Diddy and the American Dream

 

Republicans are drowning in Donald Trump's Lies by Heather Digby Parton

Source: Salon

I happened to spend some time with a highly intelligent 17-year-old over the weekend who's taking AP Government and is keenly interested in the election. She's following all the polling and the punditry and knows the ins and outs of the battleground map better than most adults I talk to. And she said something that struck me because I hadn't really considered it before. We were talking about the vice-presidential debate and she found it odd that it was so civil. She kept waiting for something to happen. And I realized that there are millions of people for whom Donald Trump's brand of demagogic politics is normal. They are either young like this person and have literally grown up in this era of bad feelings or they are those for whom politics wasn't of interest until Trump came along. That's a lot of people who don't know that it isn't supposed to be this way.

Granted we have had more spirited arguments in televised political debates than the one we witnessed last week between JD Vance and Tim Walz. But we never had the kind of debates like those that Donald Trump has participated in since 2016. It's also true that we never had election campaigns like Donald Trump's presidential campaigns and we certainly never had a presidency like his. You have to wonder, is this going to be the way it is going forward even after he's gone?

It's hard to imagine that it will be exactly the same. Trump is sui generis. But what has the next generation of GOP leaders learned from him that can be used for their own ambition? I imagine there are many things but I think there is one very clear lesson: You can lie with impunity.

Can we trust polling data? Experts break down how this data works and why it matters

Some of the new GOP leaders, like Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson, have obviously discovered that if they lie with a congenial look on their faces, there is no limit to how much they can get away with. Politicians have always lied to some degree, of course. In the past, we used to call it spin because they would not dare to just lie outright and essentially tell the voters that they shouldn't believe their own eyes or depend on their own memories. But what we are seeing today is a major shift in what is acceptable in politics — and it goes way beyond Trump.

Vance does not have a naturally pleasant personality but he discovered in that debate that if he didn't crudely disparage "childless cat ladies" or accuse Haitian immigrants of eating pets, he could lie flagrantly about the past and his plans for the future as long as he kept a smile on his face. Consider that he congenially but blatantly lied about having said that he favored a national abortion ban, that Donald Trump had saved Obamacare, that carbon emissions aren't the main cause of climate change (suggesting that climate change is "weird science") and that Chinese imports raised the cost of consumer goods. That's not spin. It's an assault on reality. Those lies and more went unchecked and I would guess that millions of people watching believed him because he said them with such a pleasant tone.

Out on the stump Vance plays to the MAGA crowd, but he's just as dishonest. One of his favorite lines is “They couldn’t beat him politically, so they tried to bankrupt him. They failed at that, so they tried to impeach him. They failed at that, so they tried to put him in prison. They even tried to kill him.” Whichever persona he assumes, attack dog or affable colleague, the lies are the one consistent feature of his speeches.

Another up-and-comer, Mike Johnson, ever the reasonable sounding fellow, has become adept at MAGA lying. Just this weekend he went on Fox News and said that the federal response to Hurricane Helene is a failure.

That's a lie and he knows it. You can ask any of the Republican governors and local officials in the affected area and they will say that the feds have been on the ground since before the hurricane hit and have been excellently coordinating the massive response.

In the past one would have expected this sort of thing from the likes of Florida gadfly Rep. Matt Gaetz but not the Speaker of the House. This kind of blatant falsehood is now completely normal among Republicans. Johnson, like Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, sat for a Sunday show interview over the weekend and refused to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election. 

They are spreading these lies on social media and television and are backed up by Trump's eager endorser Elon Musk and a massive disinformation campaign. The Republican nominee for lieutenant governor in Indiana, for example, shared a fake image to blast the Biden administration's handling of hurricane relief, writing on X that "it doesn't matter if this image is AI-generated or real."

Then there is Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who was once a respectable conservative and considered a strong candidate for president. Today he sounds like a Russian trollbot going the truther route on what he falsely called "the fake" September jobs report:

The last two reports have been revised up, but that is beside the point. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is a non-partisan agency. Rubio knows this. He is lying.

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Republicans do this reflexively now, without any fear of repercussions from their voters, some of whom actually respect them for doing it while those poor souls who actually believe what they're saying give them money and take their lives into their hands. There is no price to be paid for dishonesty and evidently they believe they have something to gain.

This didn't start with Donald Trump, although he's the first one to turn a profit from it. This really started back in the 1990s with Newt Gingrich and the primer written by Republican strategist Frank Luntz called "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control" for Gingrich's political action committee, GOPAC. A few years later we were lied into the Iraq war by the Bush administration. New York Times Magazine published an article in 2004 by reporter Ron Suskind who interviewed a senior administration aide, presumed to be Karl Rove, also known as Bush's Brain:

The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.

I'm not sure Rove thought it would devolve into an orgy of lying about everything, distorting even their own concept of reality, but that's where we are now. (Thanks a lot Karl.) Perhaps it was inevitable that a celebrity demagogue and pathological liar would take the mantle of "history's actor" and turn it into political World Wide Wrestling but the consequences of this little experiment are dire.

We owe it to my young 17-year-old friend to do everything we can to turn this country back into a reality-based community. No society can function swimming in deceit and corruption for very long. And right now we are drowning in it. 

A Devil's Playbook

 

Trump, The Purge, Black Nazis and the Language of Apocalyptic Lies and Violence by Henry Giroux

 

Source: CP

At a campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump invoked a chilling convergence of law, order, and violence—a cornerstone of what can only be described as his politics of disposability. By referencing The Purge, a dystopian film where the government legalizes all forms of violence, including murder, for 12 hours, Trump escalates his rhetoric to a dangerous metaphor. In his hands, “the purge” becomes more than just a narrative device; it embodies a vision in which state-sanctioned violence reaches its grotesque climax. This is not just careless talk. Trump’s invocation of The Purge reveals a willingness to use governmental power as a tool of extermination, targeting those he deems undesirable—immigrants, Black people, journalists, educators, and anyone daring to challenge his white Christian nationalist, neoliberal, and white supremacist agenda. Trump’s language is more than rhetoric—it is an incitement to harm, a prelude to atrocities.

Trump’s reference to The Purge signals a deeper embrace of militarized, fascist rhetoric that frames politics as war, with no limits on legality, morality, or humanity. It is a language soaked in the blood of history, recalling genocidal campaigns against Native Americans, Blacks, Jews, and countless others deemed disposable by authoritarian regimes. It is a dead language, a violent lexicon that gives birth to politicians with blood in their mouths, who weaponize fear, bigotry, and hatred, cloaking their destruction in the false promises of patriotism and security. Trump’s words are crafted to shatter the civic contract, arm citizens against one another, create the conditions for a civil war, and pave the way for a society ruled by fear, enforced by a police state. This language does more than shelter fascists; it silences dissent, normalizes torture, and echoes the horrors of death camps and crematoriums. It is the language of the unspeakable and the unimaginable, a terror that blinds us to the terrors of the unforeseen.

