Thom Hartmann: "This chillingly un-American Trump move threatens all our freedoms"

Source: Raw Story

 Back in September, most Americans (and the media) thought it was so over-the-top that it had to be a joke. Turns out, it wasn’t a joke and isn’t remotely funny.

In a bizarre directive that could have been written by the staff of The Onion or Putin’s secret police, National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), Donald Trump ordered the FBI, DOJ, and more than 200 federal Joint Terrorism Task Forces (coordinating FBI with local police forces across the country) to seek out and investigate any person or group who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential domestic terrorism.

They include, as Ken Klippenstein first reported:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

• Have you ever spoken ill of our country or its policies, particularly under Trump?
• Trash-talked capitalism or praised socialism on social media?
• Publicly questioned Christianity or professed loyalty to Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Paganism, or any other non-Christian belief system or religion?
• Embraced the trans or more general queer community?
• Spoken out in defense of single-parenting, gay marriage, or same-sex couples adopting children?
• Said things or carried a sign that might hurt the feelings of masked ICE agents, Trump, or Kristi Noem?

Just imagining that any of these could trigger FBI agents knocking on our doors was so grotesque a notion that when the story first appeared four months ago, it was reported and then largely dismissed by mainstream media within the same day.

I mentioned it in an October Saturday Report and an earlier article, but, like pretty much everybody else in the media, dismissed it as virtue-signaling to the Trump base rather than an actual plan to set up a Russia-style police state here in America.

I was wrong.

Now, in a second bombshell report, Klippenstein has obtained and published a copy of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Dec. 4 memo ordering the FBI to actually begin Russia-style investigations of people and groups who fit into the categories listed above.

Not only that, Bondi also ordered the FBI to go back as far as five years in their investigations of our social media posts, protest attendance, and other activities to find evidence of our possible adherence to these now-forbidden views.

Just being anti-fascist is, in Bondi’s eyes, apparently now a crime in America. From her memo to the FBI:

“Further, this [anti-fascist] ideology that paints legitimate government authority and traditional, conservative viewpoints as ‘fascist’ connects a recent string of political violence. Carvings on the bullet casings of Charlie Kirk’s assassin’s bullets read, ‘Hey, fascist, catch’ and ‘Bella Ciao’ — an ode to antifascist movements in Italy. … ICE agents are regularly doxed by anti-fascists, and calls to dox ICE agents appear in the same sentence of opinion pieces calling the Trump Administration fascist.”

At the same time, ICE is using a chunk of the massive budget the Big Ugly Bill gave them — larger than the budget of the FBI or any other police agency in America (or, probably, any other police agency in the world outside of China and Russia) — to buy tools they can use to spy on “anti-fascist” people who protest or oppose their actions.

In a report titled “ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants,” the Brennan Center for Justice details how the agency has acquired “a smorgasbord of spy technology: social media monitoring systems, cellphone location tracking, facial recognition, remote hacking tools, and more.”

They’ve reportedly acquired devices that spoof cellphone towers, so if you’re near them your phone will connect, thinking it’s talking to your cell carrier. Once the connection is established, ICE and/or DHS can monitor every communication to or from your phone and possibly even download all the content on your phone including emails, pictures, apps, and your browsing history.

They’re tying into nationwide networks of license-plate readers, airport facial recognition systems, and using federal surveillance drones to monitor people they consider enemies of the agency. And they’re carefully combing your social media content for posts, likes, and reposts they consider objectionable. As the Brennan Center noted:

“Homeland Security Investigations recently signed a multimillion dollar contract for a social media monitoring platform called Zignal Labs that claims to ingest and analyze more than 8 billion posts a day. The agency is also paying millions to Penlink for monitoring tools that gather information from multiple sources, including social media platforms, the dark web, and databases of location data.”

ICE is also acquiring Russian-style spy software that can remotely target your phone without your realizing it, infect it with the equivalent of an “ICE virus,” and then have your phone send them everything you do, say, hear, or see on an ongoing basis for months.

The only clue you’ll have will probably be that your battery life seems to have dropped as your phone is pumping out to ICE your data and everything the microphone in it picks up, all without your knowledge or permission.

