes America’s transformation into a monstrous carceral state, a symbol of state-sponsored terror where due process is suspended, and suffering is not just an outcome but the point itself. A culture of cruelty now merges with state sponsored racial terror, functioning as a badge of honor. One example is noted in Trump advisor Laura Loomer,  who ominously remarked that “the wild animals surrounding President Donald Trump’s new immigration detention center… will have ‘at least 65 million meals.” Change.org, along with others such as  Pod Save America co-host Tommy Vietor, noted that her comment “is not only racist, it is a direct emotional attack and veiled threat against Hispanic communities. This kind of speech dehumanizes people of color and normalizes genocidal language.”  Her racist remark not only reveals the profound contempt for human life within Trump’s inner circle but also highlights how cruelty and violence are strategically used as both a policy tool and a public spectacle. Loomer’s remark is not an aberration, it is a symptom of the fascist logic animating this administration, where death itself becomes a political message. Her blood-soaked discourse if symptomatic of the criminogenic politics fundamental to the working of the Trump regime. 

The parallels to history are unmistakable. Loomer’s invocation of death as the outcome of detention recalls the Nazi designation of certain camps as Vernichtungslager, extermination camps, where as Holocaust survivor Primo Levi noted, imprisonment and execution were inseparable. Likewise, the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, though often sanitized in public memory, operated under a similar logic of racial suspicion and collective punishment. The message in each case is clear, as Judith Butler has noted in her writing: some lives are rendered invisible,  deemed unworthy of legal protection, of family, of dignity, of life itself. In fascist regimes, such spaces function not only as instruments of punishment but as symbolic theaters of power, meant to instill terror, enforce obedience, and declare which bodies the state has marked for erasure.

For Trump, J.D. Vance, and their ilk, fascism is not a specter to be feared but a banner to be waved. The spirit of the Confederacy and the corpse-like doctrines of white supremacy, militarism, and neoliberal authoritarianism have returned, this time supercharged by surveillance technologies, financial capital, and social media echo chambers. In the spirit of the Trump regime, the symbols of the Confederacy are normalized. Confederate flags are now waved by neo-Nazis in public squares and parades, while Trump renames US warships and 7 military bases after Confederate officers, reinforcing a dangerous nostalgia for a past rooted in racism and rebellion against the very ideals of unity and equality that this nation claims to uphold.

It should not surprise us that the American public has grown numb with the constant echo chamber of state terrorism playing out in multiple sites of attack. Powerful disimagination machines, mainstream media, right-wing propaganda platforms, tech billionaires, have flooded public consciousness with conspiracy theories, historical amnesia, and spectacularized images of immigrants and others being deported to prisons, foreign Gulags, and moder day black holes. These are not simply entertainment outlets; they are pedagogical weapons of mass distraction, breeding civic illiteracy and moral paralysis. Under their influence, the American people have been placed in a moral and political coma.

White Nationalism and Reproductive Control

Nowhere is this more evident than in the mainstream media’s failure to address the racial and ideological foundations of Trump’s agenda. His attacks on Haitian immigrants, the travel ban on seven African countries, the shutting down of refugee programs, and his open-door policy for white Afrikaners from South Africa are not merely racist; they are explicitly white nationalist. The same ideology drives attacks on women’s reproductive rights, revealing the deep racial and gender anxieties of a movement obsessed with white demographic decline. These are not isolated skirmishes, they are interconnected strategies of domination.

These converging assaults, white nationalism, white supremacy, patriarchal control, and militarized life, manifest most vividly in the war on reproductive freedom. White nationalists encourage white women to reproduce, to hold back demographic change, while punishing women of color, LGBTQ+ people, and the poor. It is a violent calculus, animated by fantasies of purity and control.

The Systemic Assault on Democracy

This is a full-spectrum assault on democracy. Every act of cruelty, every racist law, every violent metaphor chips away at the social contract. A culture of authoritarianism is now used to demean those considered other, both citizens and non-citizens, critics and immigrants, naturalized citizens and those seeking such status. They are labeled as unworthy of citizenship now defined by the Trump regime as a privilege rather than a right. Meanwhile, a media ecosystem built on clickbait and erasure renders both such fascists as legitimate while making invisible the roots of suffering mass suffering and fear, all the while, turning oppression into spectacle and silence into complicity.

In this fog, language itself is emptied of meaning. Truth and falsehood blur. As Paulo Freire warned, the tools of the oppressor are often adopted by the oppressed. We now see that the logic of fascism has seeped into the culture, eroding civic sensibility, destroying moral imagination, and rendering resistance almost unspeakable.