For the far right politicians like Trump, J.D. Vance, and others, fascist rhetoric and politics are now displayed and enacted as a badge of honor. There is more at work here than an echo of former authoritarian regimes. The ensuing threats from Trump and his warrior-soldier types lead directly to the Gulags and camps in a former age of authoritarianism. The spirit of the Confederacy along with an upgraded and Americanized version of fascism is back. The corpse-like orthodoxies of militarism, racial cleansing, and neoliberal fascism point to the bankruptcy of conscience, an instance in which language fails and morality collapses into barbarism, and a politics where any vestige of democracy is both mocked and attacked.

What is clear is that there is a massive rebellion against democracy taking place in the United States and across the globe. And it is not simply being imposed from above through military dictatorships or the morbid charisma of alleged circus performers. People now vote for fascist politics and politicians such as Trump, Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbot, and others of their anti-democratic ilk. MAGA Republicans openly celebrate politicians who not only proudly dismiss democracy but also make racist remarks. CNN reported that Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for Governor of North Carolina, once referred to himself as a “black Nazi” and “expressed support for reinstating slavery” on a pornography website’s message board over a decade ago.[1]  Hannah Knowles, writing in The Washinton Post, offered the following deluge of offensive comments Robinson made before winning the GOP nomination for governor. She provides the following summary:

There was the time he called school shooting survivors “media prosti-tots” for advocating for gun-control policies. The meme mocking a Harvey Weinstein accuser, and the other meme mocking actresses for wearing “whore dresses to protest sexual harassment.” The prediction that rising acceptance of homosexuality would lead to pedophilia and “the END of civilization as we know it”; the talk of arresting transgender people for their bathroom choice; the use of antisemitic tropes; the Facebook posts calling Hillary Clinton a “heifer” and Michelle Obama a man.[2]

Despite the fact that Robinson has a long history of making misogynist, racist and anti-transgender comments, Trump has enthusiastically endorsed him, absurdly calling Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids.”[3] The latter comment made in spite of the fact that Robinson once accused King Jr. “of being a white supremacist.”[4] This shocking alignment with unapologetic racists and would-be fascists underscores how far the party has strayed from democratic and moral principles. This is a party for whom The Purge is less a dystopian film than a model for how American society should be organized.

That such shocking comments are left largely uncriticized by the American public is largely the result of disimagination machines such as the mainstream media and far-right online platforms, many of which have become platforms for billionaires spreading conspiracy theories, that have become powerful ideological fictions—pedagogical machineries of political illiteracy inflicting upon the American people an astonishing vacancy that amounts to a moral and political coma.  As one writer for New York Magazine succinctly summarized, powerful social media platforms are now home to dangerous, illiterate fictions. He writes:

Bill Ackman, a wealthy hedge fund manager turned Trump supporter began posting uncontrollably about a right-wing theory that there is (or was) a whistleblower at ABC News, claims the network gave its questions to Harris in advance of the presidential debate, and then perished in a car crash. [He adds that] Elon Musk, one of the world’s wealthiest people and a large financial supporter of Trump’s ground operation, predicted on his social media platform that Harris’s first act if elected will be to ban X and arrest Musk.[5]

The rapid spread of such unfounded conspiracies highlights the dangerous intersection of wealth, political influence, and misinformation. Stacked atop the ever-growing mountain of lies and relentless conspiracy theories are the ceaseless media stories peddling the absurd and grotesque falsehoods that sacrifice the truth and social responsibility for mindless and often cruel political theater. Trump and his supine backers have ushered in an age of fabricated narratives that become clickbait for an ethically spineless media landscape, where both centrist and right-wing outlets spectacularize eye-popping stories for profit. Let’s be clear, this ploy goes beyond a politics of mere distraction.

The merging of lies, ignorance, and violence was on full display when Trump in a presidential debate with Vice-President Kamala Harris falsely claimed that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. These racist lies did more than spurn endless memes and jokes on social media and late night comedy shows, they also produced a familiar pattern in which the city was subject “to bomb threats that shut down the elementary schools…swatting attacks meant to intimidate community members, [and a series] of high-speed-networked harassment that over the last few years has largely focused on community events for queer and trans people.”[6]  Such lies give Trump’s merry band of white supremacists and proto-Nazis the opportunity to smear immigrants, people of color, and anyone else considered disposable. In this instance, such language is more than a vehicle for spreading lies and misinformation. As Toni Morrison reminds us, “this systemic looting of language…does more than represent violence; it is violence.”[7]

What is often overlooked in mainstream media discussions of attacks on immigrants, Black people, and other marginalized groups is the driving force behind these assaults: white nationalism. Trump’s attacks on Haitian immigrants, for example, are frequently dismissed as mere racism when, in reality, they are part of a larger, insidious white nationalist agenda. These attacks are about more than just racism; they are a key aspect of white nationalism, which targets anyone who is not a white, wealthy, straight, Christian male. Under the guise of white replacement theory, a wide range of people—beyond just people of color—are “othered.”

This same white nationalist logic underpins the far-right assault on women’s reproductive rights, which seeks to control women’s bodies in the name of preserving white dominance. This exclusionary agenda extends beyond moral failings within the corporate-controlled media, representing a broader and more dangerous convergence of power, technology, and language that defends the unthinkable, unforgivable, and indefensible. This indiscriminate destruction invades daily life without restraint, ushering in a new era of “pedestrian warfare” where Palestinians are reduced to subjects in a morbid experiment.[8]   Joelle M. Abi-Rached, Associate Professor of Medicine at the American University of Beirut, describes this devastation as the “literal weaponization of electronic devices,” underscoring the immense suffering and death inflicted by this strategy.[9]

These intertwined projects—rooted in white nationalism, patriarchal control, and the militarization of everyday life—are glaringly evident in the assault on women’s reproductive rights, which seeks to control women’s bodies, particularly encouraging white women to have more children out of fear that people of color are increasing in number. By focusing on reproductive control, white nationalism seeks to preserve and expand its dominance through the fear of a growing population of people of color. Together, these strategies reflect a broader agenda of racial and gendered control, where domination extends from the battlefield into the most intimate aspects of life. What we are witnessing is a calculated and deliberate assault on the very foundations of democracy, undermining the fabric of society with each repeated lie. This death dealing agenda and the conditions that produce it remain largely invisible in a “21^st-century media ecosystem” that spews out language that merged corruption, lies, profits, and clouds of vagueness.

Under such circumstances, the underlying causes of poverty, dispossession, exploitation, misery, and massive suffering disappear in a spectacularized culture of silence, commodification, and cult-like mystifications. As civic culture collapses, the distinction between truth and falsehoods dissolves, and with it a public consciousness able to discern the difference between good and evil. Too many Americans have internalized what Paulo Freire once called the tools of the oppressor. They not only accept the shift in American politics towards authoritarianism, but they also support the idea itself.[10] Trump’s enduring public support is a chilling reflection of his overt embrace of fascist politics. He openly calls for revoking the Constitution, boasts of wanting to be a “dictator for a day,” and threatens to weaponize the presidency to imprison political opponents like Liz Cheney if he regains power.[11]

Trump’s rhetoric of violence and hatred is not mere political theater—it is a calculated assault on the very foundations of democratic life. His words are designed to dismantle all vestiges of social responsibility and the social state, erode democratic institutions, and pave the way for authoritarian rule. Far from alienating his base, this dangerous rhetoric galvanizes it, exposing a deep and unsettling readiness among many to forsake democratic principles in favor of tyranny. In a just society, language is the lifeblood of justice, equality, and democracy. Yet, under Trump, language has become a weapon of division, driven by white nationalism, white supremacy, and fear. His apocalyptic vision is the canary in the coal mine, a stark warning of the perils that lie ahead if we fail to act. As the United States teeters on the brink of fascism, the corruption of language into a tool of violence and exclusion signals an urgent crisis. The stakes are nothing less than the survival of democracy itself.