This Putin-style sort of “search” without a legal warrant is the sort of thing that King George III’s officers did against the colonists (although back then it was reading their mail, spying on them in person, and kicking in their doors) in the 1770s that provoked our nation’s Founders to write in the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

It’s also a clear violation of the First Amendment’s protection of our rights to “free speech” and “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

When Putin ended democracy in Russia, he defined the people who protested his policies as domestic terrorists and had his secret police go after them in ways that are shockingly similar to what ICE is launching and Bondi is ordering the FBI to do.

It’s chillingly un-American.

Reach out to your elected representatives (Congress’ phone is 202-224-3121) to let them know your opinion of this new aspect of Trump’s imperial reign, and pass this along to help wake up others.

If Congress and the courts refuse to give serious oversight and regulation to these agencies, we may all one day soon be facing the same neofascist brutality that killed Alexi Navalny and imprisoned (to this day) so many of his supporters.

HISTORY WARNED US: Why These 12 Warnings Could Mean Its Too Late? w/ Laurence Rees

 

 

 Historians are scared - These 12 Warnings show how the third Reich was built, and under Trump - every single one of them is happening again. Laurence Reez, author of The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings From History - joins Thom Hartmann for a shocking interview detailing how Hitler took over Germany.

Trump’s Plan Is Now Out in the Open by Peter Wehner

 

Source: TheAtlantic

Give Donald Trump this much: He has never tried to hide his malice, his lawlessness, or his desire to inflict pain on others. These were on vivid display when he engaged in a multipart conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and stood by as a mob of supporters sought to hang his vice president. These were displayed, as well, every day during his 2024 vengeance campaign. Yet more than 77 million Americans decided that he was the man with whom they wanted to entrust the care of this nation.

For more Americans than not, and for many more evangelical Christians than not, Trump is the representative man of our time. His ethic is theirs. So are his corruptions. And for those of us who, in our younger years, revered America as a shining city upon a hill, a nation of nations, the “last, best hope of earth,” this is quite a painful period. America has lost its moral bearings; as a result, it has also lost its moral standing in the world.

A curtain of darkness is settling over our nation. And it’s getting ever harder to avoid connecting the authoritarian dots.

Trump is in the process of building his own paramilitary force. He is invoking wartime powers to deport people without due process, even suggesting that American citizens may be sent to foreign prisons. He has deployed National Guard troops to cities over the objections of local officials. In a speech to American troops in Japan, he warned: “If we need more than the National Guard, we’ll send more than the National Guard.”

Trump has signaled that he is open to invoking the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that allows the president to deploy the military in the United States. And he has claimed, without legal justification, that he has the right to order the military to summarily kill people suspected of smuggling drugs on boats off the coast of South America. (The administration has yet to provide evidence to support its claims that the individuals who have been killed were cartel members or that the vessels were transporting drugs.)

Read: The boat strikes are just the beginning

My colleague Tom Nichols, a retired professor at the U.S. Naval War College, warns that eventually what Trump is doing will become a new principle for the use of force: “He is acclimating people to the notion that the military is his private army, unconstrained by law, unconstrained by norms, unconstrained by American traditions.”

Earlier this year, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired the senior judge advocates general, removing the officials who could obstruct the execution of unlawful orders from the commander in chief. Their dismissals will also have a chilling effect on those who remain. The firing of the JAGs is just one element of a broader purge of the military, which started at the beginning of Trump’s second term. In February, five former defense secretaries, including James Mattis, who served under Trump in his first term, wrote a letter to lawmakers, saying the dismissals “raise troubling questions about the administration’s desire to politicize the military and to remove legal constraints on the president’s power.”

Speaking of which: Trump views himself as the final arbiter of the legality of anything he does. An executive order he signed in February says, “The President and the Attorney General’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties. No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law.”

There’s more. Trump is the most corrupt and self-enriching president ever. He is also conducting what The New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg describes as “the most punishing government crackdown against major American media institutions in modern times, using what seems like every tool at his disposal to eradicate reporting and commentary with which he disagrees.” That includes suggesting that the Federal Communications Commission should revoke the licenses of television broadcasters that give him too much “bad publicity” and suing major newspapers and networks.

He has targeted law firms for political reasons and universities for ideological reasons. As part of his disinformation campaign, he fired the nonpartisan commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the agency reported weaker-than-expected jobs numbers for July. He has called judges who rule against him “lunatics” and “monsters who want our country to go to hell.” And he granted blanket clemency to the nearly 1,600 people charged in the attacks on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, including members of extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers who were convicted of seditious conspiracy.

