Chris Hedges: The Empire Self Destructs

 

Trump II Is a Formula for Hell on Earth by

 

Source: Fair Observer

Honestly, as 2025 begins, isn’t it finally time to reimagine American history? So, what do you think of this: George Trump, Abraham Trump, Ulysses S. Trump, Franklin D. Trump, Dwight D. Trump, John F. Trump, Lyndon B. Trump, and even Richard M. and George W. Trump. And yes, of course, on January 20, Donald J. Trump (of all people) will once again be president of these distinctly (dis-)United States of America.

As Joe Biden hobbles into… well, if not the future, then some unknown past, HE looms over us, the political equivalent of a giant armed drone about to be back in the skies of our lives. Of all the Americans whom, once upon a time, I couldn’t have dreamed of being in the White House, Donald J. Trump would have been at the top of my list. No longer, of course. Sometimes I even imagine calling my parents back from the dead and trying to explain President Trump (twice!) to them. They would be… well, flabbergasted is far too modest a word for it, even if, to put him in a context they would have understood, I had compared him to a nightmarish figure of their own time: Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

My mother was a political and theatrical caricaturist in the 1950s. Of all the drawings of hers I still have, the one that, grimly enough, I keep propped up near my desk in the room where I work — call me a masochist, if you will — is a caricature she did for the New York Post (in the pre-Murdoch days when it was still a liberal publication) of that grimmest of senators of her era, Joe McCarthy. He was the fellow who claimed that the State Department contained hundreds — yes, hundreds! — of communists. She drew that eerily smiling portrait in the spring of 1954 at the time of the Army-McCarthy hearings when he insisted that the US military, too, was filled with commies and, in the process, essentially took himself down.

I was then nine years old and Senator McCarthy’s face was quite literally the first one I ever saw on a black-and-white TV in my house after the Post hired my mom to draw those televised congressional hearings. On opening our front door and walking in from school on whatever spring day that was, the face on that new TV screen was… well, the political precursor to D.J.T., although McCarthy looked far more like the evil monster he was than The Donald does. (No yellow hair and burnished red face for him.)

And yes, he was indeed a monster (and not just an anti-communist maniac, but an antisemitic one, too). Here’s the difference, though: he could indeed wound officials in Washington, as well as figures in the entertainment industry and elsewhere, destroying careers, but he was a senator and no more than that. In other words, he never truly entered the ultimate realms of American, not to speak of global, power.

Unlike Donald Trump, he was never chosen to be president, no less reelected to that powerful position in an era when, thanks in part to this country’s Global War on Terror, whoever holds that office has become a far more powerful figure in the American political landscape. Senator McCarthy never had a significant hand in creating the national budget. He undoubtedly couldn’t have imagined taking stances like insisting that this country should possess Greenland or repossess the Panama Canal, no less referring to Canada as “the 51st state” and its leader as “Governor Justin Trudeau,” as You Know Who did only recently. He could never have ordered the US military to do anything, no less potentially round up and deport masses of immigrants (though, had he been alive in 2017, he might at least have agreed with Donald Trump that a group of neo-Nazi and white nationalist protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia, included some “very fine people”).

Strangely enough, however, they had more in common than just a certain grim similarity in style, belligerence, and subject matter. The two of them were also linked by a single adviser, one Roy Cohn, who helped them both find their all-too-aggressive footing in this ever stranger world of ours.

A new “golden” age

Now, of course, we’re about to face the modern Joe McCarthy the third time around (counting, of course, his loss in 2020 that he’s never stopped disputing). He will return to the White House on a planet that, in more than one sense, is all too literally going to hell in a handbasket. I mean, just imagine this: in the last election, 49.7% of American voters and a striking number of energy industry funders decided to send back to the Oval Office a man whose tagline was, above all else, “drill, baby, drill” — a phrase that, in reality, should have been “heat, baby, heat,” or “destroy, baby, destroy,” in a world that’s already been warming to the boiling point, with year after year of unprecedented high temperatures even when he wasn’t in office. We’re talking about a candidate who has openly sworn that, on Day One back in the White House, he will direct his government to do everything in its power to turn this planet into an all-too-literal hothouse.