The Normalization of Tyranny

Trump’s authoritarian fantasies do not alienate his base, they galvanize it. What was once unthinkable is now policy. What was once fringe has become mainstream. Cruelty is not something to be deplored and avoided at all costs, it is a central feature of power, wielded with theatrical and spectacularized brutality. Under the current acting ICE Director, Todd Lyons, this punitive logic has intensified: Lyons oversees a $4.4 billion Enforcement and Removal Operations apparatus staffed by over 8,600 agents across 200 domestic locations, using militarized tactics, surprise raids, and aggressive targeting of immigrant communities to sustain a regime of fear. ICE’s presence is at the heart of Trump’s hyper-police state, and its funding has been greatly expanded to $170 billion under Trump’s new budget bill, creating  what journalist Will Bunch calls Trump’s “own gulag archipelago of detention camps across a United States that’s becoming increasingly hard to recognize.” 

Meanwhile, figures like Tom Homan, who led ICE under Trump’s first term, laid the groundwork with Gestapo-style operations, midnight raids, family separations, and public declarations that undocumented immigrants “should be afraid”.  As the “border tzar” under Trump, Homan has initiated deportation policies that are even more aggressively violent and cruel that those that took place in Trump’s first term as president.  As Bunch notes, take the case of “the 64-year-old New Orleans woman, Donna Kashanian, who fled a tumultuous Iran 47 years ago, volunteered to rebuild her battered Louisiana community after Hurricane Katrina, never missed a check-in with U.S. immigration officials ,  and was snatched by ICE agents in unmarked vehicles while she was out working in her garden and sent to a notorious detention center.” These horror stories now take place daily in cities extending from Los Angeles to Providence, Rhode Island. 

A central player in this current regime of state terrorism, systemic racism, mass abductions, deportations, and the criminalization of dissent is Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff. During Trump’s first term, Miller was the driving force behind the Muslim ban, the family separation policy, and assaults on birthright citizenship, all rooted in an unapologetic white supremacist and eugenicist worldview. In Trump’s second term, he has emerged as the architect of even more draconian measures, pushing for mass deportations, the abolition of birthright citizenship, and the revocation of naturalized citizenship for those who fall outside his white Christian vision of who deserves to be called American.

Far-right white nationalist such as Miller, Tom Homan and Todd Lyons, do not treat cruelty as a regrettable side effect. For them, cruelty is the currency of power. Suffering becomes a spectacle, and violence a ritual of statecraft. Tyranny is not inching forward in silence; it is advancing at full speed, cheered on by those who treat fear as a governing principle and pain as public policy.

This is not a passing storm. It is the death throes of a system that has long glorified violence, commodified everything, and fed on division. Trump’s language is not a performance, it is preparation. His words are laying the foundation for a society without empathy, without justice, without democracy.

Reclaiming the Language of Resistance, Reclaiming Democracy

In a decent society, language is the lifeblood of democracy, a vessel of solidarity, truth, and hope. But in Trump’s America, language has become a weapon, dehumanizing, excluding, and dominating. His vision is not a warning; it is a blueprint. We must resist, or we risk losing everything. The stakes are nothing less than the survival of democracy, the retrieval of truth and the refusal to live in a world where cruelty is policy and silence is complicity. What is needed now is not only a rupture in language but a rupture in consciousness, one that brings together the critical illumination of the present with a premonitory vision of what lies ahead if fascist dynamics remain unchecked. As Walter Benjamin insisted, we must cultivate a form of profane illumination, a language that disrupts the spectacle of lies and names the crisis in all its violent clarity. At the same time, as A.K. Thompson argues, we must grasp the future implicit in the present. His notion of premonitions urges us to read the events unfolding around us as urgent warnings, as signs of the catastrophe that awaits if we do not confront and reverse the political and cultural paths we are on. It demands that we see the connections that bind our suffering, rejecting the fragmented reality that neoliberalism forces upon us. The time for complacency is past. The time for a new and more vibrant language, one of critique, resistance, and militant hope, is now. A language capable not only of indicting the present but of envisioning a future rooted in justice, memory, and collective struggle.

As Antonio Gramsci remarked in his Prison Notebooks, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” What is clear is that these morbid symptoms have arrived. Yet, alongside the despair they breed, they also present new challenges and opportunities for revitalized struggles. This is where the power of language comes into play—this is the challenge and opportunity for those who believe in the transformative power of culture, language, and education to address not just the nature of the crisis but its deeper roots in politics, memory, agency, values, power, and democracy itself.

