Eddie Glaude's Call to America

 

Musings

 

Chris Hedges: On the Precipice of Darkness

 

 

 The world is getting darker by the day.....the sun will rise again, thankfully. whether we're here or not...perhaps it's better that we're not here..the world will heal faster without us here...

Alex Henderson: Americans in 'denial' as 'Age of Trump' spins 'out of control'

Source: MSN

The ironic term "Good Germans" is used to describe Germans who, during the 1930s and 1940s, didn't actively support Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime but looked the other way and downplayed or ignored the atrocities that were taking place. Often, "Good Germans" would argue that sure, Hitler is brash, but his opponents are overreacting to his inflammatory speeches.

Salon's Chauncey DeVega, in an article published on July 18, fears that in 2025, too many "Good Americans" — not unlike the "Good Germans" of the 1930s and 1940s — are downplaying the most disturbing parts of Donald Trump's second presidency.

"I have studied accounts from people who lived through authoritarian and fascist regimes in places like Chile, Argentina and Germany," DeVega warns. "One of the common threads is how citizens compromised their ethics and, in the end, were stained in ways both large and small. For some, this took the form of actively working with the regime against their family, friends and neighbors. They raised high the banner of patriotism! Law and order! The Dear Leader is always right! Other denizens chose denial and willful ignorance, turning inward to a fantasyland where, somehow, everything was normal, even when it was not."

DeVega continues, "Those 'Good Germans.' How could they ever do such things? We 'Good Americans' will, in all probability, not be much different."

Americans, DeVega laments, "are being intentionally spun out of control by Trump and the larger right-wing anti-democracy movement."

"These last few weeks have seen Trump's reign as a wannabe king and aspiring dictator made even more secure by a series of decisions by the right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court, who have neutered the ability of the federal courts to slow down the (Trump) Administration's assaults on the rule of law and democracy," DeVega observes. "In violation of decades — and centuries — of norms and precedents, Trump has expanded the use of the military and federalized National Guard as part of his mass deportation campaign. He is also claiming the right to nullify and generally ignore any law he does not agree with."

DeVega adds, "According to a recent whistleblower report, Justice Department official Emil Bove, who Trump has nominated for a federal judgeship, suggested telling courts that ruled against the (Trump) Administration 'f——— you' and then 'ignor(ing) their orders.' This is part of a much larger pattern where Trump, his staffers and other mouthpieces have argued he does not have to obey the Constitution and its protections for civil and human rights. The president and his agents are becoming even louder with their threats to arrest and imprison members of the Democratic Party for 'crimes.'"

Despite the massive No Kings Day protests of June 14, DeVega observes, the Trump Administration's "attempts to end multiracial pluralistic democracy" are "accelerating with little effective resistance from civil society or the mass public."

"To ignore these dimensions of our current national emergency is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the existential danger we are facing," DeVega explains. "To wit: Public opinion polls, focus groups and other data consistently show that the vertigo we are experiencing during this Age of Trump is getting worse…. Ultimately, Americans are quickly running out of time to stop our democracy and society from spinning out of control. However the Age of Trump may end, I fear it will show that too many Americans, along with their 'responsible' mainstream leaders and other elites, did not pay close attention when the flight crew told them about the escape doors and flotation devices."

The Gaza Riviera by Chris Hedges

 

Source: Chris Hedges

Starvation is not a pretty sight. I covered the famine in Sudan in 1988 that took an estimated 250,000 lives. There are streaks in my lungs — scars from standing amid hundreds of Sudanese who were dying of tuberculosis. I was strong and healthy and fought off the contagion. They were weak and emaciated and did not.

I watched hundreds of skeletal figures, ghosts of human beings, trudge at a glacial pace across the barren Sudanese landscape. Hyenas, accustomed to eating human flesh, routinely picked off small children. I stood over clusters of bleached human bones on the outskirts of villages where dozens of people, too weak to walk, had laid down in a group and never got up. Many were the remains of entire families.

The starved lack enough calories to sustain themselves. They eat anything to survive — animal feed, grass, leaves, insects, rodents, even dirt. They suffer from constant diarrhea. They have trouble breathing because of respiratory infections. They rip up tiny bits of food, often spoiled, and ration it in a vain attempt to hold off the gnawing hunger pains.

