The electorate affirmed that the worst human being to hold the presidency deserves a second turn in the job. Despite Trump being eight years older and obviously losing his mind, despite the fact that he ran a corrosive campaign on naked malevolence, and despite his having promised to mass arrest, cage and deport immigrants, Americans rewarded him with ultimate power.

Toward the end of the 2024 election, the candidates made their closing arguments. Trump painted the United States as a dark, terrifying and infested place, festering with pet-eating immigrants, violent criminals, and deviant trans people. America was a savage hellscape where good, “normal” Americans were forgotten as their white, heterosexual world was reshaped by Democrats into something alien and repulsive.

Trump stoked conspiracy theories and promised vengeance. He mused about reporters being shot, mimed oral sex with a microphone, spewed racist lies, and threatened to order the military against the “enemy from within.” He emphasized every rotten thing about himself. None of this prevented his popularity from expanding in multiple electorates across the country; it may have even facilitated his success.

Kamala Harris articulated a hopeful future. Positioning herself as a moderate, Harris expressed a willingness to work with her political opponents. She embraced diversity and promised to better the lives of all Americans. The electorate was offered a choice between a mainstream Democrat and a candidate running the most openly fascist campaign ever undertaken by a major-party nominee for president. They chose the latter.

Voters who cast their ballots for Trump engaged in contemptible behavior, turning amoral, unserious about governing, and proving themselves undeserving of our constitutional legacy. More than a Trump problem, there’s a voter problem. If you elect a monster once, you’ve made a mistake. If you elect it twice, you’re the monster.

Unlike Trump’s first election, this one cannot be minimized as the result of an overconfident Democratic campaign and the successful con of a hundred thousand voters in a handful of swing states. This time, voters decisively chose Trump. The autocrat, who has grown more belligerent and maniacal over the years, is now is a maniac with a mandate.

Time and again, we hear the wild lies Trump‘s voters believe, such as babies being aborted after birth. We act as if they are sharing the same reality as ours, as if they are making informed decisions about legitimate issues. The media often portrays this gullible crowd as woefully misunderstood: if only Democrats addressed their economic anxiety, they might vote differently. That’s a myth no one should believe. They are not congenitally ignorant. They chose to close their eyes to reality.

Autocracies thrive on befuddled, ill-informed populations. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt noted, “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”

Harris decried Trump as a fascist, a petty tyrant, a liar. If all America needed was an articulate case for why Trump was terrible, then Harris was the right candidate. With a long career as a prosecutor, she’s taken on perpetrators of all kinds: “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said. “I know Donald Trump’s type.” She was the prosecutor who would defeat the felon. The voters heard her case, and they found for the defendant. America knew his type, too, and liked it.

Many thought  women would rise up in defense of bodily autonomy. And they did, but not enough. Abortion was less of a key issue than expected. Harris did win the support of 54 percent of women, lower than Biden’s 57 percent in 2020. No group of voters was more loyal to Trump than white men. He managed to drive up what were already sky-high margins with his white, blue-collar base. Male voters — terrified or resentful of women — bought into Trump’s regressive idea of masculinity in which power over women is a birthright.

Despite enthusiastic crowds and the endorsement of high profile celebrities, antagonism or apathy undermined Harris: over 7 million Biden voters did not vote for her. Trump likely won as a result. Currently, Harris has received 74 million votes, while Biden obtained over 81 million votes. Some may have even voted for Trump, who increased his 2020 vote total by over 2 million, up to 76 million. The anti-Trump coalition failed to sustain their 2020 outrage. Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Julia Roberts lost to Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, and Joe Rogan.

Voting in 2020 was portrayed as an act of heroism, because of the raging pandemic. Though Joe Biden provoked little passion, his campaign felt like the culmination of a liberation movement. The sense of outrage, which carried Biden to victory, was blunted for Harris. In a 2016 essay “Autocracy: Rules for Survival,” Masha Gessen wrote, “It is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock and outrage,” otherwise apathy would set in. And once that happened, autocracy would seem as natural as the weather.

Defusing Trump outrage and hanging over the election was the festering political wound that was Democratic support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The slaughter and starvation of Palestinians — funded by U.S. taxpayers and live-streamed on social media — has triggered one of the greatest surges in progressive activism in a generation. Roused to action by their government’s complicity in Gaza’s destruction, some voted for Jill Stein, many stayed home.

Harris loyally lined up behind the despicable and unpopular blank-check policy of Biden, which demoralized the party’s base and threatened its chances in Michigan. As the carnage continued and expanded, furious Arab American and Muslim voters determined to punish the party by making it lose. It appears to have worked: Trump captured Michigan partly thanks to a shocking, winning margin in Dearborn, the largest majority Arab-American city.

Trump will not improve the lives of Palestinians, nor those of most Americans. It’s no secret that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu supported Trump over Kamala Harris. He held off on any cease-fire deal that might help Harris. Trump supported Israel’s brutal bombing campaigns in both Lebanon and Gaza and told his buddy Netanyahu ”do what you have to do.” As a “gift” to the incoming Trump administration, Netanyahu is preparing a cease-fire plan regarding its bombing of Lebanon. 

Along with recriminations about Harris’s failure to at least express more remorse about the suffering in Gaza, a profusion of Democratic self-flagellation began immediately after the brutal loss. The party was too woke. Harris — the candidate who had been a magnet for joyful enthusiasm — was disparaged. She was too centrist, too un-primaried, too female and laughed too often. She leaned too much on reproductive freedom, or gave fatally little attention to concerns about immigration.

Democrats whined further: if only Biden hadn’t waited so long to withdraw, or if only he hadn’t mumbled something about “garbage”. Pundits opined furiously and confusingly: the campaign missed what spoke to men, perhaps particularly Black men, or Latino men — or was it women? Also, Harris failed to talk enough about the kitchen-table economy and failed to address the many grievances of the working class, who are not getting their share and fear “urban” crime.

Maybe there’s a little truth in some of that, but none of it explains the magnitude of what’s happened. Despite being the best-fed, richest, and most lethally defended humans in the history of planet Earth, Americans are afraid. Despite being coddled with too much of everything: more cars, more good roads, more personal gadgets, more guns, and more freedom than any country in the world, it’s not enough. Americans are annoyed. The price of eggs went up. Gas doesn’t cost what it cost in 1989. Did America elect a dictator because Cheerios — available in about 20 flavors — hit $5.29 at the grocery store?

Americans reelected a Bigot who promotes hatred and division and who lies — blatantly, shamelessly — every time he appears in public. They chose a man described by his own former advisers as a fascist. Voters witnessed his abuse of presidential power toward fascist ends and understood that returning him to office will immunize him legally for those abuses. Their votes affirm that conspiring to disenfranchise Americans by overturning a national election does not make someone unfit for national office — even if that someone is already plotting to do it again. There’s no way to rationalize an outright Trump victory except as a despicable reflection of the American character.

As president, Trump will likely issue shock and awe executive orders that will activate some form of Trump’s MAGA-pleasing deportation threat. The logistics of a nationwide mass kidnapping of millions of “illegals,” who are “poisoning the blood” of America are unclear. Trump confirmed last Monday that his plan for mass deportations will involve a national emergency declaration and the military. If street protests are mobilized, the regime — with a bloated strongman twitching for a reason to invoke the Insurrection Act — will deploy troops. The worst-case scenarios, including razor-wired concentration camps in the desert, are beyond horrifying.

Our country has been deliberately set on fire by fellow Americans. Aside from mass deportations and contempt for climate change, human rights, and gun control, Trump will appoint a more reactionary federal judiciary and assault the press. On day one, Trump will pardon the J6ers creating a paramilitary force answerable to him. These are not the imaginings of a paranoiac. These are campaign promises announced from the podium and include a federal government stocked with fools and jesters whose highest qualification is fealty to the Great Leader.

Trump has already initiated a Cabinet reminiscent of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the German Expressionist film about an evil hypnotist who brainwashes automatons to commit murders for him. Trump’s lackeys and loyalists include a propagandist for Russia — Tulsi Gabbard — as Director of National Intelligence, a Fox News host and subject of sexual assault charges — Pete Hegseth — as Secretary of Defense, an End Times Christian Zionist — Mike Huckabee — as ambassador to Israel, and an accused statutory rapist — Matt Gaetz — as Attorney General.

Somehow topping all these MAGA freaks is the anti-vaxxer — Robert F. Kennedy — nominated to lead Health and Human Services. Kennedy recently commented that on its first day in power, the Trump regime will ban fluoride in water. Fluoridated water has been a favorite target of paranoid anti-Communist conspiracists dating to the 1950s. In Stanley Kubrick’s vicious satire Dr. Strangelove, General Jack D. Ripper explains that he avoids fluoridated water because it’s a Communist plot that will sap his “precious bodily fluids.”

Trump’s nominations are meant to bolster his effort to lay waste to the institutions that he has come to despise or regard as threats to his power or purse strings. “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty,” wrote Arendt. Trump’s cabinet offers a deliberate negation or mockery of the government functions they’re supposed to administer. They are his shock troops.

Trump wants to force Senate Republicans to humiliate themselves by confirming these unqualified toadies. Republicans will not try to stop this Trump travesty or any other. On the contrary, they’ll say — and are already saying it — that they owe it to Americans to give them every stupid, destructive thing they voted for.

Having lived through the circus of Trump 1.0, the voters also affirm that they’d prefer to plunge the country back into that embarrassing prior horror: blatant corruption, blathering of state secrets, the turbo-obnoxious Trump family, freak-show personnel choices, blue-state retribution, government-by-impulse, and policy-by-tweet. Trump 2.0 will likely involve more overt and impeachable crises, like flouting court orders or the constitution. Trump’s voters are plainly willing to run the risk. Knowing now what a Trump show-presidency looks like, they’ve voted for a sequel.

The public has chosen malevolent leadership. The only consolation for the enemies within is clarity — the moral clarity of the voter’s decision is crystalline: Trump will regard his slim plurality vote margin as a “mandate” to do his worst. We hope that many of the ideas on Trump’s demented wish list will not actually come to fruition and that our democracy can once more withstand this sociopath and the lunatics who surround him. But that is just desperate, wishful thinking. As of yet, there is nothing that will break the iron grip Trump has over his cult, now joined by a plurality of Americans.

Over the past decade, opinion polls have shown Americans’ faith in their institutions waning. But no opinion poll could make this shift in values any clearer than this vote. The United States will become a different kind of country. The lesson of this election is that the American people aren’t worthy of their Constitution. They elected a president who has never read it and who, by his behavior, holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, in contempt. Like the counter-culture hippies and anti-Vietnam radicals of the 1960s, the enemies within are rebels — strangers in a strange land, exiled inside a country many of us no longer feel fully part of. 

In the midst of the Vietnam War and Watergate, Richard Nixon won a huge and depressing landslide reelection in 1972. In a stunning shift, this dark history was overturned with Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Change is always possible, but we should not underestimate how arduous it will be to achieve, or how long it will take. In 2020, we believed that we had broken with history, with the Trump era; in 2024, it is apparent that history has broken some part of us. Acknowledging this is not surrender but a realization that the fights ahead will be formidable, but that anything is possible.

Musk — owner of SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter/X — had already endorsed the Tyrant and helped fuel his alternative reality, based on lies and fear. Throughout 2024, he amplified Trump’s xenophobia and election paranoia with a steady drumbeat of conspiracy theories and disinformation. Messaging his 202 million followers, Musk stoked panic about Haitian immigrants and spread debunked claims that FEMA failed to help victims of hurricane Helene and spent the money instead on migrants.

Regarding the election, Musk asserted that “if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election” and wove that lie into a false narrative about the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. He posted a vile, toxic, hate video that purports to lay bare the vast conspiracy: Democrats are expediting the conversion of “illegals” to citizens in an attempt to make America a “one-party state.” Musk amplifies radical right propaganda to the masses that might otherwise languish in the darkest corners of the internet.

With his promotion of fascist fabrications, Musk channels Model-T owner and Hitler-apologist Henry Ford. In 1918 plutocrat Ford, who had just lost a Senate race, purchased a newspaper The Dearborn Independent — the 20^th century equivalent to Twitter/X. Convinced that victory had been stolen from him, Ford bought a platform for his self-promoting populist message, unfiltered by media skeptics and naysayers.

After purchasing the newspaper, Ford attacked the man who beat him in the Senate election and continuously harangued readers that the election had been stolen. Musk has feebly crawled onto Trump’s 2020 Big Lie bandwagon and is even helping set the stage for Big Lie 2.0 by spreading false claims that voting machines are programmed to rig the election against Trump.

One of the most successful industrialists on the planet, Ford became well-known for his anti-Semitic scapegoating of Jews that echoed Musk’s current scapegoating of immigrants. According to Rachel Maddow in her book Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism: “Ford spewed anti-Semitism freely in private tirades among friends, family, business cohorts, newspaper reporters or anybody within earshot. He attributes all evil to Jews or to Jewish Communists.”

For Ford, Jews and Communists were interchangeable. He hated both equally and considered them synonymous. After Trump repeatedly called Kamala Harris a Communist and referred to her as “Comrade Kamala,” Musk amplified the Demagogue on Twitter/X. He posted an AI-generated image of Harris dressed as a “communist dictator,” wearing a red uniform complete with hammer-and-sickle emblazoned hat. Musk captioned the image with the false assertion, “Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one. Can you believe she wears that outfit!?” A troll like Trump, neither Musk nor Trump ever says anything that is amusing, wry or witty.