A Working Definition of Racism by Ricky Sherover-Marcuse

1. Human beings are members of the same species. The term 'racism' is useful as a shorthand way of categorizing the systematic mistreatment experienced by people of color and Third world people both in the United States and in many other parts of the world. But this term should not mislead us into supposing that human beings belong to biologically different species. We all belong to one race, the human race.

 

2. The systematic mistreatment experienced by people of color is a result of institutionalized inequalities in the social structure. Racism is one consequence of a self-perpetuating imbalance in economic, political and social power. This imbalance consistently favors members of some ethnic and cultural groups at the expense of others. The consequences of this imbalance pervade all aspects of the social system and affect all facets of people's lives.

 

3. At its most extreme, systematic mistreatment takes the form of physical violence and extermination, but it occurs in many other forms as well. Pervasive invalidation, the denial or the non-recognition of the full humanity of persons of color also constitutes the mistreatment categorized as racism. Putting the matter in these terms may clear up the confusion, which is generated by thinking of racism merely as 'different treatment'. If we examine the facts, we will see that what is often called 'different treatment' is in reality inhuman treatment, i.e. treatment which denies the humanity of the individual person and their group.

 

4. The systematic mistreatment of any group of people generates misinformation about them, which in turn becomes the 'explanation' of or justification for continued mistreatment. Racism exists as a whole series of attitudes, assumptions, feelings and beliefs about people of color and their cultures which are a mixture of misinformation, fear and ignorance. Just as 'the systematic mistreatment of people of color' means 'inhuman treatment', so 'misinformation about people of color' designates beliefs and assumptions that in any way imply that people of color are less than fully human. These beliefs and attitudes are not just neutral errors; they are impacted misinformation: ideas and opinions which are glued together with painful emotion and held in place by frozen memories of distressing experiences.

 

5. Because misinformation about people of color functions as the justification for their continued mistreatment, it becomes socially empowered or sanctioned misinformation. It is recycled through the society as a form of conditioning that affects everyone. In this way, misinformation about people of color becomes part of everyone's 'ordinary' assumptions. 6. For purposes of clarity, it is helpful to use the term 'internalized racism' or 'internalized oppression' to designate the misinformation that people of color may have about themselves and their cultures. The purpose of this term is to point out that this misinformation is consequence of the mistreatment experienced by people of color. It is not an inherent feature of their culture.

 

7. The term 'reverse racism' is sometimes used to characterize 'affirmative action' programs, but this is inaccurate. Affirmative action programs are attempts to repair the results of institutionalized racism by setting guidelines and establishing procedures for finding qualified applicants from all segments of the population.

 

8. The term 'reverse racism' is also sometimes used to characterize the mistreatment that individual whites may have experienced at the hands of individuals of color. This too is inaccurate. While any form of humans harming other humans is wrong because no one is entitled to mistreat anyone, we should not confuse the occasional mistreatment experienced by whites at the hands of people of color with the systematic and institutionalized mistreatment experienced by people of color at the hands of whites.

 

9. Racism operates as a strategy of divide and conquer. It helps to perpetuate a social system in which some people are consistently 'haves' and others are consistently 'have nots'. While the 'haves' receive certain material benefits from this situation, the long range effects of racism short change everyone. Racism sets groups of people against each other and makes it difficult for us to perceive our common interests as human beings.

Racism make us forget that we all need and are entitled to good health care, stimulating education, and challenging work. Racism limits our horizons to what presently exists. Racism makes us suppose that current injustices are 'natural', or at best, inevitable: "someone has to be unemployed; someone has to go hungry." Most importantly, racism distorts our perceptions of the possibilities for change; it makes us abandon our visions of solidarity; it robs us of our dreams of community.

 

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Musings

 

“We are aberrations—beings born undead, neither one thing nor another, or two things at once … uncanny things that have nothing to do with the rest of creation, horrors that poison the world by sowing our madness everywhere we go, glutting daylight and darkness with incorporeal obscenities. From across an immeasurable divide, we brought the supernatural into all that is manifest. Like a faint haze it floats around us. We keep company with ghosts. Their graves are marked in our minds, and they will never be disinterred from the cemeteries of our remembrance. Our heartbeats are numbered, our steps counted. Even as we survive and reproduce, we know ourselves to be dying in a dark corner of infinity. Wherever we go, we know not what expects our arrival but only that it is there.”

― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

What Does It Take to Destroy a World Order? by Alfred McCoy

Source: TomDispatch 

Once upon a time in America, we could all argue about whether or not U.S. global power was declining. Now, most observers have little doubt that the end is just a matter of timing and circumstance. Ten years ago, I predicted that, by 2025, it would be all over for American power, a then-controversial comment that’s commonplace today. Under President Donald Trump, the once “indispensable nation” that won World War II and built a new world order has become dispensable indeed.

The decline and fall of American global power is, of course, nothing special in the great sweep of history. After all, in the 4,000 years since humanity’s first empire formed in the Fertile Crescent, at least 200 empires have risen, collided with other imperial powers, and in time collapsed. In the past century alone, two dozen modern imperial states have fallen and the world has managed just fine in the wake of their demise.

The global order didn’t blink when the sprawling Soviet empire imploded in 1991, freeing its 15 “republics” and seven “satellites” to become 22 newly capitalist nations. Washington took that epochal event largely in stride. There were no triumphal demonstrations, in the tradition of ancient Rome, with manacled Russian captives and their plundered treasures paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue. Instead, a Manhattan real-estate developer bought a 20-foot chunk of the Berlin Wall for display near Madison Avenue, a sight barely noticed by busy shoppers.

For those trying to track global trends for the next decade or two, the real question is not the fate of American global hegemony, but the future of the world order it began building at the peak of its power, not in 1991, but right after World War II. For the past 75 years, Washington’s global dominion has rested on a “delicate duality.” The raw realpolitik of U.S. military bases, multinational corporations, CIA coups and foreign military interventions has been balanced, even softened, by a surprisingly liberal world order — with sovereign states meeting as equals at the United Nations, an international rule of law that muted armed conflict, a World Health Organization that actually eradicated epidemic diseases which had plagued humanity for generations, and a developmental effort led by the World Bank that lifted 40% of humanity out of poverty.

Some observers remain supremely confident that Washington’s world order can survive the inexorable erosion of its global power. Princeton political scientist G. John Ikenberry, for example, has essentially staked his reputation on that debatable proposition. As U.S. decline first became apparent in 2011, he argued that Washington’s ability to shape world politics would diminish, but “the liberal international order will survive and thrive,” preserving its core elements of multilateral governance, free trade and human rights. Seven years later, amid a rise of anti-global nationalists across significant parts of the planet, he remains optimistic that the American-made world order will endure because international issues such as climate change make its “protean vision of interdependence and cooperation… more important as the century unfolds.”

