The Skinny: Pork Reich on Parade
Pork Reich on Parade: April 13th to 15th, 2025
Bombs Not Food in the Trump Era
In the lead up to the US 2024 election, I made it a sort of policy not to take anyone claiming Donald Trump was “anti-war” seriously; after all, I was conscious during his first presidency and I have a very clear memory of him engaging in nuclear brinksmanship with North Korea via social media, dropping the largest conventional bomb in Afghanistan just to prove he could, and actively trying to start a war with Iran – in addition to his material support for the KSA’s war in Yemen, scaling up airstrikes and drone attacks in our ongoing wars, as well as a significant increase in American covert military operations which often had disastrous consequences. Perhaps most tellingly, Trump increased US military spending each and every single year during his first four years in office.
As such I found it pretty laughable when motivated observers, including a few in “independent” media claiming to be progressives, defended the rise of Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative by suggesting the Trump regime would find and end “fraud, waste, and abuse” in the Pentagon budget. In so much as I bothered to engage with these arguments, I predicted that neither Trump nor Musk would touch the military budget, or any other part of the US government that’s about committing violence against their perceived enemies, including domestically; with the possible exception of an FBI Trump still hates because they investigated him for crimes he absolutely committed. So I can’t say I was surprised to learn that during a sit-down meeting with noted genocidal fascist warmonger and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump bragged about his intentions to increase U.S. military spending to literally a trillion dollars.
Trump Pledges $1 Trillion for US Military While Hitting Working Class With Huge Tax Hike
“President Donald Trump on Monday publicly backed an annual budget of roughly $1 trillion for the U.S. military as his administration rushed ahead with a destructive tariff scheme that amounts to a major tax increase on American households, with working-class families set to bear much of the pain.
Speaking to reporters at the White House during a sit-down with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump said his administration has signed off on an upcoming military budget in the vicinity of $1 trillion, which would be a record sum. The military budget for the current fiscal year is $892 billion, more than half of the federal government’s discretionary budget.
“Nobody’s seen anything like it,” Trump said Monday of his $1 trillion budget proposal.”
Given that I see no reason to engage with the absurd and typically disingenuous idea that Trump is somehow not a bog standard American imperialist, I’d like to focus in on the budgetary arguments about fraud and waste that are obfuscating and propping up what is clearly a billionaire nazi bust-out operation being conducted on the US government. If you take a step back and simply look at the argument people defending DOGE are presenting here, the whole game falls apart:
- Health inspectors, disease specialists, labor board adjudicators, consumer protection departments, food and drug inspectors, IRS officials working to get the super rich to pay the taxes they owe, feeding starving children in conflict zones, Inspector Generals that oversee government officials, Medicaid and SNAP benefits, the social security check that means your grandma isn’t living on cat food? Waste, fraud, and abuse.
- A bloated Pentagon wholly captured by the military industrial complex, that literally cannot pass an audit, is already a source of large-scale fraud and waste, and currently spends more money on “defense” than any other country on earth by a degree that’s objectively mind blowing; particularly when you factor in that we’re not *officially* involved in a major war at the moment? Vitally important spending and in fact a reason to celebrate!
Look folks, I’m creeping closer and closer to my fiftieth year on this Earth; so you don’t need to tell me that imperialism and obscene military spending is a bipartisan objective in American politics. The critique I’m articulating about Donald Trump’s spending on the murder machine could just as easily have been written about every Democrat President in the post-war era. But that’s also the point; Downmarket Mussolini, a man who just committed a war crime in Yemen, wholly supports Israel’s genocide in Gaza, is openly talking about trying to annex Canada, and whose regime is building support to potentially bomb Mexico, is just another fucking imperialist and none of these nazis give a fuck about fraud and waste. They just want to starve your grandparents and poison your children to pay for tax cuts for the uber rich.
Fascist Broligarchs and the New (Old) Company Towns
I’ve made no secret of the fact that I think the nazi “broligarch” cultists who brought Trump to power, and support the creation of monarchal techno-feudalist city states under a variety of names, Network States, and Freedom Cities most prominently, are working on a larger dystopian plan for literal authoritarian global domination; a plan that encompasses and revolves around the destruction of democratic structures, the implementation of digital fascist surveillance and repression via AI technology, the adoption of quasi-religious beliefs about our future as exemplified by the TESCREAL movement, and even the fascist plan to remake America into a type of dictatorship under Trump proposed by “neo-reactionary scholar” Curtis Yarvin, also known as The Butterfly Revolution. Taken together the proponents of these ideas, who are often quite wealthy and influential people in our society and in particular the tech industry, have dubbed their ideology “Dark Enlightenment” – which should give you at least some idea of both how obnoxious these rich fascists are, but also how far-reaching their plans ultimately go.