Finding a new way to scapegoat Communists and “evil Jews,” Ford latched onto a newly translated tome called ”The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The work of Russian fabulists and the Tsars’ secret police who were furious at the Bolsheviks’ overthrow of tsarist aristocracy, the screed purported to be the surreptitious “notes of a top-secret meeting wherein Jewish puppet masters had drawn up their strategy and tactics” to overthrow the regime. As Maddow says, “Ford unleashed a new era of anti-Semitism.”

Beginning in 1920, Ford’s newspaper published 149 articles, a multi-year series on the anti-Semitic hoax “proving” that a cabal of Jews were plotting to enslave the “goyim” and take over the world. The Protocols were debunked over and over. But that didn’t matter to Ford. Like Trump and Musk’s promotion of anti-immigrant lies, Ford’s unbounded hatred was not susceptible to facts.

Ford pressured his dealerships, which were selling the wildly popular Model-T at the time, to distribute his publication. It reached 900,000 copies at its peak in 1925 — the second largest newspaper circulation in the US. Ford also published the noxious series in book form, titled The International Jew. It ran to four volumes and contributed to the deaths of millions.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler — one of Trump’s favorite dictators according to his former chief of staff — lifted ideas, stereotypes, and whole passages from Ford’s publications. Hitler extolled Ford by name, singling out the American automobile baron for his steadfast courage in the face of assault by strikers or Communists or bankers, all of whom he asserted were Jews.

When Ford mulled running for president in 1923, Hitler wanted to deploy “some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections.” Hitler kept a large framed portrait of Ford in his office and told a reporter, “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.” Returning the adulation, Ford — who did extensive business in the Third Reich — was obsessed with Hitler and Nazism and throughout his life kept company with Nazi sympathizers and devout Hitlerites including Fritz Kuhn, the Nazi leader of the German American Bund.

Kuhn, who wanted to be the American Hitler prior to Trump, helped organize the 1939 Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden that championed Nazi ideals camouflaged as pro-American rhetoric. It presaged Trump’s recent MSG MAGA rally — an orgy of fascism, misogyny, racism, and grievances. The MAGA retribution list included Blacks, Latinos, Jews, women, and liberals and anyone who would even consider voting for Kamala Harris. To MAGA, all that matters is gaining power and then using it to crush anyone who would stand in their way. At the rally, Musk said nothing of consequence, but wore a black hat in which the MAGA lettering resembled the Nazi font Fraktur.

Like Ford did for Hitler, Musk has become a mouthpiece for Trump, turning Twitter/X into the 21^st century version of The Dearborn Independent — one that scapegoats immigrants, Muslims, and, more quietly, Jews. Musk praised the pernicious anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jewish communities are supporting “hordes of minorities” who are “flooding” into the country to replace white people. He further asserted that George Soros “appears to want nothing less than the destruction of western civilization.”

Musk has also re-instated Twitter/X accounts that are pro-Hitler Holocaust deniers, white nationalists, and neo-Nazis with a predictable surge in anti-Semitism, racism, and homophobia, according to reports in Media Matters. He allowed Nazis like Andrew Anglin and Nick Fuentes back on his Website along with Qanon supporter, pardoned-by-Trump criminal, and violence promoter Mike Flynn. The Twitter/X algorithm blocks left liberal views and clearly favors MAGA content, with the blatant goal of breeding extremism and radicalizing people against their own government — and against each other.

To help buy Twitter/X, Musk received funding from a Saudi conglomerate, the cryptocurrency firm Binance, entities associated with the rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs — indicted recently for sex trafficking — and fellow apartheid veteran and PayPal Mafia associate Peter Thiel, who controls JD Vance. United in their formative white supremacist experience in South Africa, Musk and Thiel — in backing a racist for president, expressing xenophobic views, and opposing a Black presidential candidate — show that the old white South African mindset lives on in MAGA. Musk, like Ford, chooses to use the power gained through the labor of others to persecute and dehumanize those they consider lesser.

Musk, however, is going beyond Ford in his parasitical attachment to Trump and his manic pursuit of political power. The MAGA billionaire founded America PAC earlier this year so he and his like-minded, ultra-rich MAGA pals could dump tens of millions of their own wealth into registering and persuading voters on behalf of the criminal candidate.

“If the Blind Lead the Blind . . ,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

Musk craves a techno-fascist fantasy of ultimate power. As a foreign-born South African, Musk cannot run for president, according to the Constitution — assuming that still matters. By attaching himself to Trump like a leech, he hopes to not only enrich himself but also seize power in the United States. The wannabe Dictator has explicitly invited Musk into the government as a social engineer to redesign America.

To reach that objective, Musk — a messianic narcissist — is pouring tons of personal attention and financial resources into the campaign. He has relocated to Pennsylvania to oversee Trump’s ground game there. Last week, he rehashed the refuted assertion that Dominion Voting Systems rigged the vote count in 2020, a falsehood that resulted in a $787.5 million settlement paid by Fox News. “We should not allow voting machines of any kind,” he said in Pittsburgh. If Trump wins Pennsylvania and the presidency, it will be by a slight margin that could be attributed to Musk. He can boast that he was the critical variable in this success.

In another desperate attempt to elect the Insurrectionist and gain the approval of the MAGA pack, the socially inept Musk hosts his own rallies that turn into bacchanals of greed. In one instance, Musk stood stiffly before a huge US flag and told an assembled crowd that he loved them while promising one of them a million dollars. Like the audience at a giveaway gameshow, they howled in ravenous anticipation and chanted Musk’s name. He glowed amidst their purchased admiration.

“This kind of energy lights a fire in my soul,” Musk said, as he made one of the crowd a millionaire and pledged to do that daily. His love and the million-dollar-handouts were conditioned on their signing a petition tied to his PAC, which is devoted to returning the Madman to the White House. The spectacle was bizarre and potentially illegal — akin to buying votes. But no one, not least Musk himself, cared in the slightest.

Musk’s public adoration of the Bigot begins with his avaricious understanding of his own economic interests. A corporate welfare bum, he has turned the government into a spectacular money gusher. Tesla flourishes on tax credits for electric cars as well as subsidies for its charging stations. SpaceX heavily depends on contracts with the Department of Defense while taking over key roles previously handled by NASA. Both companies have won $15 billion in federal contracts. But that’s just the beginning. SpaceX is designing a slew of new products with “national security customers in mind.”

While railing against alleged government giveaways to migrants, Musk himself has only begun to tap the financial benefits of the government. Trump will fulfill his ambitions. He rewards loyalists, whether they are foreign leaders who praise him, former opponents who genuflect before him, or supplicants who spend money at his resorts and hotels. In office, Trump gave some of his donors highly unusual and potent roles in government, despite conflicts of interest. The king of corruption, Trump knows that his party or even the Supreme Court will never punish him for his lawless transgressions.

Trump makes it easy to imagine how the Tesla car-baron will exploit this deal with the Devil. When Trump brags that Musk will send a rocket to Mars during his administration, he is pledging to bestow SpaceX with a gargantuan amount of money. He is talking about making the world’s richest man even richer.

Trump already announced that he will put Musk in charge of a murky new government-efficiency position — the “secretary of cost-cutting.” Hating regulation, Musk will advocate for privatizing the government, outsourcing state functions to self-interested hustlers and his technologist pals. Musk would also reap one of the largest personalized tax breaks in American history — a tax benefit available to government employees. Further, by targeting regulators of his own companies, conflict of interest will be institutionalized as the normal method by which Musk does government business.

Project 2025 involves the dismantling of the federal government — eliminating entire agencies while sweeping out swaths of politically neutral civil servants. This kind of transformative change suits Musk’s grandiose dreams of world domination and his techno-authoritarian ideology. An exaltation of the narcissism encoded in the Silicon Valley Tech Bro’s pursuit of monopoly is the belief that concentrating power in the hands of self-described geniuses is the most desirable social organization. Musk agrees with his accomplice Pete Thiel, “Competition is for losers.” In this worldview, democratic restraints on absolute power must be eradicated as hindrances to “progress.”

While Henry Ford hung out with fascists back in the 1920s and 30s, and published anti-Semitic bilge, Musk has wealth and access to power that Ford could only dream of. A sniveling sidekick to the Despot who wants generals ”like Hitler had,” the raving reactionary Musk — out of rapacious greed — is doing everything in his power to get that maniac elected.

At Tesla, Musk crowned himself “technoking.” Following Trump’s example of malfeasance, Musk will not divest himself from his businesses — not even his social-media company. In a dictatorial regime of unchecked power, he would not need to fear congressional oversight. The risk posed by Musk running parts of the government will not be on the minds of most Americans voting in the election, given the myriad other potential horrors already promised by the delusional Authoritarian. Yet if Americans elect the Fascist or the Fascist steals the election and the ghastly Trump nightmare becomes real, Musk will be one of its hideous monsters — a vampire squid feeding on what remains of America’s lifeblood.

Women favor Kamala Harris 58-37 in a recent NBC poll, while men prefer Trump 52-40. The gender conflict spans across swing states and racial groups. And the gender disparity is overwhelmingly pronounced among young women, who favor Harris by 38 points, and young men, who favor the MAGA candidate by 13 points, a 51-point gap.

If you are a woman in America, Trump wants you to be a mother whether you want to or not. As the misogynist-in-chief, Trump personifies the radical rightwing movement to outlaw abortion nationwide, restrict contraception, and severely limit the scope of reproductive health care. Trump wants women to birth more babies even if it means risking their health or endangering their lives, as women die from Trump‘s abortion ban in states such as Georgia.

“Women know that the feminist struggle to dismantle sexism and male power and ensure that women have opportunities in life will not be achieved until all women have control over their sexual reproductive lives,” writes Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer in their book The Fall of Roe. “It’s a fundamental human right to control one’s own body and that it’s crucial to the ability of women to exercise their other social, economic, and political human rights.” Until they can fully decide when and if to become pregnant, women cannot be truly equal with men. 

Along with his misogyny, the litany of Trump’s liabilities is well known to the American electorate: his corruption, narcissism, malevolence, racism, nepotism, mendacity, depravity, duplicity, hypocrisy, and venality are seared on the psyches of American voters. A convicted felon and insurrectionist, he has unmistakably signaled that a second term would bring about a blatant assault on the justice system, a ruthless prosecution of political enemies, a violent expulsion of immigrants, a reckless abandonment of the nation’s allies, an emboldening of tyrants worldwide, and a deepening of the nation’s racial and cultural rifts.

For these reasons, apparently, a majority of American men — MAGA Men — support him. Loathed by most women, Trump’s hope of winning the election depends on getting enough people — enough men — to join him in the curtailment of women’s rights and its fascistic merger with the termination of immigrants‘ rights.

He appointed hardline anti-abortion activists to help lead the Department of Health and Human Services, in his disastrous first term, and encouraged evangelical VP Mike Pence to engineer a governmental anti-abortion machine. And, of course, Trump nominated the three Catholic justices who voted — with three other Catholic members of the Supreme Court — to overturn Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision and end the constitutional right to an abortion. Incidentally, their decision was released on June 24, 2022 — the Catholic Feast of the Sacred Heart.

All of this is deeply unpopular, and Trump knows it. This is why he tried the laughably transparent contradiction of exulting in his appointments to the court but distancing himself from the consequences, both practical and political, of his draconian anti-abortion accomplishments. During his monumentally stupid debate with Harris, he also tried to tar Democrats as extreme with the deranged claim that they want to “take the life of a child in the ninth month, and even after birth” — baby “executions.”

Trump has spent a lifetime evading responsibility for his actions, whether that’s defrauding customers or instigating an effort to overturn constitutional government in the United States. While he can try to run away from Dobbs, he can’t escape the anti-abortion zealots that helped him secure the presidency in 2016 and support him now. He disingenuously suggested he might vote for a Florida amendment to protect abortion rights. Unable to withstand the torrent of criticism from anti-abortion extremists and fearful of demobilizing anti-abortion voters, Trump caved and voted with the anti-abortionists.

A second Trump presidency would be catastrophic for reproductive rights. Starting with radical Catholic VP J.D. Vance and Project 2025, abortion opponents will be integral to the entire ecosystem of his administration — their priorities woven into its very fabric, whether or not their cause is a priority for Trump. Part of the purpose of Project 2025 was to ensure a deep bench of MAGA apparatchiks ready to staff a second Trump administration and educated to use the levers of the federal government to further constrict women’s sovereignty over their bodies.

In a desperate and duplicitous attempt to woo female voters, Trump — during that humiliating debate with Harris — grandly proclaimed, “I have been a leader on fertilization, which is IVF.” Trump is not a leader on “fertilization,” unless by “fertilization” he means the kind of stuff that people use to kill weeds on lawns. To say he was a leader on IVF, or in vitro fertilization, it follows that he would have rallied Republicans to support it.

Instead – a mere week after Trump’s comments on IVF, Senate Republicans blocked, for the second time, a bill that would have provided a nationwide right to the fertility treatment. Sen. Vance wasn’t present for this vote, but had voted against the bill in June. Trump, the self-proclaimed “leader on IVF,” couldn’t even lead his own running mate to vote “yes.”