So, expect a presidency focused — to the extent that Donald Trump can truly focus on anything (except, of course, himself) — on drilling, drilling, drilling for oil and natural gas, and so adding significantly more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere (and waters) of Planet Earth. Which means more wildfires, droughts, unprecedented storms, you name it. And that, of course, is just to begin to lay out the nightmare to come. And don’t forget that, at least until (as predictably will happen) Trump turns on him, it looks like we’ll have as co-president the richest person on earth, that potential future first trillionaire Elon Musk. We’re talking, of course, about the fellow who only recently and all too symbolically gave his support to Germany’s rising anti-immigrant neo-Nazi party, the Alternative für Deutschland. (“Only the AfD can save Germany.”)

Yes, Donald Trump is guaranteed to make this not only the hottest planet around but a planet of billionaires living in a new golden age (both of their wealth and of a world in flames).

When you think about it (as so many American voters obviously didn’t) on this ever hotter, more arid, more wildly stormy planet of ours, we (and I think under the circumstances I should put that in quotes) — “we” voted back into office someone who will leave Senator Joe McCarthy in the dust of history when it comes to utter malevolence and destructiveness. Consider it guaranteed that he will go a long way toward tearing both this country and this world apart. Indeed, he truly does give the all-American decline of the United States and this planet wild new meaning.

Unlike Senator McCarthy, he won’t just malignantly take out a few imagined bad guys, but potentially all of us. In such a context, four years of (or do I mean in?) hell will have a new, anything but metaphorical meaning in the wake (not an inappropriate word under the circumstances) of the year that will undoubtedly prove to have been the hottest ever and which, in the years to come, will undoubtedly be left in — once again! — the dustbin of history. Oh, and with the help of Elon Musk (or as Bernie Sanders calls him “President Elon Musk”), he only recently tried (and failed) to ensure that Americans who were recently clobbered by two horrific hurricanes that had been fed mightily by the ever more severely overheated waters of the Gulf of Mexico would not get any further government help in the recovery process.

Consider it no small thing that, 70 years after Senator Joe McCarthy went down in flames (and then essentially drank himself to death), an all-too-fierce update of him (and what an update he is!) will once again be in the White House, backed — imagine this, Joe! — by the richest man on Planet Earth, a possible future speaker of the House of Representatives, Trump’s ultimate attack dog — or do I mean (thanks to Space X) the commander in chief of outer space? — Elon R. Musk, who controls a world of commentary, communication, and entertainment that would have been inconceivable on the planet where black-and-white TVs were a wonder to behold.

Make America Gross Again

Imagining the future has never been among humanity’s greatest skills. With that in mind let me nonetheless suggest that Donald Trump’s return to the all-too-grimly Grayer House is a sign of how this country and this planet are preparing to go down big time. The second time around, consider him the functional definition of decline — even if the US does get Greenland and the Panama Canal in the bargain. (Okay, I’m just joking or do I mean Donalding?) In fact, think of MAGA the second time around as Make America Gross Again.

There have, of course, been distinctly bad times in this country before. Consider, for instance, 1968, the year of the assassinations of both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, of rioting and destruction in American cities, and of the horror of the ongoing war in Vietnam and the election of — god save us! — Richard M. Nixon as president. Still, it remains hard to face the second round (or is it the 102nd round?) of Donald J. Trump.

Yes, starting on January 20, you can plan on watching the country that, in the years after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, American officials came to think of as “the sole superpower” on planet Earth, begin to come apart at the seams on a planet that, unfortunately, is now doing the same. After all, a Europe increasingly threatened by rightist regimes seems itself at the edge of a similar reality (while, of course, Donald Trump functionally dismisses the NATO alliance), even as the nightmarish war in Ukraine spins on (and on and on), while the Middle East seems to be in a stunning process of disintegration.

It’s important, in fact, to put Donald Trump in a global context since he was anything but solely responsible for either the climate or war chaos that’s been increasing for all too long with or without him. What he represents, however, is the coming apart at the seams of that once-upon-a-time sole superpower and that’s no small thing in what still passes for human (or perhaps I mean inhuman) history.