Thom Hartmann: A Very Dark Place

Source: Thom Hartman

Former FBI agent Michael Fienberg has gone public, pointing out that the agency, under the leadership of Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, is purging itself of people who are not members of the Trump cult (my phrase, not his).

Similar cult-like behavior is on vivid display with the White House press secretary, the head of DHS, and the head of the Department of Justice — among numerous other administration officials and elected Republicans — regularly spouting lies and half-truths that target women, immigrants, and Democrats.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is implying that the children who died in the Texas floods were the victims of a nefarious plot — presumably by Democrats or Jews who operate space lasers — to modify the weather, completely ignoring the fact that Republican-aligned fossil fuel billionaires have been engaged in a half-century-long scheme to sabotage our atmosphere with their carbon dioxide emissions in exchange for trillions of dollars in profits. Some of which, no doubt, have been shared with Greene or her campaign.

Multiple administration officials, elected Republicans, and rightwing media cult leaders on platforms like Fox “News” have been amplifying the racist, antisemitic “Great Replacement Theory,” that wealthy Jews are paying to “replace” white people in America with Blacks, Mexicans, and other people of color. This has led to ICE becoming the largest police force in America, with a budget larger than that of the entire Russian military, soon to be sweeping a neighborhood near you in their never-ending hunt for brown-skinned people.

Donald Trump didn’t need to lure his followers into a remote jungle, like Jim Jones did in Guyana. He didn’t need to physically isolate them from the rest of the world. Instead, Trump built his Jonestown right here at home, within the boundaries of our republic, brick by brick. He did it using over 30,000 documented lies, fear, rage, and the intoxicating promise of belonging.

Today, tens of millions of Americans are trapped inside Trump’s reality-warping cult. And just as Jones’ followers drank poisoned Kool-Aid believing it was salvation, Trump’s followers have swallowed his Big Lies and are now willing to sacrifice our Constitution, our democracy, and our future on the altar of one man’s insatiable ego.

This is an old story in new packaging.

Jim Jones wasn’t always a madman. In the beginning, he offered something people desperately wanted: community, belonging, equality. He drew in the lonely, the marginalized, the disillusioned. He offered them meaning, dignity, and the hope of a better world. But slowly, he twisted that hope into a tool of control, weaponizing his followers’ trust for his own wealth, power, and self-aggrandizement.

He didn’t invent the grievances he exploited. For decades, America’s middle class was gutted by Reaganomics and neoliberal trade policies. Jobs were shipped overseas. Unions were crushed. Wages stagnated while billionaires like Trump amassed obscene wealth.

Trump didn’t cause that pain, but he channeled it. He told working-class Americans that he alone could restore their lost greatness. At the 2016 Republican National Convention, he bellowed: “I alone can fix it.”

That wasn’t a campaign promise. It was a cult leader’s declaration. Like Jones, Trump positioned himself not as a servant of the people, but as their savior, the one indispensable man without whom all hope would be lost.

All cults, whether religious or political, thrive on division and a sense of victimhood. Jim Jones taught his followers that outsiders were out to destroy them, that they were surrounded by enemies, traitors, and saboteurs. He warned that the CIA, the media, and shadowy conspirators would annihilate Jonestown unless his people followed him without question.

His enemies list is long: immigrants, Black voters, Muslims, women, Democrats, journalists, scientists, the “deep state,” election officials, even members of his own party who dare to tell the truth. He has spent years feeding his followers a steady diet of paranoia, victimhood, and grievance, convincing them that the only thing standing between them and ruin is him.

And just as Jones’ followers were taught to see dissent as treason, Trump’s followers are conditioned to see any criticism of him as an attack on themselves. They’ve surrendered their own personal identities to him and his cult. When he tells them that an election they lost was stolen, they believe it; not because the evidence says so, but because Trump says so. And in a cult, the cult leader’s word is truth.

Jones kept his followers in a physical jungle, cut off from the outside world. Trump does the same psychologically with the help of billionaire-backed media. His repeated attacks on the press as “the enemy of the people” are no accident: they are a deliberate strategy to isolate his followers in an information silo, where only his voice matters.