Trump has pressured the Department of Justice to target, indict, and destroy those he considers to be his political enemies. And he signed memorandums targeting two officials from his first term, including Chris Krebs, the former cybersecurity official who rejected Trump’s false claim of widespread election fraud.

As for free elections, the cornerstone of democracy, the Trump administration is using the levers of government to target “the financial, digital and legal machinery that powers the Democratic Party and much of the progressive political world,” The New York Times reports. Trump has ordered the Department of Justice to investigate ActBlue, the main Democratic fundraising platform. He has also said he’s going to “lead a movement” to outlaw electronic-voting machines and mail-in balloting, in an effort to disadvantage Democrats. Cleta Mitchell, who played a role in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, threatens that Trump could declare a national emergency to take control of national elections. The Atlantic’s David A. Graham warns that Trump’s plan to subvert the midterms is already well under way. “The insurrection failed the first time,” Graham writes, “but the second try might be more effective.”

Trump, having attempted to overthrow one election, can be counted on to attempt to rig the next one. As J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge, warns in The Atlantic: “With his every word and deed, Trump has given Americans reason to believe that he will seek a third term, in defiance of the Constitution. It seems abundantly clear that he will hold on to the office at any cost, including America’s ruin.”

Trump learned from his first term; in his second go-around, he’s placed MAGA cultists in every key position of power. They will follow Trump to the ends of the Earth, knowing that a presidential pardon is there for the asking, if necessary.

There’s little indication that the central institutions of American life, including the Supreme Court, are willing to check Trump as he seeks unprecedented and nearly unlimited power. Nor is it clear that if they tried to do so, they would succeed. Trump has so far largely abided by court decisions, but beyond a certain point, on things he really cares about, he’ll likely ignore them. He will ask about Chief Justice John Roberts a variation of the question Joseph Stalin is supposed to have asked about the pope: How many divisions does he have?

We’re less than one-fifth of the way through Trump’s second term; things will get much worse. So it’s too early to know whether the damage that Trump and his MAGA movement are inflicting on the foundations of the United States is reversible, or whether the injury to our civic and political culture is repairable.

If America recovers, the path will lie not simply through electoral politics. The fate of the country rests on the recovery of republican virtue, the cultivation of an active passion for the public interest, and a willingness to sacrifice individual interests for the common good. Words and phrases such as honor and love of country have to stir people out of their lethargy and into action.

We saw some of that in the “No Kings” protests, but much more needs to happen. My colleague David Brooks, citing the work of the political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, reminds us that “citizens are not powerless; they have many ways to defend democracy.” Whether we step up or not is a matter of civic will and civic courage. Can we summon those virtues at a moment when American ideals are under sustained assault by the American president?

A final thought: As we continue along this journey, into places none of us has ever quite been before, it is worth holding close to our hearts the words of the Czech playwright and dissident Václav Havel. They moved me when I first read them, in the early 1990s, when so much was so different, and I have cited them several times since, but they hold more meaning now than ever.

“I have few illusions,” Havel wrote. “But I feel a responsibility to work towards the things I consider good and right. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to change certain things for the better, or not at all. Both outcomes are possible. There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.”

Trapture!!

 

The Democrats: a Modern Day Version of Zombie Politics and the Walking Dead by Henry Giroux

 

Source: CP

Bill Clinton’s endorsement of former governor Andrew Cuomo, coupled with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s refusal to support Zohran Mamdani, the successful Muslim democratic socialist in the New York City mayoral race, reveals everything we need to know about today’s Democratic Party. Add to that the cowardly Democratic lawmakers who stood with Trump to end the shutdown, and the picture sharpens: this is no longer a party of alleged principles but an echo chamber of timidity, moral vacuity, and political emptiness. The failure of the Democrats to defend Americans from the crushing costs and deepening fragility of health care has become a matter of life and death. Studies published in The American Journal of Public Health and updated by Public Citizen estimate that 44,789 working-age Americans die each year simply because they lack health insurance.

By capitulating on this issue, the Democrats bear blood on their hands, proving once again that their vaunted talk of justice and a better life for working-class people is not only hollow but an act of political and moral violence. What we are witnessing is not mere complacency but complicity, a politics of managed decline masquerading as pragmatism, a surrender to cruelty dressed up as bipartisanship. The Democratic Party’s retreat from the language of moral responsibility is more than a failure of policy; it is a betrayal of conscience, an abdication of the very democratic promise it claims to defend.