Starvation reduces the iron needed to produce hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body, and myoglobin, a protein that provides oxygen to muscles, coupled with a lack of vitamin B1, which affects heart and brain function. Anemia sets in. The body, in essence, feeds on itself. Tissue and muscle waste away. It is impossible to regulate body temperature. Kidneys shut down. Immune systems crash. Vital organs atrophy. Blood circulation slows. The volume of blood decreases. Infectious diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera become an epidemic, killing people by the thousands.

It is impossible to concentrate. Emaciated victims succumb to mental and emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved. The heart muscle is weakened. Victims, even at rest, are in a state of virtual heart failure. Wounds do not heal. Vision is impaired with cataracts, even among the young. Finally, wracked by convulsions and hallucinations, the heart stops. This process can last up to 40 days for an adult. Children, the elderly and the sick expire at faster rates.This is the future Israel has preordained for the two million people in Gaza.

Palestinians shove to receive a hot meal at a charity kitchen in the al-Mawasi area of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on July 22, 2025. (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)

But it is not the future Israelis see. They see paradise. They see an ethno-nationalist Jewish state where Palestinians, whose land they stole and occupied and whose people they have subjugated and forced into an apartheid existence, do not exist. They see cafes and hotels rising up where thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of bodies lie buried under the rubble. They see tourists frolicking on the Gaza beachfront, a vision enhanced by an Artificial Intelligence-generated video uploaded to social media by Israeli Minister of Innovation, Science and Technology, Gila Gamliel. It is what a Gaza devoid of Palestinians would look like, echoing the absurdist AI video posted by Donald Trump.

In the new video, carefree Israelis eat at seaside restaurants. Anchored in the sparkling Mediterranean are luxury yachts. Gleaming hotels and office high rises, including a Trump Tower, dot the beachfront. Attractive residential neighborhoods stand where now there are broken, jagged mounds of concrete. The video shows Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, as well as Trump and Melania, strolling along the seaside.

Gamliel, like other Israeli leaders and Trump, cynically uses the term “voluntary emigration” to describe the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. This omits the stark choice Israel actually offers the Palestinians — leave or die.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has called for a “security annexation” of the northern Gaza Strip and vowed that Gaza will become an “inseparable part of the State of Israel.” He made the remarks at a Knesset conference called “The Gaza Riviera — from vision to reality,” which presented proposals for the building of Jewish colonies in Gaza. Smotrich said Israel would “relocate Gazans to other countries,” and that Trump endorsed the plan.

Israeli Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu, who once proposed dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza, declared that “All Gaza will be Jewish.” The Israeli government “is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out,” Eliyahu said. He described Palestinians as Nazis. “Thank God, we are wiping out this evil. We are pushing this population that has been educated on ‘Mein Kampf.’”

Genocidal killers embrace fantasies of eradicating a native population and expanding their ethnonationalist state. The Nazis carried out their genocidal assault, which included mass starvation, on Slavs, Eastern European Jews and other indigenous people, dismissed as Untermenschen, or subhumans. Colonists were then to be shipped to Central and Eastern Europe to Germanize the occupied territory.

These killers do not reckon with the darkness they unleash. The upscale beachfront properties dreamt of by Israel will never appear, just as the modern, exclusively Serb capital, with its golden domed cathedral, imposing presidency building, 15-story clock tower, state-of-the-art medical center and national theater with a 72-foot revolving stage was never built on the ruins of Bosnia.

Rather, there will be ugly apartment blocks, populated by the usual miscreants, proto-fascists, racists and mediocrities who live in the Jewish colonies in the West Bank. These ultranationalists, who have formed rogue militias to seize Palestinian land and joined the Israeli army in murdering over 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since Oct. 7, will define Israel. They are the Israeli version of the 3-million-strong Pancasila Youth — Indonesia’s equivalent of the Brown Shirts or the Hitler Youth — that in 1965 helped carry out the genocidal mayhem that left half a million to one million dead.