And don’t expect any better when he takes on what passes (even if not very well these days) for the rising superpower on Planet Earth, China, tariff by tariff. Believe me, it won’t be pretty, economically, politically, or even potentially militarily to see who trumps whom in that global showdown between the two powers now putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other countries on this planet.

The Billionaire Parasites Are Winning!

 

60 years of Progress in Expanding Rights is Being Rolled Back- A Pattern That’s All Too Familiar in US history by Philip Klinkner & Rogers M. Smith

Source: The Conversation

For many Americans, Donald Trump’s head-spinning array of executive orders in the early days of his second term look like an unprecedented effort to roll back democracy and the rights and liberties of American citizens.

But it isn’t unprecedented.

As we have written, American history is not a steady march toward greater equality, democracy and individual rights. America’s commitment to these liberal values has competed with an alternative set of illiberal values that hold that full American citizenship should be limited by race, ethnicity, gender and class.

The most famous example of this conflict is the Jim Crow era after Reconstruction, when many of the political and legal rights gained by African Americans in the Civil War era were swept away by disenfranchisement, segregation and discrimination. From roughly 1870 until 1940, democracy and equal rights were retreating, not advancing, leaving what was described in the 1960s by President Lyndon Johnson as “the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”

Today, the Trump administration is seeking to roll back America’s commitment to equality and engaging in a broad effort to limit – if not outright deny – the rights, liberties and benefits of democracy to all Americans.

President Donald Trump attacked the FAA’s DEI initiatives during a press conference on the D.C. plane crash.

Progress, then rollbacks

The biggest gains in African American rights came during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II and the Cold War, when the United States confronted enemies that Americans believed contradicted its liberal values – the British monarchy, Southern slaveholders, fascist dictators and communist tyrants. The United States highlighted its commitments to democracy and human rights as a way of contrasting itself from its enemies.

But once the pressures of war faded, America’s illiberal values reasserted themselves. With the end of the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, the movement for greater equality stalled and many of the previous gains were rolled back.

The onset of World War II and then the Cold War forced Americans to renew their commitment to democracy and human rights for all Americans. This period is often described as the Second Reconstruction.

Like the First Reconstruction a century earlier, the federal government helped to ensure civil and voting rights for African Americans. These efforts laid the groundwork for advancing the political and civil rights of women, other racial and ethnic groups, immigrants, disabled persons and, eventually, members of the gay and lesbian community.

But like the First Reconstruction, these changes generated intense backlash.

Bigger than anti-DEI

Since the demise of the Cold War over 30 years ago, the Republican Party has increasingly sided with those seeking to roll back the gains of the Second Reconstruction.

Even before Trump first ran for president, the Republican Party began adopting nativist, anti-immigration policies. In 2012, a Republican-dominated Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 law barring racial discrimination in voting that was one of the signal achievements of the Second Reconstruction.

In 2016, Trump rose to the Republican nomination by expressing and amplifying the racist and xenophobic views of many white Americans, including the claim that Barack Obama was born outside of the U.S., that Mexican immigrants were criminals and rapists, and that the U.S. should close its borders to anyone from Muslim countries.

Since his second inauguration, Trump has mounted a full-scale effort to undermine the policies of the Second Reconstruction. This effort has been masked as an attack on diversity, equity and inclusion – or DEI – policies. According to Trump and other critics of DEI, these policies are themselves racist, since they allegedly single out white Americans for shame and scorn.

As scholars of race and American politics, we believe that, overall, DEI initiatives have combated racial discrimination and expanded the pools of talented people who can contribute to the nation’s progress.

The Trump administration’s effort to end DEI programs is really an attack on decades of efforts by the federal government to make good on the promise of America: to engage in rigorous nondiscrimination efforts and open up opportunities for all.

One of Trump’s first executive orders, which prominently featured abandonment of DEI policies, also repealed a 60-year-old executive order signed by President Johnson mandating “affirmative action” to end widespread discrimination by the federal government and its contractors.