A man of zero convictions, Trump has no plans to protect IVF rights; rather, he subserviently does the bidding of ultraconservatives intent on systemically dismantling women’s rights. “The reality is that Trump is the reason that IVF is at risk in the first place,” said Sen. Tammy Duckworth on the Senate floor after the vote. “The Dobbs decision is what led us to today’s nightmare, taking the power to decide how and when to start families from us women, and handing it to politicians in statehouses across the country.”

Blocking IVF protections creates an insidious pathway for Republicans to enshrine into law the biggest threat to IVF which is “fetal personhood” — the idea that a fetus or embryo should have the same rights as a child. If an embryo is a person, clinics could not dispose of unused embryos, something that is a common, necessary part of the IVF process. Fetal personhood would also ban abortion nationwide by granting full rights to fetuses. Vance, anti-abortion leaders, and Trump’s Project 2025 agenda have admitted that is their goal.

“American Women v. Trump,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024″

Despite his obvious anti-woman agenda, Trump is surprised that women don’t like him. Stuck in a 1950s Playboy version of womanizing masculinity, sad old Trump has recently taken to promising women that he will be their steadfast guardian — the national patriarch and women’s patron saint. At a recent rally in Pennsylvania, he told women that “You will be protected, and I will be your protector.” Like a malevolent horror movie villain come to life, Trump’s delivery alone made my skin crawl. I can only imagine its nauseating effect on women.

This was a follow-up to his bleat on Untruth Social that, if he wins, “Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free!” He went on, speaking directly to women, “You will no longer be in danger. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.” So says the man who famously stated, “when you’re a star, they let you do it,” who was found liable for sexual abuse, and who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by dozens of women. Most women recognize that when the predator offers protection, safety comes at the cost of freedom and submission so it’s time to fight.

Trump’s paternalism apparently extends only toward married women with children as his running mate Vance — along with the Republican party — disparage women who resist marriage and motherhood as “childless cat ladies,” who must be miserable. A recent convert to Catholicism and Trumpism, Vance ordains that adults without children should pay higher taxes and receive fewer votes. As heir apparent to the post-Trump MAGA party, the dogmatic Vance thinks he should decree other people’s sexual and reproductive choices.

Like Trump, he admires Hungary’s far-right Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán and has spoken admiringly of Orbán’s efforts to boost his nation’s marriage and birth rates, including a policy that offers subsidized loans to couples who wed before the bride’s forty-first birthday. “Why can’t we do that here?” Vance asked in a speech. “Why can’t we actually promote family formation?”

“Vance appeals to evangelicals with the message that we find happiness by fulfilling traditional gender roles, which is a cornerstone of white evangelical Christianity,” said Vanderbilt assistant professor Sophie Bjork-James, who has written extensively on evangelicals and populist politics. “He also speaks to a misogynist trend emerging out of the tech world among people who would prefer not to talk about any kind of diversity at all. Vance represents a new articulation of rightwing politics that is bridging the Christian right and a tech-influenced, hyper-masculine conservatism.

Twitter/X owner and painfully unfunny edgelord Elon Musk encouraged Trump to pick Vance as his running mate. He joins them in their disparagement of childless women singling out Taylor Swift after she endorsed Kamala Harris for president. (Trump later wrote, “I hate Taylor Swift.”) Musk posted the creepiest response possible. Replying to Swift’s identification of herself as a “childless cat lady,” he offered or perhaps threatened to impregnate her, saying “I will give you a child,” suggesting that Swift has no choice in the matter. What Musk proposed “was another way of saying rape,” said Hillary Clinton.

Musk also joined Trump and Vance and other Republicans in terrorizing Springfield, Ohio, by baselessly asserting that Haitian immigrants there are cannibalizing pets. Through xenophobic, sexist online memes, the Trump campaign has been aggressively courting what might be called the “bro vote, the frat-boy flank” — a slice of low propensity, low information 18-to-29-year-old males that has long been regarded as unreliable and unreachable.

Trump reposted a meme accusing Harris of being engaged in one of Puff Daddies’ freak offs — the horrifically abusive sexual parties that form the basis of the recent federal indictment against the rapper. Vile and entirely predictable, the post included a faked, photo-shopped picture of Harris standing with Diddy and suggesting she was an accomplice.

Along with the sexism, the bigoted former president also shares flagrantly racist memes about Middle Easterners invading America and falsely edited videos showing Harris urging migrants to cross the border. This is part of Trump’s hateful campaign strategy of scare-mongering on immigrants.  

Trump’s toxic campaign merges xenophobia, an anti-abortionist agenda, and systematic misogyny into a fascist strategy aimed at further eroding women’s reproductive and sexual rights. “Attacks on abortion rights in the Global North is part of a larger misogynist and white supremacist project of the far right,” writes Sian Norris in her book Bodies Under Siege. “This fascist ideology is focused on a racist and misogynistic conspiracy theory that a white majority is being deliberately and malignly replaced by migration from the Global South.”

When Trump blathered to millions of Americans, during the debate, that “our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote,” he was not just repeating an egregious fabrication intended to undermine the results of the 2024 election. He was also echoing the latest iteration of a once-fringe racist conspiracy theory — the “great replacement.” It claims that nonwhite immigrants into the United States and other Western countries are replacing white voters to achieve a “white genocide.”

The far right believes reproductive control and immigration control must be the solution to its white supremacist anxiety about the so-called white genocide that, they imagine, eradicates racial purity and destabilizes white majority nations. This fictitious replacement — echoed in the Trump-Vance-Musk attacks on childless women — is enabled, they fantasize, by feminists suppressing the white birth rate with abortion and contraception. Musk — who has fathered at least 12 children with three women — is obsessed with low birth rates, which has led to accusations of his spreading the “great replacement” theory.

While this concocted, delusionary belief in a white genocide may have started as an extremist idea, it has now become mainstream politics, supported by a network of deep-pocketed funders on the radical right such as Elon Musk, anti-democratic billionaire Peter Thiel, and Catholic supremacist Leonard Leo. President of the Federalist Society, Leo picked the six Supreme Court Justices who ended Roe. An abortion abolitionist, he also helped orchestrate the Trump administration’s anti-abortion machine — “the strategic, top-down takeover at every level of American political and legal life,” according to Dias and Lerer, in The Fall of Roe.

The story of the fall of Roe revealed that Leo’s brand of ultra-conservative Christianity built enormous power where it mattered most. “They did not have to be the majority to be the ones now crushing liberal America — all they had to be was a powerful, well-positioned minority,” writes Dias and Lerer.  “They had ended a ruling as deeply entrenched in American life as it was opposed in Catholic doctrine.”

For them, the fall of Roe was a beginning, not an end. As these Christian nationalists see it, the entire Roe era created rights that were untethered from the country’s traditions and Constitution: from legalized contraception to same-sex marriage, from affirmative action to immigration access — these were rights they must nullify.

Abortion rights has enabled Kamala Harris to emerge from the shadow that loomed over her during the first half of the Biden administration during which she had been relegated to the worst jobs, including the border. Over the two years since the Dobbs ruling, she traveled extensively across the country and emerged as the administration’s strongest, most compelling voice in the fight to restore abortion rights and access.

Harris reframed abortion as a fundamental freedom — the buzzword of her current campaign, which she and others on the abortion front lines have championed for years. “Harris’s approach to the fight was rooted in the women-of-color-led reproductive-justice movement,” writes Rebecca Traister in New York magazine. “She has linked abortion rights to other inequities, including the country’s high maternal-mortality rates and lack of affordable housing, paid family leave, and child-care provisions.” Together with ensuring free, safe and legal abortion, these policies promote egalitarian, voluntary families that reject the oppressive, unequal, patriarchal structures of gender and family.

Stopping Trump will not extinguish the radical religious movement that bolsters MAGA. Its diseased ecosystem permeates deeply into American life. However, American women realize that defeating Trump will at least prevent these Christian crusaders from seizing control of the government’s most powerful lever while offering a pathway to reverse the far-right direction of the Supreme Court, enact a humane immigration policy, prevent a nationwide abortion ban, and reclaim sovereignty over their bodies. In this election, American men must listen to American women.

In an appalling finale to the Court’s term, the conservative majority — three of whom were appointed by Trump — said that “official acts” that are central to the presidency are given “absolute immunity.” Other acts, even those at the “outer perimeter” of a president’s official duties, are “presumptively immune,” making them extremely difficult to prosecute. What is truly startling is not only the protection the Court has afforded Trump, but the unrestricted power it has granted him and his successors for whatever malice they might do in the future.

The majority opinion is “the most sweeping judicial reconstruction of the American presidency in history,” writes Princeton Professor of American History Sean Wilentz. Securing the monumental disgrace of the John Roberts Court, it has “seized the opportunity to invent, with no textual basis, a decision so broad that it essentially places the presidency above the law” and “invests the presidency with quasi-monarchial powers.”

The Justices have essentially legalized a losing president refusing to leave office. The defeated president can use his presidential authority to find an “official” pretext for remaining in office. While aspects of the Constitution and the Framers’ intentions are debatable, the Founders of the United States certainly did not design a constitutional system of checks and balances that established a government that would allow someone to declare themselves president for life if they felt like it.

Yet that is what the Supreme Court decision enshrines. In authoring the opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts often sounds like Trump’s lawyer rather than the impartial judge he pretends to be. He only provides a vague distinction between official and unofficial presidential acts, thereby bestowing full authority for any president to commit crimes up to and including assassination and treason with virtual impunity from criminal prosecution, as long as he can justify those crimes as part of his “official” duties.

By basing the possibility of any prosecution on this distinction and by then making that distinction virtually impossible to discern, Roberts eliminates any chance of resolving the underlying legal issues of Trump’s current federal prosecution before Trump has a chance to take power again. “The majority’s dividing line between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ conduct narrows the conduct considered ‘unofficial’ almost to a nullity,” writes Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her blistering dissent.If Trump wins, he can then — exercising the power of “absolute immunity” that the Court has conferred— dismiss the criminal investigations against him.

Roberts’s opinion illustrates just how broad this immunity will be in practice. He claims, for example, that Trump is absolutely immune from prosecution for any discussions involving Justice Department officials — even when he urged Justice Department officers to pressure states to “replace their legitimate electors” with fraudulent members of the Electoral College who would vote unlawfully to install Trump for a second term. Trump is absolutely immune from prosecution even when he told the Justice Department, “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.” If Trump had ordered the Justice Department to arrest every Democrat who holds elective office, he could not be charged with a crime as this is considered “official” conduct.

Juan Cole, Digital Image, Dream/ PS Express, 2024

Fallout from the Trumpist Court giving its MAGA master royal immunity was immediate. Judge Juan Merchan put on ice Trump’s July 11 sentencing for 34 felony convictions because the Court decision could absurdly be used to define some of Trump’s actions as “official” acts. Though ridiculous on its face, the signing of the hush money checks to pay off a porn star to influence an election occurred inside the White House Oval Office, so this pay-off might be an “official” act.

Further, the ruling will remand Trump’s election subversion case, brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith, back to Judge Tanya Chutkan, in the D.C. District Court, to sort out what, if anything, is left of the indictment. Chutkan had previously rejected, and offered a sweeping condemnation of Trump’s immunity argument — one that constitutional law professor Michael Dorf also called “crazy.” The process will take lots of time and any ruling can be appealed, so the case will not go to trial before the election.

In the very week that the nation celebrated its founding, the Court undermined the reason for the American Revolution by giving presidents what Judge Sotomayor called a “law-free zone” in which to act, thus taking a leap toward restoring the monarchy that the Declaration of Independence rejected. The entire purpose of the Constitution was to create a government that was not bound to the whims of a king. Almost 250 years later, the Court’s self-styled “originalists” have put a crown within Trump‘s reach.

Presidents can still be impeached for their crimes in office, but it is hard to see how they can ever be prosecuted. The ruling creates a series of “nightmare scenarios” for what a president is legally allowed to do, writes Justice Sotomayor. “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organize a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune, immune, immune.” She added: “The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.”

Though the Court left open the possibility of prosecuting Trump for “unofficial acts” — such as, his conniving with campaign officials, it also implied that nothing a president does can be called unofficial. For example, the Extreme Court ruled that a president’s communications with the public likely fall “comfortably” within at least the “outer perimeter” of his official acts. And, in a another twist of the legal knife, the majority ruled that Trump’s “official” acts could not even be introduced as evidence in a trial against him.

That last twist was too much even for ultra-right Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who refused to join the majority in the ruling on evidence. She gave the example of how hard it would be to prosecute a president who takes a bribe for an official act. “The Constitution does not require blinding juries to the circumstances surrounding conduct for which Presidents can be held liable,” she wrote. But the decision of her five fellow-extremists would require such blindness.

The ruling even said that courts could not evaluate a president’s “motives” in determining criminal accountability. Considering an alleged criminal‘s motives is exactly “what the Constitution itself plainly calls for,” writes Yale University Constitutional Law Professor Akhil Reed Amar. “Essentially, the Court in Trump v. United States is declaring the Constitution itself unconstitutional. Instead of properly starting with the Constitution’s text and structure, the Court has ended up repealing them.”