Furthermore, I am certain that this isn’t just some weird conspiracy theory for three key reasons. First, the billionaire fascists have more or less told us their plans out in the open. Secondly, since buying themselves a president, a small group of hyper-reactionary billionaires led by the world’s richest nazi, Elon Musk, have pretty much guided the Trump regime to act in countless ways that directly facilitate their obscene authoritarian visions for the future of humanity.
Finally of course, there are quantifiable structural reasons why what these nazi cultist billionaires are proposing represents one of the only possible futures in which most of the planet maintains capitalism and free market fundamentalist ideology. After all the planet is on fire, billions of people’s lives are at stake if we don’t act collectively to address climate crisis, and capitalism is the culprit causing both our impending destruction and our refusal to act; either capitalism and free market fundamentalism go to their graves, or billions of everyday people do, and these billionaire nazis know that. Folks aren’t going to keep supporting a capitalist order that’s killing them as the bodies pile up; eventually they will resist. So if you’re going to keep doing capitalism for the benefit of an increasingly smaller ruling class even as it leads to genocides all around us, you’re going to need a political system that provides the necessary degree of surveillance, repression, and applied force to maintain control even as society disintegrates in real time. And that political system is going to look a lot like fascism, no matter what they choose to call it.
Despite their rhetoric about “the future” and their love of technology, the truth is the ideas and plans folks like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreessen (to name a few) are proposing to accomplish their goals, are old, decrepit, and often utterly disproven. As a species we have already learned the horrible outcomes of adopting repugnant ideas like eugenics, feudalism, and fascism as enforced policy; and yet here today these ideas are being repackaged by in-pocket propagandists, and then rebranded as the only hope for our future by a billionaire nazi ruling class determined to rewind our society into the darkest days of our collective past. Down those roads leads subjugation, violence, and death; which is probably why it appeals to rich nazis who value “artificial minds” and labor over human beings, and are preparing for a world where billions of people are “surplus” to their requirements as techno-feudalist overlords.
To demonstrate that last point about recycled reactionary ideas rebranded as the future, let’s look at a piece by J.J. Anselmi writing in The New Republic that identifies a new (old) way to look at the Network States/Freedom Cities plan being pushed by Balaji Srinivasan and his ultra wealthy backers; as the author notes, at its core a “Network State” or “Freedom City” is really just a big company town:
Trump’s “Freedom Cities” Are a Devious Scam
“Tech bros love to repackage old ideas as innovation. We’ve all seen it. But their latest foray into disruption no one else wants, the so-called “network state” and its constellation of start-up cities, deserves our attention. This notion has been embraced by President Donald Trump, who has rechristened them “freedom cities.” In reality, the scheme is a techno-fascist vision of the future that’s been quietly but persistently pushed and funded by billionaires such as Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Brian Armstrong, and Sam Altman for years. Despite the shiny marketing materials for places like Próspera and California Forever, which make outlandish promises of futuristic utopias, the start-up city as a concept is a modern, ketamine-infused repackaging of something that flopped into obsolescence long ago: the company town.”
Crackdowns on Protest Go National
Emboldened no doubt by the fascist repression and rhetoric deployed by the Trump regime and a large number of right wing extremists in the US judiciary, state governments all over America are proposing or passing laws that criminalize even peaceful protest; with multi-decade prison terms laid out for dissidents and resisters:
US intensifies crackdown on peaceful protest under Trump
“Anti-protest bills that seek to expand criminal punishments for constitutionally protected peaceful protests – especially targeting those speaking out on the US-backed war in Gaza and the climate crisis – have spiked since Trump’s inauguration.
Forty-one new anti-protest bills across 22 states have been introduced since the start of the year – compared with a full-year total of 52 in 2024 and 26 in 2023, according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) tracker.
This year’s tally includes 32 bills across 16 states since Trump returned to the White House, with five federal bills targeting college students, anti-war protesters and climate activists with harsh prison sentences and hefty fines – a crackdown that experts warn threaten to erode first amendment rights to freedom of speech, assembly and petition.”