Antidiscrimination is discrimination?

These diversity initiatives have for more than 50 years included requirements that beneficiaries of these policies must be qualified for the benefits they obtain.

But to Trump and many conservatives, such policies force employers to engage in racial and gender quotas to prove that they don’t discriminate. Furthermore, these efforts to end discrimination, according to Trump’s executive order, “diminish the importance of individual merit, aptitude, hard work, and determination,” leading to “disastrous consequences.”

In other words, Trump and others claim that efforts to end discrimination are themselves a form of discrimination and force the hiring of unqualified and incompetent people.

Trump made this view clear in his comments on the recent collision between a passenger airliner and a military helicopter in Washington, D.C. Before any formal investigation, Trump alleged that the crash resulted from Obama and Biden administration efforts to diversify the Federal Aviation Administration staff. Such efforts, he suggested, elevate unqualified people.

“If they don’t have a great brain … they’re not going to be good at what they do and bad things will happen,” he said.

Efforts to reverse DEI have been accompanied by other antidiversity moves. One example: According to a news release, the Defense Department will no longer use “official resources” to mark “Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Pride Month, National Hispanic Heritage Month, National Disability Employment Awareness Month, and National American Indian Heritage Month.”

Undoing 19th-century advances

The attack on DEI goes beyond the federal government. Other executive orders mandate that K-12 schools as well as colleges and universities end DEI programs, since they are “anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies.”

Instead, Trump insists that schools engage only in “patriotic education.”

Such a policy will almost certainly prevent schools from honestly addressing the ways in which racial, ethnic and gender discrimination have influenced America’s past and present.

The Trump administration is attacking the First Reconstruction as well. Another Trump executive order seeks to end birthright citizenship for children of unauthorized alien residents.

That move would limit the 14th Amendment, one of the constitutional cornerstones of the First Reconstruction. Passed in 1868 in order to guarantee citizenship rights for African Americans, it begins by stating:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

This provision was included in order to explicitly overturn the notorious 1857 Supreme Court decision, Dred Scott v. Sandford, that ruled that African Americans were not citizens and consequently “they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Pushback capacity

How far can the Trump administration go in its efforts to undo the Second Reconstruction?

Numerous legal challenges have already been filed. In the case of the executive order limiting birthright citizenship, a lower federal court judge appointed by President Ronald Reagan blocked the order, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.”

Many of these cases will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court, which under Chief Justice John Roberts has been willing to overturn long-established equal rights precedents. Besides its 2012 gutting of the Voting Rights Act, in 2022 the court limited the reproductive rights of women by overturning its 1973 decision, Roe v. Wade. Most recently, in 2023 the court ended a 45-year precedent that allowed colleges and universities to engage in limited forms of affirmative action in order to achieve more student diversity.

Yet despite years of attacks by conservatives and now the Trump administration, most efforts to end discrimination and open doors to all Americans, including DEI, remain popular. And the groups empowered by the Second Reconstruction – racial and ethnic minorities, women, immigrants, the LGBTQ community – are far more numerous and have far more legal and political resources available with which to fight back than those that were aided by the First Reconstruction.

There are now no government pressures driving Americans to make greater progress toward democracy and equal rights for all, as in the relatively brief earlier periods of significant reform in America.

But those reforms have given many more Americans the capacity to push back against policies that violate both American values and American interests.

A Trumpian Fascistic Coup is Underway—Stop It Before the Terror Starts by Ralph Nader

Source: Ralph Nader

Rise up people and fast. Tyrant Trump and his Musk-driven gangsters are launching a fascistic coup d’état. Much of everything you like about federal/civil service for your health, safety, and economic well-being and protections is being targeted.

To feed Trump’s insatiable vengeance over being prosecuted, being defeated in the 2020 election, or now just being challenged, this megalomaniacal, self-described dictator is harming the lives of tens of millions of Americans in need and millions of Americans who are assisting them.