Summing up the question of whether a former President enjoys immunity from federal criminal prosecution, Justice Sotomayor writes in her dissent, “The majority thinks he should, and so it invents an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law.” For a conservative majority that pretends to rely on historical precedent, the newly created standards are remarkable for their lack of basis in the Constitution, law or any precedent of the court. The immunity standards are pure fabrications.

The Supreme Court has intervened directly in the 2024 presidential campaign by shielding Trump from being tried on major federal charges before the November election. No previous Supreme Court has protected a political candidate in this way. This outcome benefits the Court’s preferred presidential candidate by defacing beyond recognition the Constitution and the concept of democratic self-determination. Trump poses a unique threat to constitutional government, but it’s one that the Trumpist Judges just happen to support. These aren’t Justices, they’re Trump cronies.

The outcome of the Court’s majority runs counter to the long-settled understanding of a president’s exposure to criminal prosecution, regardless of whether his acts were considered “official.” That understanding endured until last week. The outstanding example in living memory is the case of Richard Nixon, who accepted a pardon from President Gerald Ford to avoid criminal prosecution. Nixon accepted the pardon for his role in the Watergate scandal because everyone agreed that his actions were legally prosecutable. Yet Nixon’s criminal behavior could easily be misconstrued by the Roberts Court as official acts.

As the Nixon pardon made clear 50 years ago, the country understood well that ex-presidents could face trial for their crimes in office. Last Monday, the court radically redefined the settled understanding of the liability of ex-presidents, an opinion that contradicts the entire notion of a government based on the rule of law. The president can violate the law, exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, and use his official power for malevolent ends. We want a president that is bold and fearless, even if he breaks the law in doing so. That is the majority’s terrifying message.

We have entered the era of the imperial presidency as well as the era of the “Imperial Supreme Court” as Stanford law professor Mark A. Lemly calls it. In casting aside the text, structure and history of the Constitution in favor of vague concerns about the need to “enable the president to carry out his constitutional duties without undue caution,” the Court reveals that it will rule — and rule us all — based on its own free-floating and distorted vision of an optimal constitutional order.

The immunity ruling reflects a massive Supreme Court power grab that is also evident in the recent Loper Bright decision that overturned a 40-year-old precedent — the Chevron deference. The decision took judicial power over federal agency regulations — transferring policy-making authority from agency experts to a judiciary that lacks the personnel and expertise to evaluate the overwhelming array of policy questions that arise from legal ambiguity. 

The court’s three liberals denounced the ruling as a threat to American democracy by an un-elected branch of government. “A longstanding precedent at the crux of administrative governance thus falls victim to a bald assertion of judicial authority,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent. “The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power.”

In a further condescending flaunting of their power, Justices Thomas and Alito refused to recuse themselves from decisions related to any January 6 cases. Thomas’s wife — lawyer and activist Ginni Thomas — denounced the “fascist left” and posted on Facebook “love MAGA people!!!” on January 6. Connected to Trump’s coup attempt, she was implicated with the fake elector schemers in Arizona. Alito — a flag-flying Christian Nationalist — is openly aligned with the Big Lie traitors, having allowed the upside-down American flag, the “insurrection flag,” to be flown in his yard during the 2021 Capitol violence.

The anti-democratic determination by these Trump-supporting, Supreme Frauds could not come at a more dangerous time for democracy. The ruling has removed a major check on the office of the presidency at the very moment when dictator-for-a-day Trump is running for office on a promise to weaponize the apparatus of government against those he views as his enemies. The Trumpified Court’s decision that grants imperial powers to a future unscrupulous President Trump has raised the stakes of the election tremendously, and they were already too high. If Trump wins, he will have the presidency Nixon wanted, one in which nothing the president does is illegal.

The Court’s decision inflates the significance of Biden’s political self-immolation at the recent debate, in which the President spent much of his 90 minutes on stage staring into the middle distance, mouth agape, reiterating “the very idea” as if he was surprised and stunned by Trump reeling off lie after lie and insult after insult as he has done for years. When Biden did speak, his voice was shaky, and he sometimes lost his train of thought. Biden’s meltdown increased the wannabe tyrant’s chance of winning, according to the liberal Brookings Institute.

Now, while the convicted GOP candidate has been invested by the MAGA court with kingly powers, the Democrats are dithering about whether their impaired candidate is the best person for the job of running against the felon. The Court decision shows — if voters did not know it before — the incredible importance of putting progressive justices on the Supreme Court.

The next president might very well get two appointments to the Supreme Court — Thomas is 76 and Alito is 74. If a Democrat wins, he or she might possibly appoint two replacement justices that would return the court to a liberal majority, 5-4.  If Trump wins, the 6-judge majority will be chosen by a racist mob boss and the Christo-fascist Federalist Society.

The Trump Court’s decision is not only a grant of immunity for past crimes, but is also an  enthusiastic endorsement of the despotic power that Trump has vowed to assert. Promising “retribution” against his opponents, he will turn the Justice Department against critics. For example, he wants to subject Liz Cheney to a televised military tribunal on uncertain charges. Trump also said that he “has every right to go after” Joe Biden and his family. 

The Supreme Court essentially gave him the green light to do that as part of his “official” duties. The combination of new judicially invented presidential immunity and the longstanding pardon power means that a future Trump White House could become the site of a criminal enterprise that would make Richard Nixon’s Watergate Scandal look trivial.

Raging xenophobe Trump promises that he will set up vast camps and illegally deport millions of people from the U.S. He could invoke the Insurrection Act and use troops to lock down the southern border or crush protests. He’d stretch the powers of the presidency in ways not seen in our lifetime. He says this consistently and clearly — so it’s not conjecture.

The Supreme Court has radically changed the very structure of American government paving the way for MAGA authoritarianism. Though mind-bogglingly insane, a moronic conman has used his vile narcissism and pathological mendacity along with a maniacal cult to put him on the verge of having complete control of all three branches of the U.S. government. We need a France-like, anti-authoritarian voter turnout to stop the Gangster President.

Among them were owners of Germany’s largest corporations, some of whose names are familiar to us even today – Siemens, Krupp, Allianz, and defunct chemical manufacturer and Zyklon B poison gas supplier IG Farben, an antecedent of pharma giant Bayer.

Göring implored the gathering for the money needed to guarantee a favorable climate for business and “get rid of that wishy-washy regime once and for all.” The twenty-four billionaires nodded solemnly. “And if the Nazi Party won the majority,” added Göring, with a laugh, “These would be the last elections for ten years — even for a hundred years.”

“The twenty-four lizards rose to their hind legs and stood stiffly,” as Hitler joined the meeting, Author Eric Vuillard depicted the scene in his history, The Order of the Day. Like Göring, Hitler warned of the communist menace and promised to eliminate trade unions. “We must first gain complete power to crush the other side completely.” He impressed upon them that democracy and private property could not co-exist. Hitler argued that, in supporting his rise as Führer, the moguls would in effect be supporting themselves, their firms, and their fortunes.

“And now, gentlemen, to the cash register!” Right on the spot, the lizards opened their checkbooks and forked over nearly three million Reichsmarks, roughly equivalent to $16 million U.S. dollars today. Much like the black box of hidden donations allowed by Citizens United, the Nazis made sure to cloak the real names of their donors, who Vuillard calls “the clergy of major industry . . . the high priests of Ptah. And there they stand, affectless, like twenty-four calculating machines at the gates of hell.”

Almost a hundred years later, the American donor class is just as affectless, just as calculating, and just as eager to ensure that profits never stop rising. The threat of fascism is still second to the bottom line, while fear-mongering about the “radical left” is as common today as the warnings about communism coming out of Hitler’s mouth.

Ignoring Trump’s promise to turn America into a “unified Reich,” Republican donors have claimed, “the threat to capitalism from the Democrats is more concerning than the threat to democracy from Trump” — an absurd, spurious claim. Indeed, three-and-a-half years into Biden’s term, the U.S. economy is easily the strongest in the world, and international investors are throwing money at American businesses.

In the past month, some of the most insidious billionaires have coalesced like flies behind Trump, threatening to blunt President Biden’s fundraising edge. Most Blue Chip Wall Street CEOs have distanced themselves from the insurrectionist criminal who tried to steal the 2020 election and savaged the judicial system. Although no one among the Fortune 100 CEOs has donated to Trump this time, however, some heads of lesser corporations and many among the unaffiliated, wild-card super-rich, are less responsible. These modern-day lizards are swallowing their gag-inducing qualms about Trump’s campaign of lies, retribution, mindless gibberish, and willingness to bulldoze laws and democracy. They’re focusing instead on issues closer to their ideological and vampiric interests: how he might ease regulations, subvert unions, and cut their taxes.

Trump is auctioning off his potential presidency in a desperate drive to win the election and avoid jail. In a shakedown meeting with oil executives worthy of Hitler and Göring, Trump promised that if elected he would immediately reverse dozens of environmental rules, kill the transition to green energy, and keep us addicted to fossil fuels. In pressing the energy CEOs for donations, he said, “You all are wealthy enough that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House” and that “giving $1 billion would be a ‘deal’ . . . because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid.”

Given this influence peddling, it’s hardly surprising that Trump has outraised Biden in the energy sector. Despite blatant extortion, the media barely raises an eyebrow when Trump incoherently rants about whether sinking electric boats can electrocute sharks — his exceedingly stupid rationale for a policy plan to ban electric vehicles. The proposal is a shameless, open payback for his one billion dollar campaign donation ask from fossil fuel giants.

MSNBC Video: “Joy: ‘Every other billionaire is kissing Trump’s… ring'”

Trump no longer pretends to be the incorruptible swamp drainer with no need of corporate money. Demonstrating that nothing matters to his mindless MAGA drones, he openly grovels like a dog, pleading for money, and saying anything to ingratiate himself with his corporate masters as he tests the boundaries of campaign finance laws.

The convicted felon’s fire sale on his future presidency will involve totally capitulating to Israeli billionaire and radical Zionist Miriam Adelson, who is worth $30 billion. Trump, who bribed Adelson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018, met with her multiple times in recent months. After hesitating and letting him squirm and beg, Adelson committed more than $100 million to Trump’s campaign.

Adelson demands no criticism of Israel or Netanyahu, who she has backed since the early 1990s.

Trump psychotically detests Netanyahu — not for slaughtering more than 30,000 Palestinians, but for recognizing Biden’s 2020 victory. But he has stopped sniping at the Israeli authoritarian.

Beyond this, Adelson also expects Trump to unconditionally support Israel’s war, support Israeli annexation of the West Bank, and recognize its sovereignty there. Adelson has never embraced what she called the “useless mold of the so-called peace process.” Trump‘s re-election will make a horrible situation unfathomably worse.

Adelson is not the only rich, pro-Israeli Trump donor. He met with a group, which he said included “98 percent of my Jewish friends.” In response to a question about anti-genocide protestors, Trump said, “Any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.” Trump called the demonstrators part of a “radical revolution” that he vowed to defeat. “If you get me elected, and you should really be doing this . . . we’re going to set that pro-Palestinian movement back 25 or 30 years.”

If Trump gets re-elected, it will set the world back 25 or 30 years, yet billionaires continue to rally behind him. David Sacks — a grotesquely pro-Trump Silicon Valley investor, and his tech associate Elon Musk reportedly held a secret dinner party of billionaires and millionaires in Hollywood last month. Its purpose: to defeat Joe Biden and re-install Trump in the White House. The guest list included Peter Thiel — tech billionaire and ultra-conservative, Rupert Murdoch — owner of the Foxbot propaganda network, and Steven Mnuchin — Trump’s ultra-rich, corrupt treasury secretary. These oligarchs aren’t just hostile to progressivism. They’re hostile to American democracy itself.

Thiel once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He  donated $15 million to the successful Republican senatorial campaign of J.D. Vance, who alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.” A dangerously converted former Trump hater, Vance is high on the list of Trump vice-presidential possibilities.

Musk posts frequently in support of Trump while amplifying the volume of his anti-Biden harangues on Twitter/X, the platform he owns. According to a New York Times analysis, Musk has posted Biden criticism at least seven times a month this year. Vilifying the president on issues ranging from his age to his policies on health and immigration, he called Biden “a tragic front for a far left political machine.”

This is no small matter. Musk has 187 million followers on X, and because he owns the platform he’s able to manipulate the algorithm to maximize the number of people who see his posts. Serving his business interests and reactionary politics, Musk promotes other autocrats around the world. In addition to Trump, Musk has used X to bolster India’s Narendra Modi, Argentina’s Javier Milei, and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

When asked if he was becoming more political, Musk admitted on Lex Fridman’s podcast, “If you consider fighting the woke mind virus, which I consider to be a civilizational threat, to be political, then yes. The woke mind virus is communism rebranded.” Musk reverts back to the 1930s for this Hitlerian threat.

Thiel regresses even further, writing: “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

If “capitalist democracy” is a contradiction, it’s not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Musk and Thiel are intent on killing democracy by supporting mob boss Trump and the neo-fascists surrounding him.