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been having arguments with liberals about what constitutes an effective protest since at least the Occupy Wall Street movement, and invariably their excuse for not actually disrupting anything or shutting shit down is that effective resistance will give the authorities an excuse to crack down on otherwise peaceful protests. So what now folks? If you’re gonna be called a domestic terrorist and do twenty years in prison for peacefully disrupting the oil and gas industry, or opposing a US-backed genocide conducted by its client state Israel regardless of how you protest, why remain peaceful? Given that Trump’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi, is openly talking about twenty year prison terms for vandalizing a Tesla dealership, it seems pretty clear that the penalties are the same whether you march peacefully waving your little signs, or actually shut the fuck barrel down and hurt these folks where it counts – their wallets.
Furthermore, while it’s obvious these anti-protest bills are designed to target anti-genocide protestors as part of the Trump regime’s crackdown on anyone who doesn’t support settler colonialist massacres by Israel in Gaza, don’t sleep on the fact that these guys are also targeting climate crisis protestors who disrupt the fossil fuel and energy industries. As I’ve been telling you for years now, understanding climate crisis and what our leaders already know about it is crucial to understanding the rise of fascism; because these folks absolutely intend to lead us all off the ecological cliff and they know, sooner or later, the public at large isn’t going to accept “we think you should all die so a handful of nazi billionaires can keep stacking filthy lucre.” All over the Pig Empire, whether your government is overtly fascist, or covertly fascist under the guise of neoliberalism, our states are preparing to meet everyday people rising up against the capitalism that’s killing us, with fascist repression; and we’ve already caught the companies that know they’ve got bodies on their hands actively funding the lobbies behind these anti-democratic suppression laws, to protect their business interests.
As I’ve told you a number of times already, it only takes one side to declare war and the rise of fascism in the so-called West must be understood as part of a much larger class war; a war nazi billionaire cultists and corporate power brokers intend to win, once and for all. It doesn’t matter how peaceful you are; the fact that you know the machine is killing your kids for five pennies a share and don’t like it, is enough to make you the enemy of a capitalist order increasingly turning to overt fascism to lock in their way of life and future profits, no matter how many of their victims (all of us) don’t like it. Whether you fight back, or not, the boot is coming.
Brendan Carr’s FCC as Trump’s Instrument of Revenge
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before; the Trump regime is cynically employing a rarely enacted policy from the 1960’s to intimidate and attack folks critical of Donald Trump, despite that not being what the policy was, or has ever been intended for. This time its Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, who is targeting some of the largest media corporations in America for investigations under the mostly obsolete “news distortion” policy, as part of what certainly looks like a larger plan to revoke the licenses of broadcasters who oppose Trump and the regime’s fascist takeover:
The speech police: Chairman Brendan Carr and the FCC’s news distortion policy
“Andrew Jay Schwartzman, an expert on media law and senior counselor for the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, told Ars that “the CBS complaint is utterly lacking in merit. What is alleged doesn’t come within light-years of a violation of any FCC policy.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), an advocacy group, called Carr’s investigation of CBS “a political stunt,” an “illegitimate show trial,” and an “unconstitutional abuse of regulatory authority.” Democratic lawmakers are demanding answers from Carr about what they call “bogus investigations” designed to “target and intimidate news organizations and broadcasters in violation of the First Amendment.”
The CBS investigation was also lambasted in comments submitted by Christopher Terry, a professor of media law and ethics at the University of Minnesota, and J. Israel Balderas, a journalism professor at Elon University who is also a First Amendment attorney and a former FCC media advisor.
“The agency under Brendan Carr appears to be, based on the flimsiest of complaints, pursuing media outlets critical of Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign, while ignoring similar complaints from the public about Trump-friendly media outlets,” Terry and Balderas wrote. “Being the speech police is not the FCC’s job, but enforcing any restrictions in a selective, much less a partisan, way is problematic, and likely to lead to extensive legal actions challenging FCC authority.”
This is a long, granular, and well-written article that’s worth your time to read if you want to understand what Carr and the regime are trying to do here. The short-short version is that the new fascist chair of the FCC is using a rarely enforced policy that probably should have been cancelled years ago, and has almost universally been used in cases where a news outlet is caught staging or creating the news it wants to report itself, to target Trump’s critics in the media; in this case CBS, although the logic is more or less repeatable for any news outlet whose coverage the regime doesn’t like. Furthermore, even if Carr weren’t crassly weaponizing a sixty year old FCC policy to punish media outlets who (fairly) criticize Trump, the fact that this is purely about silencing critics of the regime in the media is laid bare by the Chairman’s proposed solutions – pulling broadcast licenses; something that has literally never happened or been recommended before, even in the rare instances the news distortion policy was employed by the agency.