In his demented lawless arrogance, convicted felon Trump is nullifying the freedoms and protections of the American Revolution (King Donald is today’s King George III), and rejecting the Declaration of Independence (which listed the rights and abuses against the British Tyrant that Trump is shredding and entrenching). He is defiantly violating the U.S. Constitution, its controls over dictatorial government, and its powers exclusively given to Congress.  The Constitution demands that we live under the rule of law, not the rule of one man.

While Trump enjoys Mar-a-Lago and his golfing, Madman Musk, a South African, is literally living in the Executive Office Building next to the White House, with his heel-clicking Musketeers, seven days a week (they brought in sleeping cots) guarded by a large private security detail.

Consider, people, that the world’s richest man, with billions of dollars of federal contracts, is unleashing his henchmen to wreck the daily work of public servants committed to providing critical services that have long and bi-partisan support. Assistance to children, emergency workers, the sick and elderly, public school students, and people ripped off by business crooks. He is firing the federal cops on the corporate crime beat – whether at the FBI, the EPA, or the key Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which Trump/Musk are gutting.

Some headlines: “Laws? What Laws? Trump’s Brazen Grab for Executive Power” by the great reporter Charlie Savage (New York Times, February 6, 2025). Outlaws taking charge, driven by greed for the government’s honeypots of corporate welfare, and near-zero taxes for the rich and big corporations.

Or “Searching for Motive to Musk Team’s Focus on ‘Checkbook’ of U.S.” by Alan Rappeport, February 6, 2025, New York Times.

Or “White House Billionaires Take on the World’s Poorest Kids” by the super-reporter Nicholas Kristof (February 6, 2025. New York Times) shutting down The Agency for International Development’s distribution of AIDS medicines, and crucially stopping U.S. health agencies from countering rising, deadly pandemics in Africa that could come here quickly without U.S. defensive actions abroad. Already the devastating effects on children missing healthcare and food are erupting.

Kristof concludes that all this (and the dollar amounts are very small compared to their benefits) may seem like a game for Trump/Musk, but “… it’s about children’s lives and our own security, and what’s unfolding is sickening.” It is also criminal!

When the forces of law and order reassert themselves, Elon Musk may become known as felon Musk. He is not a properly appointed federal official. He has no authority to send his wrecking crews into one agency after another, demanding private information about Americans, pushing people out, and shutting down operations.

Musk, whose next target is the federal auto safety agency that has been enforcing the safety laws against Tesla and has not surrendered its regulation of self-driving cars (Musk’s next big project). Musk refuses to disclose his sweetheart contracts with the federal agencies nor has he disclosed his tax returns. Demand them.

What is very clear in the first 20 days of Trump’s lawless madness is that he is moving fast for a police state along with deepening the corporate state with and for Big Business. His prime victims are not the vast military budget at the Department of Defense, nor the big budgets of the Spy Agencies or of Musk’s lucrative fiefdom – NASA, the Space Agency. No, like the bullies they are, Trump/Musk are smashing people’s programs.  They hate Medicaid (provided to over 80 million Americans) or the food programs for millions of children.  Crazed Trump is pushing to shut down many clean wind power projects and cut credits to homeowners installing solar panels while booming the omnicidal oil, gas, and coal industries. He wants many more giant exporting natural gas facilities near U.S. ports which could accidentally blow up entire cities.

Musk’s poisoned Tusks have even reached Laos, Cambodia, and parts of Vietnam where mine-clearing efforts have been cut off. These are the U.S.’s Vietnam War era unexploded ordinances and bomblets that have killed tens of thousands of innocent residents, mostly children, in the past fifty years.

The Washington Post headline on February 6th, “Musk Team Taking Over Public Operations” understates the carnage. They are brazenly shutting down agencies, taking down thousands of government websites helpful to all Americans, and telling conscientious civil servants to obey or be driven out.

The Republicans in Congress, to their future shame and guilt, are surrendering their constitutional powers in the very branch of government our Founders assigned to check any rising monarchy in the White House.

The Democrats in the minority are just starting to protest, some in front of shuttered federal buildings. But they have not yet initiated unofficial public hearings in Congress to give voice to the surging anger of Americans (now flooding their switchboards) whose narrow majority of Trump voters are sensing betrayal big time. Demand unofficialhearings now! Federal judges are starting to uphold the violated laws.