This sense of guarded optimism is widely shared among foreign policy elites in the New York-Washington corridor of power. The president of the influential Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, has typically argued that the “post-Cold War order cannot be restored, but the world is not yet on the edge of a systemic crisis.” Through deft diplomacy, Washington could still save the planet from “deeper disarray” or even “trends that spell catastrophe.”

But is it true that the decline of the planet’s “sole superpower” (as it was once known) will no more shake the present world order than the Soviet collapse once did? To explore what it takes to produce just such an implosion of a world order, it’s necessary to turn to history — to the history, in fact, of collapsing imperial orders and a changing planet.

Admittedly, such analogies are always imperfect, yet what other guide to the future do we have but the past? Among its many lessons: that world orders are far more fundamental than we might imagine and that their uprooting requires a perfect storm of history’s most powerful forces. Indeed, the question of the moment should be: Is climate change now gathering sufficient destructive force to cripple Washington’s liberal world order and create an opening for Beijing’s decidedly illiberal one or possibly even a new world in which such orders will be unrecognizable?

Empires and world orders

Despite the aura of awe-inspiring power they give off, empires have often been the ephemeral creations of an individual conqueror like Alexander the Great or Napoleon that fade fast after his death or defeat. World orders are, by contrast, far more deeply rooted. They are resilient global systems created by a convergence of economic, technological and ideological forces. On the surface, they entail a diplomatic entente among nations, while at a deeper level they entwine themselves within the cultures, commerce and values of countless societies. World orders influence the languages people speak, the laws they live by, and the ways they work, worship, and even play. World orders are woven into the fabric of civilization itself. To uproot them takes an extraordinary event or set of events, even a global catastrophe.

Looking back over the last millennium, old orders die and new ones arise when a cataclysm, marked by mass death or a maelstrom of destruction, coincides with some slower yet sweeping social transformation. Since the age of European exploration started in the 15th century, some 90 empires, large and small, have come and gone. In those same centuries, however, there have been only three major world orders — the Iberian age (1494-1805), the British imperial era (1815-1914) and the Washington world system (1945-2025).

Is climate change now gathering sufficient destructive force to cripple Washington’s liberal world order and create an opening for Beijing’s decidedly illiberal one?

Such global orders are not the mere imaginings of historians trying, so many decades or centuries later, to impose some logic upon a chaotic past. Those three powers — Spain, Britain and the United States — consciously tried to reorder their worlds for, they hoped, generations to come through formal agreements — the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and the San Francisco conference that drafted the U.N. charter in 1945. Should Beijing succeed Washington as the world’s preeminent power, future historians will likely look back on its Belt and Road Forum, which brought 130 nations to Beijing in 2017, as the formal start of the Chinese era.

Each of these treaties shaped a world in the most fundamental ways, articulating universal principles that would define the nature of nations and the rights of all humans within them for decades to come. Over this span of 500 years, these three world orders conducted what could be seen, in retrospect, as a continuing debate over the nature of human rights and the limits of state sovereignty over vast stretches of the planet.

In their spread across disparate lands, world orders become coalitions of contending, even contradictory, social forces — diverse peoples, rival nations, competing classes. When deftly balanced, such a system can survive for decades, even centuries, by subsuming those contending forces within broadly shared interests. As tensions swell into contradictions, however, a cataclysm in the form of war or natural disaster can catalyze otherwise simmering conflicts — allowing challenges from rival powers, revolts by subordinate social orders, or both.

The Iberian age

During the last thousand years, the first of these transformative cataclysms was certainly the Black Death of 1350, one of history’s greatest waves of mass mortality via disease, this one spread by rats carrying infected lice from Central Asia across Europe. In just six years, this pandemic killed up to 60% of Europe’s population, leaving some 50 million dead. As lesser yet still lethal epidemics recurred at least eight times over the next half-century, the world’s population fell sharply from an estimated 440 million to just 350 million people, a crash from which it would not fully recover for another two centuries.

Historians have long argued that the plague caused lasting labor shortages, slashing revenues on feudal estates and so forcing aristocrats to seek alternative income through warfare. The result: a century of incessant conflict across France, Italy and Spain. But few historians have explored the broader geopolitical impact of this demographic disaster. After nearly a millennium, it seems to have ended the Middle Ages with its system of localized states and relatively stable regional empires, while unleashing the gathering forces of merchant capital, maritime trade and military technology to, quite literally, set the world in motion.

As Tamerlane’s horsemen swept across Central Asia and the Ottoman Turks occupied southeast Europe (while also capturing Constantinople, the Byzantine empire’s capital, in 1453), Iberia’s kingdoms turned seaward for a century of exploration. Not only did they extend their growing imperial power to four continents (Africa, Asia and both Americas), but they also created the first truly global order worthy of the name, commingling commerce, conquest and religious conversion on a global scale.

The Black Death ended the Middle Ages with its system of localized states and relatively stable regional empires, while unleashing the gathering forces of merchant capital, maritime trade and military technology to literally set the world in motion.

Starting in 1420, thanks to advances in navigation and naval warfare, including the creation of the agile caravel gunship, Portuguese mariners pushed south, rounded Africa, and eventually built some 50 fortified ports from Southeast Asia to Brazil.  This would allow them to dominate much of world trade for more than a century. Somewhat later, Spanish conquistadors followed Columbus across the Atlantic to conquer the Aztec and Incan empires, occupying significant parts of the Americas.

Just weeks after Columbus completed his first voyage in 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued a decree awarding the Spanish crown perpetual sovereignty over all lands west of a mid-Atlantic line so “that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the [Catholic] faith.” He also affirmed an earlier papal bull (Romanus Pontifex, 1455) that gave Portugal’s king rights to “subdue all Saracens and pagans” east of that line, “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery,” and “possess these islands, lands, harbors, and seas.”

To settle just where that line actually lay, Spanish and Portuguese diplomats met for months in 1494 in the tiny city of Tordesillas for high-stakes negotiations, producing a treaty that split the non-Christian world between them and officially launched the Iberian age. In its expansive definition of national sovereignty, this treaty allowed European states to acquire “barbarous nations” by conquest and make entire oceans into a mare clausum, or a closed sea, through exploration. This diplomacy would also impose a rigid religious-cum-racial segregation upon humanity that would persist for another five centuries.

Even as they rejected Iberia’s global land grab, other European states contributed to the formation of that distinctive world order. King Francis I of France typically demanded “to see the clause of Adam’s will by which I should be denied my share of the world.” Nonetheless, he accepted the principle of European conquest and later sent navigator Giovanni da Verrazzano to explore North America and claim what became Canada for France.

A century after, when Protestant Dutch mariners defied Catholic Portugal’s mare clausum by seizing one of its merchant ships off Singapore, their jurist Hugo Grotius argued persuasively, in his 1609 treatise "Mare Liberum" (“Freedom of the Seas”), that the sea like the air is “so limitless that it cannot become a possession of any one.” For the next 400 years, the twin diplomatic principles of open seas and conquered colonies would remain foundational for the international order.