These rogue militias, equipped with automatic weapons provided by the Israeli government, lynched Saifullah Musallet, a 20-year-old Palestinian-American, who was attempting to protect his family’s land two weeks ago. He is the fifth U.S. citizen killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7.

Once these Israeli goons and thugs are done with the Palestinians, they will turn on each other.

The genocide in Gaza signals the abolition, for Israelis as well as Palestinians, of the rule of law. It marks the obliteration of even the pretense of an ethical code. Israelis are the barbarians they condemn. If there is any warped justice in this genocide it is that Israelis, once they finish with the Palestinians, will be forced to live together in moral squalor.

Traitors to the Earth: Fascism, Christian Nationalism, and the Tech Elite

 

 

Source: TruthOut

What do we do when they preach against empathy? This question lies at the heart of the current economic landscape, where ideologies of fascism, Christian nationalism, and the influence of the tech elite intersect to shape our financial future.

David Corn: Donald Trump - The Boy Who Cried Hoax

Source: Mother Jones

 So often when Donald Trump is cornered, he manages to escape thanks to a simple tactic: He cries hoax. With his latest troubles—caused by his administration’s declaration that there’s nothing new to see or investigate regarding deceased pedophile and sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein—Trump is once again screaming “hoax.” Yet it is not quite doing the trick.

One of Trump’s brilliant moves as a demagogic politician was to train his supporters to believe that he was the target of conspiratorial forces and “fake news.” So whenever he was hit by a critical news report or investigation, he could explain it away by declaring that he was a victim of evil forces that aimed to destroy the nation.

This began in the earliest days of his first presidency. As the press, the FBI, and congressional committees investigated Moscow’s attack on the 2016 election and interactions between Trump’s campaign and Russia, Trump tried to swat all that away by declaring it was a “hoax” and a “witch hunt”—a product of “fake news.” No matter that the intelligence community, a special counsel, and congressional committees repeatedly confirmed the basic facts of that scandal—Vladimir Putin launched a covert operation to try to help Trump win, and Trump and his campaign aided and abetted that attack by repeatedly echoing Putin’s false denials—Trump consistently repeated these catchphrases. “Russia, Russia, Russia” became the derisive nickname he deployed to obliterate a significant reality of the 2016 election.

It worked.

His devotees fully embraced his characterization. Right-wing media constantly cast the Russia investigation as a scheme orchestrated by Democrats, something called the Deep State, and mainstream media. For Trumpland, it was indeed a “hoax.” For instance, Kash Patel, now Trump’s FBI director, has routinely asserted that the Russia inquiry was “the greatest political scandal” in US history, describing it as a con job entirely cooked up by spooks, Dems, and journalists. He has gone so far as to claim absurdly that Russia did not intervene in the 2016 election.

Once Trump established this Russia hoax narrative, he found he could apply it to other jams. When he was impeached for the first time for having threatened to withhold weapons from Ukraine unless its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, launched an investigation of Joe Biden, Trump called this affair a “hoax,” comparing it to “Russia, Russia, Russia.” It was also a “witch hunt,” a “scam,” and a “sham.” Once more, Trump was the victim of diabolical plotting. During the impeachment hearings, Trump’s Republican defenders tried to deflect from the topic at hand by tossing out conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation.

When Trump lost his re-election bid in 2020, it was, in his view, another “hoax.” The Deep State—along with China, Venezuela, Dominion Voting Systems, the media, Italian satellite operators, and election workers in Atlanta—had rigged the election. Trump’s assaults on the news media for covering up the purported theft of the election were a callback to his “Russia, Russia, Russia” rhetoric.

After the insurrectionist January 6 riot that Trump incited, as the House moved toward a second impeachment of Trump, he again hurled the same charge: “The impeachment hoax is a continuation of the greatest and most vicious witch hunt in the history of our country.” For Trump, every new political or legal threat he faced was an extension of the vicious and underhanded war against him that began with the Russia investigation.