Fox “News,” Truth Social, MAGA podcasts, and a network of social media influencers form the walls of this new Jonestown. Alternative facts replace real ones. And when reality intrudes — when courts reject Trump’s lawsuits, when audits confirm his losses — his followers simply double down. “That’s just what the enemy wants us to believe.”

It’s classic cult behavior. And it’s why millions remain convinced that Trump won in 2020, that the COVID vaccine was a hoax or a plot, that January 6th was “legitimate political discourse.” Like Jones, Trump has taught his followers to see the world not as it is, but as he tells them it is.

When Jones’ utopia began to crumble — when defections and investigations threatened his power and a congressional delegation arrived to expose his lies and manipulations — he led his followers into mass suicide. Over 900 men, women, and children perished, drinking poisoned Kool-Aid to prove their loyalty.

Trump, faced with the reality of defeat in 2020, incited his followers to violence rather than admit loss. January 6th was America’s political Jonestown: a desperate, delusional last stand to keep their messiah in power. Trump didn’t just sit back as the Capitol was attacked. He watched with satisfaction, refusing to act for hours, while the very heart of our democracy was desecrated in his name.

And to this day, he defends that insurrection, calling those convicted of violent crimes “hostages,” giving pardons, and encouraging more violence if he’s indicted or loses again. Jones destroyed his followers; Trump is willing to destroy our nation.

I wrote about this back in the summer of 2023 in an article titled, “Will America Face “Narcissistic Collapse” as Trump Descends into Legal Hell?”Narcissistic collapse is what happens when psychopathic narcissists face defeat and humiliation and strike out against the world around them.

Think Hitler in his bunker when my old friend Armin Lehmann, then a 16-year-old Hitler Youth, handed him the news that the war was lost. Armin wrote a book about his experience, In Hitler’s Bunker: A Boy Soldier’s Eyewitness Account of the Fuhrer’s Last Days, which we discussed extensively when he was writing it and during the three years we traveled the world together, lecturing mostly across Europe and the Far East.

Hitler, in those final weeks — Armin told me and the historical record verifies — actually welcomed the destruction of Germany by American and Soviet bombs and tanks.

He hadn’t failed: his narcissism and the cult he had created and surrounded himself with wouldn’t let him confront that.

Instead, in his mind, the German people had failed, his generals had failed, his soldiers had failed. They had failed Germany, but, more importantly they had failed him and his cult — and he wanted them punished for failing him.

When he was finally pushed into full-blown narcissistic collapse — those final days that Armin spent with him — he succumbed to the fate of many severe narcissists who experience a failure so undeniable that it provokes full-blown narcissistic collapse: he killed his wife and then turned the gun on himself.

In the final stages of narcissistic collapse, long before suicide becomes an option, first comes the blaming and the attempts to punish others.

We see this now with Trump blaming the media, the courts, and the Democrats he now openly brags that he “hates” and encourages his cult followers to hate as well.

Historians and political scientists have long warned us about men like Trump. In Strongmenand on her Lucid Substack newsletter, Ruth Ben-Ghiat traces the path of authoritarians like Mussolini, Putin, and Trump: they all consistently cultivate a cult of personality, demonize opponents, destroy the press, capture the courts, collaborate with oligarchs, and use violence as a political tool.

Trump has followed that playbook to the letter.

Jason Stanley, in How Fascism Worksand on his Forward Substack, identifies Trump’s tactics: appeals to a mythic past, relentless lying, glorification of violence, and the creation of a “victim” identity for the dominant group. Steven Hassan, one of America’s foremost experts on cults, calls Trumpism a “destructive political cult” in his book The Cult of Trump and on his Substack newsletter Freedom of Mind.

These aren’t wild theories. They’re the sober assessments of professional scholars and historians who’ve studied how democracies fall and how cults rise.

It’s easy to see Jones’ Kool-Aid as the symbol of his evil, but let’s not forget: Trump’s lies have already cost real lives.

His downplaying of COVID, his undermining of vaccines and masks, his promotion of quack cures like hydroxychloroquine and bleach weren’t just irresponsible: they were deadly. Hundreds of thousands of Americans would be alive today if Trump hadn’t turned public health into a culture war battlefield.

And now, his Big Lies about the election and the “deep state” are poisoning faith in our democracy itself. In poll after poll, a majority of Republicans say they believe Trump won in 2020. They believe it so deeply that they’re passing laws to suppress votes, installing loyalists to oversee elections, and preparing to reject any future result that doesn’t favor their Dear Leader. The poison is spreading and fast.

So what comes next?