As for the threat of communism, many investors and executives in the tech sector are currently doing very well. According to a Silicon Valley research group, the market capitalization of Valley companies reached $14.3 trillion last year, and “venture capital funding reached an astounding $30 billion.” Big banks, hedge funds, and private-equity funds have all made bumper profits. The Financial Times recently reported that “founders and top executives of the largest private equity groups in the U.S. have seen the value of their shares rise by more than $40 billion since the beginning of 2023.”

How grateful is the capitalist class to Biden for presiding over this swelling tide of riches? Not very. Stephen Schwarzman, billionaire CEO of the private-equity Blackstone Group, had previously denounced the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol as “appalling and an affront to the democratic values we hold dear as Americans.” Yet last month, the sycophantic Schwarzman issued a statement: “I am planning to vote for change and support Donald Trump for president” because “our economic, immigration, and foreign policies are taking the country in the wrong direction.”

The Business Roundtable — a powerful Washington lobbying group whose CEO members include Apple’s Tim Cook, General Motors’ Mary Barra and JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon — led a chorus of condemnation after the January 6 insurrection. “The chaos unfolding in the nation’s capital is the result of unlawful efforts to overturn the legitimate results of a democratic election. The country deserves better,” the Business Roundtable said in a statement.

Recently, the same CEOs met privately with Trump. Despite being shocked by his incoherence and his nonsensical meandering, CEOs are flocking back to Trump,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Though the WSJ is an unreliable narrator, this opinion rings true because Biden-supporting CEOs are not publicly voicing their support for him nor are they criticizing Trump’s litany of failures as president and as a human being. These money men are not even mocking Trump’s current policy proposal of a 10 percent tariff on imports — a “terrible” plan that economic journalist Matt Yglesias called “cartoonishly evil” because it would “raise taxes on the poor and the middle class in order to finance yet another tax cut for rich people.”  

Speaking in January from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jamie Dimon – one of the most influential CEOs in the world – heaped praise on the former president who he earlier castigated for trying to overthrow American democracy. “Take a step back, be honest,” Dimon said. “Trump grew the economy quite well. Tax reform worked.”

No, not for most people. The tax cuts benefited wealthy families and corporations.

Trump has repeatedly promised to extend many of the giveaways that the 2017 GOP tax bill bestowed on corporations and high earners. When Republicans passed the tax cuts six years ago, they set much of it to expire in 2025 — a budget gimmick to mask the cost in lost revenue.

Biden has pledged to let the 2017 tax handouts lapse for the ultra-rich. His 2025 budget proposes raising the corporate tax rate and requiring billionaires to pay at least twenty-five per cent of their income in federal taxes. Further, the Biden Administration’s long-overdue effort to enforce antitrust laws more aggressively has enraged some Republican corporate leaders and financiers.

So it’s no surprise that some of the opportunistic vultures of corporate America are swarming around Trump even though the loser president still has not accepted the results of the 2020 election, nor has he committed to accepting the 2024 outcome. He even vows to pardon insurrectionist criminals sentenced to jail.

Not satisfied with their vast, obscene wealth, the MAGA idle rich overlook the felon’s criminality, his profound ignorance, his pathological indifference to reality, and his anti-American tirades so they might reap yet more benefits — from lucrative tax breaks to sweeping rollbacks of Biden’s efforts to strengthen worker power. American oligarchs want a useful idiot running the U.S. government, even if he is a fascist mob boss surrounded by a criminal cartel.

Last year, the rightwing Heritage Foundation published “Project 2025,” a 900 page policy-by-policy, agency-by-agency roadmap to “dismantle the administrative state,” as the organization’s president described it. Many of the recommendations align with positions that corporate interests have already taken. If Trump wins through mass psychosis, the implementation of Project 2025 is a blueprint for an authoritarian take-over, giving Trump and his stooges total control over the entire federal apparatus.

Trump has been able to fill his campaign coffers by undertaking one of the most nakedly corrupt fundraising tours in the history of presidential campaigns, promising his well-heeled benefactors a generous return on their investment. In addition to financing his circus show campaign, he requires a enormous amount of money to pay the legal fees that have helped him delay three other court cases against him — with the help of an incompetent Florida judge and the MAGA-majority Supreme Court‘s super-slow motion ruling on his absurd claim of total immunity from prosecution.

The cynical billionaires who support Trump — whether feverishly with piles of ill-gotten wealth or passively by not using their wealth and influence to try to stop the fascist train — are the enemy within. These MAGA bankrollers believe that great individual wealth is a sign of the holder’s innate superiority, not the lucky fallout of nepotism, whiteness, a privileged childhood, and access to education. They are the 21st Century American version of the German industrialists, bankers, and rich families who bankrolled Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s, similarly fanatical about expanding their already-vast wealth and willing to ignore the consequences of the creeping fascism that they are enabling.

These brave anti-genocide protestors have taken to heart the words of Berkeley Free Speech leader Mario Savio, who said in 1964: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop!”

With moral conviction as the foundation of its outrage, the movement against the Vietnam massacre — the U.S. exterminated over a million Vietnamese civilians — began on college campuses, sustained its energy for years, and eventually grew, by 1969, into a majority of Americans who opposed the war.

Infuriated by their universities profiting off the Israeli genocide that has killed over 34,000 Palestinians with 2 million people at risk of starvation, protestors have called on their schools to divest from companies that support or profit from the Israeli military. For example, at Brown University, students insist that the school divest from eleven corporations, including RTX corporation — a weapons manufacturer and Northrop Grumman — a military company that makes air-launched missiles, interceptors, submarine-launched systems and hypersonic missile systems.

Opposition to the Vietnam war on college campuses initially took the form of an attack on  universities’ complicity with the murderous assault in Vietnam. The U.S. committed war crimes on an industrial scale. Along with the use of carpet bombing, the US dropped napalm — liquid fire that clung to human bodies and melted flesh. The use of toxic herbicides, such as Agent Orange, defoliated over 7 million acres of forest while destroying crops. This ecocide resulted in 400,000 deaths caused by a range of cancers and 500,000 children born with serious birth defects.

The producer of napalm and Agent Orange was Dow Chemical. When the company came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus in 1967, students seized the campus building where Dow was recruiting and demanded the University stop cooperating with Dow. Dozens of students were beaten bloody as Madison police brutally ejected and arrested them. Nevertheless, the boldness of the demonstration and the repressive violence of the police politicized thousands of previously apathetic students and helped to transform the Madison campus into one of the nation’s leading anti-war communities.

As one of the earliest examples of students stopping their University’s complicity in war-making, the occupation of the UW building became a protest model utilized since then, most famously at Columbia University in 1968 and now in 2024. The current protest encampments — that occupy a small section of the campus — echo those building take-overs while also evoking the image of the squalid tent camps in Rafah where homeless Palestinians have been forced to live.

Just as the anti-Vietnam war peace movement was charged with being terrorist apologists and Communist sympathizers, the current student movement against Israel’s genocide is smeared as Hamas supporters and antisemitic oppressors.

This current vilification began in earnest when Columbia University president Minouche Shafik appeared before Congress in mid-April. Currying favor with the House committee led by MAGA stalwart Elise Stefanik — who has been known to float antisemitic conspiracy theories, Shafik defamed protesting students and two faculty as antisemitic for using chants like “From the river to sea, Palestine will be free.”

The transparently phony outrage of Republicans against antisemitism is part of a tactic to reinforce their decades-old racist attack on higher education with campaigns against critical race theory and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. In its war on education and its ostentatious displays of grievance against “woke” universities, the far right is hostile to academic freedom, peaceful protest, and vast swaths of progressive speech.

Colluding with the congressional goon squad, Shafik invited New York police to attack and destroy the Pro-Palestine, protest encampment on her campus. She proved herself a willing ally of rightwing politicians who want to suppress politically disfavored speech that challenges Christian supremacist authoritarianism.

Treating demonstrating students as a terrorist-level threat, the police arrested more than a hundred students and booked them for trespassing — on their own campus. Despite sacrificing her faculty on the congressional altar and unleashing state violence on peaceful students, Shafik was denounced. House speaker Mike Johnson unsurprisingly demanded her resignation while calling out students as terrorist-supporters and asserting, “the virus of antisemitism is spreading across other campuses.” Capitulation does not work with MAGA fanatics like the Christian Nationalist, Zionist puppet Johnson.

This police attack was followed up in May when Shafik again called in New York cops. In an echo of Columbia 1968, anti-genocide students had once again occupied Hamilton Hall and re-named it “Hind’s Hall” in honor of six-year-old Hind Rajab, who was killed alongside her family by Israeli soldiers in Gaza. Mayor Eric Adams sent a small army of militarized police to forcibly remove the protestors. Calling law enforcement did not work at Berkeley in 1964, at Wisconsin in 1967, at Columbia in 1968, or at Kent State in 1970.

TRT World Video: “Jewish student calls anti-Semitism claims ‘distraction from Gaza genocide’”

Shafik’s grotesque reenactment of her predecessors’ strong-arm tactics was weakly justified by alleged concerns about the safety of Jewish students. Images of keffiyeh-wearing students smashing windows provided the media with visuals that could recast the protest as violent, terrorist anarchy. Comparing protestors to “ISIS fighters” because of their garb, Anti-Defamation League (ADL) head Jonathan Greenblatt — a ubiquitous presence on cable news — falsely equated protests against Zionism with antisemitism. Greenblatt has also called for the National Guard to control campus protests — as have several US senators such as Zionist stooge Tom Cotton — both know full well that the last time that happened, at Kent State in 1970, four students were killed.

As with the University of Wisconsin in 1967, the Columbia University encampment as well as its authoritarian repression have inspired a mass uprising of students across the country. As of May 3, galvanized by the Israeli slaughter and the imminent invasion of Rafah, more than 80 schools report protest encampments. Though some schools such as Brown University, Northwestern University, and Rutgers have negotiated with protesters, others have called out police who have arrested more than 2500 students on 50 campuses nationwide. Most recently, on Monday night, the University of Chicago — self-described as a free speech bastion — called out cops to destroy a Pro-Palestine encampment based on vague “policy violations.” Social media has been filled with horrifying images of students and professors being violently dragged away by the police.

Rightwing media have relentlessly played up any and all claims of antisemitism at Pro-Palestine protests, in total disregard for the most basic standards of evidence. The Wall Street Journal incited a moral panic about young people daring to criticize Israel’s horrendous bloodbath in Gaza, writing “Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and others are grooming activists in the U.S. and across the West.” A critical conversation about U.S. support of genocide gets twisted into bizarre and unsubstantiated directions.

Looking backward, we remember the anti-Vietnam war protests as pure and untainted. Our memories elide some of the extreme tactics. During Vietnam era protests, some people broke windows, carried North Vietnamese flags, and voiced support for the National Liberation Front (NLF) insurgency that America wanted to destroy, chanting “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win.” Used to stigmatize war protestors, this sentiment did not represent the peace movement.

Likewise, a tiny handful of Pro-Palestinian protesters, full of outrage at decades of brutal occupation, defend Hamas’s brutal October 7 attack against civilians. A Christian outlet breathlessly reported hearing pro-Hamas chants: “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground” and “Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets too.” As during the Vietnam era, such unrepresentative chants cannot be used to smear the vast protest movement.

However, they do make some Jewish students uncomfortable, even fearful. Yet the encampments are less a danger to Jewish students than the police crackdown. As one Jewish student said, “I was raised as a Jewish person to call attention to injustice whenever I see it. Palestinians should be the focus, not my safety on campus. The only threat to my safety comes from the administration.” Further, a large minority — 34 percent — of young American Jews told pollsters, in 2021, that Israel is an “apartheid state,” while 22 percent agreed that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians.”

Many encampment videos show peaceful, even joyful demonstrations or feature Jewish students who support the pro-Palestinian protests and declare that they feel safe on campus. As administrators call SWAT teams onto campuses to smother a new peace movement, we should keep in mind why we have forgotten the ugliest aspects of the Vietnam protests: Those memories have been replaced by an enduring horror and revulsion at what the U.S. did.

Every level of education in Gaza has been devastated by seven months of war. More than 80 percent of Gaza’s schools have been severely damaged or destroyed by fighting, including every one of its 12 universities. As Juan Cole said, in Informed Comment, “No president of a major American University has deplored the Israeli Destruction of all Gaza Universities.” Israel has made a comprehensive effort to destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as “scholasticide” according to a group of 25 U.N. experts. While Gaza’s schools lie in ruins, it is notable that Israel’s universities are quiet. “Without protest here,” writes the Jewish newspaper Haaretz, “Israel’s ostensibly enlightened academia will remain identified with Israel’s government.”

Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu lambasted the U.S. protests as “horrific” antisemitism even equating them to anti-Jewish, Nazi rallies in Germany. This apparently led CNN’s Dana Bash to solemnly denounce the “destruction, violence and hate on college campuses across the country.” Her voice dripping with hostility, Bash ominously described protest encampments as “hearkening back to the 1930s in Europe” obviously referring to Nazi rallies.

Tension between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students does exist. But equating Judaism with the state of Israel makes it possible to label all opposition as antisemitic. Thus, any time a student with an Israeli flag is shouted down, this is painted as an act of antisemitism. This conflation has the effect of portraying Jews as a monolithic group that supports the bombing, torturing, and starving of tens of thousands of people.