When the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago residence in search of classified documents Trump took with him when he left the White House, his spokesman declared, “The Democrats have spent seven years fabricating hoaxes and witch hunts against President Trump, and the recent unprecedented and unnecessary raid is just another example of exactly that.” Trump called the prosecution that ended with him being convicted of 34 felony counts a “scam” and a “sham.” And E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit accusing Trump of sexual assault? “It is a hoax and a lie just like all the other hoaxes that have been played on me for the past seven years,” Trump said in a deposition. At her one debate with Trump during the 2024 election, Kamala Harris slammed Trump for having said there were “very fine people on both sides” following the 2017 rally in Charlottesville organized by white supremacists that became violent; two days later, Trump called this the “Charlottesville hoax.”

In each of these episodes, the hoax strategy succeeded. At least with his people. MAGA World stood by him, and the right-wing media embraced his false accusations. So much so he won his way back to the White House.

Now he’s facing a tsunami of outrage and criticism from Republicans and MAGA champions for sitting on Epstein material that they assume would bolster their long-running QAnon-ish conspiracy theories. And Trump, yet again, is turning to his standby sidestep. He’s calling this a “hoax.”

As the anger swelled among his flock this past weekend, on his social media platform, Trump compared the fuss to the “Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax.” He complained that “selfish people” were trying to “hurt” his “PERFECT Administration” over Epstein. He asserted that the Epstein files were “written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration.” That is, he was advancing another conspiracy theory: His enemies had concocted fake Epstein files. That didn’t make much sense. But Trump was trying to rope this latest hullabaloo into his long-running “hoax” narrative.

That post did not stem the fury from the right. Many replies to it were from self-declared Trump backers who expressed dismay that Trump was not keeping what they believed was a promise to tell all about Epstein. MAGA influencers called for firing Attorney General Pam Bondi. Congressional Republicans urged the release of files from the Epstein case.

On Wednesday, Trump tried again with another post. He once more proclaimed the whole Epstein thing was a hoax akin to “Russia, Russia, Russia.” He brayed, “these Scams and Hoaxes are all the Democrats are good at – It’s all they have… Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker. They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will, even after being conned by the Lunatic Left for 8 long years.” He pulled out his classic pushback: the “Fake News” and Democrats were orchestrating “the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.”

Talking to reporters in the Oval Office later in the day, Trump reiterated his new mantra: “I know it’s a hoax. It’s started by Democrats. It’s been run by the Democrats for four year….Some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans fall into the net… I call it the Epstein hoax.”

Factcheck: Trump was not telling the truth. Most of the noise about the Epstein files has arisen not from Democrats but from MAGA—people who Trump now denounces as idiots and “past supporters.” And Trump, no surprise, did not specify what he means by “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.” There’s no question that his Justice Department and FBI released a memo declaring that Epstein had committed suicide and that there were no new and undisclosed revelations—and no so-called clients list—within the files of his two criminal cases. Where’s the hoax? It looked as if Trump believed that after all these years of pushing the “hoax” button, he could do so once again as a getaway. Drop the H-word and—presto!—his believers will fall in line.

But the MAGA crowd wants more. After years of the right promoting conspiracy theories that demonized Democrats and elites as cannibals and pedophilic globalists—see Pizzagate and QAnon—Trumpers expected the Trump administration to finally produce the goods with presumed evidence from the Epstein case. Patel, Donald Trump Jr., deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, and other MAGA leaders had long demanded the Epstein files be released. Trump himself had indicated he would do that if elected to a second term.

Instead, nothing has been revealed, and Trump is saying it’s time to move on and castigating his fans who feel betrayed. That’s not playing well. There’s no telling yet if his familiar move of yelling “hoax” will work this time. His steady shouts of “hoax” over the years have themselves been a long-running hoax. Usually, his voters responded as he wished. This time they may see the real hoax.

Peter Thiel Reveals How Scared Oligarchs Are of the People

 

Source: Rambler Henry

Billionaire Peter Thiel had a fascinating televised moment the other day when asked by Piers Morgan what he thought about the public making a hero of the man suspected of murdering health insurance CEO Brian Thompson. The way he stumbled and stuttered when trying to answer the question gives a lot of insight into how terrified such people are of the public turning against them one day.

“And to those who think this shooter is a hero, because he did it because he said this healthcare executive is presiding over a healthcare system which kills thousands of Americans by denying them cover, what would you say to them?” Morgan asked.