Jim Jones didn’t start out plotting mass suicide. He got there one lie, one power grab, one act of cruelty at a time. Trump’s path is no different. His first term tested the boundaries. His second is breaking them.

Already, Trump openly promised dictatorship “on day one.” He’s already pursuing “retribution,” purging the government, and rounding up immigrants into camps. He’s gutted the civil service, weaponized the justice department, and is today using the military for domestic crackdowns.

This isn’t hyperbole. It’s all on the record. And it’s what happens when a cult leader gains the reins of state power, as the world has seen repeatedly throughout history.

We don’t have to follow Trump into the abyss. We can refuse the poison. We can choose the hard work of repairing our democracy, telling the truth, and holding this would-be strongman accountable.

But time is short. The cult is deep, and its leader is relentless.

History tells us where this path ends. Jonestown. Berlin 1933. Rome in 1922. Moscow in 2020. The question is whether we have the courage to change course before it’s too late.

Trump may not have led us into a jungle, but he has led millions into a psychological wilderness, where lies are truth, enemies are everywhere, and only he can lead the way out. Jim Jones led his people to destruction, all in the name of salvation. Trump is leading America down the same road.

We must say no. We must tell the truth. And we must do it now.

The Invisible War of Trump’s Mind

 

    Source: Noam Chomsky Wisdom

A Remarkable Message Worth Noting by anonymous

 

SOURCE: Z

The following message purporting to be from Liz Cheney, is a hoax. She didn’t write it. It’s an excellent and important message, nonetheless. 

---

From Liz Cheney

Dear Democratic Party,

I need more from you.

You keep sending emails begging for $15,

while we’re watching fascism consolidate power in real time.

This administration is not simply “a different ideology.”

It is a coordinated, authoritarian machine — with the Supreme Court, the House, the Senate, and the executive pen all under its control.

And you?

You’re still asking for decorum and donations. WTF.

That won’t save us.

I don’t want to hear another polite floor speech.

I want strategy.

I want fire.

I want action so bold it shifts the damn news cycle — not fits inside one.

Every time I see something from the DNC, it’s asking me for funds.

Surprise.

Those of us who donate don’t want to keep sending money just to watch you stand frozen as the Constitution goes up in flames — shaking your heads and saying,

“Well, there’s not much we can do. He has the majority.”

I call bullshit.

If you don’t know how to think outside the box…

If you don’t know how to strategize…

If you don’t know how to fight fire with fire…

what the hell are we giving you money for?

Some of us have two or three advanced degrees.

Some of us have military training.

Some of us know what coordinated resistance looks like — and this ain’t it.

Yes, the tours around the country? Nice.

The speeches? Nice.

The clever congressional clapbacks? Nice.

That was great for giving hope.

Now we need action.

You have to stop acting like this is a normal presidency that will just time out in four years.

We’re not even at Day 90, and look at the chaos.

Look at the disappearances.

Look at the erosion of the judiciary, the press, and our rights.

If you do not stop this, we will not make it 1,460 days.

So here’s what I need from you — right now:

⸻

1. Form an independent, civilian-powered investigative coalition.

I’m talking experts. Veterans. Whistleblowers. Journalists. Watchdog orgs.

Deputize the resistance. Build a real-time archive of corruption, overreach, and executive abuse.

Make it public. Make it unshakable.

Let the people drag the rot into the light.

If you can’t hold formal hearings, hold public ones.

If Congress won’t act, let the country act.

This isn’t about optics — it’s about receipts.

Because at some point, these people will be held accountable.

And when that day comes, we’ll need every name, every signature, every illegal order, every act of silence — documented.

You’re not just preserving truth — you’re preparing evidence for prosecution.

The more they vanish people and weaponize data, the more we need truth in the sunlight.

⸻

2. Join the International Criminal Court.

Yes, I said it. Call their bluff.

You cannot control what the other side does.

But you can control your own integrity.

So prove it. Prove that your party is still grounded in law, human rights, and ethical leadership.

Join.

If you’ve got nothing to hide — join.

Show the world who’s hiding bodies, bribes, and buried bank accounts.

Force the GOP to explain why they’d rather protect a war criminal than sign a treaty.

And while you’re at it, publicly invite ICC observers into U.S. borders.

Make this administration explain — on camera — why they’re terrified of international oversight.

⸻

3. Fund state-level resistance infrastructure.

Don’t just send postcards. Send resources.

Channel DNC funds into rapid-response teams, legal defense coalitions, sanctuary networks, and digital security training.