Sustained by mercantile profits and inspired by missionary zeal, this diffuse global order proved surprisingly resilient, surviving for three full centuries. By the start of the 18th century, however, Europe’s absolutist states had descended into destructive internecine conflicts, notably the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714) and a global Seven Years War (1756-1763). Moreover, the royal chartered companies — British, Dutch and French — that by then ran those empires were proving ever less capable of effective colonial rule and increasingly inept at producing profits.

After two centuries of dominion, the French East India Company liquidated in 1794 and its venerable Dutch counterpart collapsed only five years later.  Final fatal blows to these absolutist regimes were delivered by the American, French and Haitian revolutions that erupted between 1776 and 1804.

The British imperial era

The British imperial age emerged from the cataclysmic Napoleonic Wars that unleashed the transformative power of England’s innovations in industry and global finance. For 12 years, 1803 to 1815, those wars proved to be a Black Death-style maelstrom that roiled Europe, leaving six million dead in their wake and reaching India, Southeast Asia and the Americas.

By the time the Emperor Napoleon disappeared into exile, France, stripped of many of its overseas colonies, had been reduced to secondary status in Europe, while its erstwhile ally, Spain, was so weakened that it would soon lose its Latin American empire. Propelled by a tumultuous and historic economic transformation, Britain suddenly faced no serious European rival and found itself free to create and oversee a bifurcated world order in which sovereignty remained a right and reality only in Europe and parts of the Americas, while much of the rest of the planet was subject to imperial dominion.

Admittedly, the destruction caused by the Napoleonic wars may seem relatively modest compared to the devastation of the Black Death, but the long-term changes engendered by Britain’s industrial revolution and the finance capitalism that emerged from those wars proved far more compelling than the earlier era’s merchant companies and missionary endeavors. From 1815 to 1914, London presided over an expanding global system marked by industry, capital exports and colonial conquests, all spurred by the integration of the planet via railroad, steamship, telegraph and ultimately radio. In contrast to the weak royal companies of the earlier age, this version of imperialism combined modern corporations with direct colonial rule in a way that allowed for far more efficient exploitation of local resources. No surprise, then, that some scholars have called Britain’s century of dominion the “first age of globalization.”

From 1815 to 1914, London presided over an expanding global system marked by industry, capital exports and colonial conquests, all spurred by the integration of the planet via railroad, steamship, telegraph and radio.

While British industry and finance were quintessentially modern, its imperial age extended key international principles of centuries past, even if in grim secular guise. While the Dutch doctrine of “freedom of the seas” allowed the British navy to rule the waves, the earlier religious justification for domination was replaced by a racialist ideology that legitimized European efforts to conquer and colonize the half of humanity whom the imperialist poet Rudyard Kipling branded the “lesser breeds.”

Although the 1815 Congress of Vienna officially launched the British era by eliminating France as a rival, the 1885 Berlin Conference on Africa truly defined the age. Much as the Portuguese and Spanish had done at Tordesillas in 1494, the 14 imperial powers (including the United States) present at Berlin four centuries later justified carving up the entire continent of Africa by proclaiming a self-serving commitment “to watch over the preservation of the native tribes and to care for the improvement of the conditions of their moral and material well-being.” Just as that designation of Africans as “native tribes” instead of “nations” or “peoples” denied them both sovereignty and human rights, so the British century witnessed eight empires subjecting nearly half of humanity to colonial rule premised on racial inferiority.

Only a century after its founding, however, the contradictions that lurked within Great Britain’s global rule erupted, thanks to the way that two cataclysmic world wars coincided with the long-term rise of anti-colonial nationalism to create our current world order. The alliance system among rival empires proved volatile, exploding into murderous conflicts in 1914 and again in 1939. Worse yet, industrialization had spawned the battleship and the airship as engines for warfare of unprecedented range and destructive power, while modern science would also create nuclear weapons with the power to potentially destroy the planet itself. Meanwhile, the colonies that covered nearly half the globe refused to abide by the institutionalized denial of the very liberty, humanity, and sovereignty that Europe prized for itself.

While most of the 15 million combat deaths in World War I emerged from the destructive nature of trench warfare on the western front in France (compounded by 100 million fatalities worldwide from an influenza pandemic), World War II spread its devastation globally, killing more than 60 million people and ravaging cities across Europe and Asia. With Europe struggling to recover, its empires could no longer constrain colonial cries for independence. Just two decades after the war’s end, the six European overseas empires that had dominated much of Asia and Africa for five centuries gave way to 100 new nations.

Washington’s world order

In the aftermath of history’s most destructive war, the United States used its unmatched power to form the Washington world system. American deaths in World War II numbered 418,000, but those losses paled before the 24 million dead in Russia, the 20 million more in China, and the 19 million in Europe. While industries across Europe, Russia and Japan were damaged or destroyed and much of Eurasia was ravaged, the United States found itself left with a vibrant economy on a war footing and half the world’s industrial capacity. With much of Europe and Asia suffering from mass hunger, the swelling surpluses of American agriculture fed a famished humanity.

Washington’s visionary world order took form at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944.  There, 44 Allied nations created an international financial system exemplified by the World Bank and then, at San Francisco in 1945, by a U.N. charter to form a community of sovereign nations. In a striking blow for human progress, this new order resoundingly rejected the religious and racial divisions of the previous five centuries, proclaiming in the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights the “equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family,” which “should be protected by the rule of law.”

Within a decade after the end of World War II, Washington had 500 overseas military bases ringing Eurasia, a chain of mutual defense pacts and a globe-girding armada of nuclear-armed warships and strategic bombers.

Within a decade after the end of World War II, Washington also had 500 overseas military bases ringing Eurasia and a chain of mutual defense pacts stretching from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to the Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty (ANZUS), and a globe-girding armada of nuclear-armed warships and strategic bombers. To exercise its version of global dominion, Washington retained the 17th-century Dutch doctrine of “freedom of the seas,” later extending it even to space where, for more than half a century, its military satellites have orbited without restraint.

Just as the British imperial system was far more pervasive and powerful than its Iberian predecessor, so Washington’s world order went beyond both of them, becoming rigorously systematic and deeply embedded in every aspect of planetary life. While the 1815 Congress of Vienna was an ephemeral gathering of two dozen diplomats whose influence faded within a decade, the United Nations and its 193 member states have, for nearly 75 years, sustained 44,000 permanent staff to supervise global health, human rights, education, law, labor, gender relations, development, food, culture, peacekeeping and refugees. In addition to such broad governance, the U.N. also hosts treaties that are meant to regulate sea, space and the climate.

Not only did the Bretton Woods conference create a global financial system, but it also led to the formation of the World Trade Organization that regulates commerce among 124 member states. You might imagine, then, that such an extraordinarily comprehensive system, integrated into almost every aspect of international intercourse, would be able to survive even major upheavals.

Cataclysm and collapse

Yet there is mounting evidence that climate change, as it accelerates, is creating the basis for the sort of cataclysm that will be capable of shaking even such a deeply rooted world order. The cascading effects of global warming will be ever more evident, not in the distant future of 2100 (as once thought), but within just 20 years, impacting the lives of most adults alive today.