The media, itself threatened by Trump’s attacks, censorship, and who knows what is next from this venomous liar (see the Washington Post’s Glen Kessler’s January 26, 2025 piece “The White House’s wildly inaccurate claims about USAID spending” or “Trump’s gusher of misleading economic statistics at Davos”) will cover protests and testimony by people all over the country. The rallies and marches have begun and will only get larger as Trump and Musk sink lower with their tyrannical abuses.

The career military does not relish the reckless buffoon that Trump put over them as Secretary of Defense. American business cannot tolerate the chaos, the uncertainty, the tumult.  Thirty-nine million small businesses are already feeling the oncoming Trump tsunami.

Break with your routine, Americans. It’s your country they are seizing with this burgeoning coup. Take it back fast, is what our original patriots of 1776 would be saying.

Musings

 

F***ed Around & Found Out

 

The Time of Monsters by Ray Acheson

Source: CP

In Fire Weather, author John Vaillant describes the “Lucretius Problem,” a phenomenon wherein people can have all the information about what is happening yet fail to understand that it is happening. People tend to perceive reality within the confines of what they have already experienced, and struggle to grasp a worst-case scenario even as it unfolds around them. Vaillant, writing about the Fort McMurray fire in Alberta, Canada in 2016, is talking about the increasing destructive potential of fire due to the climate crisis, the fossil fuel extraction industry, and changes in the materials and methods for building towns and cities. But the concept is equally applicable to the devastation being wrought by the new US political regime.

The New York Times, as just one example, used its morning newsletter on 6 February to describe Trump’s first weeks in office as relatively weak, focusing primarily on the walk-backs of tariffs on Canada and Mexico. The newsletter only briefly mentioned the executive orders aimed at eliminating immigrants and trans people, and failed to mention at all that tech bros and incels are gleefully running amok in the corridors of power under (unelected) Elon Musk’s command, gaining unprecedented access to Social Security payment systems, closing agencies and firing federal workers, and, at this point, who even knows what else. As journalist Parker Molloy noted, “If this were happening in any other country, we’d call it what it is: a coup.”

Yet in certain quarters, US exceptionalism persists. Many maintream politicians and pundits are still clinging to the notion that “it can’t happen here,” that the system’s “checks and balances” will prevail, even as the institutions they claim to believe in are being lit on metaphorical fire. These same folks also refuse to take responsibility for building the scaffolding upon which these acts of fascism are taking place, by building and feeding the surveillance, border, deportation, incarceration, and war machines for decades.

Putting aside the liberal “Lucretius Problem,” though, we need to focus on—and exploit—the same failure of imagination of the fascists leading the coup.

As writer John Ganz points out, “Musk’s total idiocy is structural: it goes back to the very origin of the Greek term idiotes, a person who cannot understand the shared political life of the city. These people cannot understand that their wealth and power are not their sovereign creations but the shared product of the wider state and society that supports and sustains them.”

We see the same structural idiocy in Israel’s belief that it can bomb, starve, or genocide its way to what it wants in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Iran. We can also see it in Trump’s arrogant belief that he can buy or invade Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal, and now Gaza, too, because why not? The Biden administration helped Israel destroy Gaza, now he just needs to get rid of those pesky Palestinian people—and if there’s anything he’s good at it’s getting rid of people; he is flexing his ethnic cleansing muscles already by shipping immigrants off to Guantánamo Bay and perhaps El Salvador’s notoriously brutal mega-prison.

One destructive impulse feeds off the other. Structural idiocy is fueled by lack of consequences. Like the Fort McMurray fire described by John Vaillant, the flames and heat become more intense the more the fire burns. The more Trump, Musk, or Netanyahu can get away with, the more invincible they will believe themselves to be. US support for, and the world’s failure to stop, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians will haunt us here; as Tariq Kenney-Shawa warns, “When children can be sniped at will, when hospitals and journalists are apparently legitimate targets, when a military can posthumously deem their victims ‘terrorists’ with no need for evidence and still receive unconditional funding and support from the defenders of the so-called rules-based international order, then we are all dragged back to a point in our evolution we thought we left in the past.”