While berating the protests as threatening to Jews, the media and American officials ignore the fact that white supremacists are the biggest threat facing the Jewish community, as reported by the ADL. When neo-Nazis marched through the streets of Charlottesville and shouted, “Jews will not replace us,” racist president Trump downplayed it. The anti-American traitor Trump, who dined with white nationalist Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, recently called that deadly Charlottesville rally a “peanut” compared to the “antisemitic” demonstrations happening across the U.S.

Meanwhile, pundits and politicians want to make the wave of protests fodder for grinding various culture-war axes about privileged Ivy League students — ignoring all the protests at non-elite campuses — or “wokeness,” or some brand-new form of left-wing insanity. Others mock these protestors as privileged students cosplaying as resistance fighters, while camping out in expensive North Face tents. One pundit worries, “These proud anti-fascists are agitating against a country on another continent and abominating the only alternative to the fascist Trump.”

The simple reality is that students now are protesting for the same reasons students took over the building at Madison in 1967 and Columbia in 1968, and the same reason there was a massive wave of student strikes and demonstrations around the country when Richard Nixon announced his illegal invasion of Cambodia in 1970. They’re horrified to see their country and their universities participate in crimes against humanity.

To be clear, the protests of today do differ in significant ways from yesteryear’s protests. No protester is motivated by the fear that they could be drafted to fight in Gaza. Many students faced conscription during the Vietnam era. Further, the ethnic diversity and social inclusiveness differs from the predominantly white person protests of 1960s. On many campuses, Arab, Muslim, Jewish, Black, Native American and White students are standing shoulder to shoulder with their Palestinian peers in a unified stance. 

“The campus protests fill me with hope,” said Peter Beinart, Jewish author and journalist. “At the Columbia encampment, we saw Muslims praying, and Jews praying; of Jews holding Kabbalat Shabbat and Passover Seders alongside people of every different background and race and religion. This is a vision of hope that we desperately need.”

“Amid these dark times, what is happening across U.S. campuses fills me with inspiration and hope,” said Palestinian law student Ahmad Ibsais. “This is what a Palestinian future can look like: Jews performing Passover rituals along with Muslims praying Maghrib; people of all backgrounds taking part in collective liberation – a Palestine that existed before the British Mandate.” The encampments imagine and rehearse a peaceful future for Palestinians and Jews.

In 1968, the campus protests ended when the semester did and students dispersed. But our opposition to the war did not end with the academic year. In the months leading up to the August 1968 Democratic convention, organizers planned a major protest, intended to be held regardless of whether it was allowed, drawing students from around the country. Before the convention, one of the organizers Rennie Davis said, “No denial of a permit is going to prevent the tens of thousands of people who are coming to Chicago from expressing their convictions on these issues.”

This is all playing out again. Students will leave for the summer, allowing more time and energy for their efforts to be focused on the August Democratic convention in Chicago. Antiwar groups are already planning large protests at the convention. Hatem Abudayyeh of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network recently told The Chicago Tribune: “We’ll be marching with or without permits. This D.N.C. is the most important one since 1968, also in Chicago, when Vietnam War protesters and the Black liberation movement organized mass demonstrations that were violently repressed.”

The Biden campaign seems to believe that it can simply wait the protesters out, that passions will eventually fade and that Democratic voters will fall in line when we get closer to Election Day and the choice between Biden and Donald Trump becomes more stark. That is a reckless gamble. Many believe that a president they supported is abetting a genocide. Their position will not easily be altered.

The current student uprising evokes the moral outrage of the anti-Vietnam War movement. As the past peace movement was proven right about Vietnam, the current one will also be favored by history. Like Vietnam in the 1960s, Palestine is the human rights issue of our time.

The name Frantz Fanon has become inseparable from both the horrors of colonialization and the history of liberation movements. He inspired generations of militants to fight colonialism. Since the 1961 publication of The Wretched of the Earth, which has been called the “Bible of Decolonialization,” Fanon — the Black West Indian psychiatrist who fought for Algerian independence — has been idealized by activists in the global south and beyond. For them, Frantz Fanon is the uncompromising prophet of revolution.

In The Wretched of the Earth’s infamous first chapter “On Violence,” Fanon described colonialism as a pathological system — the complete imposition of violence by the settler on the natives, who are given a “colonial identity,” ”reduced to the state of an animal,” and thereby dehumanized. The colonist uses a “language of pure violence” and “derives his validity from the imposition of violence.” The colonial system, Fanon emphasized, was itself founded on “genocidal acts of dispossession and repression.”

Since Hamas‘s brutal October 7 attack, Fanon has been frequently invoked, seeming more popular than ever. Quoted in essays and social media posts, Fanon’s provocative ideas have been used by supporters of Palestine to contextualize or justify Hamas’s horrific assault as well as to castigate Israel’s colonial subjugation and genocidal obliteration of Gaza and its people. The Israeli bombardment has slaughtered more than 33,000 Palestinians with uncounted more buried under the rubble and has wounded over 75,000 people while starving the surviving population.

The ongoing calamity for Palestinians is not limited to the besieged Gaza Strip —  it also afflicts those in the occupied West Bank, which has been all but shut down since October 7. Road closures, checkpoints, and the increased risk of military and settler violence have kept West Bank Palestinians restricted to their towns and villages. As Israeli soldiers carried out a mission of dispossession, U.N. data showed that 2023 had been an especially deadly year for Palestinians, with Israeli forces killing more of them — 499 — than in any other non-conflict year since 2005. According to Hamas‘s leaders, this provided motivation for their attack. The pure violence of the Israeli Occupation has never been more clear.

“Colonialism is not a thinking machine,” wrote Fanon. “It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.” The way out of colonial oppression and the colonized person’s “inferiority complex and his despairing attitude,” is through the “cleansing force” of violence. Fanon believed that violent resistance would restore the humanity of the colonized, elevate them psychologically to a position of equality, and deliver social justice: “The native discovers that his life, his breath, his beating heart are the same as those of the settler. He finds out that the settler’s skin is not of any more value than a native’s skin.”

Fanon’s concepts have become integral to the rationalization of Hamas‘s terrorism. On X, TikTok, and Instagram, Fanon quotes proliferated after October 7: “Decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men” and “Decolonization is an inherently violent phenomenon” among many others.

H/t Wikimedia.

An article in the Middle East Eye declared, “Don’t ask Palestinians to condemn Hamas – they are already condemned to live in hell on Earth” and concluded “those bearing the brunt of the onslaught today aren’t caught up in the semantic trap of condemnation. For Palestinians in Gaza and beyond, for the wretched of our shared earth, as for Fanon, ‘to fight is the only solution.’”

In a statement titled “Oppression Breeds Resistance,” Columbia University students began by mourning “the tragic losses experienced by both Palestinians and Israelis” but concluded with a Fanon quote: “When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.”

Many of Fanon‘s contemporary admirers have apparently not read past the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth; or, they have ignored the final chapter “Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders” — a series of disturbing case studies that depict the debilitating and long-lasting effects of violence. By regurgitating his provocative phrases alone, Fanon’s devotees portray this complex and challenging thinker as nothing more than a sloganeer of political violence. In a timely new biography — The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon — author Adam Shatz, an editor at the London Review of Books, rescues Fanon from reduction while still agreeing that he wrote “some of the most memorable catchphrases of the liberation struggle.”

The Rebel’s Clinic elaborates the drama and contradictions in Fanon’s life story and political writings, striving to explain why he is such a compelling figure more than 60 years after his death. Significantly, Shatz points out that Fanon’s “practice as a healer” who pledged to do no harm contradicted his practice as a revolutionary, who advocated violence which is harmful to both the victim and perpetrator.

As a psychiatrist, Fanon believed that the violent struggle of the colonized for liberation was a kind of shock treatment that would “restore confidence to the colonized mind” and “overcome the paralyzing sense of hopelessness induced by colonial subjugation,” but “was only a first step toward the birth of a new humanity.” The Rebel’s Clinic provides a comprehensive perspective on Fanon — one that social media slogans cannot suggest. As for Fanon’s advocacy of violence, Shatz calls it “alarming” at one point but emphasizes the humanist side of Fanon — “a dashing and sophisticated intellectual who earned the admiration of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.”

Though Fanon would eventually identify with the powerless, he was a child of empire — born into a middle-class family on the island of Martinique, a French colony. A fervent French patriot, Fanon eagerly joined the Free French Army. He fought against the Nazis in North Africa and Europe, even sustaining a shrapnel injury. Experiencing racism in the Army, his relationship to France and his own racial identity underwent a radical change – from French patriot who fought for empire to Black West Indian who rebelled against it. His first book Black Skin White Masks, published in 1952, diagnosed the pathological symptoms of racism in everyday life.

After completing his studies, Fanon directed a psychiatric hospital in colonial Algeria, where he discerned the many ways that French colonialism itself was the main cause of his patients’ psychological ailments. Algerians — like Palestinians today — were violently uprooted, their lands were confiscated, while their culture, language, and religion were denigrated. These experiences of dispossession, violence and alienation constituted a profound psychological trauma. Mental illness could never be divorced from racist social conditions, writes Shatz, so Fanon “approached psychiatry as if it were an extension of politics by other means.”

He turned against French colonialism, joined the revolt orchestrated by the National Liberation Front (FLN) in 1954, and fought for Algerian independence. Subversively, Fanon used the hospital as a hideout for anti-French fighters as well as a treatment center for all walks of colonial Algeria, including FLN militants who had been tortured by French forces.

The Martiniquais philosopher later incorporated his insights and experiences as a psychiatrist and a revolutionary into what would be his final book. The Wretched of the Earth was published in 1961 as Fanon, 36, lay perishing from leukemia in a Maryland hospital in the heart of the American empire he despised as “the country of lynchers.” He would never see a free Algeria, dying three months shy of its liberation in March, 1962. The Wretched of the Earth was the culmination of his thinking about anti-colonial revolution and, writes Shatz, “one of the great manifestos of the modern age.”

The Wretched of the Earth spread across the planet within a few years of its appearance transforming Fanon into a hero among leftwing and developing-world revolutionaries and inspiring radicals in the national liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It was translated widely — Che Guevara commissioned a Cuban version — and “cited worshipfully by the Black Panthers.” Huey Newton, for example, spoke of Black people as an occupied colony in imperialist America whose only option was revolutionary violence. According to Shatz, Fanon’s book helped galvanize the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, Latin American guerrillas, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Islamic revolutionaries of Iran, Black Lives Matter activists, and “not least the Palestinian fedayeen in training camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.”

Helping to propel the book’s proliferation, especially in the West, was Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 movie The Battle of Algiers. Though not an adaptation, The Battle of Algiers functioned as a filmic depiction of The Wretched of the Earth. A strikingly realistic, politically radical film that sympathized with the revolutionaries, The Battle of Algiers reconstructs the oppressive colonial social conditions, the French brutality in response to anti-colonial demonstrations, the FLN attacks on French policemen, the torture of Algerian civilians, and the terror bombings that marked the four-year insurgency in the streets of Algiers leading to independence.

Summoning Fanon in support of Hamas implies that the war in Gaza is the battle of Algiers of our time. However, the Gaza catastrophe is less a reenactment of The Battle of Algiers, more Hotel Rwanda or Apocalypse Now. Israel cannot extinguish Palestinian resistance through indiscriminate violence any more than Palestine can win an Algerian-style war of liberation. “Palestine today is not Algeria in 1956,” notes Al Jazeera, “which was Fanon’s most important reference point. There will be no long-fought war of independence resulting in the vast majority of Jews” being evicted “from a reconquered Palestine.”

Further, the outcome in Algeria does not provide a model for a free and democratic Palestine. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon stressed that mere violence as an end in itself, disconnected from any wider achievable political and social goal, would only reproduce the power relations of the colonizer. He suggested that liberation movements can become new oppressors once they attain power, thus exchanging one barbarism for another.

Though Fanon did not live to see it, Algeria descended into one-party rule built on state terror and religious fanaticism. Fanon’s warnings about the obstacles to post-colonial freedom: corruption, autocratic rule, religious zealotry, the enduring wounds of colonial violence, and the persistence of underdevelopment and hunger came to pass and still haunt liberation movements today.

“The militant who confronts the colonialist war machine with his rudimentary resources realizes that while he is demolishing colonial oppression he is indirectly building up yet another system of exploitation,” wrote Fanon. “Such a discovery is galling, painful, and sickening. It was once all so simple with the bad on the one side and the good on the other. The people discover that the iniquitous phenomenon of exploitation can assume a Black or Arab face.”

In a passage that none of his latter-day followers have cited, Fanon warned that “racism, hatred, resentment, and the legitimate desire for revenge alone cannot nurture a war of liberation — one does not endure massive repression or witness the disappearance of one’s entire family in order for hatred or racism to triumph.” Fanon — the authentic revolutionary — shows himself more doubtful of violent resolutions than his less courageous social media acolytes, who indulge in easy revolutionary talk from positions of comfort.

The social media application of The Wretched of the Earth to Palestine eliminates the aspirational aspects of his anti-colonial prescription. Fanon’s advocacy of anti-colonial violence cannot be separated from his belief in a revolutionary humanism, emancipated from colonialism and empire. He wrote that the overthrow of the colonial oppressors will inevitably lead to a “new humanism written into the objectives and methods of the struggle.”