Last October, scientists with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a “doomsday report,” warning that humanity had just 12 years left to cut carbon emissions by a striking 45% or the world’s temperature would rise by at least 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by about 2040.  This, in turn, would bring significant coastal flooding, ever more intense storms, fierce drought, wildfires and heat waves with damage that might add up to as much as $54 trillion — well over half the current size of the global economy. Within a few decades after that, global warming would, absent heroic measures, reach a dangerous 2 degrees Celsius, with even more devastation.

In January, scientists, using new data from sophisticated floating sensors, reported that the world’s oceans were heating 40% faster than estimated only five years earlier, unleashing powerful storms with frequent coastal flooding. Sooner or later, sea levels might rise by a full foot thanks to nothing but the thermal expansion of existing waters. Simultaneous reports showed that the rise in world air temperature has already made the last five years the hottest in recorded history, bringing ever more powerful hurricanes and raging wildfires to the United States with damages totaling $306 billion in 2017. And that hefty sum should be considered just the most modest of down payments on what’s to come.

Surprisingly fast-melting ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic will only intensify the impact of climate change. An anticipated rise in sea level of eight inches by 2050 could double coastal flooding in tropical latitudes — with devastating impacts on millions of people in low-lying Bangladesh and the mega-cities of southeastern Asia from Mumbai to Saigon and Guangzhou. Meltwater from Greenland is also disrupting the North Atlantic’s “overturning circulation” that regulates the region’s climate and is destined to produce yet more extreme weather events. Meanwhile, Antarctic meltwater will trap warm water under the surface, accelerating the break-up of the West Antarctic ice shelf and contributing to a rise in ocean levels that could hit 20 inches by 2100.

In sum, an ever-escalating tempo of climate change over the coming decades is likely to produce massive damage to the infrastructure that sustains human life. Seven hundred years later, humanity could be facing another catastrophe on the scale of the Black Death, one that might, once again, set the world in motion.

The geopolitical impact of climate change may be felt most immediately in the Mediterranean basin, home to 466 million people, where temperatures in 2016 had already reached 1.3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.  (The current global average was still around 0.85 degrees.) This means that the threat of devastating drought is going to be brought to a historically dry region bordered by sprawling deserts in North Africa and the Middle East. In a telling example of how climate catastrophe can erase an entire world order, around 1200 B.C. the eastern Mediterranean suffered a protracted drought that “caused crop failures, dearth, and famine,” sweeping away Late Bronze Age civilizations like the Greek Mycenaean cities, the Hittite empire and the New Kingdom in Egypt.

From 2007 to 2010, ongoing global warming caused the “worst three-year drought” in Syria’s recorded history — precipitating unrest marked by “massive agricultural failures” that drove 1.5 million people into city slums and, next, by a devastating civil war that, starting in 2011, forced five million refugees to flee that country. As more than a million migrants, led by 350,000 Syrians, poured into Europe in 2015, the European Union plunged into political crisis. Anti-immigrant parties soon gained in popularity and power across the continent while Britain voted for its own chaotic Brexit.

Projecting the Middle East’s history, ancient and modern, into the near future, the ingredients for a regional crisis with serious global ramifications are clearly present. Just last month, the U.S. National Intelligence Council warned that “climate hazards,” such as “heat waves [and] droughts,” were increasing “social unrest, migration and interstate tension in countries such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Iraq and Jordan.”

If we translate those sparse words into a future scenario, sometime before 2040 when average global warming is likely to reach that dangerous 1.5 degrees Celsius mark, the Middle East will likely experience a disastrous temperature rise of 2.3 degrees. Such intense heat will produce protracted droughts far worse than the one that destroyed those Bronze Age civilizations, potentially devastating agriculture and sparking water wars among the nations that share the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, while sending yet more millions of refugees fleeing toward Europe. Under such unprecedented pressure, far-right parties might take power across the continent and the EU could rupture as every nation seals its borders. NATO, suffering a “severe crisis” since the Trump years, might simply implode, creating a strategic vacuum that finally allows Russia to seize Ukraine and the Baltic states.

As tensions rise on both sides of the Atlantic, the U.N. could be paralyzed by a great-power deadlock in the Security Council as well as growing recriminations over the role of its High Commissioner for Refugees. Pummeled by these and similar crises from other climate-change hot spots, the international cooperation that lay at the heart of Washington’s world order for the past 90 years would simply wither, leaving a legacy even less visible than that block of the Berlin Wall in midtown Manhattan.

Beijing’s emerging world system

As Washington’s global power fades and its world order weakens, Beijing is working to build a successor system in its own image that would be strikingly different from the present one.

Most fundamentally, China has subordinated human rights to an overarching vision of expanding state sovereignty, vehemently rejecting foreign criticism of its treatment of its Tibetan and Uighur minorities, just as it ignores equally egregious domestic transgressions by countries like North Korea and the Philippines. If climate change does, in fact, spark mass migrations, then China’s untrammeled nationalism, with its implicit hostility to the rights of refugees, might prove more acceptable to a future era than Washington’s dream of international cooperation that has already begun to sink from sight in the era of Donald Trump’s “great wall.”

In a distinctly ironic twist, a rising China has defied the long-standing doctrine of open seas, now sanctioned under a U.N. convention, instead effectively reviving the mare clausum version of imperial power by claiming adjacent oceans as its sovereign territory. When the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the original world court, unanimously rejected its claim to the South China Sea in 2016, Beijing insisted that the ruling was “naturally null and void” and would not affect its “territorial sovereignty” over an entire sea. Not only did Beijing in that way extend its sovereignty over the open seas, but it also signaled its disdain for the international rule of law, an essential ingredient in Washington’s world order.

More broadly, Beijing is building an alternative international system quite separate from established institutions. As a counterpoise to NATO on Eurasia’s western extremity, China founded the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in 2001, a security and economic bloc weighted toward the eastern end of Eurasia thanks to the membership of nations like Russia, India and Pakistan. As a counterpoint to the World Bank, Beijing formed the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank in 2016 that quickly attracted 70 member nations and was capitalized to the tune of $100 billion, nearly half the size of the World Bank itself. Above all, China’s $1.3 trillion Belt and Road Initiative, 10 times the size of the U.S. Marshall Plan that rebuilt a ravaged Europe after World War II, is now attempting to mobilize up to $8 trillion more in matching funds for 1,700 projects that could, within a decade, knit 76 nations across Africa and Eurasia, a full half of all humanity, into an integrated commercial infrastructure.

By shedding current ideals of human rights and the rule of law, such a future world order would likely be governed by the raw realpolitik of commercial advantage and national self-interest. Just as Beijing effectively revived the 1455 doctrine of mare clausum, so its diplomacy will be infused with the self-aggrandizing spirit of the 1885 Berlin conference that once partitioned Africa. China’s communist ideals might promise human progress, but in one of history’s unsettling ironies, Beijing’s emerging world order seems more likely to bend that “arc of the moral universe” backward.