Nowhere is the collapse of moral responsibility more evident than in the Democratic Party’s unwavering support for the genocidal war in Gaza. Not only have its leaders aligned themselves with Israel’s war criminal prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they have also supplied the very weapons that have annihilated more than 70,000 Palestinians, men, women, and children. This is not merely a political failure. It is a moral collapse. The complicity of the Democratic Party is written in blood.

The Democratic Party, stripped of moral conviction and political imagination, has collapsed into a hollow centrism, an empty vessel adrift in a sea of political and moral paralysis. As Trump bulldozes the Constitution and transforms the republicinto a warfare state, Democrats respond with platitudes instead of power. They refuse to call for mass movements, summon people into the streets, call for strikes, and fight to dismantle the machinery of the war economy and the obscene inequality it sustains. They are the soft face of neoliberalism’s ruthless cruelty, servants to the corporate–military–techno complex they claim to restrain.

As Richard Wolff has long argued, both major parties are bound by their allegiance to the financial elite and the billionaire class. Neither dares utter a critical word about capitalism, much less connect it to the crises, social, ecological, and moral, that define our time. This silence is not neutrality; it is complicity.

In their cowardice, they have become collaborators, not opponents, of authoritarianrule. Their politics of accommodation mask a failure of moral will. Rather than ignite collective resistance, they drift in the shallow waters of corporate centrism, where compromise replaces courage and the language of reform masks complicity. What remains is a party drained of purpose, incapable of moral outrage, and deaf to history’s warning. Drowning in their own vapid centrism, they offer no vision, no movement, no dream, only the cold echo of a political corpse.

Chris Hedges reminds us, “Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay.” Trump is not an aberration but the political expression of a deeper pathology: the long-standing war that neoliberal capitalism has waged against democracy itself. This is gangster capitalism in its purest form: a politics rooted in greed, racial hatred, and the legacy of colonial domination. Its endpoint is an updated version of American fascism.

This system produces staggering inequalities of wealth and power, displaces workers by outsourcing labor to global sweatshops, and sustains itself by weaponizing resentment. It diverts the anger of the dispossessed toward scapegoats, immigrants, Black people, refugees, and anyone who does not fit the profile of the white Christian nationalist ideal. The cruelty is deliberate: fascism thrives on manufactured enemies and the illusion of order through violence.

The Democratic Party cannot face their own complicity in pushing gangster capitalism into its current cruel, authoritarian, zombie-like form. The dominant elements of the party just gave Trump another win in their willingness to end the shutdown without preventing the Trump death machine from eliminating health care for millions. In Europe, the Democratic Party would be viewed as a right-wing organization. Yes, there is Zohran Mamdani and younger, more militant members of the party, but until they break with the false assumption that capitalism and democracy are synonymous, they are doomed to a party that has no answer to redistributing wealth, power, providing universal health care, decent housing for everyone, and a social order in which human needs are prioritized over the criminal class of billionaires. America is a criminogenic state and the traditional mechanisms of checks and balances serve that state. Political culture runs on the model of a merger between the Mafia and zombie politics.

Not even liberals are willing to call American society a fascist state. This is not merely cowardice; it is an act of enabling–the kind of behavior that after 1945 put people on trial for crimes against humanity. We need a new version of the Nuremberg trials and until that happens, violence, state terrorism, and the collapse of conscience will burn down the planet, along with the very idea of democracy.

What is needed now is not another party of compromise but a new movement of conscience, one capable of rekindling moral courage and collective imagination. We need a socialist movement willing to make power visible, to revive dangerous memories, and to forge a politics rooted in critique, solidarity, and hope. Such a movement must speak the unspeakable truth: that capitalism is the breeding ground of fascism, and that democracy can only be rescued by those willing to imagine, organize, and fight for a radically different future.

This is not merely a call for reform but for rebirth, a call to build institutions that nourish life rather than destroy it, to mobilize a mass movement that creates a new language of critique and possibility, embraces anti-capitalist values, and fights for a radical democracy grounded in equality and justice. It requires the courage to challenge the machinery of cruelty, to expose the myths that mask domination, and to reclaim education as the practice of freedom and the lifeblood of civic consciousness.

The urgency of this project cannot be overstated. The struggle for democracy is no longer about repairing a broken system, it is about survival: moral, political, and planetary. Either we breathe life back into the corpse of democracy through collective struggle, or we watch it decay under the rule of the walking dead.