Fanon asserted that a violent uprising by the native people would be the first step in a transformative process that would lead to a postcolonial society based on universalist ideas of freedom and equality for all — a society that might very well include the former colonizers. Palestine, however, is a long way from this social transformation that would deliver a political solution rooted in equality, dignity and justice for both Palestinians and Israelis.

The Caribbean thinker perceptively diagnosed the disease of colonialism that Israel continues to propagate as it replicates its primary pathology: the obliteration of Palestinians. As a new UN report states: “Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure. For over seven decades this process has suffocated the Palestinian people as a group – demographically, culturally, economically and politically – seeking to displace it and expropriate and control its land and resources.” Fanon, the psychiatrist, did not enunciate a enduring cure for this vengeful colonial pathology.

Surprisingly, Fanon concluded The Wretched of the Earth in the same place as John Lennon in his utopian song Imagine, which conceives of “no wars and a brotherhood of man.” Fanon ended The Wretched of the Earth with an idealistic challenge to imagine a new world: “For humanity, comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man.” But Fanon did not clarify how we would arrive at this new, more equitable reality.

Despite this apparent disconnect, we read Fanon today for his startlingly prescient analysis of contemporary ills: the enduring trauma of racism, the persistent plague of white supremacy and xenophobia, the scourge of authoritarianism, and the savagery of colonial domination. Poetic, enraged, and insubordinate, Frantz Fanon gave voice to the anguish of the colonized voiceless and his words continue to resonate with a new global “wretched of the earth.”

The Yippies’ pig had no chance of becoming president: according to the Constitution Pigasus wasn’t qualified, being younger than 35 years old. Trump as an insurrectionist is — like the pig  — unqualified to be president, according to the Constitution. Yet, unlike Pigasus, he has a good chance to become president: the Supreme Court will likely discount the Constitution, he leads Biden in some polls and, if he loses, he will try to steal the election again, threatening “bedlam” if that happens.

Global Image Works Video: “In 1968, This Pig Ran For President”

To rational people, it is mind-bogglingly surreal that an incompetent, ignorant megalomaniac and sexual abuser like Trump, whose grating voice alone rattles teeth, would be deemed fit for the presidency, let alone close to winning power. Yet he is. Despite his enabling of the pandemic, his 2020 defeat, his instigation of the January 6 attack on the Capital, the 91 charges across four criminal cases, and his never-ending hurricane of lies, millions of reality-challenged Americans worship and support him.

Exposing its total MAGA-tization, the Republican Party has crawled with Trump into a moral abyss that turns out to be a bottomless pit of unreality. The fake GOP primary delivers phony, cowardly candidates Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, who are terrified of criticizing him and have promised to support him even if he were a convicted felon. They continue their sham candidacies, hoping that the laws of gravity will reverse on Trump and he will be sucked up into the vacuum of outer space. Failing that, it is perfectly fine with them that the defeated president attempted a coup and, though stopped, he can still return to the presidency.

The deranged Trump swamped his “opposition” in the Iowa caucus by thirty points. Watching cable news afterwards, it felt like I was living in Russia and Putin was running against two puppet candidates. The pundits seriously discussed the micro-details of the race and how each of the candidates fared in Nowheresville, Iowa, and no one screamed, “This is insanity — this is the cult of a madman!”  

The nightmarish possibility of electing the shameless septuagenarian — a self-described dictator — is helped by his politically weak octogenarian opponent Joe Biden who frames the election as a choice between him and doomsday, but provides doomsday-style weapons and unconditional support for Israel’s Gaza genocide. In addition, Biden risks a “Red Sea War” by bombing Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world.

Embed from Getty Images
Former US President Donald Trump during a campaign event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, US, on Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2024. Trump signaled he would again make his stance on China a key part of his US presidential campaign strategy, drawing an unsubstantiated correlation between turbulence in the nation’s equity markets and his runaway Iowa Republican caucus victory. Photographer: Adam Glanzman/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

Angry with Biden, pro-Palestine anti-war progressives might turn away from him in disgust — not voting or voting for third party candidates, undoubtedly funded by Republican donors. Other voters don’t like him because he is too old. In any case, Biden-hating voters might help elect the Muslim-hating, also elderly Trump, who is even more supportive of Netanyahu than Biden. In his first torturous term, Trump moved the American embassy to Jerusalem and left Palestinians out of the Abraham Accords, which many viewed as a betrayal of Palestine.

In his first term, Trump’s brutality and corruption were slightly mitigated by his ignorance and laziness. In a second, Trump — older and lazier — would better understand the system’s vulnerabilities and loop-holes. On inauguration day 2025, Trump will be an indicted or convicted outlaw. He will commit the first crime of his second term at noon: his oath to defend the United States Constitution will be a perjury.

In a second term, he would install an army of political loyalists whose fealty to his most unhinged demands will take precedence over their commitment to the Constitution or legal governance. They will help him drive a much more focused agenda of vengeance against his adversaries and impunity for himself.  For his own survival, he must destroy the rule of law by stopping all state and federal, civil and criminal cases against him. If a president can order the justice department to stop a case against him — as Trump would surely do — then obstruction of justice becomes a normal privilege of the presidency.

A former insurrectionist re-elected to the Presidency, he would use the Insurrection Act to order the military to crush protests — which he hoped to do during the summer of 2020 — and turn the power of the federal government against his perceived enemies. Paraphrasing Hitler, he said, “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” It has always been Trump’s supreme political wish to wield military violence as personal weapons of power — a wish that many in his party now seem determined to help him achieve.

As xenophobe-in-chief, he hopes to institute a program of mass detainment and deportation of undocumented immigrants, who he says are “poisoning the blood” of the country, employing the rhetoric of European totalitarians. His aides have already drawn up plans for new detention centers at the U.S.-Mexico border, where anyone suspected of illegal entry would be held until officials have settled the person’s immigration status.

American democracy will disintegrate piece by piece as a second Trump term erects a postmodern fascist state modeled on Victor Orbán’s Hungary — destroying the legitimacy of elections, trampling constitutional rights, instituting a nation-wide abortion ban, cutting off immigration, suppressing derogatory media, promoting Christian nationalism, and undermining the rule of law.

Even beyond this horror, the craven cult that inflates Trump’s already-enormous self-esteem has given him the power to bend the arc of reality. His hallucinating supporters believe in an elaborate MAGA phantasmagoria that Trump has concocted: that the previous election was stolen, that Biden is an illegitimate president, that Biden has weaponized the legal system to prosecute his strongest opponent Trump, and that the January 6 riot was not an insurrection by Trump supporters but an instigation by the FBI and antifa.

In a brief moment after the January 6 Capitol attack, many in the GOP thought the Trump monster had been banished, a pariah in the Party. Republican leaders blamed him for the insurrection. Party fund-raisers assured donors they were done with him. Trump’s own loyalists turned against him. Former Attorney General Barr said Trump’s conduct was a “betrayal of his office and supporters.”

The Murdoch-owned lapdog Wall Street Journal argued that Trump was done: “This week finished him as a serious political figure. He has betrayed his loyal supporters by lying to them about the election and the ability of Congress and Mr. Pence to overturn it. He has refused to accept the basic bargain of democracy, which is to accept the result, win or lose.” Trump also got blamed when the 2022 midterms went seriously awry as Trump-endorsed election deniers lost winnable races and the much-hyped “red tsunami” turned into a dribble. In her book, purged Republican Liz Cheney reported that afterwards Trump was depressed and refused to eat.

After condemning Trump for January 6 and even suggesting that he resign, now-deposed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy traveled to Mar-a-Lago and, in an historically spineless act of recantation, embraced and absolved the starving former President. Cheney and many others have identified this as a pivotal moment in reviving the former president’s political viability and appetite.

Still, previous to this submission, the Republican Party threw away its best chance to bury him forever when 43 senators voted to acquit him in his impeachment after the Capitol riot. They could have relegated him to Palm Beach and saved America from hearing the despicable rants of this malfunctioning moron and putting the police and the nuclear button under his thumb.

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Supporters of US President Donald Trump hold a rally outside the US Capitol as they protest the upcoming electoral college certification of Joe Biden as US President in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021. – Joe Biden’s Democratic Party took a giant step Wednesday towards seizing control of the US Senate as they won the first of two Georgia run-offs, hours before Congress was set to certify the president-elect’s victory over Donald Trump. (Photo by Olivier DOULIERY / AFP) (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images).

Trump resumed eating, lying, and constructing a new absurd reality that has proven more politically salient with the GOP and its voters than many of us thought possible on January 7, 2021, even after seeing it happen over and over for the previous six exhausting, gut-wrenching years. 

Pulling off a kind of double coup, this psychopathic fabricator added to the original Big Lie about the “rigged election.” He called January 6 “a beautiful day” and he designated the nearly thirteen hundred defendants arrested in connection with the Capitol attack ”martyrs” and “hostages.” He has promised to pardon insurrectionists and threatened to lock up the police who tried to defend the Capitol that day. If Trump is returned to office, he will undoubtedly make January 6 a national holiday — the Day of the Patriotic Martyrs.

The GOP and the right wing media echo system has been so effective in pumping out Trump’s upside-down-world propaganda that polling recently found that, in the intervening three years, the number of Republicans who believe Trump’s lies about a “rigged election” has, in fact, gone up. Today, only thirty-one per cent of Republicans believe that Biden is the “legitimate” President, down from thirty-nine per cent in late 2021. The poll also showed that Republicans thought the insurrectionist mob were mostly peaceful.

For millions of people, Trump has managed to transmute historical events that everyone saw with their own eyes into theater of the absurd, an anti-realistic dramatic genre characterized by dark humor, incoherent language, strange symbolism, and themes that relate to human irrationality.

An example of absurdist drama that prophesied Trumpist transformation is Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros — the classic play in which an entire town devolves into hard-skinned, monstrous Rhinoceroses that issue ear-shattering bellows that silence any hope of coherent conversation. Rhinoceros thundered onto the stage, in 1960, with a chilling yet farcically funny allegory of how fascism can mutate ordinary people into angry, violent, mindless beasts whose articulateness dissolves into a cacophony of guttural honks.

Writing in the wake of Hitler and Stalin, Ionesco painted a picture of a society succumbing to the contagion of “rhinoceritis,” a disease that erodes individuality and replaces it with groupthink and casual brutality as well as a hatred of non-rhinoceroses. The transformative infection suggests the dehumanizing force of tyrannical ideologies.

Becoming a huge, horned rhinoceros is gradually normalized: a formerly concerned character Jean dismisses his friend’s terror at the multiplication of grotesque rhino mutations and their deleterious effects on human freedom. Jean debases himself and enables rhinoceritis when he says that despite their savage deformity, they’re “harmless, docile herbivores” and “seem so sure of themselves.” This mindless acceptance and rationalization foreshadows the insidious nature of the disease, disguising its destructive potential.

Ionesco’s play exposes the lure of surrendering to a mass authoritarian movement and abandoning the burden of independent thought. Among Trump’s abettors are numerous verifiably insane congress people who have been infected by rhinoceritis for a long time such as Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Gaetz. But it’s the transformed normies that are most pathetic.

Current House Majority Whip Tom Emmer angered Trump when he voted to certify Biden’s election, unlike 147 colleagues who voted to overturn the election. When Emmer ran for his dream-job Speaker of the House, Trump sank his candidacy, warning that he would be a “tragic mistake” and calling him a “Globalist RINO” (not a rhinoceros). Two months later, Emmer — like nearly 100 members of the House, said, “I am proud to endorse Donald J. Trump for President.” Expressing his gratitude to Emmer for his miserable self-abasement, Trump smirked, “They always bend the knee.”

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One of the more pitiful examples of “Trump Debasement Syndrome” is Sen. Josh Hawley, the guy who egged on the January 6 rhinoceros-thugs with a fist-pump that lamely showed solidarity with them and then was recorded in security footage fleeing for his life to avoid those same stampeding thugs. Hawley has decided to “forget” his traumatic escape from the mob, though he had not endorsed King Rhinoceros as the Iowa caucus approached. Exhibiting concern for Hawley’s electoral health, Trump warned him to “be very careful” in his Senate re-election campaign. Shortly thereafter, Hawley joined the Republican Rhino herd and publicly endorsed Trump saying, “I’m with him.”

Rhinoceros explored the erosion of moral values, the seductive nature of power as people become mere instruments of brute strength and aggression. As authority figures collapse and undergo metamorphosis, other people find it easier to justify why becoming a rhinoceros is desirable. As one character declares, “It‘s the strength that counts, don’t you want to be strong?”

Once a rising conservative normie in the party — an acolyte of former Republican VP candidate Paul Ryan, Rep. Elise Stefanik has transmogrified into an automated MAGA rhinoceros. She trumpeted Trump’s reference to the January 6 criminals as “hostages,” and embraced the claim that the 2020 election was an “unconstitutional circumventing of the Constitution.” Stefanik refused to commit to certifying the results of the 2024 election, saying “We will see if this is a legal and valid election.” After calling the media biased against Trump, she said the “border crisis is poisoning Americans.” Desperately thirsty for Trump’s VP spot, Stefanik has become a eager demagogue.