Of course, on a planet on which by 2100 that country’s agricultural heartland, the north China plain with its 400 million inhabitants, could become uninhabitable thanks to unendurable heat waves and its major coastal commercial city, Shanghai, could be underwater (as could other key coastal cities), who knows what the next world order might truly be like? Climate change, if not brought under some kind of control, threatens to create a new and eternally cataclysmic planet on which the very word “order” may lose its traditional meaning.

In Plain Sight: The Evidence of Things Seen by John G. Russell

“You don’t have to ask me how someone is. You can see how they are by what they say and the comments they make.”

—Kara Young, biracial former girlfriend of Donald Trump

“Beat them up, not once but repeatedly, beat them up so it hurts so badly, until it’s unbearable.”

—Benjamin Netanyahu on how to deal with Palestinians.

“What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”

—Kamala Harris

Americans live in a state of denial. We reject the evidence of our senses, even when it is screamed at us clearly and unambiguously and paraded starkly naked before us. We bow to the deceit and manipulation of the wealthy and powerful, turning off our critical thinking and recalibrating our moral compass, all the while avoiding the truth about what we have become and what this change says about us. Not only does this betrayal of conviction impact equity and democracy at home, it also affects those living abroad whose lives are devastated by its dehumanizing and destructive consequences and the paralysis of those who fail to challenge it.

Donald Trump notoriously boasted that he could shoot someone in public view and not lose any voters. While his criminal acts have so far not included homicide, ironically, there is some truth to this statement from the self-professed “brilliant weaver” of towering tales.

Every day, in every way, Trump tells us who he is — and gets away with it. Whatever skeletons he kept in his closet have largely been exposed. We know his playbook, which Trump returns to with the feverish regularity of an obsessive-compulsive. However, it appears he has caught the corporate media off guard. Recently, it has been sounding the alarm over Trump’s insistence that the 2024 election is being rigged against him. However, he began beating that drum as early as the 2016 election, when he declared he would accept the results only if he won. Sadly, he did. Now, eight years later, after rejecting the results of the 2020 election, he repeats the claim as he runs in another election. Though newsworthy, there is nothing new here.

Another chapter in Trump’s voluminous playbook is birtherism. Given Kamala Harris’ melanated ancestry, did anyone doubt that Trump would resuscitate this old canard once she declared her candidacy? When racism was on the fringe, people believed it could be contained, but the fringe has moved closer to the center. What was once the Tea Party has hulked into MAGA and taken over the Republican Party. Conservative political organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA) make no attempt to conceal their racism, which they would like to see elevated to national policy.

Setting its sights on Harris, the NFRA has taken Trump’s birtherism a step further, claiming, based on its “originalist” (read bullshit) interpretation of Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution, that even though she was born in America, Harris is ineligible for president because her parents were not naturalized citizens at the time of her birth. (This would also apply to Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, no doubt to the orgasmic delight of Ann Coulter.) Not content with this vile sophistry, the NFRA goes so far as to quote the 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott ruling, claiming that Harris cannot be a U.S. citizen because her ancestors were enslaved blacks. (Aside from the fact that the NFRA’s interpretation of the article is flagrantly incorrect and ignores the fact that the 13th and 14th Amendments overturned the ruling, one might wonder why the organization chose not to play this trump card when Harris became vice president four years earlier, as the position also requires natural-born citizenship.)

The racist xenophobia expressed here is as obvious as it is hurtful. Imagine growing up as a black and brown child in America only to realize that your country is just not that into you and where racial progress is measured in terms of the evolution of racial epithets—from calling black people “niggers” to “rebranding them “DEI hires.” Then again, in the eyes of NFRA, it is not their country and never will be.

This is, after all, MAGA’s raison d’être—to time-slip the nation back to an age when America was great and, as Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote in the Dred Scott decision, blacks had “no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” These are the same fragile white souls who ban teaching unbowdlerized American history in classrooms because they fear it will damage the self-esteem of white children. No wonder Trump and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 want to abolish the Department of Education to perhaps replace it with the Department of Truth Social.

Despite these threats to governance and the psychological well-being of the people of color these attacks target, the media spends too much time debunking Trump’s distractions. Just when you think the media might catch up, Trump ejects some chaff to throw them off his trail. Given Trump’s history of bragging about his enormous ratings and the size of his rallies after Biden’s inauguration, was it really news that Trump would display a chronic case of Crowd Envy? We already knew Trump is a size queen, although he apparently does not measure up to his own exacting standards, which may account for his many insecurities.

Speaking of chaff, Trump would also have us believe he is a “stable genius” who knows more than anyone about everything and everyone. He knows more about military strategy, taxes, construction, campaign financing, infrastructure, ISIS, the environment, drones, technology, trucks, Facebook, the courts, steelworkers, the Kurds, trade, nuclear weapons, lawsuits, debt, politicians, and even the circumstances of Barack Obama’s birth. He is an expert not only on racial determination but also on assigning qualities appropriate to each race. As he testified in 1993 before a congressional hearing on Native American gambling, Trump knows what “Indians look like,” going so far as to call Connecticut’s Mashantucket Pequot, a tribal nation with multiracial ancestry, whom he was engaged in one of many casino gaming disputes he had with Native Americans, “the Michael Jordan Indians,” and to dismiss their indigenous roots.

Some thirty years later, Trump now assures us that he knows who is East Indian. Indeed, it wasn’t all that long ago that Trump, a connoisseur of the finer aspects of biracialism, could discern which attributes biracials inherited from each parent. In her 1997 book Confidence Man, Maggie Haberman details how Trump claimed that his biracial model girlfriend at the time, Kara Young, inherited her beauty from her black mother and her intelligence from her white father.Apparently, “low IQ,” biracial Harris —who Trump has admitted is “beautiful” like his plagiarizing spouse, though not “better-looking” than The Don himself—is also intellectually challenged, presumably due to her lack of superior white genes.

The reality is Trump’s ability to read race and ethnicity like tea leaves is as reliable as his exceptional memory: He once claimed to have received a copy of Mein Kampf from a “Jewish friend,” although it turns out the book was a collection of Hitler speeches, and the friend was not Jewish.

When matters turn contentious, under pressure, Trump’s omniscience is superseded by his self-avowed ignorance, and he suddenly transforms into an orange-skinned, blue-suited Sgt. Schultz. When asked, he knows nothing about David Duke, the Proud Boys, Nick Fuentes, Lev Parnas, Stormy Daniels, E. Jean Carroll, any of the 18 women who have accused him of sexual assault, Mein Kampf and its 21st-century sequel Project 2025, and who shot the disgraceful Arlington National Cemetery campaign video and posted it to TikTok.

Like his endless litany of lies and unchecked racism and sexism, Trump’s cognitive decline is in full view to even the most myopic of political observers. Even so, corporate media seems to be pulling its punches, perhaps because, like the assaulted Arlington employee, it fears possible future retaliation should he win in November.

Again, none of this is a state secret. Trump has not attempted to conceal his authoritarian plans for the nation, even announcing that he would “terminate parts of the Constitution,” wants to be “dictator” (albeit for “only one day”), and will “fix” things so that no one will “have to vote again.” These statements cannot be easily dismissed as mere braggadocio and jokes.