Thiel paused for a long time, and then stuttered for a long time, and then eventually got out the words, “It’s, I don’t know what, what to say? I, I think I still think you have, you should try to make an argument. And I, I think this is, this is you should, you know, there may be things wrong with our health care system, but you have, you have to make an argument, and you have to try to find a way to convince people and and change, change it by by that, and this is, you know, this is not going to work.”

For those who don’t know, Thiel is a proper deep state oligarch who owes his vast fortune to his enmeshment within the US military-intelligence machine. His company Palantir is a CIA-backed surveillance and data mining tech company with intimate ties to both the US intelligence cartel and to Israel, playing a crucial role in both the US empire’s sprawling surveillance network and Israeli atrocities against Palestinians. He backed Trump in 2016, and Vice President-Elect JD Vance was a protégé of his, so this man is thoroughly entrenched in the halls of power.

Thiel’s blustering response when asked what he thought about the public support we are seeing for the practice of assassinating health insurance CEOs reveals a lot about the kinds of things that keep men like Peter Thiel up at night.

Plutocrats like Thiel are constantly thinking about the fact that ordinary people vastly outnumber them and can kill them at any time. They think about it way more often than ordinary people do. It’s a point that they are acutely aware of at all times. It consumes their attention. They are always working on manipulating public consciousness to ensure that we don’t think as much as they do about how many more of us there are of them, and how we don’t have to put up with their domination of our society if we don’t want to.

As Michael Parenti once put it:

“I tell students when they say, ‘Oh they don’t care what we think. They ignore us’, and all that, and I say, ‘Oh no, no. That’s the only thing they care about you. The only thing they care about you is what you’re thinking. They don’t care if you eat correctly, they don’t care how your living conditions are, they don’t care that they’ve built up an inhuman and irrational traffic system that’s strangulating us and polluting our air, they don’t care about anything. The only thing about you they care about is what you’re thinking. In the morning, they start, ‘What’s going to be the story today? How do we manipulate, how do we control, how do we contain, how do we influence, how do we act upon what it is that they have in their minds?’”

Manipulating public consciousness is of existential importance to the ruling class, because no matter how many billions of dollars you amass, at the end of the day you’re still a soft skin sack of blood and bones like anybody else, and you share a society with huge numbers of people who can very easily hurt you if they want to. That’s why our minds are constantly being hammered with propaganda into accepting the status quo politics upon which our rulers have built their kingdoms.

But we’re seeing the propaganda losing its grip on our minds. Hollywood tried to train people to believe heroes look like soldiers and cops, or billionaires using their wealth to become Iron Man and Batman, and then the people chose as their hero a guy who was arrested for shooting a health insurance CEO. The other day a DJ threw up pictures of the suspected shooter Luigi Mangione during his concert and drew cheers from the crowd — and this was at a Disney-themed show.

So that’s why the empire managers are pushing to get their killer robots up and running as quickly as possible.

Israel is reportedly preparing to deploy dozens of weapons systems in the West Bank which are capable of firing deadly rounds without human intervention, meaning fully autonomous killing machines as opposed to remote-controlled. These killer robots have already been in use on Israel’s border with Gaza.

Various military robots have been tested in Gaza since Israel’s onslaught on the enclave began last year, and now they’re expanding the field testing of their murderbots to the West Bank as well. Of all the horrible things Israel and its western backers do to the Palestinians, among the most evil is the way they use them as lab rats to field test new weapons systems so the rest of the empire can learn how effective those systems are.

You may be sure that empire managers like Peter Thiel are watching these developments with keen interest. Militarized robots are the anti-guillotine. They’re the final solution to the ancient “there are a lot more of us than there are of our rulers” problem. Everyone with wealth and power has been eyeing their incremental rollout with intense interest while trying to play it cool.

So at this point we’re essentially looking at a race to see if the oligarchic empire can manufacture the necessary environment to allow the use of robotic security forces to lock their power in place forever before the masses get fed up with the increasing inequalities and abuses of the status quo and decide to force a better system into existence.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Don't Take Instruction On How To Live Your Life From A Stark Raving Mad Society

 

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.