If the federal government is hijacked, build power underneath it.

If the laws become tools of oppression, help people resist them legally, locally, and boldly.

This is not campaign season — this is an authoritarian purge.

Stop campaigning.

Act like this is the end of democracy, because it is.

We WILL REMEMBER the warriors come primaries.

Fighting this regime should be your marketing strategy.

And let’s be clear:

The reason the other side always seems three steps ahead is because they ARE.

They prepared for this.

They infiltrated school boards, courts, local legislatures, and police unions.

They built a machine while you wrote press releases.

We’re reacting — they’ve been executing a plan for years.

It’s time to shift from panic to blueprint.

You should already be working with strategists and military minds on PROJECT 2029,

a coordinated, long-term plan to rebuild this country when the smoke clears.

You should be publicly laying out:

• The laws and amendments you’ll pass to ensure this never happens again

• The systems you’ll tear down and the safeguards you’ll enshrine

• The plan to hold perpetrators of human atrocities accountable

• The urgent commitment to immediately bring home those sold into slavery in El Salvador

You say you’re the party of the people?

Then show the people the plan.

⸻

4. Use your platform to educate the public on rights and resistance tactics.

If they’re going to strip us of rights and lie about it — arm the people with truth.

Text campaigns. Mass trainings. Downloadable “Know Your Rights” kits. Multilingual legal guides. Encrypted phone trees.

Give people tools, not soundbites.

We don’t need more slogans.

We need survival manuals.

⸻

5. Leverage international media and watchdogs.

Stop hoping U.S. cable news will wake up.

They’re too busy playing both sides of fascism.

Feed the real stories to BBC, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Reuters, Der Spiegel — hell, leak them to anonymous dropboxes if you have to.

Make what’s happening in America a global scandal.

And stop relying on platforms that are actively suppressing truth.

Start leveraging Substack. Use Bluesky.

That’s where the resistance is migrating. That’s where censorship hasn’t caught up.

If the mainstream won’t carry the truth — outflank them.

Get creative. Go underground. Go global.

If our democracy is being dismantled in broad daylight, make sure the whole world sees it — and make sure we’re still able to say it.

⸻

6. Create a digital safe haven for whistleblowers and defectors.

Not everyone inside this regime is loyal.

Some are scared. Some want out.

Build the channels.

Encrypted. Anonymous. Protected.

Make it easy for the cracks in the system to become gaping holes.

And while you’re at it?

Stop ostracizing MAGA defectors.

Everyone makes mistakes — even glaring, critical ones.

We are not the bullies.

We are not the ones filled with hate.

And it is not your job to shame people who finally saw the fire and chose to step out of it.

They will have to deal with that internal struggle — the guilt of putting a very dangerous and callous regime in power.

But they’re already outnumbered. Don’t push them back into the crowd.

We don’t need purity.

We need numbers.

We need people willing to burn their red hats and testify against the machine they helped build.

⸻

7. Study the collapse — and the comeback.

You should be learning from South Korea and how they managed their brief rule under dictatorship.

They didn’t waste time chasing the one man with absolute immunity.

They went after the structure.

The aides. The enforcers. The loyalists. The architects.

They knocked out the foundation one pillar at a time —

until the “strongman” had no one left to stand on.

And his power crumbled beneath him.

You should be independently investigating every author of Project 2025,

every aide who defies court orders,

every communications director repeating lies,

every policy writer enabling cruelty,

every water boy who keeps this engine running.

You can’t stop a regime by asking the king to sit down.

You dismantle the throne he’s standing on — one coward at a time.

⸻

Stop being scared to fight dirty when the other side is fighting to erase the damn Constitution.

They are threatening to disappear AMERICANS.

A M E R I C A N S.

And your biggest move can’t be another strongly worded email.

We don’t want your urgently fundraising subject lines.

We want backbone.

We want action.

We want to know you’ll stand up before we’re all ordered to sit down — permanently.

We are watching.

And I don’t just mean your base.

I mean millions of us who see exactly what’s happening.

I’ve only got 6,000 followers — but the groups I’m in? The networks I touch? Over a quarter million.

Often when I speak, it echoes.

But when we ALL

speak, it ROARS with pressure that will cause change.

We need to be deafening.

You still have a chance to do something historic.

To be remembered for courage, not caution.

To go down as the party that didn’t just watch the fall — but fought the hell back with everything they had.

But the clock is ticking.

And the deportation buses are idling.