With every delusional, gaslit utterance, Trump proves himself mentally and emotionally unstable, someone who not only should not have access to the nuclear codes but, given his interminable, vindictive, fact-free rants, to the media, old and new. Unfortunately, even though the proverbial Framers of the Constitution anticipated the need to remove presidents from office if they were unable to carry out their duties, they failed to include a constitutional provision that would have kept demented candidates out of the White House. In an ideal world, where voters can distinguish fantasy from reality and choose leaders who share that ability, this would not be necessary. That, however, is not the world we live in.

True, as Politico’s Alexander Thompson has suggested, America may have already unknowingly elected mentally ill presidents. Indeed, not only are there sufficient grounds to believe, according to Bandy X. Lee and 36 other psychiatrists and mental health professionals, that Trump was cognitively impaired during his first (and hopefully only) term in office, but also that his condition has progressively deteriorated since leaving office. Yet despite these concerns, he is the Republican nominee, and polls show him virtually neck-and-neck with his Democratic rival. Long gone are the days when an enthused howl could end your political career. Trump, however, is free to grunt and groan and produce whatever bizarre, cacophonous noises he pleases and remain the darling (at least publicly) of the GOP and about a third of the country.

Despite the transparency of Trump’s behavioral quirks and seditious aspirations, he has yet to face any consequences. Impeachments have come and gone, as have attempts to remove him from the ballot in several states; trials pend indefinitely. Yet through all of this, the Felon of Fifth Avenue not only remains at large but is free to run for president in a race that remains obscenely close for a country that ostensibly embraces the rule of law and struggles to judge people by the content of their character and not the orange of their skin. Adding to these ironies is the possibility that, ignoring the dangers looming before them, like Germans in 1933, Americans may ultimately vote to end our democracy. Germany’s decision invited genocide. In America, a genocide precedes it, though its victims are located oceans away.The death of American democracy may be the price Americans pay for their myopia. But another group of people is already paying an existential price for our folly.

A critique of Israeli policy may seem out of place in an anti-Trump polemic. Still, the core problems remain fundamentally the same: American regard for both Trump and Israel tends to deny the evidence of things heard, seen, and performed, often ad nauseam. Despite the overwhelming evidence of corruption and atrocity, despite statement after statement from Israeli officials dehumanizing Palestinians, despite report after report of war crimes and human rights violations, including the rape and torture of Palestinian detainees and the detention and mistreatment of thousands in the West Bank and Gaza, despite the evidence of things not only seen but endlessly reiterated, the American-supported genocide in Gaza continues unabated in plain sight.

Those Americans who buck this trend are doxxed, expelled from universities, and fired. Those who call out Trump’s Bigly Lies and stand against him face a similar fate should he win in November and exact his promised retribution.

Almost a year has passed since Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel that has left some 1,200 Israelis dead, resulted in the deaths of 35 hostages, and incurred the genocidal wrath of Israel that has led to the slaughter of over 40,000 Palestinians, the destruction of Gaza, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Gazans, famine, and the outbreak of polio. Even without daily graphic reminders of the carnage, the intent of Israeli leaders is clear. From Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on down, they have repeatedly and unequivocally expressed their hatred for Palestinians and their plans for Gaza and the West Bank, all while making no secret of their opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian state and exposing American support for a two-state solution as a hollow ruse, a piece of performative art worthy of a Parisian mime. They know that America, which has proven itself unable even to persuade Israel to commit to a ceasefire, will do little to pressure its “most important ally in the Middle East” to accept a plan that might create such a state.

U.S. leaders, including Harris, have declared their unconditional commitment to the existence of the Israeli ethnostate; their support for a Palestinian state has been more equivocal, limited to an idea, not the creation of an actual entity. For all the much-ballyhooed hope, joy, and diversity conspicuously displayed at the DNC convention in Chicago, the faces of Palestinian American families affected by the genocide in Gaza were nowhere to be seen, their voices deliberately silenced. Their absence from the stage is odd given the fact that, as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, Chicago is home to more Palestinian Americans than any city in the country. Yet despite sending 29 uncommitted delegates to the convention and touting the party’s diversity, organizers refused to give them a speaking platform on stage, effectively gagging them, apparently, for fear that to do so would cast a pall on the feel-good optics of party joy and unity. No one wants a Debbie Downer to spoil all the fun, particularly if, unmuzzled, Debbie’s pro-Palestinian, pro-ceasefire, anti-genocide voice prompts pro-Israel donors to withhold their contributions. (God forbid that the Harris go the way of Liz Magill, Claudine Gay, and Minouche Shafik.) American diversity is its strength so long as Palestinian Americans are excluded and American complicity in genocide remains comfortably out of sight.

Harris has called the scale of suffering in Gaza “heartbreaking,” while failing to acknowledge the role America’s moral abrogation has played in shattering those hearts and much, much more. “So many innocent lives lost, desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety,” she laments, failing publicly to recognize that those hungry innocents are fleeing bombs made in the U.S.A. and an IDF funded by American taxpayers, including Palestinian Americans, a fact that should ensure their right to voice their concerns about the suffering in a public forum that putatively celebrates representative democracy. In 2023, speaking at a White House ceremony for the advancement of economic and educational opportunities for Hispanic Americans, Harris stated, “None of us just live in a silo. Everything is in context.” Sadly, the DNC chose to deliberately obscure some contexts and silence those who would provide them.

But then, what did one expect? The former president uses “Palestinian” as a racist slur against his political enemies. White House officials mourn the deaths of innocent Israelis but portray the deaths of innocent Palestinians, when they are recognized at all, as the inevitable price of war, and 100 days into the conflict, express America’s determination to have Israeli hostages returned to their families but say nothing specifically about the 24,000 Palestinian lives taken at that point in the conflict. Where are the congressional hearings to parse these statements, preserve the safety of Palestinian Americans, and ensure the rights of peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters?

It speaks volumes when it takes the eradication of nearly 2% of the population in Gaza for President Biden to finally admit that “Those protesters out in the street, they have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.” Why is it that it took some ten months for him to come to this realization? Although some have welcomed this statement, woefully belated as it is, it fails to acknowledge the obscene disproportionality of the killing and suffering.

In America, as in Israel, Palestinian lives don’t matter. The pain of Palestinian Americans who have lost family, relatives, and loved ones in the conflict, the plight of hundreds of thousands of Gazan refugees, and the rape, torture, and death of Palestinian detainees held in Israeli detention centers escapes the notice of mainstream media and mainstreamed politicians, revealing once again that Palestinian lives are inconsequential.

Israeli leaders rain dehumanizing racist rhetoric and lethal ordnance upon Palestinians. Still, they are not held responsible for their actions because doing so would lead to accusations of antisemitism, just as criticizing Trump and his cult for their racism and sexism is cynically framed as anti-white misandry.

In America, even if Trump loses in November, the dogs have been let loose; the damage already has been done, setting the stage for another January 6 and, perhaps, far worse. In Gaza, even if a ceasefire is eventually declared, its pulverized shell, the benighted product of moral indifference and political self-servitude, will remain, a shell-shocked elegy to the dead whose exact numbers have yet to be determined and may never be. In both cases, one did not have to be Cassandra to see what was coming, if only because it was already in plain sight.