Look folks, I know the vast majority of people reading this don’t care about a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris during the election campaign, and lord knows that corporate media hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory during either Trump administration; but this is a lot bigger than even a media corporation like CBS. By employing this policy to justify government harassment and targeting of Trump’s critics, Carr is making himself and the regime the final arbiter of what does and doesn’t constitute a “news distortion” in a way this rule was never intended to be used. If they get away with this, or even if they can just successfully use it to justify applying government pressure against an extremely large, well-funded news organization, there’s no limit to how far these nazis will take this. This is how a fascist regime transforms the entire media environment into pro-Trump, state news outlets and it won’t just stop with the Fox-ification of media orgs either. The FCC has regulatory power over all broadcasters, and unless you want to see a world where the US government is trying to destroy media organizations for talking about the US history of slavery, why oil companies are not your friend, or even just showing trans and other gender-nonconforming characters in our entertainment, this needs to be resisted vigorously and stopped at all cost.
Baby Steps to a White Ethnostate
Quietly, and relying on the numbness created by their fascist “shock doctrine” so far, the Trump regime has stripped legal protections from and ordered the expulsion of thousands more law abiding people who are effectively refugees, including a large number of migrants directly driven to seek asylum and protected status by US imperial and economic policy; this time the administration is targeting asylum seekers from Afghanistan and Cameroon:
‘Cruel and Dangerous’: Trump Ends Protected Status for Afghans and Cameroonians
“President Donald Trump made his promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants a central plank of his 2024 campaign. However, since taking office, he has consistently moved not only to crack down on undocumented immigration but to revoke the status of migrants who are in the country legally. This has included attempting to strip TPS from other nationalities, revoking visas and even green cards from immigrants from certain countries or who voice opinions the administration dislikes, and ordering nearly 1 million people who entered the country using a Biden-administration app to leave “immediately.”
Friday’s decision would impact more than 14,600 Afghans and 7,900 Cameroonians, who would now have to leave the country by May and June respectively, according toAl Jazeera.
TPS means that immigrants from certain countries undergoing conflict or hardship—who may not qualify for asylum—will not be deported and will be able to work legally in the U.S. until the situation in their home country improves.”
As the article notes, it’s entirely unclear if the Trump regime will get away with this clearly targeted suppression as part of its mass deportation scheme; a judge did temporarily block a similar order targeting Venezuelans legally living and working in America with TPS status after all. Looking at the types of people the regime is targeting however puts to lie the government’s arguments that they’re enacting a mass deportation scheme to “keep us safe” or “remove dangerous criminals” from the US. Furthermore, looking a who they’re targeting with orders like this, specifically nonwhite folks who are for all intents and purposes refugees, also exposes their fascist intentions to establish America as a white ethnostate in a way that should be being reported in corporate media, but simply isn’t for reasons that range from cowardice, to capitalist greed, and even shared racist sympathies among the ruling class (and their minions) in our society. Quite frankly, the fact that for-profit media outlets are no longer telling Americans that mass deportations are recognized as crimes against humanity by international law, speaks volumes as to why they aren’t talking about what the Trump regime’s activities clearly represent when taken as a whole; the demographic bleaching of America by force, to create a while ethno-state.
Folks, the regime isn’t targeting “dangerous criminals” for expulsion because there aren’t enough migrants committing violent crimes to justify their mass deportation agenda and white nationalist schemes; this is about expelling the easiest to find, most vulnerable migrants to make Downmarket Mussolini’s monstrous deportation quotas. These folks are refugees, coming from situations the US state has already recognized present a real and present danger to their lives. Cameroon is in the middle of a years-long civil war, against a regime executing peaceful protestors, that has already caused over a million people to flee the country. The denial of protected status to Afghans is even more galling because refugees fleeing that country are almost invariably being targeted by a Taliban regime the US just fought a two-decade long war with, or are fleeing as a byproduct of American imperial policy that bombed the country flat during that war. These are “our guys” in so much as there is ever an “our” in US imperial foreign policy situations.