What began, in Rhinoceros, as isolated incidents becomes a rhinoceros contagion as the town’s residents witness an astonishing metamorphosis as more and more people sprout horns, grow enormously huge with hard green skin, and succumb to the allure of the rampaging Rhino fascists. There are no elections in Rhinoceros Town so the entire society is transformed, except for one individual Berenger who shouts, “I’ll take on the whole of them! I’ll put up a fight against the lot of them! I’m the last man left, and I’m staying that way until the end. I’m not capitulating.”

The entire Republican Party — elected officials and voters — have capitulated. They’ve chosen the sickness, nihilism, and absurdity. Fortunately, we still have democracy. Stopping the Trump contagion will not suddenly eradicate the disease and make America perfectly healthy, but it is vital to embrace reality, reject the absurd, prevent further suffering, and preserve the possibility of progress.

Kissinger prolonged the Vietnam War and expanded the carnage to Cambodia and Laos. During the eight years he served in the American government, Kissinger backed the invasion of Angola by South Africa’s apartheid regime, accelerating civil war; green-lit Pakistan’s ethnic cleansing in Bangladesh and Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; and, supported  military coups in Chile and Argentina.

There were “few people who have had a hand in as much death and destruction, as much human suffering, in so many places around the world as Henry Kissinger,” said veteran war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody.

Despite this history, various conservative media outlets lionized the war criminal. The Wall Street Journal credited Kissinger as the man who “Helped Forge U.S. Foreign Policy During Vietnam and Cold Wars.” The Daily Mail lauded him as a “Nobel Prize winner who stared down the Soviets.” Fox News hailed him as the pioneer of “the policy of détente with the Soviet Union” who “won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for negotiating the Paris Peace Accords to end U.S. involvement in Vietnam.”

Elsewhere, major publications glossed over Kissinger’s human rights abuses, framing him as a towering figure who drew controversy in his relentless pursuit of U.S. interests. NPR highlighted Kissinger’s “unwavering commitment” when urging “bombing campaigns in Vietnam and Cambodia to strengthen the U.S. negotiating position.” PBS labeled him “consequential” and “controversial,” while CNN said he was a “dominating and polarizing force.” The BBC called him a “Divisive diplomat who shaped world affairs.”

In fact, Kissinger’s diplomatic conniving facilitated massacres around the globe. It is an insult to history that Kissinger is not condemned for his many acts of treachery: secret bombings, coup-plotting, supporting loathsome dictators, and subverting democracy in defense of corporate profiteering. Closer to the truth, Rolling Stone headlined “Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies.”

Before his time in office, Kissinger sabotaged the 1968 Paris Peace Talks, where he was a consultant. Amidst the Vietnam war‘s bloodiest year — in which 16,899 Americans were killed including my best friend — then-President Johnson initiated peace talks between the North Vietnamese communists, and the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese puppet government. Kissinger conspired with Richard Nixon’s electoral campaign against democrat Hubert Humphrey by leaking information to it. Fearing that even a ceasefire might bring the Democrats electoral victory, Nixon told an aide to “monkey wrench” the peace talks. Using Kissinger’s disclosures to urge South Vietnamese negotiators to stonewall the proposed agreement, Nixon promised them a better deal.

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President Nixon and his chief foreign affairs advisor, Dr. Henry Kissinger, arrive at the NBC-TV studios where Nixon is to make a speech to the nation on foreign policy (Via Getty Images).

A peace agreement would save American and Vietnamese lives, but it might undermine Nixon’s electoral hopes and Kissinger’s desire for power. The peace negotiations collapsed and Nixon was elected president, after which he appointed Kissinger — a man for whom power was a religion — national security adviser, a position he occupied until 1975. The war dragged on pointlessly for years.

Having claimed a secret plan to end the war, Nixon found himself without leverage with Hanoi. Hoping to manufacture leverage, Kissinger initiated the “madman strategy.” He perpetuated the idea to the North Vietnamese that Nixon was driven mad by communism, according to Seymour Hersh in The Price of Power: “We can’t restrain him when he’s angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button.”

Kissinger actually devised a plan to nuke North Vietnam in an attack called “Duck Hook,” a code-name borrowed from golf parlance. “It shall be the assignment of this group,” he explained, “to examine the option of a savage, decisive blow against North Vietnam.” In his 1957 best-selling book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Kissinger argued that the U.S. should use tactical nuclear weapons in any confrontation with the Soviet Union. In the early 1960s, he advised the Kennedy White House to revamp U.S. nuclear policies, including a first-strike option and more funding for fallout shelters.”

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Meeting between Le Duc Tho and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for negotiating an end to the war in Viêt Nam, 10 December 1972 at Gif-sur-Yvette. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images).

Kissinger was the sort of nuclear lunatic that Stanley Kubrick ferociously satirized in his 1964 film Dr. Strangelove. Peter Sellers denied that Kissinger was the model for his Strangelove character, who spoke with a German accent and whose poorly controlled mechanical arm sprang suddenly into “Sieg Heil” salutes. Nevertheless, Kissinger was the real Dr. Strangelove.

Duck Hook never became operational; however, to drive home the madman threat, Kissinger ordered a secret carpet-bombing campaign in Cambodia, through which the North Vietnamese supplied its South Vietnamese allies. The perversely named “Operation Breakfast” was Kissinger’s idea, reported history Professor Juan Cole. Having promised “an honorable end to the war,” Nixon wanted to appear to be in pursuit of peace — thus the secrecy — while still inflicting heavy damage and death to achieve concessions.

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The bombing campaign ultimately killed between 150,000 and a half-million Cambodian civilians, hastened the rise of the murderous dictator Pol Pot, whose Khmer Rouge regime killed as many as 2 million Cambodians. A Pentagon report released in 1973 stated that “Henry A. Kissinger approved each of the 3,875 Cambodia bombing raids in 1969 and 1970 as well as the methods for keeping them out of the newspapers.” Despite its ferocity, the bombing campaign fell far short of its strategic aims.

Frustrated, Nixon announced, in May, 1970, an invasion of Cambodia to do what the secret bombing had failed to do. In the air or on the ground, Kissinger was unable to destroy the supply routes, only human beings. The campuses exploded in protests. Four days after Nixon’s speech, National Guardsmen opened fire at Kent State, killing four students and wounding nine who were demonstrating. Two weeks later, at Jackson State, police shot into a group of protesting African American students, killing two and wounding twelve.

At the same time, Kissinger implemented the so-called “Vietnamization” of the war, withdrawing ground troops while increasing the bombing. This reduced the number of Americans killed, increased the number of Asians killed, while providing a phony façade of “saving face” that successfully fooled the gullible public. Winning re-election in a landslide, Nixon made Kissinger secretary of state.

Buoyed by re-election, Nixon mandated the 1972 Christmas bombing of North Vietnam, the largest of the war. The North Vietnamese still refused to renegotiate. After more years of ratcheting up the bloodshed and many corpses later, Nixon and Kissinger burnished their “peacemaker” credentials by finally giving up. Kissinger “negotiated” essentially the same deal that he sabotaged in 1968. An aide to Kissinger John Negroponte, in a documentary, offered a horrific postmortem: “We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions.”

Summing up the disaster, President Obama in 2016 said, “We dropped more ordnance on Cambodia and Laos than on Europe in World War II and yet, ultimately, Nixon withdrew, Kissinger went to Paris, and all we left behind was chaos, slaughter, and authoritarian governments that finally, over time, have emerged from that hell.”

Yet, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho “for jointly having negotiated a cease fire in Vietnam in 1973” — an award for an agreement to end a war Kissinger encouraged and extended. Tho refused the honor. He said that the U.S. had violated the treaty, while also casting the deal as an American capitulation. Kissinger was a Nobel Peace Prize-winning war criminal — a slap in the face for the many victims of his brutality.

In Southeast Asia, Kissinger laid waste to several countries. In Latin America, he subverted democracy. After socialist Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile in 1970, Kissinger began plotting the overthrow of his government. Allende’s program was more than redistributionist. He demanded reparations from U.S. corporations for exploiting its copper resources. Regarding this policy, Kissinger remarked, “I don’t see why we need to stand idly by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

Fearing the rise of an inspirational socialist country in Latin America, Kissinger supervised clandestine operations aimed at destabilizing Chile. He triggered a military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who seized power, killed thousands of Chileans, tortured many more, and implemented a murderous dictatorship. As Chile instituted a capitalist agenda, Kissinger later explained to State Department officials that “no matter how unpleasant they act, the Pinochet government is better for us than Allende was.”

Kissinger’s crimes stretched beyond Southeast Asia and Latin America. He supported the brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide by the West Pakistan military government. It suppressed Bengali nationalists, who had won an election for independence in the former East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in the early 1970s.

Kissinger ignored a congressional prohibition against sending arms to Pakistan. Despite legal pressure and advocacy initiatives like George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh, Kissinger approved shipments of weapons that perpetuated and turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s slaughter of 300,000 Bengalis. Kissinger, like his patron Nixon, showed nothing but contempt for public opinion or the rule of law and callousness for the most helpless people on earth.

Pakistan‘s military leader helped lay the ground work for Nixon’s opening to China, a cold war victory over the Soviet Union. “We saved the China option which we need for the bloody Russians,” Kissinger said to Nixon in 1972, “Why should we give a damn about Bangladesh?”

Remaining secretary of state under Gerald Ford, who assumed the presidency when the Watergate scandal forced the deranged Nixon to resign, Kissinger endorsed Indonesian dictator Suharto’s 1975 invasion of East Timor. He sparked a conflict that would, between 1976 and 1980, kill between nearly 200,000 people. Kissinger feared East Timor‘s independence effort could lead to an anti-colonialist government sympathetic to the Soviets. Kissinger believed these atrocities were worth it, to bolster American corporate interests by stopping the spread of communism.

While many of his White House colleagues had been imprisoned and disgraced by myriad Watergate crimes, Kissinger thrived. Through a combination of psychopathic narcissism, media manipulation, and an uncanny ability to obscure the truth, he transformed himself from a college professor and bureaucrat into the most celebrated American diplomat of the 20th century.

Yet in the streets of Vietnam, Cambodia or Bangladesh, Kissinger does not look like a foreign policy genius, but rather like an ugly, hubristic American who ignored the lives of people he shrugged at slaughtering.

Near the end of his time as secretary of state, Kissinger sanctioned Argentina’s neo-fascist military dictatorship that overthrew President Isabel Perón and launched what would be called the “Dirty War,” torturing, disappearing, and killing political opponents it branded as terrorists.

Kissinger’s unrepentant dishonesty and duplicity would reverberate throughout American history. The actions of the Reagan White House in the Iran-Contra scandal echo Kissinger in its attempt to deceive the public and circumvent Congress in order to exercise power unencumbered by laws. The same goes for the secret, illegal torture program pursued under President George W. Bush. The Kissinger code is a belief that the president can act unilaterally, anywhere in the world, without democratic deliberation or public accountability.

Kissinger served as an informal adviser to numerous presidents, secretaries of state and foreign policy heavyweights. He was acclaimed by leaders of both major political parties and large think tanks, and given prominent media platforms to offer his perspective on American military crusades.

In the wake of 9/11, Kissinger cheered on the war in Iraq. “The notion of justified pre-emption,” he wrote, “runs counter to modern international law,” but was nonetheless necessary because of the novelty of the “terrorist threat.” Less than three weeks later, Vice President Dick Cheney, laying out his case for an invasion of Iraq, quoted directly from Kissinger’s column: “As former Secretary of State Kissinger recently stated,” there is “an imperative for pre-emptive action.”

Kissinger advised Bush and Cheney throughout that war, in which over 200,000 Iraqi civilians died. Bush leaned on him as he rolled out his “shock and awe” strategy, deciding to carpet bomb Iraqi civilians. While not “singularly responsible for the evolution of the U.S. national security state into a monstrosity,” wrote Grandin, Henry Kissinger’s example of “bombing as an instrument of diplomacy has coursed through the decades.”

The Obama administration cited the Cambodia bombing as the legal justification for its drone wars. Kissinger later asserted that many of the arguments he made to justify the illegal and covert wars in Cambodia and Laos were now an unquestioned, public part of American policymaking — foundational pillars permitting four presidents to bomb Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis, Somalis, Libyans, Syrians, and others. Trump’s assassination of the Iranian commander Qassem Suleimani conforms to a Kissinger- style war crime.

Even while living his last days, Kissinger could not stop himself from promoting war. Following the October 7 attack in Israel, Kissinger proclaimed full support for the brutal Israeli war on Gaza, saying: “You can’t make concessions to people who have declared and demonstrated by their actions that they cannot make peace.” As Juan Cole noted, “The Netanyahu government’s carpet-bombing of Gaza is a direct descendant of Kissinger’s Operation Breakfast.”

Kissinger lived to hear human rights advocates the world over demand his prosecution for war crimes. Christopher Hitchens, in his book The Trial of Henry Kissinger, accused him of “crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture” from Argentina, Bangladesh, Chile and East Timor to Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. The accusations were never answered but the hideous policies they have identified represent Kissinger’s most infamous and influential legacy.

Kissinger never showed remorse for those misdeeds. Though his hands were drenched in blood, he remained a member in good standing of the Washington elite and never paid any real price for overseeing, overlooking, and perpetrating some of the most grotesque crimes America has ever committed.