History always teaches that resistance is born in the darkest hours. It is sustained by those who refuse despair, who turn critique into action, and who know that hope is not a sentiment but a discipline. The time has come to choose between complicity and courage, between the living and the dead. To fight for democracy today is to reclaim the very possibility of a humane future.

The Mafia Presidency by Adam Serwer

 

Source: The Atlantic

The Sunday before the New York City mayoral race, President Donald Trump told New Yorkers he might withhold federal funding if Zohran Mamdani won.

“It’s gonna be hard for me as the president to give a lot of money to New York, because if you have a Communist running New York, all you’re doing is wasting the money you’re sending there,” Trump told CBS’s 60 Minutes. Mamdani responded to Trump’s threat of extortion—vote for my preferred candidate or else—by pointing out that said federal funding was not Trump’s to give. “This funding is not something that Donald Trump is giving us here in New York City,” Mamdani said. “This is something that we are, in fact, owed in New York.”

It was not the first time Trump treated federal funds as his personal property that he could use to extort political opponents or reward political allies. Trump has approved disaster aid for red states and denied it to blue states. In the midst of the government-shutdown fight with Democrats, he is refusing to disburse rainy-day funds for food stamps, saying (falsely) that the lapse will hurt “largely Democrats.” The Trump administration has cut funding for projects in states with Democratic majorities. It is withholding federal funding from colleges and universities that do not submit to ideological control by the federal government over whom they hire, what they teach, and what sort of students they admit, and rewarding those that comply.

Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn the election on Trump’s behalf have received pardons, as have Republican officeholders convicted on corruption charges. Wealthy donors who funneled money to Trump’s family businesses have also been pardoned, such as Changpeng Zhao, the former CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who pleaded guilty to fraud charges in 2023. Trump’s selective pardons are balanced out by his selective persecutions. His political opponents, such as New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey, have been slapped with flimsy indictments. Cities and states that Trump sees as bastions of his political opposition are subject to occupation by masked federal agents. As soon as Mamdani won, many New Yorkers began bracing for Trump’s retaliation.

Incidentally, Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, was caught accepting $50,000 from federal agents in a bribery sting—and was not prosecuted. (The FBI and Justice Department “found no credible evidence of any wrongdoing, said Attorney General Pam Bondi.) Although Trump frequently accuses others of corruption, he seems to define the term not as profiting from one’s office—something he apparently has zero objection to—but as defying his will.

Elections in democracies determine who administers the government; they do not alter whom the government is for. Under any administration, Republican or Democratic, the United States government exists to serve the people of the United States, regardless of their partisan affiliation. Besides, Americans are not as easily divided as Trump might think. Millions of Republican voters live in New York, just as millions of Democrats live in Texas. He cannot tell whom he is punishing by glancing at an electoral map. But even if he could, Trump’s acts of extortion have no place in a democracy. They belong in a protection racket: If you support Trump, you are protected; if you do not, you are vulnerable. If you donate enough cash to Trump, you may receive favorable treatment, including immunity from the law. If you oppose Trump, you may be prosecuted.

This is not how a representative government works. It is how the Mafia works.

As the Italian historian Salvatore Lupo writes in his History of the Mafia, the core of the Mafia business is protection, which is to say, extortion. Emerging out of the chaos of post-feudal, post-unification Italy, the Sicilian Mafia began as a number of small organizations that could retrieve stolen property or prevent it from being stolen in the first place. Eventually, with the fledgling Italian state unable to impose order, these organizations began to compel legitimate businesses to use their services, and then demanded a greater and greater share of those businesses.

Want your citrus groves to turn a profit? You’re going to have to hire my guys and also let me skim off the top. You want your cattle back? I’ll get them for you, but if you don’t want them stolen again, you should probably cut me in. Mafia organizations turned out to be stubbornly adaptable: When a right-wing government cracked down, they exploited the strong hand of the law to take out rivals; when a left-wing government tried to build infrastructure, they made sure they got their cut.

Their entrepreneurial use of violence boiled down to: If you don’t want to get hurt, you’ll do what I say. The businesses they attached themselves to, and by extension, the larger economy, ultimately suffered as a result of the parasitic drain on efficiency, innovation, and profit caused by having to cater to these masters in the shadows.