If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and keeps doing the same things historically fascist duck regimes have done in human history, it’s time to start naming the beast; not just on blogs written by anarchists with a library card, but everywhere in our society. Failure to do so isn’t just cowardice, it’s collaboration with a fascist regime that is rapidly chugging towards openly genocidal behavior every day, while gleefully admitting that’s where they intend to go if only anyone understood what “mass deportations” actually mean. These folks are fascists, they are actively trying to establish an American white entho-state, and they are making no effort whatsoever to hide their activities or intentions.
The Trump Regime Goes Full Andrew Jackson
Given the flagrant and insulting fascist theater we were all just subjected to today during Nayib Bukele’s televised visit to Trump’s White House, I just have one question for all the folks who told me “it’s not a constitutional crisis yet,” “you can’t call them nazis,” or “it is not yet time to rise up and resist” by grinding the gears of the machine to a halt with our bodies if necessary: what now, brain geniuses?
Citing the president’s absolute power over “foreign relations,” the Trump regime has announced that it has no obligation, nor intention to return Kilmar Abrego García, the Maryland man trafficked to a Salvadoran maximum security torture prison by “mistake,” despite multiple court orders and a 9-0 SCOTUS ruling instructing them to do so.
Trump DoJ says not legally bound to return man wrongly deported to El Salvador
“The comments came a day after the Trump administration claimed it is not legally obligated to secure the return of the man, Kilmar Abrego García,, despite the US supreme court ruling that the administration should “facilitate” bringing him back.
Lawyers for the justice department argued in court filings on Sunday that asking El Salvador to return Abrego García from a notorious mega-prison should be considered “foreign relations”, and was therefore outside the scope of the courts.
The filing said “the federal courts have no authority to direct the Executive Branch to conduct foreign relations in a particular way, or engage with a foreign sovereign in a given manner,” adding: “That is the ‘exclusive power of the president as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations.”
Earlier this month, the Trump administration acknowledged that Abrego García, an immigrant from El Salvador who was living in Maryland with protected status, was deported to a prison in El Salvador on 15 March as a result of an “administrative error”. In 2019 an immigration judge had prohibited the federal government from deporting him.”
My frienads, we are through the looking glass now and if you can’t see that it’s one and truly fascism, it’s just because you don’t know what the word means. Apologists will claim that we are still not yet in a “constitutional crisis” because of the regime’s paper-thin excuse that they’re interpreting the SCOTUS ruling to mean all they had to do is remove “domestic” barriers to Garcia’s return, while claiming they have no authority to effect the return of a man they’re literally paying the government of El Salvador to house in a prison famous for torture and life sentences. This is at best wish-casting and codswallop of course, because the regime is now openly broadcasting its intention to flout the Supreme Court’s ruling while Trump meets with Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador at the White House; these fascist mutherfuckers just said “let them enforce it” while trolling the shit out of every judge in America. Just examine some of the comments from Bukele and Trump regime officials for yourself:
- “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I’m not going to do it.” “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.” – Nayib Bukele, President of El Salvador
- “The foreign policy of the United States is conducted by the president of the United States, not by a court. And no court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States.” – U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio
- “The [supreme court] ruling solely stated that if this individual at El Salvador’s sole discretion was sent back to our country, that we could deport him a second time. No version of this legally ends with him ever living here because he is a citizen of El Salvador.” – White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller.
- “In 2019 two courts ruled that he was a member of MS13 and he was illegally in our country. Right now, it was additional paperwork had needed to be done. That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him – that’s not up to us. The supreme court ruled that if El Salvador wants to return him, we would ‘facilitate’ it, meaning provide a plane.” – US Attorney General, Pam Bondi.
During that same meeting with President Bukele, Trump once again admitted that he also wants to pay to send American “criminals” to a maximum security torture prison in El Salvador his regime is simultaneously arguing that the US government has no requirement, power, or authority to return prisoners from; even under court order! Need I remind you that this is the same administration currently saying quite publicly that a wide variety of American protestors are actually domestic fucking terrorists? Please understand that if the Trump regime can successfully argue that it can keep a man they already admitted should not have been deported, in a Salvadoran forever prison despite the law, the US Constitution, and a direct SCOTUS order, because once they’ve sent him there its a matter of foreign policy and jurisdictional authority – then there is absolutely nothing stopping them from sending anyone, even so-called “natural born” American citizens to CECOT and claiming it’s too late to undo their fascist actions after the fact. In other words, the regime is now attempting to legalize disappearing its perceived enemies; full stop.