The pardoning of the January 6 insurrectionists, too, will haunt us—not only were the consequences for those would-be coup-mongers removed, but they are now trying to go after the people who prosecuted them and seek reparations for their temporary incarceration. It’s like the men who sue for libel after being accused of sexual assault—the message is one of intimidation and dominance: “I am allowed to abuse you, and if you try to stop me, I will ruin your life.” It is a form of sadism, as Judith Butler explains, a celebration of a certain kind of masculinity that “parades as freedom, while the freedoms for which many of us have struggled for decades are distorted and trammeleld as morally repressively ‘wokeism’.”

Cruetly is the mentality of this US political regime. Hate, abuse, humiliation, intimidation, incarceration, and physical violence are the mainstays of the men occupying DC. Built on the crueleties of US empire that have led to this moment, the increasing criminalization of migrants, trans people, and abortion are the devastating beginning of this administration’s onslaught against human life and dignity. It does not seem like the oligarchs taking contro of the country have a line they won’t cross; given that much of their action since taking over the government has been unlawful and unconstititutional, it’s not clear where they will stop or who they will harm or eliminate in their quest for absolute power, power that they perceive to be their own personal Manifest Destiny.

But nothing is inevitable. And as has been demonstrated with Trump’s capitulations in various ways to Canada, Colombia, Mexico, and in relation to the attempt to freeze all federal funding, even things that do occur can be undone, delayed, mitigated, frustrated. Due to their structural idiocy, Musk and Trump and their lackeys do not understand consequnces for their actions. “Their theory of change seems to be that they are going to do stuff and then it will be done,” writes Rebecca Solnit. “Like they’re moving furniture around, like you and I and the trans and immigrant communities and federal workers and Canada and Mexico are just so many sofas and chairs that are going to sit where they place us. Like we’re inanimate objects.” But this, she warns, is a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature.

We have the capacity to make fascists feel the consquences of being fascist. We have the capacity to revolt, oppose, slow things down, challenge every order. Many are already engaged in this work, led by immigrant, trans, and Indigenous communities. Teachers in Chicago prevented ICE from entering their school, students in Los Angeles walked out of classrooms to protest detention and deportation, school systems across the country have declared they will not comply with Trump’s anti-trans executive orders, lawmakers and community members are holding hospitals accountable for refusing to provide gender-affirming care, unions have launched a lawsuit to prevent Musk from accessing the Department of Labor.

Mass harm is being done and more is to come. But there is a revolutionary potential to this moment, both within the United States and in terms of US relations with other countries. We can make sure there are consequences for fascism—if we are in solidarity with one another, if we act, if we confront their hate with love for justice and each other.

The last few weeks has given new life to Antonio Gramsci’s quote, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” As usual, Gramsci is right. But also, monsters are what we make of them. While their actions are monstrous, the men performing them are human beings. We should be wary of giving them the power of monsters, of affording them mythical, unopposable status. They are men. They can be defeated.

The ways that cultures have told stories about threats taking the form of monsters offers key insights into the consequences of hubris and greed—monsters arising from the diplacement or elimination of Indigenous or Black or communities, or from nuclear weapon explosions; monsters that take root in misogyny or transphobia or racism; monsters that grow from people’s own fears and hatreds only to turn against those that imagined them into existence. There are a myriad of ways that US imperialism and warmaking can be to told through tales of monsters, as so well articulated by W. Scott Poole in Dark Carnivals.

But monsters are many things. Monsters can also be defenders, conscience, resistance. Throughout social and cultural history, many outcasts from mainstream society—including queer, Black, Indigenous, and disabled folks—have been cast as monsters. Our marginalization from mainstream politics and economics has made us leaders in mutual aid, popular education, resilience, art, creativity, and joy. Our struggles for surival are generational. We know there are ebbs and flows to the way we are treated and percieved, and that the only way we win is by fighting back and being in solidarity with each other. Just like the kaiju that rise to take on other monsters that are bent on destroying society, so will we rise and resist again.