I doubt that anyone would look at that system and think: Now, there’s a great model for the U.S. government. And yet here we are. If you are aligned with Trump, you can expect public services to function normally (although they often don’t), and you may be entitled to exemption from laws and regulations. If you are opposed to Trump, you have to worry about being crushed by the fist of the state.

Trump likes to argue that his intercession in the rule of the law is necessary because Democratic cities are war zones, and because “good” Americans are being persecuted. This, too, is a common ploy; Mafia organizations present themselves as “an expression of traditional society,” as Lupo puts it. “Every eminent mafioso makes a point of presenting himself in the guise of a mediator and resolver of disagreements, as a protector of the virtue of young women. At least once in his career, the mafioso boasts of the rapid and exemplary execution of ‘justice’ against violent muggers, rapists, and kidnappers.”

Such rhetoric is a way of presenting an avaricious and exploitative organization, in populist terms, as a protector of the people. But it’s a fraud. “Greed and ferocity,” Lupo writes, “are intrinsic characteristics of the Mafia,” and its leaders are plenty capable of ignoring “their codes of honor” whenever they become an obstacle.

One could similarly observe that the suffering the Trump administration has chosen to inflict on the American people in an attempt to extort its opposition is a more frank expression of Trump’s beliefs and ideology than his constant bleating about law and order.

The longevity of the Mafia in Italy also serves as a warning that, once these practices embed themselves in the state, they are very difficult to extract; the Italian government’s battle against the Mafia continues to this day. After Trump is gone, restoring integrity to the U.S. government, and curbing the sort of flagrant corruption that has suddenly become commonplace here, will be a monumental task. But for now, Trump’s extortion attempts are offers he has no authority to make, and the American people have every right to refuse them.

Masters of Self-Deception

 

OpenMind · Expertise

Jason Stanley: "I Study Fascism. I’ve Already Fled America"

 

The USA is Isolated on the World Stage

 

 

 

Source: DV 

“Imperialism is capitalism in that stage of development in which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital has established itself; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun; in which the division of all territories of the globe among the great capitalist powers has been completed.”

“Imperialism has the tendency to create among the nations a class of ‘rentiers’ (people who live by income from property or investments), a state which lives by the exploitation of labour of several overseas countries and colonies.”

—Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1916.

“Deep things are not necessarily complex, and simple things are not necessarily naive,”¹ wrote the novelist and iconic revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani. “The real artistic bias is: How can a human being say something profound simply?”

We have already named the lie of the passive citizen. But to understand that lie, we must diagnose the system that requires it. This is not a dissection of a machine’s parts, but a diagnosis of its terminal condition. The great capitalist machinery of the West no longer produces dreams; it produces only ghosts. This is the parasitic, spectral phase of what Lenin identified as the highest stage of capitalism: ‘the dominance of monopolies and finance capital,’ a system whose completion was ‘the division of all territories of the globe among the great capitalist powers.’ Its foundations, laid with the stones of stolen continents and cemented with the blood of enslaved peoples, are now haunted by the very violence that built them. The chaos you see—the flailing leaders, the rotting institutions—is not a failure of the system. It is the system in its final, truthful phase, where the parade of clowns and strongmen are not anomalies but logical administrators for a state that has abandoned persuasion for pure coercion.

This is the era of the open secret, the great unmasking. And Palestine remains its crucible. The criminal logic of the settler-colonial project was articulated from the beginning with a chilling clarity. It echoes, right to left, across the foundational texts of political zionism.

The Austrian Theodor Herzl, the founder of political zionism, defined his own project in his appeal for help from the archetypal colonizer, Cecil Rhodes, with unambiguous clarity: “Because it is something colonial.”² This was not an accusation from a critic, but the movement’s own self-identification. A generation later, the Russian right-wing zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky codified the mandatory strategy of all colonization in his “Iron Wall” doctrine: it must proceed, he wrote, “in defiance of the will of the native population.”³ This is not a historical artifact. It is the active, breathing principle of the project.

The same logic was betrayed by the Russian centrist zionist Chaim Weizmann’s casual dismissal of the Palestinian people as “several hundred thousand Negroes”⁴ of “no significance.” It was confessed by the Polish “Labor” zionist David Ben-Gurion’s blunt admission: “We have taken their country.”⁵

Their words are the indictment. A conscious, ongoing program of displacement, articulated from its very origins. A project that became, simultaneously, the perfected model of the imperial enterprise and its most fanatical instrument.