The America Gestapo Snatches Another Palestinian Anti-Genocide Protester
In a sign that the Trump regime plans to continue its fascist repression of student protestors legally in the US and dissent in general, even as its authority to do so is being challenged in court, ICE has kidnapped another Columbia University anti-genocide protest leader. Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian who has legally been studying in the United States for the past ten years, was arrested by ICE as he arrived for a citizenship test; now the regime seems intent on deporting him under the familiar Calvinball argument that Marco Rubio can deport anyone he deems “detrimental to U.S. foreign policy interests” on a whim – a tactic the administration has used to justify prior attempts to deport political prisoners Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, among others:
Palestinian Student Leader Was Called In for Citizenship Interview – Then Arrested by ICE
“Even before his friend and fellow Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by immigration authorities, Mahdawi asked university administrators to help him find a safe place to live so he would not be taken by ICE agents, according to emails reviewed by The Intercept. The school did nothing in response, Mahdawi said.
After ICE abducted Khalil last month, Mahdawi sheltered in place for more than three weeks for fear of being picked up himself.
Instead of taking him off the street, however, immigration authorities scheduled the citizenship test at the Colchester USCIS office and took Mahdawi into custody when he arrived.
Now, Mahdawi is facing an order to deport him to the occupied West Bank, where escalating attacks from both the Israeli military and Jewish settlers have led to increased casualties among Palestinians.
“It’s kind of a death sentence,” Mahdawi said. “Because my people are being killed unjustly in an indiscriminate way.”
Please also note that like a number of other kidnapping targets taken by ICE, Mahdawi was previously marked out for reprisal by pro-Zionist smear group Canary Mission, and Betar, a far right hate group that’s widely considered a fascist organization even in Israel; because apparently US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is now taking foreign policy and national security advice from ultra-Zionist extremist hate groups that openly advocate for violence against Palestinians and protestors. Like all of the other anti-genocide protestors the regime has kidnapped, there is no evidence that Mahdawi is a “terrorist” or committed any serious crimes; except of course the Trump administration’s usual unhinged argument that protesting a genocide is in and of itself “antisemitic and a form of domestic terrorism.
Facades of Strength in Fascist America
Well folks, if we weren’t through the looking glass into a full on fascist takeover before now, we are as of this afternoon after Trump more or less said there is no law but his word and he intends to send you, even you “natural born” Americans, to a torture prison in El Salvador nobody ever gets out of if you don’t like it. What we do collectively from here is going to decide what kind of future there is for American society; if there’s any future for this country at all. Since the day Trump camp down that escalator and announced his intention to run for President, antifascists and historians of fascism have been telling you that this moment was coming; but I understand that this is a horrifying shock and moment of despair for folks who didn’t, or perhaps just didn’t want to, believe it.
If you’re confused, alienated, and scared right now, I want you to take ten minutes and read this excellent article by Vicky Osterweil, because everything in here is correct and it’ll make you feel better. The truth is that Trump and his regime are not operating from the position of strength they would have you believe they are. That absolute muppet has given away his endgame, to the point that it can’t be denied anymore, long before the Trump regime is in position to crush all dissent. There is a window now that will not last forever, to strangle this would-be dictatorship in its crib. It won’t be easy, and it won’t be safe, but there is still far too much opposition to fascism for these nazis to crush us all; if we act now in unison, and with purpose.
“Trump did not show up with an army today. His forces are no better organized or more ready to carry out his plans than they were on Friday. In stating his absolute unwillingness to follow the law, Trump is forcing the confrontation with the judiciary. But it does not make the regime any more (or less) logistically capable of mass arrests and crackdowns on the population.
This is the prelude to the fight, not the fight itself. And while hindsight, metaphor and mythology make it seem inevitable, Caesar’s victory in the Civil War was far from assured the moment his legion placed sandaled foot on Roman soil. He gambled, correctly as it turns out, on his prowess as a military commander, his popularity with the troops and the citizens of Rome, and the political divisions within the Senate camp.
When South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol made a similar gamble in December of last year, his attempt lasted less than 24 hours. Members of parliament jumped over fences and physically fought police officers, driving Yoon right back over the river: the sorry attempt ended with him disgraced, impeached and thrown from power within a few months.”