The imperial core, having exhausted the external world to plunder, now turns its cannibalistic logic inward. The frontier is no longer overseas; it is the street, the neighborhood, the dissident. The police doctrines and weaponry engineered for the management of imprisoned populations in Gaza, Occupied Palestine, are now the standard arsenal for the pacification of the marginalized in New York, London and Berlin. The surveillance technology perfected on a captive people is marketed to governments for use on their own citizenry. The rhetoric that dehumanized the “native” as a demographic threat is now seamlessly directed at the immigrant, the poor, the political dissenter within the gates. There is no longer an “over there” and a “here.” There is only the expanding territory of the empire, and within it, a hierarchy of the controlled.

The strongman’s popularity is no mystery in this context. A demagogue is not an individual; he is a phenomenon—the type of maggot that swarms from the rot of a falling empire. This is the magic turning against the magician, the logical conclusion of a society that has dumbed down its population and forged them into consumerist individuals—a populace drowning in the psychic trauma of a meaningless existence. Such a populace will flock to anyone who offers a target for their rage and a spectacle of force. They would rather be actors in a nightmare than passengers on a derelict ship. This is the final stage of the bargain: the Western citizen-consumer, having traded their political soul for material comfort, now finds the comfort disappearing. All that remains is a hollowed-out identity, which the strongman fills with manufactured nationalist fury. They are given a flag to wave as their world burns, a scapegoat to blame for the encroaching cage whose blueprint was drawn in someone else’s stolen home.

Into this desolate landscape, the Palestinian people introduce a radical alternative: not a dream, but a reality.

The indigenous Palestinians are not an abstraction of resistance, but a society of existence—a people whose eternal roots predate the settler-colonial state that seeks to erase them. Their identity is not a reaction to occupation, but a positive, enduring culture built on the land itself; a land that holds their ancestors, their olive groves, and their stories in the language of the place, Arabic. In the face of this deep-rooted reality, the colonial project can only be understood as a recent, foreign implant, a contingent political ideology defined by its violence and its need to negate what was already there.

This is a truth the European zionist colonialists’ most lucid strategists were forced to concede. As Ze’ev Jabotinsky admitted: “They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true favor the Aztecs looked upon Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. Palestine will remain for the Palestinians not a borderland, but their birthplace, the center and basis of their own national existence.”⁶

The Palestinian struggle does not create this connection—it emerges from it. It is a defense born of a profound, pre-existing love and belonging. In the most profound sense, it is the land defending its people as much as the people defending their land.

The Palestinian cause, therefore, is the defense of this tangible, living world. It is the assertion that a homeland was not absent, but stolen—that, as Ghassan Kanafani wrote, this is “not a case of a people without a homeland, but of a people with a homeland that was stolen from them.”⁷ Consequently, their resistance is not merely political; it is the active, daily cultivation of life—sumud—in the face of a genocidal machine. It is the olive tree that refuses to wither; the student who learns in the rubble of a bombed university; the archivist collecting names that the bomber seeks to erase. This is the spirit embodied by Handala, the child created by Naji al-Ali—his back forever turned, his hands clasped in defiance, a perpetual witness who “will not end after my end,” as Naji told us. He is the unyielding conscience that the criminal can neither answer nor silence.

In this landscape, Occupied Palestine is the epicenter. It is the laboratory where the techniques of total control were perfected, and it is the mirror held up to the world. The unceasing resistance of the Palestinian people is the single greatest act of truth-telling in our time. Every child that points to the sky and names the bomber, every poem written in the dust, is a strike aimed at the heart of the imperial and colonial narrative, proving Kanafani’s dictum: “bodies fall but ideas endure.”

The struggle is not for a better version of the same system. It is a struggle between two irreconcilable forces. On one side, the force of enclosure, control, genocide, and death, built on the criminal premise that land can be emptied of its native people. On the other, the force of truth, justice, land, and liberation, a cause that, as Kanafani wrote, “is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary, wherever he is, as a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era.”⁸

There is no reforming a machine built on a colonizing, racist adventure. There is no petitioning a butcher to become a vegetarian. This is the fundamental choice. You are either upholding a dying order defined by the criminals who designed it, or you are aligning with a people defending existence and life itself. You are, in Kanafani’s words, part of the “generation who will give [the revolution] life.”

The project of the imperial West, built by war criminals and robbers, offers a future of managed decline and comfortable despair. Palestine, rooted in its people, offers a future, period.