Just because Trump says its a dictatorship now, doesn’t make it true; especially if the populace at large will not comply. There’s a limit to how much any of us can put into writing, particularly in a fascist police state, but the examples of what fighting back, refusing to obey, and shutting it down looks like are all around you in the world and its recent history. We need to put enough bodies in the streets to ensure that fascism cannot be conducted, profit cannot be made, and it’s impossible to shoot us all; and the clock is ticking. But if we can do that, the American people can absolutely take advantage of the fact that Trump has showed his cards too soon. It’s just a question of whether you and your neighbors are willing to risk something to end this nightmare, or we’d all rather hide in our dwellings and hope the nazis take someone else the next time, and the next time, and the next time, until our luck runs out.
Choose wisely.
The All-American Business of Caging Brown People
Throughout the entire decade or so I’ve been writing about the migrant carceral complex, I’ve tried to help people understand the apparent contradiction this vast federal apparatus represents. Hunting down and caging migrants, particularly on the scale the Trump regime is attempting to do, is a mind-fuckingly expensive operation that provides literally no benefit whatsoever to the vaunted “America taxpayer” (so, you) and yet we do it anyway; why? Well part of it is certainly racism and white nationalism, but the reality is that our vast incarceration and deportation machine is actually extremely profitable for some highly influential people; particularly folks that own or invest in private prison companies. How profitable? Well a recent ACLU report reveals that the Trump regime has put forty-five billion dollars up for grabs in contracts to facilitate a massive expansion of the migrant carceral complex and their white nationalist scheme to bleach America’s demographics by (lawless) force.
ACLU Exposes Trump Admin’s Plan for Massive Expansion of ICE Jail System
“The documents, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, “signal a massive expansion of ICE detention capacity — including at facilities notorious for misconduct and abuse — which echo reports earlier this week that the Trump administration has sought proposals for up to $45 billion to expand immigrant detention,” ACLU said.
“The discovery also comes on the heels of a ‘strategic sourcing vehicle‘ released by ICE earlier this month, which called for government contractors to submit proposals for immigration detention and related services,” the group added.”
The truth here is that there are billions of dollars swimming around in the migrant carceral complex whether the facilities are private or publicly controlled; but Trump’s close relationship with donors and lobbyists from the private prison industry ensures that he’s going to turn out maximum value for *his* investors – who are some of the worst human beings on earth, quite frankly. This article in particular singles out three companies (Geo Group, CoreCivic, and Management Training Corporation) that are soliciting big contracts to make the regime’s nativist dreams of an upgraded national gulag system for brown people a reality; and the free market is rewarding them in anticipation of the regime’s mass deportation agenda:
“The documents received provide important details regarding what we have long feared — a massive expansion of ICE detention facilities nationwide in an effort to further the Trump administration’s dystopian plans to deport our immigrant neighbors and loved ones,” said Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project.
“This expansion is a disastrous waste of billions of taxpayer dollars that will only line the coffers of the private prison industry,” Cho added.
Indeed, GEO shares have nearly doubled in value since Trump’s election, while CoreCivic stock is up 57% over the same period.”
Of course there are other benefits to expanding a massive private prison complex to cage migrants for a white nationalist regime bent on creating an ethno-state, besides just appeasing donors. As the article notes, privately-run ICE detention facilities are not subject to state regulation or inspection; which is both why the reported levels of abuse are so much higher than in publicly run prison facilities, and why they’re the preferred destination to send migrants for a cracker fascist regime that has more or less openly admitted “the cruelty, is the point.”
Look, as an abolitionist it’s not lost on me that all prisons are bad no matter who is running them. But the reality here is that most Americans don’t really understand what the migrant carceral complex actually is, and without that comprehension it’s easier for them to fall into the trap of casually believing this monstrous nativist bullshit serves the public interest somehow. The migrant carceral complex is at the end of the day a business, in which billions of dollars worth of public funds are distributed to rich people for the privilege of having them cage and torture brown people as part of a shockingly bipartisan, nativist agenda. You don’t get healthcare, your kids don’t get lunch at school, and your grandma is eating cat food because the wise people running our society would rather make blood ticks running prison companies fat and happy, and appease racists in the body politic. Yes, the situation is certainly worse under a white nationalist Trump regime, but the reality is the current administration just expanding this system in anticipation of conducting mass deportations; which are legally recognized as a crime against humanity by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Trump didn’t build the migrant carceral complex; it was handed to him by generations of politicians before him who laid down the railroad tracks he’s chugging towards a genocide on as we speak.
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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